Joe Cox - A Political Tragedy.

There is a rule, for troubled times, that I would see adopted en masse. I think I would formulate it as follows:

Be most wary, and most critical, of those who implore you not to politicise a tragedy.

Two things seem, to me at least, to be invariably true. First, people who make that request (or demand) are always quickest off the mark. Second, they always have a very political motive. That motive tends to be first conservative, the shielding of a view or alliance or policy from criticism. Once that is achieved, and the criticism forestalled, space is opened for something much more assertive.

“How dare Clinton use Sandy Hook to score political points,” began the NRA following the massacre of schoolchildren in 2012. “How dare she politicize this tragedy?!” Then it progresses: “Guns are not the issue. Gun control is not the issue. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

This sort of thing is not limited to the political Right, of course. Liberals, and the Left, are guilty of the same. Donald Trump is a nasty narcissist and it’s quite possible that he’s clinically stupid, of that there can be little doubt. But the liberal Left’s reaction to his statements after the Paris attacks, and the recent assault on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, tended toward that depressingly familiar refrain: “Donald Trump should not politicize this tragedy!”

It continues: “Religion is not the issue. White people do bad things too. Hate has no religion,” and so on.

This has become the default response, the preferred recourse, to any statement made in the aftermath of tragedy. It’s incredibly popular; it’s also deeply cynical. It seeks not only to pre-empt criticism and close down debate but also to create a setting in which assertions can be made – “Guns don’t kill people,” “Hate has no religion,” – that are themselves explicitly political. How dare you politicize this issue; that’s my job.

So it has been particularly depressing to note the way in which the public, and some politicians, have responded to the brutal murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox.

Granted, the official Leave and Remain campaigns have declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. I am not sure that that is quite so proper and praiseworthy as has been claimed. In any case, that has not stopped observers and participants, especially on the side of Remain, making the most shameless political capital out of the murder, and of the murderer’s alleged political affiliations.

So here we are again. David Cameron, firmly of the opinion that we should not politicize the tragedy, begins to say all the right things about hope not hate, joy not fear, diversity not intolerance, et cetera, ad nauseam. Never mind that, when not banging on about The Economy, Stupid, in the course of the referendum campaign, he has made those same soundbytes and platitudes and niceties his rhetorical tools in service of the Remain faction. But no, not now. Times have changed. He is no longer a politician, he is a human being. He has no opinion on the referendum; how could he following such a tragic event? No, no, he is not politicizing the issue at all.

Others, lacking Mr. Cameron’s experience and gift in the art of trickery, have not been quite so subtle.

The character of the murderer, who it seems was both mentally ill and had links to far-right and neo-Nazi groups, must say something about the state of politics and of political rhetoric in this country. We must not politicize the issue, but surely the toxic atmosphere of the referendum debate is at least partly responsible for this tragedy?

Alex Massie, writing in The Spectator and presumably just as keen as everyone else to avoid politicizing the tragedy, wrote, apolitically of course, that the blame for this horrible crime lies at the feet of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and the casually racist Leave campaign. A political statement? Of course not. Heaven forfend that anyone might make one of those in the aftermath of tragedy.

Massie was not the only writer at The Spectator to offer their thoughts on the matter. Those familiar with Rod Liddle are, if they have any sense, disinclined to assume that anything he writes is meant to be considered sincere. One suspects that the sentiment of his piece, entitled ‘RIP Joe Cox. Let’s call the referendum off as a mark of respect.’ was meant in earnest but not the claim itself. I was surprised to hear Douglas Murray, on Newsnight, express ‘some sympathy’ with the idea.

But there are some – quite a few, judging by the number of signatories to the petition on Change.org – who do sincerely believe that the referendum should be called off.

Whilst put online before the murder of Jo Cox, there are a large number of people, supported by ‘news’ outlets like The Independent which has gleefully reported a surge in signatures since the event, who have been moved to support it precisely because of the killing. What is this if not a political statement? The petition’s argument is that “Britain is a parliamentary democracy and that parliament, rather than a national plebiscite, should determine whether Britain stays in the EU.” What is that if not a political statement? Asinine, to be sure. Fatuous. Nonsensical. Unintentionally ironic. But a political statement is certainly is.

This whole thing is an ugly mess. It is made especially ugly because capital is being made on lies and at the expense of democracy. Is this really the way we wish to mark Jo Cox’s legacy? With deceit?

