A grotesque attack on a brilliant writer

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 18/8/2016]

Why have a Pulitzer Prize winner and a NYT bestselling author, among others, promoted a hideous racist screed this week?

A persistent dilemma, in our social media-centered age, in which any fool can (and will) voice their opinion on any given topic on an essentially equal footing with people who actually know something of what they’re talking about, is how to deal with the ignorant, fatuous, hostile and/or dishonest detractor, also known as the ‘troll’. 

The sensible policy has long seemed to me to be simply to ignore them, especially where they decline to identify themselves by name and/or photo. A thoughtful reader or correspondent with an intelligent criticism is more than welcome to get in touch, and fully deserves a considered response, but a cretin looking for nothing more than a rise out of you must never be engaged. The same goes for the crackpot who elevates his toxic emission to the more elaborate media of the blog post or full-length column. It isn’t just about denying them the airtime and platform they don’t remotely deserve. It’s about not paying them the compliment of taking their writing as though it were serious enough to merit attention. It’s a question, in the end, of self-respect.

By that standard, this article published Monday on the far-right website ‘The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection’ should have been safely ignorable by all people of discriminating taste. As a general rule, one should think of the concept of ‘alternative’ media much the same way one does ‘alternative’ medicine: if it worked, it would just be called medicine. As a particular rule, one should steer clear of websites that publish articles beginning with such sentences as “The Jews can be a formidable enemy: devoid of scruples, they hunt in packs.”

However, the piece in question – ‘Michael Weiss and the Iran-U.S. Hardline Nexus That Led Iranian-American to Evin Prison’ by Richard Silverstein – has become a special case, owing to its rapid circulation far beyond the neglected neo-Nazi gutters of the Internet to something alarmingly close to the high table of polite society. Yesterday, WikiLeaks shared it with their 3.4 million Twitter followers. The writer Glenn Greenwald beamed it out to his 723,000 Twitter followers, by means of re-tweeting one Trita Parsi, who described it to his own 43,000 followers as a “MUST READ” [his capitals]. The author Reza Aslan re-tweeted the same to his 182,000 followers.

These are big names, and big numbers. Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize winner, while Aslan’s 2013 book Zealot debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. So just what is this article they agree is such a “MUST READ” all about? The kindest thing that can be said for it is it’s a nasty work of racist conspiracy theorizing. Its subject, the author and The Daily Beast editor Michael Weiss, is portrayed as a bloodthirsty Muslim-hating warmonger bent on manipulating American foreign policy at the behest of Israel, in the mould of what Silverstein calls the “court Jews” of “European rulers [in] the Middle Ages.” You read that right – Weiss, an atheist of partial Jewish descent, is likened by the article’s author to a medieval “court Jew.” In a tweet clarifying this terminology Thursday, Silverstein explained, “Weiss does the bidding of oligarchs & the powerful much like court Jews once did for rulers.”

It’s extremely tempting to leave things there. Need any more time be wasted on a piece so nakedly manured with textbook anti-Semitism? Will anyone be prepared to stand up and say, ‘Sure, some passages rather whiff of the Protocols, but otherwise it’s a cogent critique’? Actually, it turns out they are, yes. Someone named Kevin Rothrock, editor of a website called RuNet Echo, who tweeted the article more than once to his nearly 9,000 followers, found himself able to declare that, “The “court Jews” comment is disgusting, but my Twitter interest is in media focused on Russia, hence my focus in [sic] the funding rumor.”

Very well, then. Welcome to 2016. Degrading – no, humiliating; revolting – a task as it may be, let’s briefly consent to set aside the fascist innuendo and address the piece’s key arguments, such as they are.

