Skinheads and Oi music have a reputation for racism and extreme right-wing politics and violence. But not all of them, by any means. I read somewhere, probably on the Net, that Skinhead fashion originally started with the Jamaicans and then was taken over by White working class youth. There’s an anti-racist skinhead organisation. A friend of mine met one of their members years ago at a protest he was on, and there’s a documentary on YouTube about the skinhead organisation that was set up specifically to put a well-aimed Dr. Marten’s boot into the Nazis and other White supremacists.
I found this musical expression of skinhead hate and contempt for them on YouTube. It’s from a band, Oi of the Tiger, and it’s entitled Hang the Klan. It’s loud, aggressive and you can’t hear everything that’s being sung, but the chorus is very clear: ‘Hang the Klan’. There’s footage of the Klan at their wretched cross-burnings and marches, but it ends with the simulated hanging of one of them from a tree. I don’t know anything about this band, but there might be some links to the LGBTQ movement, as a cartoon at the beginning of the video of one of the Klansmen dangling from a tree has the legend ‘F*gs and D*kes Against White Knights (the Klan)”. As Reform goose step around in the polls and Trump is unleashing his ICE goons to arrest anyone who looks at them funny, I thought this might be a suitable song to put up.
Short video on the history of Mound Bayou, a town founded by freed Black slaves exclusively for Blacks. The former slaves came from a plantation, whose owner believed he could get more work from his slaves if they practised a variety of skills and occupations. When freedom came, the liberated slaves had all the skills necessary to support themselves as a viable community.
Their leader established Mound Bayou on former marshland, and used the South’s racial segregation laws against White domination. The town was to be solely for Blacks. Whites were legally forbidden from owning property there. The city government was all Black, the sheriff and law enforcement were all Black, the banks and businesses were similarly totally Black. When a middle class White business organisation tried to force free Blacks into subservience by withdrawing credit for Black businesses through the banks, the Black bank in Mound Bayou kept these businesses afloat by supplying them instead.
The town still survives, but has declined since its 19th century heyday. One reason for this is that the trains no longer stop there.
This is a fascinating look at a successful free Black American town, in contrast to others that were burned down by White Supremacist. It’s existence challenges the notion that Blacks are unable to successfully run communities. It also partly supports the argument of the Black American conservative, Shelby Steele, in his book False Black Power that Black Americans would have been concentrating on developing themselves economically through establishing and building up businesses rather than going for political power. As a result, so he contends, Black America has produced a vast number of local and national politicians but seriously declined materially. However, Bayou prospered and defied White domination as it had both: a Black government and solid Black businesses and professions.
Understandably there’s great concern about the reliability of the facial recognition system the police and others intend to roll out in security cameras in order to catch villains. These systems aren’t 100 per cent reliable by a considerable margin. There’s thus a real possibility of wrongful arrest. A few years ago one of the tech companies in America because infamous with people calling for the scientists working in the area to be more diverse after its pattern recognition system identified Black people as gorillas. People are also worried about the effect AI is having on journalism and literature now that it is increasingly being used in these areas. Most of this concern centres around them replacing real, human journos and writers. But, as this report from Daily Dose of Democracy shows, they may also include sheer nonsense in very serious reports.
This story is funny, but it’s implications aren’t.
