Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to stir controversy, and make provocative speeches to the United Nations. He did not disappoint last month, when he made a blistering attack on the United States government and the associated NATO countries. The delegations from several European Union (EU) countries stormed out of the UN forum, as well as the US and Israeli delegations. What does walking out of the United Nations achieve? Nothing – if anything, it only demonstrated that Ahmadinejad struck a raw nerve. You can read the full text of Ahmadinejad’s speech and decide for yourself.

Conspiracy-mongering

It is true that Ahmadinejad has dabbled with various conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11 attacks. He called those attacks ‘mysterious’. Ahmadinejad accused the western powers of hypocrisy and deceit, alleging that “They tolerate no question or criticism, and instead of presenting a reason for their violations, they always put themselves in the position of a claimant. By using their imperialistic media network which is under the influence of colonialism they threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action.” But the main thrust of his rebuke was political – he criticized the use of September 11 by the United States as the pretext to launch wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are part of the larger US strategy to dominate the Middle East for financial and military advantage. A very legitimate criticism of a political superpower was met with a walkout by the US delegation.

It took the terrorist group al-Qaeda itself to respond decisively to Ahmadinejad’s conspiracy-mongering, telling the Iranian president to cease his ridiculous claims. Why did not the United States respond decisively, presenting the evidence of al-Qaeda’s guilt before the international community at the United Nations? In fact, why did the United States quietly murder the main perpetrator of the September 11 atrocities and dispose of the body so quickly?

There was another world leader who poignantly asked “I want to call on the governments of the world to reflect: since September 11th, 2001, a new and unprecedented imperialist war began, a permanent war, in perpetuity. We have to look directly at the terrifying reality of the world we live in. It is necessary to ask a series of questions on the basis of the risks and threats we face: Why is the United States the only country that scatters the planet with military bases? What is it afraid of to allocate such a staggering budget for increasing its military power? Why has it unleashed so many wars, violating the sovereignty of other nations which have the same rights on their own fates?” That world leader was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who also spoke at the United Nations. Chavez elaborated on the main danger to humanity today; “the absolute power of the military-financial leadership which is destroying the world in order to accumulate ever more profits; the military-financial leadership which is subordinated, de facto, to an increasingly larger group of States. Keep in mind that war is capital’s modus operandi: the war that ruins the majority and makes richer, up to the unthinkable, a few people.” Exactly.

Dabbling at the edges

Yes, Ahmadinejad has flirted at the edges of holocaust denial. He is too clever to deny the holocaust outright, but he gives credence to those who would deny its veracity. Ahmadinejad played host to a conference in 2006 which questioned the historicity of the holocaust. He hosted various anti-semites and holocaust deniers and provided them with a platform of respectability. The Iranian foreign minister at the time, Manochehr Mottaki, stated that the conference did not seek to deny the holocaust, but only to provide a forum in which a serious historical issue could be debated freely by historians. Well they are fine sentiments, because those were the exact points of view expressed by the foreign ministers of various European countries in 2005 and 2006 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the anti-Islamic, Muhammad-mocking cartoons which were purportedly intended to promote debate about important historical and social issues. Perhaps Ahmadinejad’s 2006 conference was his own, deliberately provocative response to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons affair and the controversy it generated.

In his 2011 speech to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad did not deny the holocaust – he lambasted the abuse of that terrible genocide by the Israeli and US governments to drum up political and financial support for the Zionist state. He stated that “If some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists, should it not be an obligation upon the slave masters or colonial powers to pay reparations to the affected nations?” Once again, he made a strident, pointed political criticism of today’s major powers. He made that comment in the context of attacking the huge military budgets of the NATO powers, while there is so much poverty, hunger and rising inequalities that condemn millions of people to a life of needless and avoidable suffering. Ahmadinejad said the following “Approximately, three billion people of the world live on less than 2.5 dollars a day, and over a billion people live without having even one sufficient meal on a daily basis. Forty-percent of the poorest world populations only share five percent of the global income, while twenty percent of the richest people share seventy-five percent of the total global income.” How is walking out of the United Nations going to address these criticisms?

Zionism, Palestine and religion

Unsurprisingly, Ahmadinejad criticised Zionism and the state of Israel. He castigated the ideology of Zionism, and made one passing reference to the Palestinian people. He completely ignored the main issue dominating the discussions at the United Nations – the quest by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for the recognition of Palestinian statehood. No mention of the illegal Israeli settlements, the ongoing blockade of Gaza (though partially lifted by Egypt), the Arab spring uprisings that have brought hope and morale to the long-suppressed Arab people. Hardly a stout defence of the Palestinians by the supposedly pro-Palestinian Iranian president. Ahmadinejad is worried by the example of the Arab spring; the courageous and ongoing uprisings by the Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis and so on against regimes that imprison and torture dissidents. The Iranian government has a long and notorious history of jailing labour activists and dissidents.

Ahmadinejad’s speech was infused with a religious world-view, and he made frequent invocations to a divine creator. The Iranian government is theocratic, and all aspects of state legislation are vetted by reactionary mullahs to ensure that political life remains strictly governed by religion. Secular people are attacked by the thugs of the ‘revolutionary’ militia, book stalls and publishing outlets advocating a secular humanist viewpoint are intimidated and shut down. The all-pervasive influence of religion in political and public life is hardly confined to Iran. There is one big country where religion (at least one version of it) exerts a profound influence on the political process, especially when selecting candidates to run for political office. That country is the United States, and this extremist rightwing political-religious movement seeks to impose its own brand of a Christian theocracy should it successfully place candidates in political office. It is not just politics that is under threat – education and public life would be subject to rampant and organised ignorance should the Christian fundamentalist movement gain ever-greater political clout.

Obama’s arrogant hypocrisy

Obama’s speech to the United Nations, full of empty bombast and arrogant pretensions, did nothing to address the substantive issues facing the international community. While referring to peace, he did not posit any concrete proposals for addressing the world’s problems. Instead, ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, he made vague statements about how ‘there are no shortcuts to peace’. Indeed, for the last twenty years (even longer), the Palestinians have been asking for statehood. He presented both the Israeli and Palestinian sides as equals, having ‘legitimate aspirations.’ Obama’s presentation of both sides as ‘equals’ reeks of hypocrisy and a kind of historical denial. Nowhere did he mention the continuing illegal settlements and land annexations, the displacement of millions of Palestinian refugees, the ongoing siege of Gaza and the deliberate immiseration of Palestinians living in Gaza.

Not only did Obama refuse to support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, he also failed to mention the 1967 borders, a reference that Obama made back in May this year which attracted heavy criticism from Israel and the American Republican party. Obama was in denial mode; denial that the Palestinians lived under occupation, that Israel has waged expansionist wars against the neighbouring Arab countries, that millions of Palestinians are still languishing in refugee camps. Just for good measure, he stated that the alliance with Israel is ‘unshakable.’ He spent the remainder of his time at the United Nations strong-arming other countries to drop their support for the Palestinian President’s bid for statehood.

Obama did make reference to the Arab Spring, and this measure demonstrates Obama’s rank hypocrisy. He paid ‘tribute’ to the people of Egypt and Tunisia, even though in both cases these regimes were armed to the teeth and supported by the United States until the final moments of their respective uprisings. No mention of the United States’ current measures to prop up the faltering dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen as the pro-democracy demonstrators are faced with American-made guns, tear gas and bullets. Obama’s reference to Libya and the NATO intervention there had the undertone of a threat – the ‘see what happened to Libya, we can do that to you’ connotation. No mention of the fact that the Qadhafi regime had become a solid ally of the US, Britain, France and western countries, opening up to foreign corporations, had cooperated with the CIA in the rendition of terrorism suspects, and had backed the US ‘war on terror’ since its inception in 2001. While declaring the Bahrain was a ‘close friend’ of the US, he made lukewarm remarks about seeking a negotiated solution for that country’s political problems.

Was there a walkout when Obama addressed the United Nations? No. Why this hypocritical, theatrical walkout when a right-wing, populistic demagogic despot like Ahmadinejad speaks, but only half-hearted but polite applause when the leader of the largest imperial power on earth makes a blustery speech, contemptuously dismissing the just demands of the international community? The walkout by EU member states, the delegates of the US and Israel while Ahmadinejad was speaking reeked of a contrived, hypocritical outrage. It was more about playing up to the cameras, much like in a bad soap-opera, rather than seriously addressing the issues that Ahmadinejad raised. Directly confronting his charges would have been the more political constructive, effective way to oppose the Iranian president’s remarks.