It begins with an artless, hysterical caricature of Weiss as a “military interventionist gun-for-hire” and “leading neocon propagandist.” [Disclosure: Weiss was a regular NOW contributor between March 2013 and April 2015, and while he and I have never met, I believe I may describe him as a friend. I have also written three times for The Daily Beast, where he is an editor.] The words “neocon” and “neoconservative,” indeed, appear no fewer than sixteen times (for the authoritative definition of this protean term, look no further than Weiss’ own indispensable lexicon). Hand-in-hand with this is a continuous effort to paint him as an ultra-Zionist Kahanist with an implacable loathing of Palestinians and “anti-Muslim […] sympathies” more broadly. Here, in no particular order, are some facts I happen to know about Weiss that would make all this laughable if it weren’t so malicious:

• About half a year ago (as best as I can remember), he declared on Facebook he was backing Bernie Sanders for president, and would vote blank in the event of a Hillary nomination by the Democrats. If he has since, very grudgingly, come round to the idea of a Hillary presidency, it’s only because (unlike Silverstein’s colleague at The Unz Review, Pat Buchanan) he finds the Trump alternative so absolutely unconscionable
• Though supportive – like almost every foreign policy analyst on earth – of military action against ISIS, Weiss has been at the forefront of those warning that force alone is useless, even dangerous and counter-productive, without  parallel non-violent efforts to address the political grievances of the communities living under ISIS’ control – almost all of whom happen to be Muslims. This is the polar opposite of the sort of vulgar militarism espoused by, say, Ted Cruz, who vowed to “carpet-bomb” ISIS till he found out “if sand can glow in the dark” (and who, unlike Weiss, thought kindly of Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of half a million Syrian Muslims. It’s interesting to see Silverstein describe Assad as “a Weiss bete noire,” as though there were something peculiar, even sinister, about disliking the 21st-century’s leading mass murderer)
• Weiss is on record supporting the creation of a Palestinian state, and is no admirer of Benjamin Netanyahu. These stances have caused him some professional headaches over the years 

Much else in the piece is gallingly ignorant, or cheap, or both. Weiss is attacked for having co-written a piece with Elizabeth O’Bagy, as though he should have personally demanded to see her PhD dissertation before agreeing to do so. He is briefly praised for being “glib and articulate,” which Silverstein apparently doesn’t understand is a contradiction. Silverstein appears greatly amused that Weiss should simultaneously admire Karl Marx and oppose Communism, which suggests nothing more than that Weiss understands left-wing politics much better than Silverstein does. At one point, Silverstein raises the possibility, without any substantiation at all, that an interview Weiss published with an ISIS defector in November was a fabrication.

Must I continue? He claims, falsely, that Weiss “recruited” Maajid Nawaz to write for The Daily Beast, for whom Nawaz was already writing before Weiss joined. He accuses Weiss of destroying the career of one John Rosenthal, who by the sounds of it did the destruction all by himself when he began denying Assad’s very-well-documented culpability for the massacre of Syrian civilians. Silverstein correctly notes that Weiss opposes the Vladimir Putin regime, a position which, in conjunction with his “anti-jihadism,” Silverstein asserts “makes for a supremely ambitious, geopolitically sweeping, and exceedingly dangerous stew.”

Finally, Silverstein throws in the story of Siamak Namazi, an American-Iranian dual national currently incarcerated in Tehran, which he imagines to be his ace-in-the-hole; the nail in Weiss’ coffin. Namazi’s unfortunate history is as follows. In July 2015, his passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities during a brief visit to the homeland. He was repeatedly harassed and interrogated by regime officials from that moment onward. Two months later, in September, The Daily Beast – which knew nothingof Namazi’s circumstances, nor even his presence in Iran – published an article criticizing his alleged lobbying in Washington in favor of the historic Iranian nuclear deal that had just, two months previously, been signed by all parties including Iran. One month later, Namazi was arrested and imprisoned, and hasn’t been heard from since.

This is, obviously, a terrible state of affairs, but Silverstein doesn’t demonstrate why it should in any way implicate Weiss. For starters, Weiss was neither the author of the piece, nor the final editor responsible for it (he’s told me this personally). Should anyone take any issue with its content, the proper people to consult would be the Beast’s editor-in-chief and lawyer, both of whom gave it their approval. 

