Australian Notes

Saturday, 18th February 2012

Whether you think it was about her judgment (bad) or her character (shifty), the Four Corners interview last Monday may go down as the clincher that entrenched beyond possible correction the public perception of Julia Gillard as an unworthy Prime Minister. It will not be enough to bring back Kevin Rudd, but it could finish off Julia Gillard. As she said in another context: ‘That was the moment!’

•••

A new Decline of the West started about 20 years ago, according to Nick Cohen in his latest polemic You Can’t Read This Book — which has the subtitle ‘Censorship in the Age of Freedom’. His idea is that liberals — who are neither hardline lefties nor hard-hearted righties — had grown fat, as it were, on easy victories. They had marched against the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover — when banning books had become a lost cause. They marched against apartheid — when it was already collapsing. They rallied once more to put the boot into Soviet Communism — when even Mr Gorbachev was pulling down the Wall. They saw themselves as the forward scouts of the new age of freedom, even the End of History. But when suddenly confronted by a fanatical and uncompromising enemy, they went into hiding. The turning point, as Cohen tells it, was their capitulation to Islamist jihadists in the Satanic Verses affair of 1989. Faced with worldwide Muslim riots, book-burnings, fire-bombings and murders, culminating in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s assassination, they tut-tutted privately but dared not regroup to march against the fundamentalist Islamists and tell them where to get off. (In Australia, the bookshop chains even refused to sell The Satanic Verses.) The hardline Left, according to Cohen, was more upfront. Rushdie was one of their own. They shared his anti-Americanism, his contempt for the West and its unrepentant imperialism, patronising racism and sanctimonious Christianity. But they had little influence. For its part, the Right could not conceal its distaste for this loud-mouthed lefty. Hugh Trevor-Roper famously said: ‘I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.’

There was more to come. In 2004 in Holland, the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch citizen and MP, scripted a ten-minute film, Submission, condemning Islamist oppression of women. (Check it out on the net.) When a Muslim fanatic murdered the film’s director in an Amsterdam street and announced she would be next, the liberal intellectuals and journalists, while deploring the murder, found fault with Hirsi Ali! She must share the blame, they said, because of her provocations — her atheistic attacks on Islam and Muslim immigration and her support for Israel. She finally fled Holland.

•••

In 2005 the Danish cartoonists provoked more worldwide Muslim riots, death threats and attempted murder. Again the West’s liberals were cautious when not silent. Few newspapers (and none in Australia) reprinted the cartoons as news.

Cohen’s gloss on this whole story is that the age of freedom, proclaimed in the 1980s, is dead and a new age of virulent censorship is now entrenched. He denounces all the appeasers, Left, Right and centre, although he reserves his most biting scorn for liberals. He breaks into Yiddish to express his contempt: they are, he says, ‘fercockt Western putzes’.

Is Cohen right? Not entirely. To some extent liberals are simply being prudent. Cohen quotes the British artist Grayson Perry, famous for blaspheming against Christianity, saying he will not take on Islamism in case someone ‘will slit my throat’. More broadly, it has never been the liberals’ policy to shock and insult people into enlightenment. They are and always have been gradualists. Better, they think, to give support to freethinkers like Rushdie and Hirsi Ali by loading them with prizes and awards (including in Rushdie’s case a knighthood for ‘services to literature’, and in Hirsi Ali’s a fellowship of a neocon think-tank). Better to rely on gradual integration of Muslims into Western societies or their absorption in the wider world of Western values. As it turns out, there will be a much longer wait than they had thought 20 or 30 years ago, but they still believe time is on their side provided they do not compromise their basic principles. Meanwhile Cohen has written a comprehensive manifesto of the trotskisant Left. His book deals with more than Islamist censorship. It also devotes several chapters to the way the oligarchic rich, with the help of a complicit judiciary, now use the libel laws to cow their critics into silence. The book is published by Fourth Estate in London, one of Rupert Murdoch’s imprints.

•••

Foreign Minister Rudd has advised the world that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has lost ‘all legitimacy’. He should ‘step aside’. This will ‘allow democratic political reform to begin’. It is the advice he offered the despots of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Few Australians, if any, regret the downfall of those detestable dictatorships. Yet in each case the beneficiaries have not been Arab democrats but Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood — totalitarian in spirit and pledged to impose sharia law. The Muslim Brotherhood is also, to quote Nick Cohen (see above), ‘the world’s largest anti-Semitic organisation’. No one can object to Mr Rudd’s democratic sentiments, but some question his judgment. It would add to his credibility when he next gives advice to the Arab world if he would explain why he has so often been wrong in the past. Surely he is not simply canvassing for votes in his bid for a seat on the UN Security Council?

More articles from: Peter Coleman | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Tina Faulk

February 28th, 2012 11:59pm Report this comment

The respected Australian defence strategist Hugh White told fran Kelly (Radio National) this morning that Rudd's peregrinations (my word, not Hugh's) to all points of the globe seldom benefitted Australian interests and it must be concluded that all that globetrotting and conference-sttending was more to do with gaining media exposure and less with promoting Australia's strategic interests, vide Rudd's lack of interest in our nearest neighbour, PNG's political turmoil.

Post comment