Obama’s meaningless posturing as a peacemaker only masks the deepening economic crisis facing the capitalist system, and he has no solutions to advocate. President Chavez took to the same podium, and spoke of the need for a multi-polar world, where no single power can impose its will on the rest. He spoke of the need for a new economic and social order, one that would place people’s needs before corporate profits. We would do well to heed his words.

News earlier this week that former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber prompted reactions ranging from shock and grief to resolution and determination. Rabbani was killed by a suicide bomber in his home, the bomber having hidden the explosives in his turban.Rabbani had been a major adviser to the Karzai regime, and had been involved in the purported peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

The media reactions to his killing emphasized his role as a peacemaker, a wise political leader and man of vision. However, we would do well to remember that Burhanuddin Rabbani was the political leader throughout the 1980s of the CIA-supported mujahideen militias that fought the socialist government and Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Rabbani represented the mullahs that wished to stop education for young girls, force women out of paid employment and return them to the home, impose a rigid ideological orthodoxy that tolerated no opposition, that sanctioned the murder and torture of secular-minded and socialist people, and restoring the privileges and wealth of the landlord class that had been ousted by the communist government. The socialist government had cancelled the debts of the poorest peasants, and established cheap, low-interest rate loans for agricultural workers which undercut the usurious practices of the richest landlords. All these measures were reversed by Rabbani when the latter came to power in 1992.

Here is Rabbani with one of his friends from the 1980s;

Rabbani was the first political leader into Kabul in 1992 after the Afghan socialist government abandoned power. The mujahideen militias then turned their guns on each other from 1992 until 1996 when they were driven out by the Taliban. During that time, women were forcibly velied, the archaeological treasures of Afghanistan were looted, the educational institutions deteriorated, medical and health systems collapsed and there was a mass exodus of refugees from Kabul and the major cities that had been relatively untouched through the 1980s Soviet period. Rabbani was a fanatical psychopath responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghans and the reversal of a relatively liberalised, secular society.

His murder was portrayed in the media as a blow to the peace process; however, the reality much more complex. As Stephen Grey of the Guardian newspaper points out, the vaunted peace process is actually more about lulling the Taliban into relaxing their guard, bribing their commanders to change sides, and generally stall for time as US and British forces continue hitting the Afghan population with night-time raids, unmanned drone strikes and carrying out this war of attrition against Taliban militants. Make no mistake, the Taliban are hurting; they are losing people, but they are responding with high-profile attacks and assassinations, the latest being the killing of Rabbani. The US and British forces in Afghanistan seem to have only one tactic for defeating the Taliban – encouraging defections through bribery.

The Taliban are most definitely a bunch of crazed, fanatical killers – there is no doubt about that. The suicide bombing of Rabbani is only the latest terrorist outrage carried out by the Taliban foot-soldiers. But sympathy for Rabbani is tempered when remembering the role he played in leading Afghanistan into its current deplorable situation. As we reach the tenth-anniversary of the current Afghan war, there is no end in sight to that conflict. The Obama administration has basically escalated that war, deepening America’s quagmire resulting in more deaths and new levels of violence. The Afghan war has nothing to do with liberating its people, but rather imposing US designs for military and economic dominance in the region.

Near where I live in Sydney, there is a war memorial commemorating all those people from the area that died serving the Australian armed forces in wars overseas. There are columns for each war Australians have participated in, followed by the names of those that never returned. For instance, there are columns for World War One (1914-1918), World War Two (1939-1945), the Korean War (1950-53), and also the International Campaign against Terrorism (2001 – ). You notice that last one? Unlike the others, the war on terror has no end date.

The horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 prompted justified outrage at the perpetrators and sympathy for their victims. Since then, there has been a continuous barrage of war crimes, an escalation of US wars in the Middle East, new offensives against Iraq and Afghanistan by the US imperial power, and a steady erosion of democratic civil liberties in the name of a ‘war on terror.’ In fact, the first decade of the 2000s can rightly be called the savage decade. The Bush/Cheney administration seized upon September 11 as an opportunity to implement imperial designs that long predate the actual terrorist attacks. As Anthony Arnove documents, senior national security staff were directed by Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser and later secretary of state, to capitalise on the opportunities for the US to reshape the world, implement regime change, and redesign significant portions of the globe for US imperial interests. The September 11 tragedy has become a blank cheque, a banner under which US war planners have justified their imperial interventions to a sceptical public.

The US has been carrying out war crimes in the name of September 11. It is a terrible, perverse usage of the tragedy to whip up public sentiment to commission crimes that have more in common with the doctrine motivating the perpetrators of September 11. As Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas points out, there was no doubt that the Bush/Cheney administration was going to use 9/11 as an excuse to launch all-out wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. There was no illusion that the Bush/Cheney cabal were fanatical imperialists and racists, dedicated on demonstrating to the world that the US empire was on the war path. What is now becoming apparent is that the Obama administration is following practically the same course, although with a different disguise. Wait a minute, didn’t Obama declare an end to the war on terror in 2009? In a way, yes – he rebranded it as ‘overseas contingency operations.‘ A different name for exactly the same package – that’s rebranding you see.

Here in Australia, we are told that the world changed on September 11. Did it really? Yes and no. As Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, economics lecturer at Drake University says, certainly the 9/11 tragedy prompted calls for regime change, imperial retribution and preemptive strikes by the United States. The rendition program where torture is ‘outsourced’ to third countries under the supervision of CIA and MI6 officials, the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without charge or trial, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security provisions – these are all developments post 9/11. But the military-industrial-financial complex had plans for regime change, the economic outreach into more countries and extension of US military power years before 9/11, since the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. With the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, a significant restraint on US militarism was removed. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under former President Jimmy Carter and main architect of the US-sponsored Islamic Mujahideen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, wrote in a 1997 book about the need for the US to confront Russia, China, India and others to remain the dominant economic and military power in Central Asia and the Middle East.

US war planners needed new enemies, and they came up with many – the clash of civilisations, rogue states, militant Islamism and so on. But 9/11 was the new mantra, and the beneficiaries of the giant military budget and security spending fixed onto a new ideological banner to disguise the agenda of imperial expansion. It is this broader context in which the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan (and now Libya) must be understood.

The National Priorities Project is an organisation dedicated to explaining, in terms as clear as possible, how the US federal budget is composed and how tax dollars are spent. They recently put together a report regarding the amount of money spent on national security since September 11, 2001. Since that day, the US ruling class has spent 8 trillion dollars on homeland security, the Pentagon’s military budget, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and all the associated spending on the US State Department and federal agencies. All this spending was supposedly prompted by nineteen hijackers armed with nothing more than box cutters? I think that Sheldon Richman is right – national security spending is a scam. As he points out in his article, opportunistic and cynical politicians have been using 9/11 to frighten people into accepting even more military spending.

Is the world actually safer because of the war on terror and all this military and national security spending? Well, according to the numerous security pundits, the world is safer because countless terrorist plots have been foiled, but they just cannot elaborate because of national security. It is the old ploy – “we could tell you, but if we did we would have to kill you” trick. Without adequate information it is hard to say, but I can make two observations. Firstly the war on terror has failed to thwart attacks on the European and Western countries. Secondly and even more importantly, the war on terror and the associated extraordinary renditions, torture and repression breeds resentments across the Islamic and Middle Eastern countries. When US forces and unmanned drones kill scores of civilians across Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq and other countries, don’t you think that some Muslim people will develop anti-American resentments and hatreds? The descent of the American military and political system into thoroughly detestable forms of behaviour – barbaric torture at Guantanamo and Bagram air base, the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the packs of unmanned Predator drones – all this behaviour leads to a massive buildup of discontent and sows the seeds for future terrorist attacks.