Second, there’s no evidence beyond the merely circumstantial linking the publication of the Beast report in September and Namazi’s arrest in October. As noted above, the regime had already been on Namazi’s case since July, two months before the piece saw the light of day. Since the Iranian judiciary won’t reveal the charges for which Namazi was arrested, any comment made on the topic cannot be other than speculative. Silverstein is free to speculate, if he wishes, that an article published in English on an American website was the determining factor in the authorities in Tehran snatching a target they already had squarely in their sights. Others would be equally free to speculate that Namazi’s arrest fits coherently with the now-well-established pattern of dual-nationality Iranians being imprisoned in Tehran for the purpose of their subsequent exchange for Iranians incarcerated in foreign countries. Namazi’s former business partner of nine years, Bijan Khajehpour, wrote a whole article in March speculating as to the reasons for his friend’s arrest, which he narrowed down to “three possible explanations,” none of them connected to the Beast report (which he did not mention). One can only hope Namazi will be released as soon as possible and given the opportunity to voice his own thoughts.

And there, mercifully, 6,200 words later, the article ends. I must say I feel rather unclean at this stage, and I suspect any readers who’ve made it this far will too. And perhaps we should, though not nearly as unclean as the public figures who lent their names and reputations to the promotion of a hideous racist screed, and a grotesque attack on a brilliant writer.

Galloway's attack on Nawaz plumbs new depths of hypocrisy

[Originally posted at NOW]

I have twice had the honor and pleasure of interacting with Maajid Nawaz; first when he was kind enough to sign my copy of his remarkable memoir, Radical, at the 2012 Edinburgh Book Festival; and second when I interviewed him by phone shortly afterward in NOW’s own pages. On both occasions the winsome charisma and quick intelligence for which he’s renowned were in full evidence.

We didn’t agree on everything – he is a believing Muslim who opposed any kind of intervention in Syria – but these facts, if anything, only make it more outrageous that he should have become the target this week of a takfir campaign launched by Islamist fascists after his tweeting of a cartoon along with the words: “This [...] is not offensive & I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it الله أكبر منه.” The former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned counter-Islamist democracy activist, who recently succeeded in convincing the head of the anti-Muslim ‘English Defence League’ skinhead mob to step down, has now received “credible” death threats, and has felt compelled to issue a statement of “regret.”

Loathsome as this assault is, it’s perhaps only to be expected from the Islamists, who are at least open about their utter rejection of “godless” liberalism and “man-made” democracy. In a sense, their behavior here is fitting, even reassuring (to discover anew that one has made an enemy of the theocratic far-right is, or ought to be, a source of satisfaction). Much less stomachable, however, was the solidarity offered to the scrofulous thugs by MP George Galloway, who took it upon himself to tweet:

“No Muslim will ever vote for the Liberal Democrats anywhere ever unless they ditch the provocateur Majid [sic] Nawaz, cuckold of the EDL.”

It’s just astounding what the man gets away with. Bad enough that Galloway – who is actually a sectarian Roman Catholic, who argues against Scottish independence because the resulting peninsula would contain too many Protestants – supposes himself eligible to speak on behalf of “Muslims.” Far worse that, in so doing, he equates all “Muslims” with the crackpot fringe minority represented by Nawaz’ would-be-murderers (precisely the sort of vile smear that was, incidentally, the stock-in-trade of the EDL).

Yet it’s his rancid hypocrisy that most churns the gut. Galloway has spent the best part of the last three years defending Bashar al-Assad, whose merciless regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslim civilians, as an enlightened and secularist bastion against the “takfiri fanatics” and “beasts” of the Syrian opposition. America, he now tells us, is “in bed with al-Qaeda.” But whenever Galloway is back home, it’s precisely the brethren of those very same takfiris and fanatics who are his dearest comrades. Indeed, he’s even dabbled in the takfir business himself, slandering his Muslim rival in a recent by-election as a hopeless alcoholic, and thundering thuggishly that “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not […] I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.”

Then again, there’s a warped sort of consistency here (and not just because, before Galloway started disliking al-Qaeda, he was lauding them as a “resistance” force in Iraq). Much like America’s televangelist millionaires, one never quite knows whether ‘Gorgeous George’ sincerely believes the things he says, or if he’s just doing too well for himself to stop now. There’s reason to think it’s the latter; in other words that he’s found a highly lucrative niche as the go-to propagandist for whichever mass-murderer is the international community’s bogeyman-of-the-day.

