Sinister warnings, infantilised debate and British 'values'

In the last few weeks, as the phrase has floated back and forth, like a cloud over the post-election horizon, I have found myself mulling precisely what “British values” are.

If there are values that are specifically “British” then they must be unique to this nation and different from values anywhere else.

Otherwise, why keep insisting that they are “British” values? And let’s face it, there has been little meat on the bones of that soundbite.

I suspect that most Britons like to think that we’re a fairly tolerant lot, so is tolerance a ‘British value’? In which case, does no other nation share it or, if they do, have they nicked the idea from us because we created it – hence it being a particularly ‘British value’?

Freedom of speech, perhaps? Exactly the same questions apply.

Freedom from illegal imprisonment? I suppose we can go back to Magna Carta on this one – fitting, in the year of its 800th anniversary. Of course, in that document, it was not about the plebs being protected from illegal imprisonment, but rebellious barons having a right to be tried by their peers.

However, let’s not get too pedantic about these things.

This, though, might give you an idea of my problem: I’m looking for a value that is quintessentially British and I can think of not a one – well, certainly not without resorting to sarcasm.

There’s going to be no suggestion here that there are ‘universal’ values, because a glance around the world would show that to be far from the case.

Values have to be developed, and while the West shares many of the same values – not least as a result of western Europe in particular having experienced the Enlightenment at the same time – other parts of the world do not. They may at some point in the future, but they do not now.

And values are not set in stone, they evolve over time: see the changing attitudes toward LGBT people in the UK – and the West in general – over the last 50 years. Which, of course, illustrates that, if tolerance is a value we rate particularly in the UK, why are we only in recent years become tolerant toward such people, both in terms of most of the populace and the country’s institutions?

But David Cameron’s post-election statement that our society has been ‘passively tolerant’ for too long, allowing things if they were within the law, is perhaps the most sinister uttering from a UK politician in a very long time.

Nobody will be in doubt as to which group are the main targets of this pumped-up rhetoric. This is about Muslims, radicalisation and extremism, and how to avoid the second and third in that list. And few people would object to that aim or fail to understand how important it is.

Last November, the then government released advice to maintained schools on Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools.

‘SMSC’ stands for ‘spiritual, moral, cultural and mental’.

The document is quite clear that the main issue it was addressing was situations where teaching of religious law might conflict with law in this UK.

It also states that “fundamental British values” are “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”.

Which is all well and good, but brings us right back to the question of what about any of these is so fundamentally ‘British’?

Interestingly, that doesn’t mention ‘free speech’, although one could probably suggest that that would fall within “individual liberty”.

The next question after that, though, is why, if they’re so fundamental, do all schools not have to promote these values and only maintained ones? This actively excludes any religious school, for instance, that is operating in a realm without state funding.

Perhaps one could avoid some issues by having a strictly secular education system where every child, no matter their religious background, has access to thought and debate that can show them a world beyond the strictures of the faith that their parents have decided they belong to?

At present, we have a situation where religious schools, for instance, can opt out of sex education to some degree or other.

Should it not be a fundamental value that all young people, irrespective of the religious beliefs (or lack thereof) of their parents, has the right to a clear and informed education about something like sex?

Ours is the same system where, at present, one particular religious sect can say that it will ban any child from its schools if they are driven to school bytheir mother, because women should not drive – but it’s okay because none of the women want to drive.

Indeed, only yesterday, the school’s leaders have claimed that such a ban is essential to maintaining “religious principles and strong traditional values” and noting that, “as private schools we have the freedom to set our own high standards by which we seek to live and bring up our children.”

Ah yes, “high standards” that include telling girls that it’s ‘immodest’ for a woman to drive a vehicle. And see that bit about being a private school allowing such things.

Let’s be clear: this is no more in tune with ‘British’ values than brainwashing children with any other religious, fundamentalist bigotry and idiocy.

A properly secular education system is far from being the be all and end of dealing with fundamentalist religion, as the situation in France illustrates, but it could help to break down the ghettoising effect of religion in general.

By all means have your places of worship and your religious traditions in the home, but education should be a free space for pupils.

We need to be encouraging young people to be able to think more philosophically – and not to run scared of ideas that may challenge their beliefs.

We need to promote the idea that nobody has a right to be not offended or have their beliefs challenged. We do not need anything that drives us down the same infantilising path as in the US, where students increasingly object when anyone voices a view that challenges their own – and run away to ‘safe rooms’ full of videos of playful puppies and Play Doh.

What can never work, though, is destroying precisely the things we claim to be defending – in the name of defending them.