While the 9/11 fanatics were driven by a complex array of religious and political motives, there is no doubt that continued American support for Zionism, and the Arab dictators around the Middle East, was a major factor in their hatred of US imperial power. With the homicidal overreaction by the US empire, the terrorists kind of got what they wanted – an extension of American imperial criminality into costly and savage wars that are draining the US of its resources. The Afghanistan war is coming onto ten years, and thousands of American troops remain in that country. There is the ongoing occupation and insurgency in Iraq, and that conflict shows no signs of ending, even after Obama’s rebranding of that occupation and fake withdrawal of troops.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, former President Bush issued a new doctrine, a new national security strategy of ‘preemptive war’ to strike at terrorist groups and states that allegedly pose a threat, or are developing a credible threat, to the United States. This doctrine, continued by Obama, is basically a license to wage aggressive war. Was not this kind of behaviour outlawed and condemned by the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War Two? Obama explicitly endorsed the doctrine of preemptive war, ironically when giving a speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

I have to agree with Tom Engelhardt – when it comes to September 11, let’s cancel it. Let’s stop the commemorations, the gatherings of pompous politicians, the hoopla, the new towers, the waterfalls – let’s stop the lot. What is more important is stopping the abuse of the 9/11 horrific attacks to perpetrate even more terrorist crimes and imperial wars, while enveloping those wars with hypocritical reverential remembrance. Stop using the supposedly ‘hallowed’ ground zero to promote carnage and barbarism overseas. The 9/11 killings, while appalling and ghastly, are not a license for continuous war and descent into harrowing political conduct. Political life over the last decade is characterised by a continual assault on democratic rights; if you doubt that, just ask Omar Khadr, or Moazzam Begg. Let’s stop this endless war funding, as Engelhardt explains.

Anthony Arnove demonstrates that we in the western world have undergone a dramatic cultural shift, with the corporate-controlled media playing a huge role in promoting the war on terror hyperbole, legitimising the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and nourishing the racist Islamophobic campaign, targeting Arabs and Muslims in general as a potential fifth column in subverting ‘western values’, and bolstering public approval for war. Let us campaign for an alternative world, without imperialist wars and occupations, racism and soaring corporate profits. Let us regain the basic democratic and social rights that we have lost because of this undemocratic war on terror, and mobilise against the financial aristocracy and war profiteers to save our planet.

In September 2006, the day after the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist atrocities, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture in his former university city of Regensburg, in which he quoted from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. The latter had written commentaries about his debates with a Muslim interlocutor, discussing the differences and relative merits of Christianity and Islam. The Pope Benedict XVI chose to extract this quote from the Byzantine emperor’s writings: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

With this quote, Pope Benedict XVI thrust into the limelight not only the name of a previously obscure emperor, but also a long-neglected empire that had fought between the Islamic world, and the main Western Christian church, namely Roman Catholicism. That empire was Byzantium, and most people were asking – what is Byzantium? To answer that question, one should look no further than the marvelous book by Professor Judith Herrin called Byzantium: The surprising life of a medieval empire. I will address the Pope’s remarks a little later.

The title of this article comes from one of the chapters in Herrin’s book – a grand duke and admiral of the Byzantine emperor had made the statement ‘better the Turkish turban than the papal tiara’ back in the 1440s to summarise the crossroads that Byzantine civilisation occupied and the foreign policy dilemmas that confronted the Byzantine political leadership. This popular proverb stands in stark contrast to the sentiments quoted by the Pope above. But what Herrin’s book accomplishes is a sweeping and detailed examination of Byzantine civilisation – its art, architecture, law, economy and politics. Quite a wide-ranging scope in one volume.

Byzantium, the eastern half of the previously united Roman empire, grew from its ancient roots to become a cosmopolitan, medieval civilisation. The first portion of the book documents the transformation of what was the East Roman empire, with its new capital at Constantinople, into the sprawling inheritor of the Roman empire’s mantle, laws, paganism and traditions. But Byzantium then developed its own distinct Greek-speaking imprint on Roman customs, and its version of Orthodox Christianity. It is as a barrier against the spread of Islam that Byzantium is best-known. Apart from the stereotypes of exotic riches, endless political intrigues and interminable theological debates, Byzantium is recognised as the ‘eastern defender’ against Islamic armies. Indeed, Byzantium came close to being totally overrun by the Islamic Arab armies that came out of the Arabian plateau. The dual challenges of the Slavic peoples in the Balkans, and the Persian empire in the east, stretched the resources and fighting capacity of Byzantium to the limit.

But Byzantium survived the Islamic challenge, and ‘rescued’ Europe from the seemingly invincible Islamic conquerors. Herrin states that if Byzantium had fallen, most of Europe would have been conquered by the Islamic forces. In one sense, today’s Europe was only able to survive because of the intercession of the Byzantines. It is this aspect of Byzantine history which the Pope and his supporters would like to enlist for their political agenda during this era of fractious relations between the West and the Islamic communities. But Byzantium was more than just a ‘bulwark against Islam’ – which is the title of one of Herrin’s chapters. Byzantium also had a complex cultural life, with pagan, pre-Christian texts and authors being incorporated into the framework of Byzantine culture and philosophy. Byzantium was an eastern orthodox empire, but with partly pagan features and origins. Byzantium was definitely and stridently a Christian empire, but it also was shaped by the ancient Greek authors, the Roman thinkers and pagan customs which influenced its society. The burning of incense, the veneration of images of gods, the celebration of Christian holidays based on pagan, pre-Christian holy days – these all attest to the complex melding of pagan and Christian elements. The translation of pagan philosophers into Greek, the active debate and commentaries about science, mathematics, whether the world was created has always existed – these debates reflect an active cultural life in Byzantium.

While Byzantium fought to contain the Muslim armies, the empire can hardly be called a defender of Christianity. The great schism between Latin West Christendom and Easter Orthodox Christianity did not start with Byzantium, but it certainly worsened with the arrival of the Crusades. In the chapter ‘Fulcrum of the Crusades’, Herrin details how the Byzantines called upon their Latin Western Christian friends, namely the papacy and the west European Christians to help fend off the growing threat posed by the encroaching Seljuk Turkish empire. With this call, Byzantium and the Christian East opened up a cantankerous, fragile relationship military relationship with the Latin Christian West. While the object of the Crusades was to reconquer the holy lands from Muslim control, the relations between the Christian forces were marked by mutual suspicion and bitter recriminations. By the time of the Fourth Crusade, relations between the Latin crusaders and their Byzantine hosts had deteriorated so much that when the Byzantine side failed to fulfill the terms of their agreement, the crusaders abandoned their original objective of the holy lands and ransacked Constantinople itself. This mass sacking of Constantinople in 1204 not only poisoned relations between the eastern and western Christians, reinforcing the great schism between the Roman Catholic west and Eastern Orthodox East, but also reduced Byzantium to such a perilous state it was divided into a patchwork of Latin and Greek-speaking states. By April 1204, the greatest city in western Christendom was a mass of smouldering ruins, as Herrin states in her book. Anti-Latin sentiment ran high, and the prospects of recovery were bleak.

Yet by the 1260s, Byzantium recovered somewhat, with one of the Greek-speaking successor states, Nicaea, managing to recover Constantinople, holding off the Seljuk Turks and reestablishing a distinctly Byzantine empire, though in truncated form. With all these military fluctuations, it is a wonder that the many architectural achievements of Byzantium have survived – in particular the church of Hagia Sophia. A whole chapter in Herrin’s book is devoted to the construction, engineering feats, and survival of the church, which became a mosque in 1453 with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, and is today preserved as a museum. The scale of Hagia Sophia and its impressive dome suggests engineering skills that are exceptional. Most of the early Christian churches followed the template of a basilica, so to construct a dome was quite novel and daring for Byzantine times. The Hagia Sophia, as constructed by the emperor Justinian, has survived arson, riots and earthquakes throughout the years.

There is so much more to digest in Herrin’s book; I hope I have done justice to its contents with this short review. Byzantium persisted for another 250-odd years after the Fourth crusade. Herrin looks at the frequent challenges Byzantium had to face – wars with the Bulgarians, the transformation of an ancient economy into a medieval one, the continued toleration of a cosmopolitan society that included Jews, Varangians – Armenians found employment in the Byzantine armed forces. But one challenge proved overwhelming – the Ottoman Turks, who expanded from the Anatolian peninsula and finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.