‘An AI-generated police report claimed a cop transformed into a frog during a routine traffic stop in Utah Look, let’s not, uh, jump to conclusions here. Sure, the Herber Police Department’s explanation — that their AI system mistakenly folded in dialogue from the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog” into a police report because the movie was playing in the background as an officer’s body camera was recording — certainly sounds plausible, but everyone knows there’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned police work. A full investigation is clearly merited here. Who’s to say the officer in question isn’t a shape-shifter, of royal bloodlines, and/or under the curse of a villainous doctor? Anyway, speaking of artificial intelligence…’
This photo from 1868 came up on Monday on my Google news feed, and I’ve been meaning to put it up here since. But alas, I haven’t got round to it until now. The current controversy and debate over White European and American complicity in the slave trade and the demand for reparations has overshadowed the fact that, after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, it acted as the world’s policeman against the abominable trade. It signed a series of treaties with different countries, such as France and, in the Indian Ocean, the Imaum of Muscat banning the trade. These treaties gave the signatories the reciprocal right of search to board and examine any vessel they suspected of carrying slaves. Suspected slaving ships were seized and taken to Sierra Leone, where a mixed court with representatives from Britain and the ship’s nation would judge it’s case. If found guilty, the ship would be seized and the crew of the capturing naval ship awarded its prize money, and the slaves aboard it would be freed. These could stay in Sierra Leone, originally founded by the British Anti-Slavery Society as a colony for freed slaves, or transported to the West Indies as ‘liberated Africans’. They were officially registered to show that they were legally taken there, rather than illegally imported slaves, and apprenticed to masters and employers, who would teach them a trade. The officers in charge of the ships patrolling the seas and oceans against the slave trade were largely evangelical Anglican Christians.
This photo shows the grim reality of the trade. In contrast to the myth of White sailors violently taking Black Africans, the slaves were captured by Black Africans themselves in raids termed razzias. They were then transported to the coast, where they were then sold to European and American slavers. Before the Scramble for Africa and the expansion of European conquest and colonization in the 19th century, powerful African coastal states prevented European penetration of the continent. Resident European slavers were kept isolated in their own ghettoes in the West African city states. Examination of the copious ledger and documents compiled by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases it was the African slavers who approached Europeans to sell their slaves, rather than Europeans approaching Africans.
The families of the boys in this picture were almost certainly killed by the slave raiders, although the registers of incoming freed slaves in the West Indies do record women with their children and the separation of mothers from their children was not allowed. It6 is to this country’s great credit that after its involvement in the trade that it turned so resolutely against it, patrolling the seas from the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
We’ve seen this week that the government’s proposed inquiry into the Muslim grooming gangs has made zero progress. It is beset with problems. No-one wants to chair it, there are arguments over its remit, as well as allegations that the government is fiddling with these to make it part of a more general inquiry into grooming gangs. One that would, no doubt, serve to hide the distinctive ethnic and religious nature of the Muslim gangs. Several of the gangs’ victims have resigned from the inquiry feeling that they were being ignored. One woman was called a liar by Jess Phillips. Phillips has been criticised for her stance on female sexual and domestic abuse. She is firmly against it, except, so it is alleged, when it is White women being assaulted by Muslims.
It has been claimed that this reluctance by Labour to confront the gangs is due to the party’s reliance on Muslim votes. Phillips only has a majority of 1,000. If Muslims in her constituency therefore get so offended they stop voting for her, she’s likely to lose her seat. There have also been allegations by Raja Miah that Labour councillors and MPs, including Andy Burnham, ignored the grooming gangs and actively hid them because their leaders were respected members of the Muslim communities who delivered Muslim block votes to the party. Others have challenged Miah’s reliability on this.
But there are also issues about Muslim attitudes towards White, non-Muslim women. One of the Muslim councillors who tried to bring the grooming gangs to light stated that she was brought up in an environment of hatred and contempt for White women and their sexuality. The police claimed that racism was not involved. But as the video below shows, the Muslim grooming gangs were extremely racist, calling their victims ‘White sluts’ and other degrading insults, and telling them that their only value was as as objects to be abused and raped by Muslim men.
Why this reluctance to admit that these Pakistani Muslims were motivated by racial and religious hatred? Some of it is, no doubt, due to the very nature of the anti-racism movement itself. This grew out of the Black liberation movements, which were aimed at combating White racism and oppression of people of colour. Anti-White racism is not seen as a problem. It is either denied, or pushed to one side on the grounds that the real problem is White racism. There are plenty of books and college courses about White racism, but I have yet to see one about anti-White racism. There are also fears that anyone who raises the issue will be smeared as racist themselves The authorities are also afraid of riots and pogroms, and the possibility that such information could lead to the victory of a real Fascist party like Hitler’s wretched Nazis.