You are well within your rights to be wrong. You are perfectly entitled to use this murder to support your argument. “The murderer was a Nazi, Farage is a racist, don’t vote Leave” is utterly contemptible, but you have the right to be stupid. But don’t you dare try to excuse yourself of the charge of politics. You are making a political point, you are politicizing a tragedy, and you should bloody well stand up and acknowledge it.

'Why I'm Joining ISIS'

 There is, at first glance, very little to distinguish Salusbury Road from any other just-off-central London backstreet. Mile after mile of terraced housing, broken only by the occasional shabby chemist, shabby off-licence, or shabby estate agents’ equally shabby offices. But appearances can, from time to time, prove deceptive. Inside one of these unremarkable flats sits a very remarkable man, and I, with curiosity overpowering my apprehension, have been sent to meet him.

Baruch Mendelsohn is surprisingly easy to find. In fact, he’s a well-known figure in these parts, especially amongst the community of drug addicts and homeless people that make up society’s shadow in the Brent Council area. One man, a cheerful old sod with a fondness for Sour Diesel and a beard that wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, sings in praise of Baruch.

“He’s a top lad, Barry,” says the vagrant. He can’t remember his own name, but he’s enamoured by ‘Barry’, who gives him food and money, and occasionally steps out to share a joint on the porch of the old, run-down police station.

This story is repeated, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of erudition and eloquence, up and down the road. By the well-spoken woman with the well-fed dog who begs outside the tube station, by the singing Rasta-man, and by the odd couple who can be found wandering drunkenly, hitting each other with half-full cans of Special Brew and, on this occasion, kicking an unopened pack of sausages up the street. “Top lad,” “Great guy,” “Love him to bits.”

 The Sleeping Man is perhaps the only exception. Huddled in an alcove next to the bookshop, he shouts and swears when I mention Baruch. But then, as I soon discover, The Sleeping Man does little else. He shouts and swears at dogs, at children, at women; at anyone who crosses his eye line. The Sleeping Man does not discriminate.

All very well and good, but how do I square this with the profile I’ve got?

This profile, written and sent to me by Mr. Mendelsohn himself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, I’ve been told that I am to address him not as Baruch Mendelsohn but as Baadir Mohamad, he having “Renounced [his] Jewish faith and [his] kafir ways, turned [his] back on decadence and sin, accepted the truth of the al-Quran,” and so on. B.M. is apparently unaware that one does not need to write ‘the’ before ‘al-Quran’; it translates as ‘the the Quran’. A quibble, but possibly quite revealing.

The mental portrait I’m trying to create is shattered as I’m accosted outside Starbucks and whirled around to face who I assume – who I hope – must be Baadir.

“Mr. Mercer!”

I’d been expecting to be confronted by a cliché; by a Choudary clone or Hamza doppelganger, all wild eyes and austere robes and liberated facial hair. But Baadir Mohamad isn’t any of that. Or rather, he’s not quite any of that. I seem to have caught him in the very early stages of his metamorphosis. An almost indiscernible hint of mania in the otherwise friendly blue eyes, something not-quite-unpleasant in the crooked-toothed, tarnished-silver smile; traces of some artificial colourant in his thinning hair.

“Mr Mohamad, I presume.”

“Please, call me Baadir.”

These introductory niceties having been concluded, Baadir takes me, bizarrely, by the hand, and leads me to a door not ten yards away from the ‘coffee’ shop (I use the term in its broadest possible sense). Two flights of stairs later, and I’m in the unremarkable flat with the very remarkable man.

We’re sitting in his kitchen, which doubles up as a living room. There’s a copy of the Quran next to a bottle of fabric softener on top of the washing machine, and the surface next to that is covered with a sea of unwashed plates. The place reeks of marijuana and cigarette smoke, and I’m hit with a strange and sudden realisation. Sitting here, on this disgusting sofa, it occurs to me that this is how it must feel to be a discarded fag butt.

My first question, the one I’ve been most looking forward to asking, concerns his Jewishness. What does he think of it? Do Jews really control the world?

“They control the media, certainly,” is his reply. He reaches for a pile of papers on the kitchen table and picks one out, seemingly at random. “This,” he says, “is something I was writing for my blog before it was taken down. This should explain it.”

And it does, after a fashion. I can’t repeat much of what I read; it would be impossible to print. It’s called ‘Letter from The Fat Controller’, the title taken from B.M.’s bizarre theory; that the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine is a metaphorical depiction of our Jewish overlords.

Does he really think Islamic State will accept him? He doesn’t look particularly Jewish, but he doesn’t look much like a Salafist, either. Wahhabi doctrine forbids you from shaving, and Baadir clearly has, and recently. His appearance is somewhat transigent; as though he dresses with one inept eye on fashion whilst the other looks toward the future he claims he desires.