The Byzantine empire was a complex, multifaceted state, with its own combination of Roman traditions and Christian practices. This brings me back to the Pope’s earlier quotation about Islam taken from Manuel II. Why did he choose to make this statement, rather than elaborate on all the scientific and cultural achievements of the Byzantines? I think the Pope’s use of that quotation was more than just misleading, as Herrin correctly notes. It poured petrol on an existing fire – the tension relationship between Islamic communities and the European West. I think Pope Benedict XVI promoted a stereotypical view of the Islamic world as uniquely irrational and incapable of rational change. Herrin’s volume goes a long way towards demolishing the highly inaccurate stereotypes about Byzantium as a tyrannical regime run by corrupt, effeminate cowardly men. We would do well to reexamine our own myths and stereotypes, rather than point an accusatory finger at other civilisations. Read Herin’s book if for no other reason than this one – Byzantium is absolutely fascinating.

Among the typical reactions I receive when stating that ancient history should be studied is “Why would you study ancient history?” and “Isn’t all about long-dead people and civilisations? What has that got to do with today?”. Well ancient history, besides being a boundlessly fascinating subject, has implications for what we do today and how we understand modern politics. Perhaps Australians do not appreciate ancient history because our own (white) history is only around two hundred years old. However, ancient history still has explosive consequences for today. Let me illustrate by using one example.

In the city of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, the government has erected a statue to Alexander the Great, the ancient Macedonian conquistador who is still celebrated today on both sides of the Greece-Macedonia border. This statue has reignited a long-simmering dispute between the Greek and Macedonian governments – was Alexander the Great (more correctly, Alexander III of Macedon) Macedonian or Greek? While this dispute may seem antiquated to us in Australia, it is the latest in a series of counterpunches between the two cultural antagonists. The current Macedonian government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski is leading the campaign to celebrate Macedonia’s classical heritage through a series of cultural and architectural projects throughout Skopje, commemorating Macedonia’s antiquity. The statue of Alexander the Great has been criticised by the Greek government, who claim that Alexander was rightly Hellenic, and any attempt by Macedonia to claim his mantle as part of their heritage is unjust, and masks Macedonia’s territorial ambitions to claim Greece’s historic province of Macedonia.

I am not going to take a ‘position’ on this debate; I think that Hajrudin Somun, Bosnia’s former ambassador to Turkey and lecturer at the International University in Sarajevo, has hit the nail on the head by stating that while Alexander belongs to the Hellenic tradition, modern Greece has no monopoly over everything Hellenic. There are numerous Hellenic historical sites located in Anatolia (modern-day Greece) and the Middle East, even going as far as Afghanistan. Do all these territories have to pay homage to Greece before commemorating their heritage? I think they have the perfect right to memorialise the Hellenic input into their history. As Somun states, Alexander belongs to both modern Greece and Macedonia. The establishment of Alexander the Great as a credential of nationhood began in the late nineteenth century, with the fight by Macedonia and Greece for independence from Ottoman Turkish rule.

Prime Minister Gruevski has ordered the construction of museums, scores of sculptures, philharmonic orchestra and the preservation of hundreds of archaeological sites to commemorate the period of Macedonia’s classical antiquity. This is a way of saying a big “up yours” to Greece, as the former foreign minister of Macedonia stated in an interview last year. An intended statue of Alexander’s father, Phillip of Macedon, is expected to be even bigger than the current sculpture. The classical period of Macedonia’s history (and Hellenic history) should be studied and remembered for its importance to our lives. Much of our political structures, scientific questions, cultural debates and social mores trace back to classical antiquity.

The title of Gruevski’s part is the Democratic party for Macedonian National Unity – Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (VMRO-DPMNE). Why such a long name? That name harks back to the time of Macedonia’s own struggle for independence from Ottoman Turkish rule. Gruevski hopes to acquire the historical legitimacy conferred by tracing the origins of his party’s political program to the Macedonian independence struggle. The VMRO-DPMNE is today a rightist, Christian Democrat party. Gruevski’s party is claiming that the fight for independence by the original VMRO-DPMNE should be respected and is the reason why Macedonia is still standing today. That is certainly the case, but then Gruevski’s government has a serious problem.

The monuments, museums and buildings commemorating the struggle by the Communist partisans to liberate Macedonia (and indeed Yugoslavia) from the tyranny of Nazi rule have been deliberately neglected since the VMRO-DPMNE assumed power in 2006. While Gruevski’s government is spending enormous sums of money to celebrate classical antiquity, the heroic struggle of those Macedonians who fought as partisans during World War Two is being studiously ignored, and the monuments to that struggle are victims of neglect. Macedonia is still standing today, and is named (somewhat clumsily) as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia because of the courage of the partisans and their vision of a united Yugoslavia. The main opposition party in Macedonia, the Social Democrats, state that they should be proud of their modern history and not neglect it like the VMRO-DPMNE government.

There are many Macedonians who are outraged that their capital is beginning to resemble a ‘mini-Las Vegas’, as one critic put it. It is interesting to note that in the same article, the academic Professor Blaze Ristovski, while hailing the campaign to celebrate Alexander the Great as a method of nation-building, admitted that during the communist era, churches and mosques were built in the republic. He was speaking from the communist-built Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which still operates until today.

The current Macedonian government, facing a bleak economic situation and rising anger over the deterioration in living standards, is using a populist reading of history to whip up nationalist sentiment and divert people’s attention from the worsening economic situation. This month marks ten years since the Ohrid agreement, which ended the country’s civil war and held out a promise of a better future. Ten years on, Macedonia has not made any progress towards joining the European Union (EU) and the peace deal remains fragile. Athens blocks Macedonia’s entry into the EU as long as the latter continues to use its current name. The financial problems of Greece and the wider EU have assumed centre stage for now.

Ancient history frequently intersects with modern politics and economics. It is foolhardy to ignore or dismiss it.

Early in August, two major World War Two anniversaries were marked in Europe; August 1 saw the 67th anniversary of the heroic Warsaw uprising by the Polish underground resistance movement against Nazi German occupation forces; and August 6 witnessed the 66th anniversary of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred on August 9. I raise these anniversaries to highlight the importance of commemorating the courageous struggles by the peoples oppressed by the Nazi regime, and to underscore the importance of historical debate for comprehending the tremendous social forces that have shaped the world today. But my point today is not to just go over old historical ground, but to highlight a growing problem in our midst; Baltic ultranationalism which has mutated to outright neofascism.

Consider the following commemoration of World War Two, this time in Estonia; the Moscow government strongly condemned the criminal connivance of the Estonian authorities in allowing a march of Estonian SS veterans in late July. The gathering of veterans of the 20th Estonian SS division not only promoted neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant ideas in the young generation, but also whitewashes the criminal actions of the Baltic SS veterans and their culpability in the crimes of the Nazi regime, in particular the holocaust.

This cannot be dismissed as just a one-off march by a band of senescent curmudgeons reliving their glory days. Last year in Latvia, a rally and commemoration was held for the veterans and supporters of the Latvian legion that served in the SS. Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom party has practiced a kind of Baltic revisionism of World War Two, obfuscating the culpability of the Baltic fascists in executing Jews, and simultaneously exaggerating and embellishing the Soviet period in the Baltic republics as equal to Nazi fascism. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and holocaust historian, has spoken out against the menace of Baltic fanatic-nationalism, calling it a threat to European democracy, and highlighting that since independence in 1991, not a single Baltic Nazi war criminal has been prosecuted in a Baltic court of law.

Back in April 2007, just prior to the traditional May 9 commemorations of victory in Europe day, which are understandably serious and solemn occasions in Russia, a monument to the Soviet soliders who fell during World War Two was dismantled in Tallinn, the Estonian capital city. There were riots and ethnic clashes between rightwing Estonians and the Russian-speaking community, leading to arrests and at least one Russian dead. The Russian government tabled a resolution to the United Nations condemning the glorification of Nazism and demanding that desecrating World War Two monuments be outlawed. The motion was defeated and the United States voted against it. Marches by Waffen-SS veterans and their supporters, drawn from the extreme rightwing parties and anti-immigrant circles in which Anders Breivik circulated, are annual events in the Baltic states. Dismantling Soviet-era memorials dedicated to the commemoration of Soviet sacrifices during World War Two have become commonplace in the Baltic republics. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly urged the international community to reject any attempts to desecrate or profane the memory of the dead and remember that victory in WWII was achieved at tremendous cost by the Soviet Union. Let us also not forget the incredible sacrifices that the Chinese made in their decisive contribution to defeat an aggressive and militarist Japan.