Yet the racist attitude that White women are hypersexual sluts, who enjoy being raped and deserve to be abused by Muslim men has a very long history, going all the way back to Mohammed. This is shown very clearly by Raymond Ibrahim in the video below. Ibrahim is an American of Coptic Christian heritage. He’s a scholar of Islam, but is part of the anti-Islam counterjihad crowd. He will therefore very definitely not get tenure in an academia geared towards presenting a sanitised version of Islam. Nevertheless, all the quotations here are backed up through citations, and are taken from reputable texts.
He starts off with accounts of the racist and sexual abuse hurled at girls in Britain, Germany and Australia by the grooming gangs, taken from newspaper reports. He quotes a British imam, who said that the majority of British imams teach that women are second class citizens and have a very misogynistic attitude. But there is an especial hatred of White women.
Then there are the historical examples. One is from the hadith, the traditions about Mohammed. In this hadith, Mohammed tries to persuade a newly converted Arab to join his campaign against Byzantium by telling him that he will be able to take light-haired or light-skinned Byzantine women as his sex slaves. The Arabs saw Byzantine women as the most beautiful, and they were highly prized as sex slaves. Ibrahim then quotes scholars of Islam’s relationship with Byzantium. These stated very clearly that Byzantine women were seen by the Arabs as shameless, promiscuous sluts and whores, with nuns offering themselves to monks. This image only existed in their perverted imaginations, as Byzantine society required women to be modest, retiring and devoted to their families. He doesn’t mention it, but some have argued that the burqa and niqub entered Islam through Byzantium, which had picked up the custom from the kingdom of Palmyra.
He then quotes Abu Uthman al-Jahiz, born 775, who salivated over the beauty, and perceived sexual willingness of a shipload of Frankish (European) women. When the Crusaders were finally conquered by the Muslims under Saladin, there were similar remarks from Muslim chroniclers, rejoicing over the prospect of these women’s rape and sexual enslavement by Muslim Arabs, including that of nuns. Ibrahim concludes by observing that there is a continuity of attitudes here. But if you notice it in Britain, you’ll get arrested. This is clearly a reference to the way the government is trying to keep a lid on this scandal through hate speech legislation.
He doesn’t mention it in the video, but the 9/11 hijackers also had vicious fantasies about the rape and degradation of western women.
Now obviously not all Muslims have these attitudes, and I know White British women who married Muslim husbands. These women said that their partners treated them like ladies. But it does show that there is a problem within the Muslim community with highly misogynistic attitudes to White women. Attitudes of deep antiquity which the political establishment fears to tackle.
This comes from the anti-immigrant YouTube channel, British Insight. Usually I wouldn’t put material from channels like these up here, but this time the point British Insight makes is a good one and needs discussing. It’s footage of a uniformed Black militia, composed of fighting age men, marching and chanting through Birmingham. British Insight states that militias are illegal, but in the case of those composed by Black and brown people, the cops are nowhere to be seen.
He’s right. Militias and the wearing of political uniforms were banned in Britain as part of the government’s campaign to stop real Fascists, such as Oswald Mosley’s BUF, goose-stepping about. Especially as Mosley was trying to get votes by stirring up racism against the Jews and staging highly provocative marches through Jewish areas. These were resisted, like the notorious Battle of Cable Street, by Jews, who disobeyed the recommendations of the Board of Deputies that they should meekly stay indoors, as well as the Irish, trade unionists and the Communist party. But now it seems uniformed militias are being brought back by a section of the Black community.