For example, a 2007 British parliamentary inquiry found “strong circumstantial evidence” that Galloway received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Saddam Hussein regime; money siphoned out of the UN Oil-for-Food Programme that was, incidentally, supposed to buy relief for Iraqi civilians rendered destitute by years of international sanctions.

And since becoming an MP again in 2012, Galloway has been forced to disclose some other fascinating sources of income, including at least $119,000 a year for his twice-monthly show on the staunchly pro-Assad al-Mayadeen TV station here in Beirut, as well as “several £20,000 ($33,000) payments for presenting programmes on Press TV,” the Iranian state channel, from which platform he memorably declared last year’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus to have been the work of al-Qaeda in cahoots with Israel (and then lied about it in parliament). No doubt impressed with what they saw, and realizing the potential value of his services, the Putin regime has since given him a weekly slot on their RT channel, in return for as-yet-untold sums.

But at the same time, there’s also reason to believe that what he says comes largely from genuine conviction. He certainly goes above and beyond the call of duty of a mere mercenary. His record on LGBT rights, for instance, is notoriously shady – he both denies that Iran executes gays and says the ones it does execute are either rapists or pedophiles. Rape itself, as it happens, is something he’s willing to pardon as long as the right people are doing it – commenting on the Julian Assange allegations, Galloway shrugged that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.” And his support for censorship has been expressed repeatedly and unambiguously: “Of course in this country there’s freedom of speech, but it cannot be an unlimited freedom of speech and other freedoms must trump it, including the freedom not to be terrorized in your own home, not to have your prophet insulted, your religion insulted.”

Perhaps these too are purely cynical statements, calibrated solely to win votes and fatten pockets. But I’m tempted to think Galloway is also one of those authoritarians still lurking on the ostensible left for whom the very idea of liberal democracy is a bourgeois abomination. There’s far more “revolutionary” excitement, after all, in the Castros and Chavezes and Saddams of the world, whose despotism, no matter how bloody, can always be excused for the good of the cause (even when “the cause” is nothing more than petty dynastic perpetuation). Ultimately, for Galloway no less than the Islamists, Nawaz’ original sin was committed the moment he put down the black-and-white flag of the caliphate, and turned his back on totalitarianism tout court. It’s incumbent on all who wish to live neither in Stalinist nor Salafist serfdom to offer their full support to Nawaz, and their full contempt to his adversaries.

British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.

The counter-Islamist: Talking to Maajid Nawaz

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Maajid Nawaz is not your typical democracy activist. For more than 12 years, he was a member of the UK branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a hardline Islamist party that calls for a global Islamic state that would invade and conquer infidel nations, forcibly veil women, and stone apostates and adulterers to death. After serving the cause in Pakistan and Palestine, he was incarcerated for five years in Egypt, where he began to question the ideology.

Upon returning to London, he abandoned Islamism and started the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank countering extremism and promoting liberal democracy, named after the first Englishman to build a mosque in Great Britain. NOW Lebanon spoke to Nawaz, who has just released a memoir, Radical: My Journey From Islamist Extremism to a Democratic Awakening.

The first half of your book tells the story of your transition in the 1990s from an essentially secular, girl-chasing hip-hop fan to a Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot. How did that happen?

Nawaz: The journey involved me suffering from a severe level of violent racism in Essex [in England]; both on the street from groups like Combat 18 and at the institutional level. In those days before the murder of Stephen Lawrence [in 1993], the level of racism in the British establishment was quite entrenched. That led me to feel very disenfranchised from society.

On top of that there was Bosnia unfolding right before our eyes. A few countries away, on the European continent, there was a genocide committed against Muslims. These combined to produce an acute identity crisis within me, which is where these ideological groups step in and push solutions that are black-and-white, which to a teenage mind can seem to make a lot of sense.

You spent five years in prison in Egypt in the 2000s, during which you began to have serious doubts about Islamist ideology. What made you change your mind?