But I think there is something more insidious going on here – equating red with brown, and obfuscating the guilt of the perpetrators of the holocaust. They are not my phrases, but the words of Dovid Katz, chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute and editor of the website Holocaustinthebaltics. In a couple of articles for the Guardian newspaper, Katz underscores two crucial themes. First is the ongoing attempt to equate Nazi and Soviet crimes. After all, if both are equally guilty then the Baltic ultranationalist agenda to revise history can proceed, portraying the Baltics as the innocent victims of two aggressive, cooperating predators. Did not Hitler and Stalin sign a pact in August 1939 which included in its provisions, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states? In the early 1990s, the newly-independent Baltic states set up state-organised committees to examine both Nazi and Soviet crimes. As Katz states, this project was a Baltic ultranationalist agenda to rewrite their participation in crimes against the Jews, and by promoting the ‘double-genocide’ interpretation, absolve the Baltic SS collaborators of their guilt, or at least to obscure their own responsibility for carrying out the genocide of the Jews. Secondly, by propounding the ‘double-genocide’ interpretation, and advocating an anti-Russian position, the Baltics further ingratiated themselves with the European powers and the United States. This reflected their political orientation after 1991. If Russia can be portrayed as a genocidal, homicidal equivalent of the Nazis, then the ‘Western democracies’ will firmly embrace the Baltic republics into the neoliberal, capitalist agenda of the major imperialist powers. Populist ultranationalism was used as an ideological battering ram to accompany the imposition of the IMF neoliberal austerity programme.

The Soviets committed terrible atrocities in the early 1940s when their troops and secret police moved into the Baltic states under the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. There were mass deportations of anti-Soviet sections of the ruling classes and intelligentsia; carrying out large-scale collectivisation of agriculture and heavy industrialisation caused massive dislocation. The Soviets invested heavily in large capital investment projects for the production of manufacturing and industrial commodities. This caused massive upheaval in a society that was largely agricultural and semi-rural.

As Dovid Katz points out, the only reason that the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians are still with us is because there was no genocide. However, the Baltic fanatic-nationalist motivation to label the Soviet period ‘genocide’ not only minimises Nazi criminality during the war, but plays up Soviet crimes in order to conceal Baltic accountability for antisemitic pogroms and massacres during WWII. It is interesting to note that with the capitalist economic crisis engulfing Europe, the once-hailed Baltic tigers are experiencing a severe economic downturn. One consequence of this has been the mass exodus of young Balts from their respective states, and the rate of exit is comparable to Stalin’s deportations of the 1940-41 period.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was unethical and immoral – Putin said as much in 2009 during a speech in Gdansk, Poland, to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII. He also went on to condemn the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the western powers, noting especially the infamous Munich pact, the Hitler-Chamberlain agreement that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany’s encroachments. Moscow’s overtures for a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France were repeatedly rebuffed. Russia faced a war on two fronts in 1939, being invaded by militarist Japan in that year. Now all this does not make the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact right, but it does indicate the selective condemnation of Moscow while ignoring the deep culpability of the western European powers in the appeasement of Nazism.

Seumas Milne states it plainly when he writes that with the resurgence of a xenophobic, ultranationalist right in Eastern Europe, some historians, particularly evident in the Baltics, are equating Nazism with Communism in order to dishonestly claim that WWII was caused not just by Nazi Germany, but also by the USSR. As Milne states in his article “But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar “enslavement” of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial.” It is virtually impossible to deny the holocaust in the Baltics, an area covered with the mass graves of its victims. So holocaust obfuscation is a cleverer, more cunning ruse to play. Baltic perpetrators of Nazi crimes gain acceptance, even honour, if they can portray their fight as a yearning for ‘independence’ from Soviet rule.

With unemployment growing, social services being cut back, and racist violence occurring across Europe, it is time to put an end to holocaust obfuscation and the poison of Baltic ultranationalism. Australia has sizable Baltic communities who brought with them not only their cuisine and culture, but their fanatic-nationalist agenda. Let us commemorate those who gave their lives fighting Nazism by stopping this revisionist deceit from spreading.

The details of the horrific terrorist attacks in Norway are well known. Most of the media commentary has focused on whether Anders Breivik, the perpetrator, was insane or mentally disturbed.

While Breivik may have had mental health issues, there is no doubt that a racist political culture gave rise to the diseased mind and criminal actions of Breivik. He circulated in a racist milieu created by the convergence of far-right parties, and the growing anti-immigrant and Islamophobic mainstream political culture. The growing European extremist far-right parties are the dangerous terrorist threat in our midst, more so than the much-hyped jihadist irritant. The Left has been warning about the interplay of economic degradation and anti-immigrant politics that results in the growth of racist, rightwing parties that advocate anti-immigrant policies, blame multiculturalism and Islam for Europe’s problems, and express their grievances through violence.

Hopenothate documents that Breivik was active in the anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway, and strongly supported the English Defence League, a fascistic, racist group in England. His strongest admiration was for the Dutch Party for Freedom, the racist, Islamophobic party in the Netherlands headed by Geert Wilders.

As Michael Brenner states in Counterpunch; will the Oslo attacks prompt a rethink about the main terrorist threat from the extreme rightwing and make us question the purported monolithic Islamic jihadist threat, a rationale used to justify a ‘war on terror’, ongoing invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as covert military operations in Somalia, Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries? The Norway attacks should compel us to question the underlying assumption that a tight-knit group of jihadist fanatics, taking a literal interpretation of the Quran and hating every value that the West stands for, are intent on unleashing acts of violence against targets in Europe. We must also question the widespread insinuation that Muslim communities in Europe are hotbeds of Islamic conservatism, a fifth column if you will, preaching hostility to their host country and plotting a takeover through the imposition of Sharia law and a high birthrate.  These are fundamental principle of most anti-terrorism measures since September 11, 2001. Will the Norway attacks compel us to rethink this assumption and change our policies to address the greater danger, the terrorist threat of rightwing racist violence, especially in Europe? I wonder if we will examine Christian fundamentalism with the same rigorous scrutiny that we examine Islamist clerics of every stripe?

As Seumas Milne states; ‘whatever Breivik has done, he hasn’t done in isolation’. Breivik’s repulsive manifesto is dripping with hatred of Muslims, multiculturalism and is based in Christian conservatism. That is nothing unusual in today’s far-right Europe. But what is even more disturbing is that this way of thinking reflects the ideas and values of mainstream conservative thinkers, at least since the 2001 September 11 attacks. The supposed ‘Islamification of Europe’, the alleged swamping of Europe and America with refugees, the appeasement of Islam by multiculturalism (whatever that is supposed to mean), and the constant sharia-hysteria – all these ideas have found a comfortable resonance within mainstream political culture, and conservative writers, while condemning the terrorist violence of Breivik, have all contributed to the poisonous ideology that gave rise to his violent behaviour. Melanie Phillips, a writer at the Daily Mail, has long spoken of the multicultural policies of Britain as ‘treachery’, undermining the British identity, and has repeatedly complained in her writings that mass immigration is going to swamp Britain. While there is a big difference between Phillips’ scholarly veneer and Breivik’s ranting, there is an underlying ideological continuum. Fixating exclusively on jihadism has made us ignore the ever-rising terrorist threat in our midst.

As Miriyam Aouragh and Richard Seymour note, ‘the “war on terror” licensed a period of intense imperial revivalism.’ The inspiration for Breivik came from mainstream intellectuals and writers, who have dehumanised Islam and Muslim as uniquely irrational, savage and barbaric, engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’ against our western way of life – remember Samuel Huntington and his semi-scholarly ravings?

And it is not just in Britain, but across Europe, there is a convergence of Islamophobic politics, diatribes against the supposed threat of Sharia law, and the anti-immigrant far-right groups that have increased because of economic discontent. The words ‘Hitler was right’ were spray painted on a memorial stone in Vilnius, Lithuania, to the 72 000 Jews who were killed by fascist Lithuanian paramilitary forces in Ponary Forest during World War Two. The far-right has traditionally attacked Jews, but is now moving onto a new target. Interestingly, Breivik claimed admiration not just for far-right political parties in Europe, but also expressed support for Zionism, and the Serbian paramilitaries who murdered thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. I suppose that birds of a feather flock together.