Radical Black firebrand Sasha Johnson, before she was left a near vegetable after being shot by four unidentified gunmen at her home, denounced the police as ‘the Ku Klux Klan’ and declared that they needed a Black militia. She tried to set one up, complete with black uniforms and stab vests. They also went marching about in direct contravention of the law to the anger of the Daily Mail. Johnson was described at the time as ‘the British Black Panther’, and I think this was her attempt to set up a similar Black Panther style organisation. Apart from their violent resistance to racism generally, the Black Panthers shot and killed racist cops who’d killed Blacks. It seems to me that Johnson was trying to set up her organisation following accusations that the Met police were similarly unjustly shooting some of the violent criminals they had apprehended, such as Marc Duggan, whose deaths sparked mass protests. While there certainly is a severe problem with racism in the Met, in no way can they be compared to the Klan. The Klan was far more violent to a truly terrifying degree and at its height enjoyed considerable public support down in the deep south. I think Johnson was hoping that there’d be some kind of confrontation between the police and her militia, but that this was avoided when she was shot. Since then her London militia seems to have petered out, along with her Taking the Initiative Black political party.
There seem to be other, similar groups around, ostensibly with the aim of defending Blacks. Black men in stab vests turned up at a school a few years ago after a Black girl was victimised in a racist fight there. Reports of the incidents stated that they came from an organisation with about thirty members or so, all from the same family. This also had the object of defending Blacks from violence. I don’t know anything about the militia here, and British Insight doesn’t supply any further information about them. But I suspect they have the same goals. And the police are probably staying away in order to avoid a confrontation with them which could spark off more racial unrest and violence.
Even so, paramilitary militias are rightly banned, and the Black militias should be subjected to the same laws as White Fascist groups. Otherwise it’s a case of double standards, one for Whites, another for Blacks and brown people, as British Insight says. Ethnic militias are wrong and a racist threat, no matter what race they are.
There’s been considerable discussion this week about the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ mass rally last weekend in central London, where people draped in the England flag, the Union Jack and the Scots Saltire marched against mass immigration and the decline of Christianity, and for free speech. It’s been denounced as ‘far right’, and there was certainly an element of that. Elon Musk, who wants anything that isn’t nailed down privatised and the welfare state destroyed on behalf of himself and his buddy Trump, addressed the crowd, telling them they had to fight to be free. And the event was led by Tommy Robinson, formerly of the BNP, formerly of the EDL, a football hooligan, bully boy, mortgage fraudster and grifter, as well as libel merchant. In my opinion, of course. Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Council for Racial Equality way back when, appeared on Sky News to talk about it. Phillips acknowledged Musk’s alarming rhetoric, but said that possibly what was really alarming to some was how normal it was. It was attended by the kind of people you find in country pubs or the loo at a football club. He noted a scattering of brown and black faces, and the rally ended with a Gospel choir singing .Jerusalem’.
So not quite the Nazi rally it has been described as.
Its supporters have put up videos showing some of the Black attendees at the event talking about why they’re there. Unfortunately, while it appears not to have been a racial hate-fest, it does seem to have been present amongst some of the protesters. Shady Shae, a Black YouTuber who went on the rally, has posted up a video about the horrendous racial abuse he received from White racists, telling him he wasn’t wanted or needed. I’ve also been told by some of the great commenters to this blog that some of the organisers of these marches regard ethnic minority supporters as useful idiots to give them a respectability they don’t deserve. So make your own mind up about how racist or not it was.
Clifford Lindsey Alderman, Colonists for Sale: The Story of Indentured Servants in America (New York: MacMillan 1975).
