Common Sense and Wonder

I'm not talking here of a fear of abuse and attack or of being accused of political incorrectness. I couldn't give a fig about that. No, I mean the need to hold on to common courtesy and avoiding making generalizations that could hurt good people.

Here are some recent examples, in that I have so little room to discuss this issue in full.

We used to be told by pop stars and other philosophers that "the Russians love their children too." It was self-evident then that all people loved their young. Now I'm not so sure. Do the Palestinians, for example, love their children too?

I should think most of them do.

But I have to be candid: many of them don't. We can't just rely on tired old relativism when we look at all this. Nobody who loves his or her child will send that little being out as a suicide bomber. Nobody who loves their children will line them up in front of tanks.

The natural instinct of a loving parent is to hide the children. Armed struggle and resistance I can understand, even if I do not approve. This, though, is something different. I've seen it myself. Mothers screaming for their tiny offspring to come out of the house, stand in front of Israeli patrols and throw stones at soldiers.

I take here no position on the causes of Israelis or Palestinians, but I do on the moral substance of a parent who would send children to fight the battles of adults.

Do not, please, tell me they have no option. There are legions of young Palestinian men willing to kill Israelis. It's just that children can sometimes be undetected. And are easily convinced of the delights of paradise in the world to come when, I quote, "Zionist skulls, blood and limbs fly against the walls."

British Muslim fundamentalists planned terror attacks and arrests were made in Ilford, England, my hometown. Boring Ilford may be, but nobody is oppressed there! Muslims who grew up with British democracy, free British health care, free British education and British tolerance have no reason to kill anyone, let alone those who gave them such privilege.

Remember, these people came to Britain, as they did to Canada, the United States and the rest of the free, Christian-based world to escape Islamic states and their harshness.

It is the pluralistic openness and decency of Europe and North America that has allowed so many Muslim immigrants. How ironic that a minority of those people hate that very pluralism and decency and want to slaughter women and children in the name of their god and their cause.

I opposed the war in Iraq, but I cannot remain silent when people kill contract workers, then disembowel and hang them from wires in the street. While children dance.

And, no, these murderers are not refugees from pain but the favoured sons of Saddam. Their fight is to restore fascism, not liberate their nation. Even if it was, nothing justifies such sadism.

German bomber pilots, their planes shot down, would parachute into London after destroying entire towns and killing thousands of people. Almost without exception they were treated properly, as prisoners of war.

It's not about colonization, globalization, Zionism, American dominance or any other cliches. The Muslims themselves are colonizers, having pushed most Christians out of the Middle and near East, once the cradle of the Christian world.

The Ottoman Turks, Muslims all, colonized the region for centuries. Arabs colonized Persians, Assyrians, Kurds and others. The Saudis, sponsors of so much terror, are nobody's victims. They are wealthy beyond belief, and deprive women and minorities of most basic civil rights.

This is something deeper, darker, than an imagined fight against a foreign foe. There is a virus at work. For the sake of the good, law-abiding Muslims of the world -- the majority -- we cannot pretend any longer it's about anything other than what it is: a religion gone mad and gone bad.

From time immemorial philosophers have debated what the primary determinant of religious faith is. How do we know when someone's religious conviction is sincere? Some say it is a love of God's creatures. But I have met legions of confirmed atheists who are sincere humanitarians and sincere lovers of the human family. Others argue that it is martyrdom and a preparedness to lay down one's life for God. But suicide bombers – who are as distant from God as Hugh Hefner is from fidelity – die for their god every day of the week.

Still others argue that faith is judged principally by ritual observance, but we all know religious people who are devout church or synagogue goers, but who may not be ethical in business.

Which brings us to this conclusion. The most accurate arbiter in judging people's attachment to God is the extent to which they hate and fight against evil.

Secular humanists can be good people, but they usually find some way of excusing the actions of a Chairman Mao or a Marshal Stalin. A man as enlightened as George Bernard Shaw called Hitler a great man. Many on the Left object to the war in Iraq and find compelling reasons why Saddam should have been left in power.

They may love good people, but they don't hate evil people. But the truly religious hate murderers because they see them as the arch-enemies of the God who created life. They despise the heartless because they are the opponents of the God who created love. People sincerely attached to God will manifest their faith first and foremost in their loathing of cruelty and abhorrence of mercilessness.

If you don't hate Kim Jong Il who is starving his people, if you don't loathe the Klan for killing innocent black children, if you are not filled with odium at the muttawa'a – the Saudi religious police who in March 2002 allowed 15 high-school girls to burn to death rather than be allowed to escape without their head coverings – you may still be decent, but you have a very weak relationship with God.

Thus the Book of Proverbs declares, "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil," and King David declared regarding the pitiless, "I have hated them with a deep loathing; they are as enemies to me." Whatever virtue Howard Dean may possess, a hatred of murderers is not one of them.

Dean is the man who famously referred to Hamas terrorists as "soldiers" and promised in September 2003 that if elected president he would pursue a more "even-handed" approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that "it's not our place to take sides."
A man who cannot choose between a law-abiding democracy and a murderous tyranny is both immoral and irreligious.
Dean also recently said that Osama bin Laden deserved a fair trial. This while bin Laden, with cold delight, discusses with Khaled al-Harbi the horrific aftermath of the September 11 attacks on that infamous videotape, and releases one audio message after another promising America "you will not see from us anything but bombs, fire, destroying homes and beheadings."