Nawaz: There were two main factors, although I must emphasize it was a process, it wasn’t a sudden light-bulb moment.

First, Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. I saw people fighting for justice on my behalf who weren’t Muslims, and that had a profound impact on me.

Second were the discussions I had in prison with the “Who’s Who” of political prisoners, from the assassins of Anwar Sadat through the entire Islamist spectrum to liberal political prisoners.

After leaving Hizb ut-Tahrir, you co-founded the Quilliam Foundation, which aims to counter extremist ideology and promote democratic pluralism. How, in practical terms, can that be done?

Nawaz: There’s a grass-roots approach and a policy approach, as I described in my TED talk. We work on both sides. Governments have a role—for instance in choosing their partners and interlocutors—who they engage with. They have to make sure they aren’t unwittingly encouraging extremism. Media, too, have a role to be sure [in making sure] they are not furthering the Islamist narrative through their reporting.

On the other end we try to build up a grass-roots allegiance for democratic values in countries such as Pakistan. To directly compete with groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Taiba who are working to recruit young Pakistanis. That is a long-term solution. The Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928 and it took them until 2012 to win elections in Egypt. You have to start somewhere.

You’ve founded a similar organization, Khudi, in Pakistan. What sort of obstacles do you face there?

Nawaz: Security is a big one. We’re talking about an environment where “secularism” has become an insult and a swear word; where democracy is viewed with suspicion and a synonym for corruption. An environment where people are killed by mobs upon the mere accusation of blasphemy. So we have to be very careful what we say and how we say it. But there are large chunks of the country, especially the youth, who are increasingly disillusioned with the status quo and are turning to our organization.

Turning to the Arab Spring, as someone who was tortured by President Mubarak’s infamous state security, what did the Egyptian revolution mean to you?

Nawaz: It was a cathartic moment, because the ideas of non-violent uprising that led to Tahrir Square were the sort of ideas that were being debated by us in prison all those years before. And in fact some of those involved in starting the intellectual input were my cell-mates—people like Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the famous Egyptian sociologist, and Ayman Nour. So it was a vindication, especially because Mubarak is now in the very same prison we were.

Have the recent electoral victories of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia been a disappointment to you?

Nawaz: Not really; they were expected. What’s more important in these countries is to have what I call a democratic trinity in place: a firm entrenchment of democratic values, democratic institutions and the democratic process. If those three can be rooted in society it’s more important than any one party or who wins the election.

In “Radical” you write that “If the West […] had intervened earlier and harder” in Bosnia, it might have limited “the spread of Islamism and [Hizb ut-Tahrir].” Does this suggest a reason to intervene in Syria?

Nawaz: It suggested a reason for Libya, because Libya was a very uncontroversial and legal intervention. The problem with Syria is we have to try and be consistent. As Muslims, sometimes we like to have our cake and eat it too. So when we disagreed with the Iraq war, we were the first to shout that this was an illegal intervention and it was Western colonialism, and yet in Syria we are frustrated that intervention hasn’t been possible. I am frustrated about that. The problem without a coalition is that now if states do intervene, it gives other governments like Iran and Russia the perfect excuse to say, “Well this is illegal, we’re backing the Syrian regime.” And that leads to a potential regional war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I’m sure a lot more can and must be done to help the rebels, but I’m saying it’s simply not analogous to Libya or Bosnia. It’s very complicated—Lebanon is there and suffering from sectarian fallout—so it’s one of these ones that’s genuinely stumped me, because I’m very keen to see the back of the Assads, but I’m not very keen to further entrench Iran, Hezbollah and Russia in the region. I don’t think anyone really has a solution to this.

Do you worry that just as Bosnia turned you to Islamism, today some young Muslims are doing the same because of Syria?

Nawaz: Of course, absolutely. In fact we know that a minority of the fighters in Syria are foreign jihadists. However, I think that those groups would capitalize on it with or without intervention.

Turning to Lebanon, your former Hizb ut-Tahrir leader, Omar Bakri Muhammad, currently resides here. Do you think the Lebanese government should ban him and other Salafist-Jihadists from the country, as the UK has done?