While there’s a considerable amount of literature devoted to the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Black Africans, the role of White indentured servants in the colonisation of America is often overlooked and neglected. These were poor Whites from Britain, Irelands, Germany and Switzerland, who signed on to serve masters in America as unpaid servants for a limited period of time, usually about seven years. Although they weren’t paid, were generally exploited and subject to extremely harsh discipline comparable to Black slaves, they received at the end of their indenture plots of land as well as gifts of clothes, tools and other equipment. When the scheme was first set up in the late 16th and 17th centuries by the chartered companies, the terms were extremely generous. This, however,, succeeded in attracting very few of the poor White emigrants needed to serve as labour as well as populate the newly planted colonies. As a result, the scheme passed into the hands of private merchants,, who had far less scruples and who offered far less generous rewards and incentives for the prospective emigrants. They, however, produced a series of glowing broadsides dwelling on the wealth the New World had to offer in order to entice prospective servants to sign on.
Driving the emigration from Britain, Ireland and Germany was grinding poverty. Germany was recovering from the horrors of the 30 Years War, when a quarter of the population had starved to death as the polyglot armies of Catholic and Protestant princes fought across the German states, as well as the exactions of feudal princes. Similar desperate poverty existed in England, Scotland and Wales. In England a cause of much poverty was the enclosure of common land, where peasants who had held the right to use certain private lands were denied it as the landlords enclosed it for their own use and development. Ireland also suffered from the harsh misrule of English government.
Conditions were harsh and highly exploitative. The book begins with an account of the journey of Mittelburger, a German organ builder who had been hired by a German congregation in Pennsylvania to supply them with an organ and accompany it across the Atlantic. Mittelburger describes the squalid conditions on board and the complete absence of any concern for human life. One man lost his three children as the fell off the gang plank getting on to the ship when it was only sailing up the Rhine collecting its passengers. The servants had to pay for the own food and accommodation at every stop along the way. This ate up their savings, particularly when they stopped to take on supplies and more servants at Rotterdam, an extremely expensive city. More expense was incurred again when the ship stopped at Cowes for more supplies, before crossing the Atlantic. Conditions were cramped and filthy. The food was scant, poor quality and rotten. The drinking water was black and swarming with worms. Boredom and overcrowding resulted in fights. Disease and death was common, with the deceased causally disposed of by being thrown over the side. Once they reached America, the colonists would be sold at the dockside to their new masters. There were a class of colonists, redemptionists, who started with enough money they considered would be enough to pay for their journey. They were sadly mistaken, as the frequent stops consumed all their savings so that they were in debt by the time they landed in America, and had to serve as indentured servants until such time it was paid.
Also exploiting them was a type of slave driver, who would drive the unsold servants around the farms, gradually selling them one by one. One quick-witted Irish chap managed to turn the tables on one of them. He ended up as the last unsold servant, and the slave driver eventually ended the day at an inn, where he took accommodation for himself and the servant. He sold the Irish feller to the landlord, who was looking for a bit of help. The lad got his revenge the next morning when he got up before the slave driver, and pretended that he was him. He warned the landlord that the sleeping slave driver was in fact a tricky indentured servant, who frequently tried to pass himself off as a slave driver. The landlord didn’t know which one was which and was taken in, so that the real slave driver had to do some talking of his own in order to establish his identity. By which time the Irish lad was well away.
Some indentured servants had kindly, generous employers, and prospered. There were even cases where indentured servants tried to take their masters to court, though this was difficult and often sailed because of the sheer difficulty of raising enough money to pay for the litigation. Some fought in the colonial wars against the French and their Indian allies, while others served with distinction in the Continental Army against the British during the Revolution. In some colonies former indentured servants became important politicians and public officials. At one point, about 3/4 quarters of the Virginia legislature were former unfree colonists. Not all colonists could vote, however. The German colonists, particularly in Pennsylvania, were denied the franchise for some time because of fears that they would take over from the British and Irish settlers. I’d have liked to have known a bit more about this, as there is a parallel today with fears about White Brits and Americans being swamped through mass immigration.