The censorship and the increased snooping that are being proposed; the replacement of human rights legislation with a bill of rights – with the degree of rights one is afforded dependent on where one is from; the suggestion that simply living within the law will no longer be good enough for some to avoid government intervention … all these are absolutely the opposite of what most people would consider to be ‘our’ values.

In particular, that statement on ‘passive tolerance’ is pernicious. Few people would be actively supportive of terrorists of any ilk, but such vague statements can only give rise to a feeling that we are moving into the realms of an assault on free speech; of thought crime, even.

If someone says, for instance, that ‘the Charlie Hebdo murderers had a point’, will that now be a cue for state intervention?

And if so, how long before saying that the government’s heads should be on spikes for all to see be put on the same level?

Who gets to choose, once the rationale has ceased to be breaking the law? Start down such a route and you’re on a very slippery slope.

And saying that only one group has its capacity for free speech impinged upon is really not a way to defeat the substantial issues of the radicalisation of the young.

Frankly, it’s like handing the extremist groomers an additional recruitment tool, never mind doing one of the sort of things that the very same people would like to do to us, in attacking our way of life.

Double standards and bad laws win no hearts and minds.

And it would be hoped that they were most certainly not what anyone views as ‘British values’.

  

Keep looking on the bright side

Look on the bright side of life – offends some Christians

More than once commentator pointed out, last month, the hypocrisy behind the attendance in Paris of so many senior politicians in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and that week’s other murders.

Then again there were the UK media outlets that spoke high and mighty words about ‘free speech’, but thought twice about actually reprinting a Charlie Hebdo cartoon or two – and instead, chose to illustrate reports with pictures (in some cases not even pixilated) of policeman Ahmed Merabet seconds before he was murdered, thus doing the terrorists’ work for them – while some on the British left chose to castigate the victims for ‘racism’.

I didn’t envisage coming back to the question of offence again so quickly, but within the last few days, there has been a further assault on free speech in the UK, with a call to ‘ban racists from social media’.

This came from the all-party Parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, days after the Community Security Trust had reported that UK anti-smitic incidents “more than doubled to 1,168 in 2014”.

That itself came against a background of various news reports claiming that anti-semitism was up, with increased numbers of Jewish people thinking of leaving for Israel or the US.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, in the wake of the murders of four Jewish people in a kosher supermarket in Paris, been urging Jewish people to emigrate to Israel.

Mira Bar-Hillel, an Israeli-born freelance writer on property and housing, and Zionism and Israel for the Evening Standard and Independent, took to social media to question some of what this report said.

She pointed out that it listed one serious assault, while most of the other incidents listed were comments – largely but not exclusively – made on social media, relating to or as a result of the attacks by the state of Israel against Gaza last summer.

Some of those were downright nasty; many were very emotional responses to Gaza that didn’t worry too much about taste (whatever that is) or logic; some made comparisons that others may find distasteful or historically inaccurate (ie drawing similarities between Zionism and Nazism), but from what it’s possible to see from the examples provided, while there may be hate and there may be ignorance and there may be a lack of intellectual rigour, there are no examples of incitement to assault or attack.

And what is the wider context of this?

Anti-Muslim incidents in the UK are also apparently on the rise – and these saw a particular spike after the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013.

But it’s not just religion.

Disability hate crime has increased too.

“Home Office statistics reveal police recorded 1,841 reports of disability hate crime in 2012-13, with 810 incidents going to court.

“This led to 349 convictions, but only seven of these resulted in an increased sentence with the victim’s disability being considered an aggravating factor.”

Carlie Hebdo cartoon

A report from last November says that “Scotland Yard [alone] recorded 1,073 violent homophobic offences between January and October, up from 1,007 in 2013 and 1,002 in 2012”.

Other forces around the UK also reported rising figures.

Transphobic hate crime is also on the rise.

It seems to be generally felt that much of the rise is down to increased reporting of issues and greater confidence in the police to deal with them, so the rises in reported attacks may not be as negative as first appears.

But there’s a vast difference between a violent assault – whatever the motive – and being upset by something seen on social media or as graffiti.

We’re back, once again, into the territory of ‘offence’.

For most people, it’s no fun being labeled a bigot. I got it in the neck on social media a couple of times last summer, being accused of being an anti-Semite for daring to challenge Zionists.

But then I count myself in good company, with people such as Bar-Hillel and satirist Jon Stewart, both of whom have spoken out on such issues and both of whom have been accused of anti-Semitism, self-hate and goodness knows what else in an effort to silence them.