The Socialist Worker newspaper has long covered terrorist violence from the anti-immigrant groups, while the hate-spouting neo-conservative writers like Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis and Bill O’Reilly simply shrug their shoulders and continue on their way disseminating hatred. Attacking Islam and multiculturalism from the right has long been a staple of the mainstream media, and now we see the results. But do not worry, the terrorism experts who have been bloviating for years about jihadism, now explain to us the cause of Breivik’s atrocity; Islam.

More importantly, this is the world that created Breivik and thousands like him; a world where government social services are increasingly privatised and unemployment is on the rise; where the 1991 US war on Iraq was televised as a spectacle to behold in awesome regard; where Muslims are regarded as terrible threat to ‘our’ way of life (I still do not know what ‘our way of life is supposed to be); where multiculturalism is under sustained attack as ‘appeasement’; where the labour unions have retreated and the major Labour parties have accommodated themselves to the capitalist agenda of cost-cutting and corporate profits; and since 2001, the US in cooperation with several European countries are waging criminal wars of occupation against countries with predominantly Muslim populations, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with these realities are the culture wars – the attacks on migrants and refugees, the ‘jihad versus McWorld’ philosophy of rightwing blowhards like Benjamin Barber, (that was the title of his 1996 book)

The convergence of the Islamophobic culture and the far-right has resulted in parliamentary success – many current European governments are ruling in coalition with extreme rightwing parties, such as in Denmark and Austria.

The mass protests in Oslo in the wake of the terrorist killings, the thousands of people marching to oppose rightwing terrorism gives us hope for the future.

Reams of commentary has been written about the scandal engulfing the world’s largest media mogul, Rupert Murdoch and his business empire. Everyday there are continuous updates about the latest revelations, twists and turns by his chief executives and lieutenants, and the ongoing questions about just how far this scandal reaches into the highest levels of political power.

The exposure of the constant phone-hacking by the News of the World media corporation has lifted the lid on the underlying criminality of the financial and political elites in Britain. Even the former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated that the Murdoch clan run a “criminal-media” nexus. He glaringly omitted to mention that the political highflyers and the top law enforcement officials are also implicated in this ever-growing scandal of corruption and nepotism. The Metropolitan police chief, Sir Paul Stephenson, had to resign because of the failure of the police to follow up investigations of misconduct by News of the World journalists and the bribery of police officials.

However, I think a number of points get lost in the maelstrom of media coverage about this issue. This scandal exposes the decay and rottenness of the British liberal democratic system, whereby a major media corporation has gotten away with criminal behaviour for years while the politicians embraced the Murdoch empire singing its praises, and the law enforcement officials were bribed to look the other way. Even current UK Prime Minister David Cameron had to acknowledge that a high degree of collusion between the political establishment and the media empire. The parasitic nature of the Murdoch empire is not in question, it has been exposed for all the world to see.

The larger point to make, I think, was made by the always perceptive and indefatigable John Pilger, who stated that the Murdoch effect has not only corrupted the political and legal systems, but has corrupted the journalistic process as well. Murdoch has presided over a steady poisoning of the journalistic system, “waging a war on journalism, truth and humanity and succeeded because he knew how to exploit a system that welcomed his rapacious devotion to the ‘free market’.” Murdoch was the most effective and public of the practitioners of waging a stealthy and sleazy war on journalism, and was able to get away with it because all of his colleagues and competitors in the media business were operating on the same principles, if only on a smaller scale.

Where were all the critics when Murdoch’s papers were hounding striking workers and their families, the unemployed, refugees, welfare recipients, and cheering US wars for imperial conquest? The British Labour Party, having feted Murdoch and his executives for decades, are now suddenly finding their teeth and biting chunks out of the Murdoch empire. While the Murdoch press loudly applauded the Tory party in Britain for their assault on the working conditions of ordinary people, and their privatisations of government assets, the Murdoch media juggernaut switched sides abruptly in the mid-1990s and backed Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ to the hilt. It was revealed that Murdoch even had a hotline to then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in the run-up to the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq. It is highly hypocritical of the British Labour Party to assume the mantle of principled opposition to the Murdoch empire when they have been carefully cultivating a close relationship for years.

Where are the changes to the laws that made such a massive media oligopoly possible? After all, Murdoch did not come from nowhere, but is a scion of the Australo-British elite and plotted his way to amassing a gigantic media empire. He pioneered the journalism of ‘infotainment’, packaging news into sound-bytes between commercials, and loudly cheering on the oligarchy whether it be attacks on workers, migrants, refugees or wars in search of commercial opportunities abroad. The Murdochisation of the media is to turn the media into a partisan cheerleader of the oligarchic power structures. The Murdoch tabloids are an appendage of the most jingoistic, racist, rabid sections of the US-British ruling class, contaminating the political debate of a country with appalling paeans to the ‘free market’, xenophobic commentary about immigrants and refugees, the sleazy celebration of US militarist adventures abroad, and the effusion of sex scandals and celebrity-worship, as if their shenanigans are newsworthy. The British Labour Party accommodated itself to the Murdoch effect, and changed its politics to follow the course of the ultra-conservative in domestic and foreign policies. Funny how the Murdoch tabloids vehemently denounce ‘big government’ yet owe their rise and success to cultivating cozy relations with big government politicians and were protected by law enforcement officials?

What is necessary now is not just a full public enquiry into the media, though that would be a positive first step. From this putrid morass, there should be a full overhaul of the political-legal-media nexus; breaking the bonds of this incestuous relationship, breaking the media monopolies that have dominated public discourse for so long. While it is great to see heads rolling, with the sackings (excuse me, resignations) of Coulson and Brooks, there needs to be a public campaign pressuring the politicians for complete media reform. Let’s maintain the rage, and not simply acquiesce at the first sign of some half-hearted moves and fake apologies by the Murdoch clan and its minions. Clean up this decayed cesspit, implement laws to stop one person or corporation from owning so much media, break apart the monopolies to ensure diversity of opinion. We are one world, but we have many voices.

As Nicole Colson points out in her article, “the Murdoch press stands apart as morally bankrupt”. The British ruling class intends to contain the crisis, so that it does not develop into a generalised crisis of capitalist authority. Years ago, during the late 1980s, one of the alleged failings of the socialist system in the Soviet Union was the close relationship between the highest levels of political authority and the organs of the mass press. Journalism was viewed as just a mouthpiece for the political authorities, and this was presented as evidence of the weakness of the Soviet socialist system. Well, now I am going to ask, does not this scandal expose the predatory criminality of the capitalist elite, and its utter inability to govern for the people? Does not this scandal, revealing the corporate media to be a direct mouthpiece of the financial oligarchy, indict the capitalist system as a systemically failed entity? We should look beyond the personalities and trivial distractions of this scandal and ask serious questions about how to limit the destructive capacity of the media monopolies. The media moguls like Murdoch will only be halted when the mass of people (and the main victims of this phone-hacking) rise up and force those in power to listen.

The always informative Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, has written an inspiring article in Counterpunch about the Yemeni uprising. The Yemeni revolt has not gotten much press here in Australia, so any information about it is always welcome. While most of the mainstream media’s attention is focused on Libya, the implications of a victory for the Yemeni people would be significant for the Arab world, as well as directly impacting the position of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian peninsula.

Yemen is a strategically important country for the US military, as Baroud observes. Located at the southern portion of the Arabian plateau, it has a coastline on the Red Sea, a major waterway, and is close to Somalia, another flashpoint. There is an ongoing civil war in the country, and the demonstrators have proven resilient in the face of violent repression by the Yemeni military forces. While the long-term president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, remains in power for now, his grip is tenuous, with army units defecting from the government side.

Interestingly, Baroud documents that in terms of all the current US wars around the globe, Yemen is the fourth-most costly in terms of finance and human life, behind Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are no calls by the major capitalist powers for a no-fly zone over Yemen in support of the rebels, as far as I am aware. The Obama administration has been quietly bombing Yemen for the past several years, with repeated unmanned drone strikes against alleged al-Qaeda hideouts. These drone strikes have killed scores of civilians and further radicalised the Yemeni people against US imperialist power.

The least that the Obama administration can do is stop supporting the brutal dictatorship of Saleh by stopping the sale of arms to that regime. After all, the Yemeni military is using military hardware sold to it by the United States to prop up its power. But the United States is still talking about maintaining military-to-military relations, according to Baroud.

Yet the Yemeni people fight on, with such unparalleled courage and determination. Mass anti-regime demonstrations occur with regularity in this impoverished country. They more than deserve our support.