The book provides a comprehensive, accessible account of the suffering, hardships and triumphs of these unfree and very frequently exploited servants and settlers. The scheme was compared to slavery at the time. In Ireland it was called ‘the Irish slave trade’, and there is still bitterness about it today. One Canadian girl at Bristol university still felt bitter about how her ancestor had been taken to Canada as a servants by an English aristocrat and then dumped there. A few years ago there was increasing discussion about the Irish slave trade, particularly among Irish nationalists. This awareness of the Irish people’s own past as unfree, exploited servants prevented there from being much sympathy for Black Lives Matter when they went round some Irish communities trying to make them feel guilty about the Irish involvement in the slave trade. I don’t doubt that some Irish ports may have been involved. The trade was so lucrative that many minor parts across Britain were involved, before the trade was monopolised by London, Bristol, Liverpool and some other ports. But the Irish were also practically enslaved. Many of the indentured servants were political prisoners and prisoners of war from the Monmouth Rebellion in southwest England and the various Irish rebellions. These enslaved colonists frequently, and especially the Irish, made common cause with Black slaves and joined their rebellions, or attempted to collaborate with foreign attacks on their colonies.
The blurb for the book runs
‘Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shiploads of emigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland landed at American harbors. Poverty and hardship at home had driven them to seek better lives elsewhere. And the colonies were desperately in need of workers to help clear and settle the new land.
‘Many of the new colonists came not as free men, however, but as indentured servants who had agreed to work for a certain number of years without wages in return. for the cost of their transatlantic passage.
‘For some, the system worked well. They were treated decently by their masters, were given generous “freedom dues” at the end of the specified time and went on to become happy and successful citizens. But for others- men, women and children – the articles of indenture were a trap, binding them in virtual slavery to harsh and brutal masters for unexpectedly long periods of time.
”Indentured servants played a vital part in the settlement and development of the American colonies, yet their experiences and the extent of their contributions have been almost forgotten today. In Colonists for Sale, Clifford Lindsey Alderman presents their story in full and fascinating detail: where they were recruited, how they were sold, and to whom; the conditions under which they lived in in each of the colonies; and what happened to them after their terms of servitude were completed.’
The book has the following chapters
The Frightful Journey
How It Began
Spirits and Newlanders
Servant Snatching in Ireland and Scotland
White Slaves to Virginia
How They Fared in Maryland
Land of Promise, Often Broken
Servants in the Southernmost Colonies
New York, the Palatine Fiasco and New Jersey
How New England Handled the Servants
The Soldiers and Peter Francisco
Others Who Made Good
A Summing Up
And a section for further reading, bibliography and index.
It wasn’t just in the continental American colonies that the system of indentured servitude was used and exploited. It also operated in the British Caribbean colonies. It was eventually discontinued there as supplies of available land ran out to give to prospective White settlers, and Black slavery taken up instead. However, I’ve been told that you can still which of the former slave cabins on Barbados were occupied by the Irish as they have shamrocks painted on them.
Al-Jahiz, Book of the Glory of the Black Race Introduction by Simon Starr, (House of Starr 2015).
Al-Jahiz, Abu Uthman Amr ibn Babi al-Kinani al-Basri, 781-868/9, was a Muslim polymath from Basra, in what is now Iraq. He wrote over 100 books on Arabic grammar, zoology, poetry, lexicography and rhetoric. His works on zoology have particularly gained the interest of modern scholars, as it has been claimed that he propounded a theory of evolution centuries before Charles Darwin. This is mistaken. Al-Jahiz held the orthodox Muslim – and Christian belief – of his time that the world’s creatures had been created by the Almighty, separate and complete, and had not developed from previous forms. Where he was pioneering instead is in his understanding and description of the interconnectedness of the natural world. He should therefore be respected instead as an early scholar and forerunner of modern ecology.
