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Wednesday 3 December 2008

Intelligence2 debate

Intelligence2

Lloyd Evans on Tuesday night's debate

Opposing the motion, Charles Glass, a distinguished American war correspondent, made an urbane, ironic speech in which he pretended to side with his opponents. ‘Aren’t we jolly lucky to be Western and to be superior to those not fortunate enough to share our values?’ He reminded us that the explorer Magellan, on arriving in Madras, ordered the extermination of all the city’s Jews and Muslims. Glass linked this to later atrocities committed by Europeans and Americans. ‘A culture that created two world wars should be wary of assuming its superiority.’ He invoked Vietnam and Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

Times columnist David Aaronovitch lighted on Iran and painted a vivid and appalling picture of its misogynistic legal system. Teenage girls are often subjected to stoning for ‘crimes against chastity’, i.e. being alone with a boy. A young woman recently imprisoned on such charges was raped by her jailer. Both were convicted of adultery. The man, 52, was flogged. The girl, 16, was hanged. These details subtly refined the terms of the debate. It was now a dispute between Islam and Judaeo-Christianity. But no one minded. The room was eager to slug it out on just that territory.

The French academic Tariq Ramadan gave a spirited rebuttal of Aaronovitch.
Ramadan has a Jose Mourinho-like knack for coining memorable phrases. ‘Implicit in your talk is that Islam is the problem,’ he said. And he accused Aaronovitch of generalising. ‘From one story we make a civilisation? Unfair! Unjust! Dangerous!’ He surprised us with a list of Islamic mediaeval thinkers who had espoused the cause of free debate. We struggled to recognise their names. And that was the point. Western history is too blinkered and exclusive to admit the tradition of liberal Islam. He told us that our so-called ‘superiority’ is inspired by a fear of losing our special identity. ‘We select the past to build a new “we”’, he thundered. And we — the we he meant — shuddered as we digested this slogan. Instead of ‘superior’, we felt suddenly biased, parochial and ill-informed.

Then up stood Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion. The youngest of the speakers, Murray was easily the most adept and relaxed. Glancing only occasionally at his notes, he gave a searching, witty and brilliantly informal speech in which he dissected his opponents’ arguments. Unpicking the motion and its troublesome word ‘assert’, he defused its imperialist flavour. ‘Our superiority need not be asserted violently.’ He reiterated a point made by David Aaronovitch about the crisis of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately the discovery that America had committed torture reaffirmed liberal values. ‘Lynndie England was found guilty,’ Murray said, ‘in the West. By the West. For the West.’

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