Bar-Hillel wrote recently: “The beauty of the antisemitic label (and libel) is that it is impossible to disprove.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem that I see with calling for bans on (in this instance) “racists” using social media.

We have laws to deal with incitement – on any grounds. If people use social – or any other media – to incite on the basis of any hatred, then they can be dealt with by laws that already exist.

But how are we going to define, in law, what constitutes hate speech if it is not incitement?

Who gets to decide?

As Bar-Hillel put it, “it is impossible to disprove”. Or at least it is certainly very difficult on any objective level, if one person genuinely believes that, say, criticism of the state of Israel is a synonym for anti-semitism.

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we had some people doing a ‘oh, it was bad, but ...’ routine.

In other words, they found it entirely reasonable for someone to say: ‘oh look, nobody can insult my god (according to my definition/interpretation of theology) because that’s racism (because Muslims are usually brown people’.

That’s the thin end of the wedge (as well as being patronising).

I’ve no desire to see or hear hateful thoughts – but should they be illegal or should it be illegal to voice them in what is supposed to be a free and open space, ie social media?

Don’t criticise anything theological or someone will be offended.

Don’t comment on something political – or someone will be offended.

Don’t satirise something – or someone, somewhere, will take offence.

As noted earlier, hate crimes – including serious, physical assaults – are up against disabled and LGBT people.

The increase in attacks on the former group has been laid – in part at least – at the doorstep of some in the UK mainstream news media, which has spent a nice chunk of the last five years demonising those on disability benefits as ‘scroungers’.

For the latter group, there has been negative coverage too, plus hatred/dislike of various other groups, from the far right to assorted intolerant religious sorts.

Ralph Steadman cartoon

The thing about free speech – the thing that most seems to confuse a lot of well-meaning voices these days – is that the philosophical aspect of the question isn’t about what you agree with, but what you disagree with.

It’s never difficult to think that what you agree with should be allowed.

That’s why it’s important that we have incitement as a crime that can be prosecuted.

But if we say that someone should have legal action taken against them that is the equivalent of a convicted child abuser being denied internet use, on the basis that they accused Zionism of being like Nazism or suggested that Mohammed was a child abuser or ... well, fill in as many entries as you wish ... and thus upset some tender souls: this is naïve and dangerous.

Offence is a subjective matter. If you claim to have been offended by something – to have been abused by something – then who is to say that you’re wrong?

In 2009, the then Fianna Fáil government introduced a new blasphemy law in Ireland.

This legislation defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted,” and with fines of up to €25,000 for conviction.

Former justice minister Dermot Ahern has subsequently defended the law, saying that it was needed because the 1936 Irish constitution only covers Christians.

Well, just scrap that bit of the constitution, then. Why does any religious person need this special, legal protection?

Yet encouraged by the Irish law, various Islamic states – led by Pakistan – have been using it at the UN to both highlight Western hypocrisy and promote universal blasphemy laws, while, as a result, the Irish government has currently reneged on a plan to have a referendum this spring to scrap it.

Blasphemy is a brilliant cover-all for any offence: law based on total subjectivity and a lack of reason.

In January 2012, Indonesian civil servant Alexander Aan posted on an atheist Facebook group that God did not exist.

Further, he asked: “If God exists, why do bad things happen? ... There should only be good things if God is merciful.”

He went on to declare that heaven, hell, angels and devils are “myths” and also posted an article describing Mohammed as “attracted to his daughter-in-law”.

But that counts as blasphemy in Indonesia – and also incitement – and he was reported to the police, attacked by a mob in the street and then charged. In June 2010, Aan was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, with a fine of 100 million rupiah (£6,945.15).

Predictably, that wasn’t enough for some: the Islamic Society Forum, a coalition of Islamic groups, wanted him executed.

Thankfully, Aan was released in January 2014, but the case reveals the sheer bonkersness and subjectivity of the entire issue.

But clearly it’s light years away from what happens in, say, the UK. Or is it?It is really not that long since the likes of Mary Whitehouse and her ilk demanded prosecution of people for offending them. It’s not long since The Life of Brian was the subject of outrage (if not actual riots).

It’s not that long since BBC staff were sent death threats because the corporation screened Jerry Springer: The Opera, which portrayed the family of Jesus as dysfunctional.

The only objective way of dealing with this is to say that nobody has a right not to be offended; that providing there is no incitement to violence, let people say what they want.

I’ve been on the receiving end of all sorts of verbal abuse over the years, including on the internet and for a variety of reasons – but all of which essentially stems from someone being ‘offended’ by something about me and wanting to shut me up with something other than an actual argument.