In the lead-up to the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the pop-group the Dixie Chicks played a concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in London. One of the group’s members, Natalie Maines, a native of Texas, made a critical comment about a fellow Texan, George W Bush who was then president of the United States. She said that “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” A seemingly innocuous comment, you would think?

The comment was picked up by American media outlets. After that, the Dixie Chicks faced death threats, hate messages, their music was dropped from commercial country/western music radio stations, their CDs were publicly crushed by bulldozers in anti-Dixie Chicks protests, they faced accusations of being traitors, “Saddam’s Angels”, “Dixie Sluts”, and so forth. A Colorado radio station suspended two disc jockeys for playing Dixie Chicks songs. The group was not officially censored, but the full weight of commercial pressures was brought to bear on a group of artists for making a statement that was politically offensive to some people. If a musician, novelist, or artist produces a work that is offensive to some people, should their work be censored and its broadcast or publication stopped?

Violence in the service of censorship is nothing new, sadly. The Dixie Chicks controversy, and the reaction to it, contains the faint echoes of an older episode, the 1989 Rushdie affair and the censorious violence directed against the author for the novel The Satanic Verses. Kenan Malik, an Indian-British journalist and researcher, attempts to answer disturbing questions about freedom of speech, the ability of authors to express political and religious viewpoints through their works, and how in Britain, a society with a long history of anti-racist struggles, a minority group came to be so alienated and despised that it ended up burning books. The book is titled From Fatwa to Jihad: the Rushdie Affair and its legacy.

The book is engagingly written, and should be read by every person wanting a deeper understanding of the cultural and political issues that affect our societies. The book covers diverse topics such as immigration in Britain from the 1950s, especially Muslim migrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Migrants had been settling in Britain, working, raising families, and while they were Muslim, it was never a central part of their identity as Malik explains. Malik was one of many Asian migrants (Asian in Britain meant from the subcontinent) who participated in anti-racist struggles, from street-fighting against the white supremacist thugs attacking Asian families, speaking out against police brutality and the inaction of the police to protect newly-arrived migrants from racist gangs; Malik was a member of the East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR), a group established by the socialist Revolutionary Communist Party to take direct action against the racist gangs where the police and politicians had remained indifferent to the suffering of migrants. Official police attitudes blamed the victims for racist violence; they ‘had it coming’ because they moved into a white neighbourhood. So socialist and anti-racist groups took the lead in protecting migrant workers as part of their campaign of solidarity against a racist capitalist system.

Political struggles such as these helped to unite disparate ethnic minorities for a common platform of economic justice, political equality and human rights. Malik documents the fascinating example of the Asian Youth Movement (AYM). This group brought together two distinct and mutually supportive political models – traditional working-class politics, with ‘bread-and-butter’ demands for better conditions, and also the black power movements, the anti-racist demands for a just, egalitarian society that recognised ethnic minorities as equals. Trade unions took up the struggles of many of these migrant workers, and while the AYM was never necessarily an atheist or secular organisation, religion was never an important or significant marker of identity according to Malik. Race and class issues seemed to march in tandem. Then in 1989 came the Rushdie affair.

In February 1989, Malik was in Bradford, England, to witness about 1000 Muslim demonstrators set alight a copy of  Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, for its allegedly blasphemous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and its purported attack on Islam. For Malik, the book-burning was more than just a odd demonstration, it was a symbol of Islamic defiance and rage. How had British Muslims, who had lived and worked in that country for years, whose Islamic identity had been merely a background, suddenly explode into anger like that? How had Muslim youths – born and bred in Britain, who had participated in anti-racist struggles, just like Malik – end up joining a book-burning for its alleged offence against Islam? Malik provides some insightful answers to these difficult questions. If I may use an analogy with sport – while Malik lands some strong punches and body-blows, in other places he swings wildly and misses.

In September 1988, Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British author and ex-Muslim, published The Satanic Verses. There were protests in some Muslim countries, and Pakistan and Bangladesh banned the sale of the book, but the controversy was largely simmering beneath the surface. Malik says that the book was freely available in the vast majority of Muslim countries, even after the Organisation of the Islamic Conference demanded a ban. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, issued a fatwa (a religious ruling or decree) that not only banned the Satanic Verses, but pronounced a death sentence on its author, and decreed that anyone who published or distributed the book should be killed. As Malik explains in his book, this was a cultural controversy that was quite different from anything else Britain had experienced. But rather than being a product of religion or Islamic theology, the fatwa was more so a product of Iranian and Middle Eastern politics.

Khomeini’s regime in Iran was on the defensive in 1989. Having failed to export their particular brand of Islamic revolution to Iraq, and having lost all the ground they had gained by the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Iran’s Islamic revolution was losing legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims around the world. Iran’s main nemesis in the region, Saudi Arabia, appeared on the ascendant. Its brand of extreme Wahhabist fundamentalism was being exported to other countries, mainly thanks to the petro-dollars of the oil industry. Saudi-supported Muslim institutions were gaining ground not only in the Middle East, but among the unemployed, disenfranchised Muslim youth of Europe. It is in this political context that the issuance of the fatwa must be understood, Malik explains. Iran seized upon the Rushdie book as a way of regaining its influence with Muslims around the world, portraying itself as a defender of Islamic values and integrity against attacks by secular governments and writers. The controversy over the novel seemed to divide Muslim ethnic minorities from the ‘white’ westerners, and this ‘clash of civilisations’ was reinforced by the weakening of the traditional socialist, anti-racist ideals of secular humanism, workers rights and group solidarity.

Tariq Ali, writing in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, says that most of the Muslim community in Britain did not react violently against the publication of The Satanic Verses. They wanted their scholars and activists to write a withering critique of the novel. Other British Muslims, like the scholar Anwar Shaikh, have written stridently critical evaluations of the Quran and Islamic philosophy, and have also faced intimidation and threats. It was the community leaders, the mullahs, who agitated for a violent response to Rushdie’s novel. But Malik examines the issue more deeply, and finds that the real blame for this tribal response resides with the policies of multiculturalism.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Malik explains, Britain was gripped by race riots, and an ever-growing proportion of migrants and their children found political expression with socialist, anti-racist and militant groups. They were winning the battle of the streets and ideas. The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher launched a new policy of state multiculturalism, which was intended to divide the ethnic minorities on the basis of race. While couched in terms of respecting ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism was a vast improvement on the previous ‘white Australia’ policy in Australia, official state multiculturalism, according to Malik, segmented the black, Asian and Muslim communities into hierarchical structures. Creating a black middle class was the intent of state multiculturalism. The British government elevated an identity-politics policy, emphasizing a single component of identity, into the main mechanism for handing out funding and official recognition. Self-appointed community leaders and official bodies arose which corralled the myriad ethnic groups into rigid tribal identities. Where once there was a unified response to economic inequalities and racial discrimination, there is now a segmented, arbitrarily-grouped set of communities that challenged the very notion of a common human identity.

Malik scores some direct hits with his criticism of multiculturalism. While in Australia, multiculturalism has been an enormous step over the racist ‘white Australia’ policy, it has made society less openly racist, but only in the cultural arena. There are now multilingual radio and television stations, ethnic-based sports clubs, restaurants and literature. All these gains of multiculturalism should be defended against the attacks by racist politicians and media commentators. But to stop at the cultural sphere, without extending anti-racism into the political and economic arenas, is a major failing. In the 1980s, the Australian Labour Party became the main repository of migrant political expression – ethnic minorities voted en masse for the ALP, and in return, monies and funding is handed out to migrant bodies that are the official representatives of ethnic communities. Multiculturalism has scored gains against overt racism, I think it has had a consequence of encouraging ethnic minorities to view one another as the enemy, rather than the common enemy of a corporate-industrial elite.

Here I think Malik misses the mark, downplaying the extent of tribalism and racism prevalent even before the advent of multiculturalism. Australia was already a tribal society prior to the introduction of multiculturalism. The various ethnic groups that had come here to work and study, retreated into their own cultural areas. This is understandable on the one hand, because migrating to a completely new country is a cultural shock, so people congregate around their own language group and culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, trade unions had taken up the struggle of migrant workers, not just as migrants, but also as working class people, advocating equal treatment in the context of workers rights. As Malik points out, political and economic struggle unites people of different cultures. Malik also correctly mentions that in 1989, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the political Left was weakened around the world. The vision of a common, united struggle of workers achieving their political and economic emancipation had taken a battering. The one area that a migrant could rely on for support was their tribe, their ethnic grouping. Here, state multiculturalism encouraged the co-opting of migrants into the official, government-approved ethnic channels rather than into militant, anti-capitalist alternatives. The Australian Labour Party, particularly since the 1980s, has retreated from a traditional, labour-union class struggle approach, to a conciliatory, business-accommodation approach. As the labour organisations retreat, and with them their vision of a multiracial, egalitarian society, the vacuum created is taken up by religion.