Racism is explicitly condemned by Mohammed in the Quran. Nevertheless, as the Arab slave trade in Black Africans developed, racist attitudes justifying their enslavement also appeared. These are very much of the sort that were later expressed by White Europeans during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade – Blacks were stupid, lazy, sexually promiscuous and thieving. But Black Africans were also the subjects of much admiration as well as after the foundation of Black Muslim kingdoms. The great 12th century Arab traveller, Ibn Battuta, said that they would be excellent Muslims, if only they didn’t hold Whites in such contempt. Al-Jahiz himself had a Black grandfather, and the Book of the Glory of the Black Race was his defence of Black Africans against Arab racism. Starr’s introduction not only includes a brief description of Al-Jahiz’s life and career, but also the Zanj rebellion of the 9th century against the Abbasid caliphate, to the participants of which he dedicates the book, and the Year of the Elephant, an invasion of Arabia by the Christian Ethiopian king Abraha and conflict with the pagan Arabs over Mecca.
One of the most striking and important passages in the Al-Jahiz’s book, according to YouTube, is a passage where states very clearly that Blacks have not been given their characteristic skin colour by the Lord as a punishment. It’s just a natural adaptation to their climate and environment. This directly attacks one of the religious prejudices used to justify Black enslavement, that their colour and status as slaves was imposed upon them for their sinful nature.
Al-Jahiz’s book, however, is short, only 32 pages. The rest of the book, going up to page 87, is an exposition of Kemetics. I think this is a Black American new religious movement centred around worship of the Atum and based on ancient Egyptian paganism. Starr appears to be an Afrocentrist, as he begins the book with a quote from the late 18th century French traveller, the Count de Volney, that the Sphinx’s features are that of a negro. Kemetics is the latest in a series of Black religious, such as the various forms of Black Islam, Rastarianism and the Black Hebrew Israelites which attempt to centre Blacks as the true recipients of spirituality and salvation against White oppression. It is yet another expression of the Afrocentrist belief in ancient Egypt as a Black civilisation with superior culture and religion.
The right-wing, anti-Islam YouTuber British Insight today put up on his community page a meme asking his readers if Islam should be banned as a form of mental illness.
The answer should be an overwhelming ‘No!’ for the following reasons:
Firstly, regarding Islam specifically, the religion is no more or less rational than any other religion, philosophy or belief system. Although some religions may seem completely irrational from the outside, from inside, to their believers they seem perfectly rational. This has been argued by the American Jewish anthropologist, Franz Boas, who conducted research among the Inuit and was obviously deeply concerned about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This was part of his riposte to it. The sociologist Clifford Geertz has also argued for the essential rationality of religions within their own worldviews. Boax’ argument, however, has been pushed to argue that all religions and cultures have equal validity, one of the essential doctrines of postmodernism. It has been used to attack and relativise western philosophical, political and legal achievements like the rule of law, democracy and science. These first took shape in the west, but they are of universal validity, as shown by the Black abolitionists who articulated their arguments against slavery using western philosophical concepts in the 18th and 19thy century.
Turning to medieval Europe, the traditional view that this was an age of faith and dark superstition has taken a well-deserved hammering in recent decades. Books have been written about the rise of science in the Middle Ages, such as God’s Philosophers. One medieval writer on the inventions of his age, firmly proclaimed it was all provable by science and that if you wanted to know more, you should travel to Spain to learn from the masters, the Muslims. Some scholars have even called it an age of scepticism, as there is no evidence that people then were less sceptical than they are now. William of Auvergne medieval theologian, put the visions of demons seen in one French monastery down to a form of indigestion. The monks had eaten too well, and their stomachs were so heavy they weighed down on the nerves carrying the essential fluids through the body, thus giving them bad dreams. And so it was no accident that they saw the demons disappearing into the monastery’s toilets. One sceptical French clergyman also described a notorious scryer claiming that he’d found the identity of a thief who’d stolen his client’s property through looking in a bowl of water. But he noted that it all could be trick, as the man he identified was notorious for theft. John Lennox in his book, The Science of God, has shown how important Christian belief in the creation of a rational universe governed by law by the Almighty to the emergence of modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The eminent biologist, Aleister Hardie, argued in his book, The Biology of God, that people’s religious experiences were so reliable and trustworthy that they could be used to establish a genuine science of God, which would be more reliable than theology. More recently, scholars of medieval thought have written book on ‘Medieval Rationalities’, arguing that this is also an age of rationalism.