It can be damned unpleasant, to say the least. No sane person wants to be accused of being an anti-semite or a racist, for instance.

But how naïve is it to expect that all of life should be ‘nice’.

Great if it was – but how would we be able to tell? – but reality is not all chamomile tea and cuddles.

Education has to be central to changing attitudes.

But driving things underground, fueling a sense of victimisation and martyrdom ... what good does that do?

If people want to burn flags or books, ignore them. They’re little different to online trolls demanding attention. So don’t give them the reward.

And unless you really want a situation in which what you say can be reported because it ‘offended’ someone else, then be very – very – careful what you demand be censored in situations where you decide that is the acceptable approach because you disagree with the comments.

Context, logic and the horrors in religious books

According to reports from the UK schools inspector, Ofsted, an English primary school in Luton has been found to have books in it that involve what most people would regard as fairly extreme ideas, including stonings and lashings.

The BBC has stated that books in the schoollibrary included “The Ideal Muslim by Dr Muhammad Ali Al-Hashimi, which advocates parents hitting children if they do not pray by the age of 10, the report said.

“Another, Commanders Of The Muslim Army by Mahmood Ahmad Ghadanfar, was said to praise individuals who ‘loved death more than life in their pursuit of righteous and true religion’.”

The school has been told that it must act to meet “key standards for independent schools.

“These include ensuring the curriculum ‘better prepares [pupils] for living in modern Britain ... in line with the laws of the land’ and having library books with ‘balanced and tolerant views which reflect British democratic values’.”

A couple of things occur.

First, it’s actually worth asking why some people find the idea of stoning as a method of execution so bad, if they believe that capital punishment is otherwise acceptable. Could there be anything less civilised than employing – and paying – people to come up with methods of execution that are not “cruel and unusual”?

If you find the idea of burying someone up to their chest or neck and then belting them with rocks until bloodied and dead, do you not also find the idea of hanging bad? And what about strapping someone to a table and injecting them with chemicals that, when they work properly, stop that person’s heart?

Anyway, back in 2012, education secretary Michael Gove announced that every school was to be sent a special copy of the King James Bible, to mark the 400th anniversary of its translation, and complete with an introduction by the minister himself.

As it happened, even Prime Minister David Cameron baulked at the idea of public funding for the project at a time of cuts, and it was decided that it would be done via donations.

It was never made clear just how many UK schools do not already possess at least one Bible – and in that particular translation – but it seems unlikely to be a large number.

But if we can feel fairly safe in the assumption that the overwhelming majority of schools will already be in possession of at least one Bible, then it’s also clear that the overwhelming majority of schools will be in possession of a book that condones and suggests an awful lot of spectacularly nasty stuff.

There are stonings and plenty of other brutal killings in the Bible.

Take the tale of Onan, for instance. After his brother died, God ordered him to, in effect, ‘take over’ his widowed sister in law.

He refused to take her sexually, ‘spilled his seed on the ground’ and was killed for that. Hence ‘onanism’ being a synonym for masturbation.

The Bible is full of stuff like that.

Now obviously, most believers – well, at least those in what we like to see as the tolerant, generally sensible West – don’t take all the Old Testament horrors too literally.

Some believers play the old pick ‘n’ mix game and ignore some of the most horrific bits – few will demand, for instance, that a woman should take two birds to her priest to be sacrificed after her period has finished, so as to ‘cleanse’ her, although plenty who would reject that will still quote the same book of Leviticus on homosexuality.

Colour your own child sacrifice

But it’s all too easy to think that no Christian would ever take the most brutal aspects of the Bible things literally.

Well, unless they do. Only recently, a woman in Florida, who killed a two-year-old boy that she was babysitting, cited a sermon about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

The woman, who subsequently tried to kill herself, left a note saying that the sermon had really affected her, but that “God never told me to stop!”

A solitary exception?

As the BBC reported yesterday, around 50 independent schools in the UK use the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum, which has been imported from the US.

The course makes some interesting observations on homosexuality, which are worth reproducing at length.

“Homosexuality. Homosexual activity is another of man’s corruptions of God’s plan. The prefix homo- comes from a Greek word that means “same.” Homosexuals engage in sexual activity with their own sex. The Bible records that God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexual activity.

“Some people mistakenly believe that an individual is born a homosexual and his attraction to those of the same sex is normal. Because extensive tests have shown that there is no biological difference between homosexuals and others, these tests seem to prove that homosexuality is learned behavior [sic]. The Bible teaches that homosexuality is sin. In Old Testament times, God commanded that homosexuals be put to death. Since God never commanded death for normal or acceptable actions, it is as unreasonable to say that homosexuality is normal as it to say that murder is normal.”