The trade unions, which had been the one organisation that had raised migrant’s issues, were also co-opted, retreating from a class-struggle based politics, into a class-conciliation political stand. The labour unions gradually abandoned the traditional demands of anti-racist social justice for which they had long stood. The remaining avenue for a migrant worker is to compromise their political demands and devote themselves to the cultural arena. While Malik does correctly identify the tendency of state multiculturalism to fragment ethnic groups along cultural lines, I think Malik has retreated from a socialist perspective into a left-liberal critique of multiculturalism. While he would not agree with today’s rightwing critics of multiculturalism, Malik has given some ground to those critics, like the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, who blames immigrants for not doing enough to integrate into the wider society. While state multiculturalism is conducive to a sense of tribalism, to single it out as the original cause of a tribal politics is to widely miss the mark. The broader social and economic inequalities, and the retreat of the labour unions and their accommodation with big-business policies, is the wider context in which the growth of tribalism must be understood.

With the retreat of a labour union, political struggle alternative, many migrants and their children face the prospect of either devoting themselves to their own ethnic tribe – the Armenians go to Armenian clubs and events, the Greeks, Croats, Serbs and so on retreat into their bastions – or devote their energies to religion. In the case of the Christian communities, this was never a problem for the Australian ruling class. The Armenians have their church, the Greeks have the Orthodox denomination and so on. While attendance at the traditional churches has declined, the 1980s witnessed the growth of the rightwing evangelical fundamentalist Christian churches. Their agenda, to turn Australia (and Britain and the other countries in which they reside) into a basic theocracy. They are opposed to, among other things, secular education, homosexuality and contraception. They have gained ground, especially among the youth, with a clever tactic of social inclusion. The kind of society they advocate contains many similarities to the kind of society proposed by advocates of sharia law, but of course with different religious underpinnings. As fundamentalist Christianity advanced among the mainstream Anglo-Australian society, fundamentalist Islamism gained ground among the disaffected Muslim youth of Britain and Europe, especially when the society in which they live does not provide an adequate, anti-racist political alternative.

Malik explains that in November 1997, the Muslim Council of Britain was born, and its Secretary General was Iqbal Sacranie. In 2006 he gave an interview to the BBC Radio where he stated, among other things, that homosexuality was immoral, spreads disease, and that same-sex couples do not make a solid foundation for the raising of children or stable families. These type of sentiments have been promoted by religious, faith-based groups for many years. Sacranie was investigated by Scotland Yard’s community safety unit to determine whether he had breached the 1986 Public Order Act which prohibits threatening, insulting or abusive words or behaviour. In response, Muslim leaders in Britain, and twenty-two imams, demanded that freedom of speech be observed, and thay anyone, no matter how repugnant their views, should be allowed to express them free of intimidation and harassment. Here, Malik does raise an interesting point – those who wanted to ban The Satanic Verses because of its alleged blasphemy were now calling for freedom of speech in defence of one of their colleagues. Malik explains the change of heart by Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. When you ban one book, where does it end? After supporting the fatwa on Rushdie, Bunglawala changed his mind when he saw that the rightwing neo-fascist Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has incited hatred against Muslims, calling for a ban on the Quran. Bunglawala, chariperson of Muslims4UK, has not only courageously changed his mind about the book-banning fatwa, but also called upon his fellow Muslims to seriously engage with science, especially the theory of evolution and cease denying its veracity.

While Malik is correct to criticise the conservatism of fundamentalist Islamist groups in the UK, he downplays and dismisses the Islamophobia of the mainstream British society, especially when he makes statements like this, “If Muslims are singled out in Britain, it is often for privileged treatment.” Well that would be news to the victims of the December 2005 Cronulla beach race riots, where anyone of ‘Middle Eastern apperance’ was assaulted by riotous Anglo-Australian mobs, instigated by racist radio shock jocks like Alan Jones, who encouraged ‘Aussies’ to go and bash ‘Middle Eastern grubs’. A strong element of the ideological encouragement given to the people who rioted was anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice. Racism against Arabic-speaking people, and by extension Muslims, has long been part of the Australian political landscape. If the Islamic communities have developed a ‘culture of grievance’, as Malik asserts, they do have legitimate grounds for strong complaint. While official multiculturalism may have to shoulder some of the blame, to single out that policy while ignoring the widening economic gap is short-sighted. I would have to agree with Priyamvada Gopal, who states that targeting multiculturalism on its own ignores the deflects attention from the increasing economic inequalities. Poor white Britons do suffer discrimination she states; not racial, but economic.

In 2005, while the Cronulla race riots occurred in Australia, seemingly highlighted a cultural fault-line between ‘us’ in the west and ‘them’ in the Islamic East, another equally shocking event occurred in Britain. In July 2005, terrorist bombings rocked London, killing 56 people (including the bombers) and wounding seven hundred. Malik makes the chilling observation that “more people died on 7/7 than in any single IRA attack in Britain or Ireland.” Even more disturbing, as Malik recounts, is that this bombing was perpetrated by British citizens. Three out of the four were born and bred in England; the fourth was Jamaican-born but had lived in Britain since the age of five. What drove these apparently well-established, educated, middle-class youths – the products of the English education system – to turn so violently against the country that nurtured them?

Malik tries to steer a middle course – he states that neither ‘blame it all on Islam’ is satisfactory, and neither is the ‘blame it all on the West’ explanation. As Malik rightly observes, Muslims have been living in Britain for half a century, the jihadist mindset is only a recent phenomenon. Blaming passages in the Quran flies in the face of recent history. Islam comprises not just a text, but a body of clerics, a history and culture, with many different interpretations. Malik also observes that Western governments have been attacking Muslim countries long before the anti-American jihad of Osama Bin Laden and the 2003 American attack on Iraq and Afghanistan. As one example, Churchill ordered the use of mustard gas, a chemical weapon, to suppress a 1920 nationalist uprising by Iraqi insurgents in their struggle for independence. What is the explanation? Malik does not make any explicit statements, but he does allude to a possible accounting.

Prior to the 1990s, the political Left was quite strong in many western countries. Many young Muslims were members of, or sympathetic to, leftwing and socialist groups. With the weakening of the Left in the early 1990s, many such Muslims were left adrift, looking for a new political home. Fundamentalist political Islam, which seemed to be on the rise at that time, provided an alternative ideological umbrella. Islamist parties made sweeping electoral gains in Turkey; in Algeria an openly Islamist party won democratic elections, only to be subverted by the Algerian military and its members put down in a vicious civil war. Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon – the star of political Islam appeared to be rising. Couple this with the outrageously hypocritical US and British foreign policies in the Middle East – the unstinting support for Israel against the Palestinians, the 1991 US attack on Iraq and subsequent continuation of that war through sanctions for much of the 1990s – and one can get a sense of the alienation from the wider Western society that a Muslim must feel.

Terrorism is the response of the weak. Individual acts of savagery are never acceptable, and are a dead-end ethically and politically. The Blair government’s foreign policy was singled out for criticism by Home Office advisers seeking an explanation for the terrible July 7 atrocity. They warned that Blair’s close alignment with the United States objectives in the Middle East, fueled the extremism that resulted in the terrorist bombings in London. Long-time war correspondent Robert Fisk wrote a perceptive column in 2005 stating that Britain was unfortunately a target since the Tony Blair government lined up with the ‘war on terror’ and George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Notwithstanding the criticisms, I think that From Fatwa to Jihad is a riveting, outstanding book and should be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand the origins of the cultural fault-lines that confront us today. Malik forces us to ask serious questions about ourselves, our attitudes to freedom of speech, our policies towards the Islamic communities, and the successes and shortcomings of multiculturalism. If we are to move forward in constructing a more humane, equitable, socialist society, we need to understand the grievances and resentments that fuel so many of today’s conflicts.