Nawaz: I have absolutely no doubt that he’s involved in ratcheting up sectarianism in the Syrian conflict right now. But he’s a Syrian national, so I don’t think it’s possible to extradite him at the moment.

In general we have to distinguish between extremist thought and calling for violence. Hizb ut-Tahrir is not banned in the UK, and I’ve argued for them to remain legal, while organizations like al-Muhajiroun, which was Omar Bakri’s in London, are banned and I’ve argued for them to be banned. The distinction I make is that groups that directly call for terrorism need to be outlawed, whereas groups that call for extremist thought need to be challenged by civil society.

Finally, might you ever consider extending your activism to Lebanon?

Nawaz: I would love to, but capacity is one of the issues. We are working very hard to build up and expand the Khudi model into other countries. We’ve already started training people in three other countries. It’s a matter of time.

What a former Islamist's memoir tells us about Syria today

It would be a grave injustice to suggest that Radical, the extraordinary new memoir of former Islamist Maajid Nawaz, yields nothing worthy of comment beyond so narrow a subject as military intervention in Syria, but then these days I’m in no position to give the book the full-length review it deserves for free (enterprising editors can mail the usual address). Suffice to say whatever flesh I succeed in carving off below is but a sliver of the overall fruit available.

In brief, Radical tells the story of Nawaz’ journey from secular Essex hip-hop ‘B-boy’ to zealous Hizb ut-Tahrir revolutionary – a path which took him to Pakistan, Palestine and, fatefully, Egypt, where he was incarcerated for five years in Mubarak’s dungeons – and then eventually to democratic counter-extremist think-tanker. The relevant question here is how? How did a partygoing, breakdancing, girl-chasing British teenager, bereft of neither money nor education, go on to become a stone-faced servant of the Caliphate? Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) is not just any Islamist outfit – its alumni include the Sadat assassins and a certain Ayman al-Zawahiri (the name, by the way, means ‘Party of Liberation’. Rightly has it been said that satire is dead). Here is Nawaz’ sketch of their manifesto:

[O]nce our version of ‘the Khilafah’ was formed, we advocated an aggressive policy of foreign invasion and expansion, the death penalty for apostates, ‘rebels’ and homosexuals, and a forced dress code for women. Thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterous women would be stoned to death.

Which of the arguments in favour of this vision did Nawaz and his young comrades find most persuasive? It remains exceedingly rare to have first-hand testimony on this; a fact which obliges us to study his account with especial assiduity.

The basic recruitment pitch, as he describes it, was that the British government was party to a global conspiracy to keep the Muslims down. Accordingly, the only way to avert permanent subjugation was for the umma to rise under the aegis of a pan-Islamic super-state.

Evidence of this nefarious conspiracy was ubiquitous, once one learned how to look for it. From the West European architects of Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration to the American invaders of Operation Desert Storm to the Soviet butchers of Afghanistan to the Indian annihilators of the Babri Mosque, Muslims were under assault from every conceivable angle, targeted simply for their deen.

What readers may be surprised to learn, however, and what is especially pertinent to Syria today, is that the conflict that produced the most outrage; the trump card that won more converts than even the Palestinian intifada; was the genocide then unfolding in Bosnia. “Bosnia was particularly crucial in bringing about a shift in identity among Britain’s Muslims”, Nawaz writes. “In some ways, you could argue that just as Pakistan’s troubles with violent Islamism – Jihadism – were born through Afghanistan, European Jihadism was born through Bosnia.”

Why does this matter for Syria? Because it was precisely the West’s non-intervention in Bosnia that scored the slam dunk for the HT narrative:

[T]he fact that Britain and other Western governments were doing nothing about it reinforced their ‘blind eye’ approach to world politics. When it was Muslims who were under attack, and there was no oil to defend, the West wasn’t interested in getting involved. And why should they? These were our people not theirs, which is why we needed ‘the Khilafah’. 