The issue has divided French society across religious and cultural fault-lines that few would have acknowledged a decade ago: Should the government forbid girls from wearing the foulard at state schools?

A special committee, set up by President Jacques Chirac last summer, has just submitted its report on the subject, suggesting that the foulard be banned from public schools along with other "ostensible signs of religion" such as Jewish skullcaps and large crosses. The president is scheduled to unveil his conclusions in a televised address this week.

Some secularists insist that the foulard should be banned from schools, hospitals and other public institutions by a special law because it represents "an ostentatious religious sign" in spaces that should remain neutral as far as religion is concerned. Others believe that an outright ban could be seen as an attack on individual beliefs, and force girls who wish to wear the foulard to switch to private Koranic schools.

All this may well be a result of a misunderstanding. To start with, the term "foulard islamique" is inaccurate because it assumes that the controversial headscarf is an article of Islamic faith, which it emphatically is not. It is a political symbol shared by several radical movements that, each in its own way, tries to transform Islam from a religion into a political ideology.

One could describe these movements as Islamist, but not Islamic. A new word has been coined in Arabic to describe them: Mutuasslim. Its equivalent in Persian is Islamgara.

The foulard should be seen as a political symbol in the same way as Nazi casquettes, Mao Zedong caps and Che Guevara berets were in their times. It has never been sanctioned by any Islamic religious authority and is worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women.

It was first created in Lebanon in 1975 by Imam Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had become leader of the Shi'ite community there. Sadr wanted the foulard to mark out Shi'ite girls so that they would not be molested by the Palestinians who controlled southern Lebanon at the time.

In 1982, the Lebanese-designed headgear was imposed by law on all Iranian girls and women, including non-Muslims, aged six years and above. Thus, Iranian Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian women are also forced to wear a headgear that is supposed to be an Islamic symbol. The Khomeinist claim is that women's hair has to be covered because it emits rays that turn men "wild with sex."

From the mid 1980s, the foulard appeared in North Africa and Egypt before moving east to the Persian Gulf, the Indo-Pakistani Subcontinent and Southeast Asia. It made its first appearance in France in 1984, brought in by Iranian Mujahedin asylum seekers. Today, thousands of women, especially new converts, wear it in Europe and North America.

That the foulard did not exist before 1975 is easy to verify. Muslim women could refer to their family albums to see that none of their female parents and ancestors ever wore it.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, President of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, does not wear it. Nor does Khalidah Zia, prime minister of Bangladesh, the world's second most populous country. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, does not wear it, except inside Iran - where she would go to jail if she did not.

That the foulard is a political invention can be ascertained in two other ways. First, there is the Iranian law of 1982 that specifies the shape, size and even the "authorized" colors of the headscarf.

Second, the various Islamist movements have developed specific color schemes to assert their identity. The Khomeinists wear dark blue or brown. The Sunni Salafis, who sympathize with al Qaeda and the Taliban, prefer black. Supporters of Abu-Sayyaf and other Southeast Asian radical groups wear white or yellow. Supporters of Palestinian radical groups don checkered foulards.

Islamism is a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Fascism. And like them it loves uniforms. While it forces, or brainwashes, women into wearing the foulard, it also presses men to grow beards as an advertisement of piety.

Like people of other faiths and cultures, Muslim men and women often covered their heads. But the headgear used had no political significance and reflected local cultural, tribal and folkloric traditions. No one ever claimed that donning any particular headgear, whether for men or women, was a religious duty.

In any case Islam, with its rich tradition of iconoclasm, is not a religion of symbols. It also abhors any advertisement of piety which, known as tajallow (showing off), is regarded as a sin.

By trying to turn the issue of the foulard into a duel between Islam and secularism, the French may be missing the point. The real problem is posed by organized and well-funded efforts of Fascist groups to develop a form of apartheid in which Muslims in France, now numbering almost 6 million, will not be protected by the French political system and the laws that sustain it.

As things are, the foulard concerns a small number of Muslim women in France. The French Interior Ministry's latest report says that only an estimated 11,200, out of some 1.8 million Muslim schoolgirls, wore the "foulard" at schools last year.

The same report says that only 1,253 of those who wore the foulard were involved in incidents provoked by their attempts to force other girls to cover their heads.

A survey by a group of Muslim women in the Paris suburb of Courneuve last May shows that 77 per cent of the girls who wore the foulard did so because they feared that if they did not they would be beaten up or even disfigured by Islamist vigilantes. Girls refusing the foulard are often followed by gangs of youth shouting "putain" (whore) at them.

In some suburbs, the Islamist Fascists have appointed an Emir al-Momeneen (Commander of the Faithful) and set up armed units that the French state fears to confront. These groups tell Muslims not to allow their womenfolk to be examined by male doctors, not to donate blood or receive blood from Jews or Christians, and to prevent girls from studying science, swimming or taking part in group sports.

What the French state needs to do is to protect Muslims on its territory, especially women, against the Fascists who are setting up "emirates" around major French cities, notably Paris.

Yes, "brights," as in "I am a bright." In a recent article in the New York Times, philosopher Daniel Dennett defined a bright as "a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view." Mr. Dennett added that "we brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter bunny or God." His implication was clear: Brights are the smart people who don't fall for silly superstitions.

Mr. Dennett, like many atheists, is confident that atheists are simply brighter -- more rational -- than religious believers. Their assumption is: We nonbelievers employ critical reason while the theists rely on blind faith. But Mr. Dennett and his fellow "brights," for all their credentials and learning, have been duped by a fallacy. This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.