Where shall we start?

First, it presents the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by God as having been an historic event – and because of homosexuality.

And nowhere does it suggest that God might just have been a bit OTT and that, obviously, He wouldn’t go around acting like that nowadays.

Nowhere does it point out that God saved one ‘good’ man from Sodom and Gomorrah – and his daughters and (almost) his wife – but that Lot was considered as the one good man worth saving irrespective of his having tried to pimp his daughters to be gang-raped as a way of distracting a group of adult males wanting sex with other adult males.

Go on – read the story, because that’s what the Good Book says.

If that should alert people to one point, it’s that what might have been acceptable in the dim and distant past is not acceptable now – in other words, that humanity has moved on since such books were written and such stories told. And that applies to every single ancient religious text.

Nor does the ACE brainwashing teaching point out that after Lot and his daughters successfully flee (his wife is turned to a pillar of salt by God after she looks back at Sodom), the daughters rape their father when he’s drunk and get themselves up the duff.

Then, of course, there’s the absence of basic logic in the conclusions on homosexuality being “learned”, which are nonsense. There doesn’t have to be a discernible biological difference for sexuality not to be “learned”.

The thing is, though, once you introduce children to certain parts of a story as a literal, historic truth that must be accepted uncritically, how do they know not to take the rest of it in the same manner when they read that later on – particularly when the entire book is being taught as the word of God?

Indeed, very carefully, the ACE teaching effectively presents God’s condemnation of homosexuals as factual, without any moral comment. But since it also presents that god as all-knowing and generally infallible – He’s God, after all – then how can God be wrong if He chooses to punish homosexuals with death?

You can probably guess the approach that ACE takes toward evolution and science.

But these are the sort of values that are contained in the book that Michael Gove thought needed sending to every school in the UK.

‘British values’, one wonders? It’s rather doubtful that many people would think so.

But in recent years, religious faith has taken on a sort of ‘special’ nature that political leaders seem happy to encourage.

It leaves us with a situation where questioning any religious beliefs can be decried as ‘offensive’ or even ‘discriminatory’.

Well, how about a quite simple question on about what many non-fundamentalist believers believe?

For instance, many mainstream Christians, while absolutely rejecting the horrors of the Old Testament, would still says that they believe that God was the father of Jesus Christ.

The trouble is, if you believe that, how do you reconcile it with modern morals – and, indeed, with ‘British values’ – given that the Bible story makes it entirely clear that God didn’t ask Mary’s permission first, and that she was only notified by an angel after she had been impregnated?

Wouldn’t that be classed as rape?

There are layers to all this. Some indoctrination is rather more subtle/sophisticated that other indoctrination.

And there are questions of harm: in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if someone believes that Mary was impregnated by God – and then quietly fudges over the ethical implications of that belief?

The mere presence of a book on a school library shelf does not automatically mean that children are being taught that everything in it is acceptable.

But it is entirely reasonable to ask what any school is doing – never mind a primary school – with a modern book (first published in 2007) that proclaims beating a child if he or she doesn’t say their prayers by the age of 10.

It’s not censorship to say there’s no place for such a book in any school any more than it would be for any such library to have modern Christian books on parenting that promote regular beatings – a variety of literary endeavour to which a number of cases of child murder in the US have been linked.

There is a difference between modern books and ancient ones – even when the latter include particularly nasty things, as does the Bible and, no doubt the Qur’an too (I haven’t read any of the latter so am in no position to comment specifically on it).

Perfect entertainment for children

The differences between different flavours of fundamentalists are not as wide as some might imagine.

Everyone has – or should have – the right to believe whatever they want.

Clearly they have the right to tell their children what they believe.

But in that case, perhaps the ultimate solution is for all education to be secular – if for no other reason than to give every child the space in which to learn about the wider world, outside their own parents’ ideologies and beliefs.

Any curriculum should include teaching children about religion in the broadest sense – in that it exists in many forms and has done throughout history etc. This should be entirely neutral.

In the meantime, if we’re going to have politicians near the end of their term in office wittering on about ‘British values’, then it would be rather nice if they would make at least a tiny effort to think through what they’re on about.

And if we’re going to have edicts about school libraries that contain only books with ‘balanced and tolerant views which reflect British democratic values’, then whoever came up with that garbled, populist soundbite better get ready to ban the Bible, the Qur’an and plenty, plenty more, including, but not limited to, any books of Greek or Norse myths and legends.