How much whiter could you get than the Muslims of Bosnia, and just look at what was going on there while the rest of Europe stood by and watched. [My italics]

The point could not be plainer. While it has become liberal dogma that it is Western intervention that swells the jihadists’ corps and coffers, it was in fact Western isolationism on Bosnia that most infuriated them. The argument that Islamists would have no quarrel with the West if only it would leave Muslim peoples to their fate hits a brick wall here. Indeed, Nawaz candidly puts the case the other way around:

If the West had been more proactive, if they had intervened earlier and harder as when Tony Blair and NATO did so over Kosovo, the situation would have been different, not just for Bosnia, but perhaps also for the spread of Islamism and for [HT]. [My italics]

The West may be punished, in other words, for what it doesn’t do no less severely than for what it does. The lessons here for Syria are as obvious as the parallels are ominous. Here is Nawaz, for instance, describing some of the more dedicated “brothers” he encountered in the ‘90s:

British Muslims went as civilians, trained in camps funded by the Saudis, fought in Bosnia and had come back again to recruit more soldiers.

Now take the following, published in an AFP report last month, quoting a British photojournalist captured and later freed by Islamists in Syria:

I ended up running for my life, barefoot and handcuffed, while British jihadists – young men with South London accents – shot to kill […] They were aiming their Kalashnikovs at a British journalist, Londoner against Londoner.

Perhaps even less encouraging is the common denominator of Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Syrian-born cleric who was HT’s leader in the UK when Nawaz joined. Bakri is sometimes dismissed today as a bit of a jester, a media bogeyman with no real following, but his stature in the British Islamist circles of the ‘90s was titanic. “Under Omar Bakri’s leadership HT swept across the UK”, Nawaz writes. He was eventually fired by HT’s global leadership for being too extreme (if you’re able to imagine such a thing) and moved on to the now-banned jihadist groups al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK. By sheer chance, I ran into Bakri in June while covering a Salafist demonstration in Lebanon, where he has wound up after being banned from the UK. Though the ostensible purpose of the rally was to call for the disarmament of Hizbullah (because Shia jihadists obviously won’t do), Bakri was soon denouncing “the atrocities in Syria”. In a subsequent interview, Bakri described the Assad regime as “genocidal”, thus echoing the Srebrenica comparison that even Ban Ki-moon was able to make.

Of course, in one sense this is all irrelevant. The case for intervention in Syria does not stand or fall on the approval of sectarian bigots, and the moral obligation to defeat the regime’s death squads would certainly be no weaker if we knew it would upset al-Qaeda. Nawaz’ testimony doesn’t change any of that. But it’s very useful all the same to learn, in hard-nosed “realist” terms alone, that if averting jihad in Syria is the priority, the “earlier and harder” the intervention the better.

Postscript: After writing the above, I had the opportunity to put the hypothesis to Nawaz himself, while interviewing him for NOW Lebanon. Though he didn’t exactly endorse it, nor did he convincingly rebut it either, in my opinion.

He spoke for some time about the need for intervention to be “legal”, by which he means authorized by the UN Security Council, which seems to me more of a procedural (not to mention impossible) demand  than a strictly moral one. He correctly pointed out that an “illegal” intervention would give Iran and Russia the cover to back the Syrian regime, but then added that “Iran and Russia are already intervening”.

He said “I’m sure a lot more can be done and a lot more must be done to help the rebels, but it’s simply not analogous to Libya or Bosnia”, for reasons he never quite made clear. “It’s one of these ones that’s genuinely stumped me, because I’m very keen to see the back of the Assads, but at the same time I’m not very keen to further entrench Iran, Hizbullah and Russia in the region […] I don’t think anyone really has a solution to this”.

I then asked if he believes Syria today is turning young Muslims to Islamism in the way that Bosnia did for him. “Of course, absolutely, that’s a worry. [But] I think that those groups to be honest in Syria would capitalize on it whether there was intervention or not. If there was intervention, they would capitalize on it from one angle, and in the absence of intervention they’re capitalizing on it from another”. If this is true, which it may well be, then it’s as much as saying the West is damned either way, and so incurs no additional loss by intervening.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d prefer to be hated for fighting a fascist mass-murderer than for not fighting one.