Three, witch beliefs are, from an anthropological perspective, no more or less irrational than modern western science and other beliefs. See the section ‘Part Five: Witch-Beliefs Throw Light on Other Problems’, with the chapters, Mark Gluckman (1944), ‘The Logic of African Witchcraft’; Michael Polanyi (1958), ‘The Stability of Scientific Theories Against Experience’; Max Marwick, (1974), ‘Witchcraft and the Epistemology of Science’; and A. Rebecca Cardozo, (1968), ‘A Modern American Witch-craze’ in Max Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and Sorcery (2nd Edition, London: Penguin 1982).
Fourthly, way back at the beginning of this century some of the more fanatical of the New Atheists were claiming that religion and mystical experiences were indeed a form of mental illness. Then it was investigate by psychiatrists and neuroscientists, who found that religious people, even those who regularly had religious experiences, were no more nuts than anyone else and indeed were largely completely sane.
Banning Islam would be a dangerous attack on freedom of belief and conscience.
At the moment we still have something resembling freedom of belief, conscience and thought, although these are coming under dangerous attack from both left and right, particularly as Starmer and the cops get worried about the rise of Reform and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment. But any attack on one religion as irrational can be used against all. I can remember the time in the 70s when Russian dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn revealed that the Soviet state, as part of their persecution of religious believers, was throwing them in mental hospitals as they were judged mad for not wholeheartedly believing in Communism and Dialectal Materialism.
Back here in Blighty, Nicholas Humphries, an Oxford paediatrician and one of the most fanatical of the New Atheists, strongly believed that religion was a form of mental illness. He set up a position demanding that people, who taught their children anything other than what was established science, should have their children taken away. Seven thousand people signed it, including Richard Dawkins. Dawkins later asked for his name to be removed from the petition after P.Z. Myers, an atheist scientist from Minnesota, called him a Fascist. Well, seven thousand signatures sounds impressive, until you find out that eight thousand people signed a petition calling for the-prime minister Tony Blair to stand on his head and swivel.
I believe if a petition gets to 100,000 signatures or so it has to be debated in the House.
Oh, if only.
Wouldn’t it have been an amazing spectacle to see the honourable gentlemen and ladies debating this in the Lower and Upper chambers.
There is irrationality in Islam, just as you can find it in many other religions and philosophies. Some of these are dangerous, some benign. The space brother cults established by various UFO contactees and channellers, all claiming to be passing on the spiritual wisdom they’ve receiver from space aliens may seem to many people to be utterly bonkers, but as long as they do no harm, their members should be allowed to believe what they want.
The same goes with Islam and the other world religions. There is dangerous fanaticism there, especially in accusations of blasphemy and the desecration of the Quran. These have led to false accusations, and the persecution in Pakistan of Christians, and Ahmadi and Shia Muslims. One of the most shocking cases of religiously motivated murder I have come across was the killing of a school teacher by one of her students. The girl killed her, not because the teacher had blasphemed, but because the wretched child had dreamt she’d blasphemed. That’s genuine religious hysteria for you, and in my opinion the kid needs to be locked up in the Pakistani version of Broadmoor for a very long time.
But this is extremism and a kind of social hysteria. It is not the entirety of Islam.
Most Muslims are not going around murdering people for their faith, but are decent, law-abiding, unremarkable citizens. In the Middle Ages Islam produced some of the greatest, pioneering mathematicians, scientists and philosophers before reaction set in.
What needs to be banned is not Islam, but only the extreme, reactionary forms of it that demonise non-Muslims, demand the separation and subjugation of non-Muslims and their murder and enslavement. As has already been done with Islamist groups like Hisb-ut Tahrir.
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