“They will, when I get there. I can’t look the part now; I’m too easily noticed, and they’re watching me.”

This is undoubtedly true. When I ask him how he plans to get to Syria, he explains that he’s already tried, and been prevented. He also tried to move to Birmingham, believing that there might be some truth to the Fox News claim that the city is all but ready to declare itself an Islamic state, but was prevented again. He’s set his sights on a move to Tower Hamlets, from where he intends to plot his escape. Either he’s being coy, or he really has no idea how he’s going to go about it.

When I ask him about his family his expression becomes dark. Born and raised somewhere near Luton, he left home when he was fourteen, arrived in London when he was nineteen, and claims to have never been back. Having been born and raised somewhere near Luton myself, I can attest to the fact that the closer you are to it, the more it f*cks you up.

“My mother,” he says, “is a decadent western whore.”

“How so?”

“She can’t cook. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t tend the house. She goes out to work and leaves the place to fester. She’s not married; wears makeup and no veil. She made me a bastard. She made me the way I am, or rather, the way I was.”

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Every Tuesday.”

Curious. “You said she made you the way you were. What were you?”

He pauses. “You know the story of Lut?”

I do. Lut, or Lot, is amongst a handful of figures from scripture who have survived plagiarism twice, appearing first in the Torah, then in the Bible and finally in the Quran. His story is contains that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  “Ah,” I say, “so you are-“

“I was,” he interrupts, “but I am cured.”

“But you blame your mother?”

He shrugs, non-committally. “One way or another it’s her fault. And I won’t stop until the black flag of jihad flies above her house. Maybe it’s her nature. Maybe it’s because she had me vaccinated. You know about vaccines? You know the Jews in the CIA invented them for their war on Muslims? They sterilise us, they infect us, they make us mentally ill.”

“Are you mentally ill?”

“Again, I was cured.” The source of these ‘cures’ is to be found in the Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza’s alma mater. Baadir’s conversion owes itself, at least in part, to the toxic blend of Saudi Wahhabism, oil wealth, and Prince Charles, that royal speaker to vegetables. “Allah is the cure,” Baadir continues.

When I ask him about his other diagnosis he waves me away, claiming he can’t remember. Schizophrenia or MPD; one of those. So, as he begins to roll a joint, I ask him… why. Why Islamic State? Conversion is one thing, terrorism is surely quite another.

“You mean you can’t see it?!” he exclaims, gesticulating toward the window. “Look at it. It’s filthy. It’s corrupt. The women are all prostitutes, the men are all beggars and sinners. The scriptures are clear; we do this, and we win. We have to win. There is no way we won’t win. The people who accept that might be saved, but the rest can burn.”

“And you’d be prepared to behead people?”

“Sure, why not.” He shrugs again. “I’ve seen the videos. I could do it. And it’s not as though I’d be beheading real Muslims.”

Alas, our time together is almost over. We both have places to be. Baadir is heading out to the Two Brewers in Clapham, which means I have to change my plans and head elsewhere. The Two Brewers describes itself as being ‘gay friendly’, and it’s full of friendly gays. It serves as a useful staging ground for trips into other worlds. Perhaps Baruch isn’t as dead as Baadir likes to pretend. Perhaps Baruch is still in him, somewhere. Perhaps someone else will be, later.

-----

“One for the road?”

He’s offering me a joint. I hate the stuff, but how often does one get the chance to take a spliff from a wannabe jihadi?

“Sure,” I say.

I’m still wondering, as I make my way back up Salusbury Road, what it is that separates us. We are the same age, we have similar backgrounds, we share many interests. And yet, he fantasizes about joining Islamic State, about beheading infidels and blowing up history, whilst I do not. Quite the opposite. Let the infidels keep their heads, I say, and history has a lot going for it.

The nameless old sod from earlier is sitting on the porch of the old, run-down police station. He eyes me up, meaningfully, as I stride toward him, and beckons with his gnarled old claw. Well, why not?

“Alright, Barry?” he asks, as I squat down beside him.

“Barry?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind, old sod. Got a light?”

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

 “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

George Bernard Shaw is too seldom referenced in discussions on free speech. This is a shame, for two good reasons.

Firstly, his statements on the subject are useful because they highlight the value of criticism. Simply put: “It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.” 

Secondly, his record should serve to educate one on a dangerous compulsion. Allowing criticism of views and ideas he disliked, Shaw’s support for Stalin, ‘moderate’ eugenics and the doctrine of Lysenkoism is a lesson in the uncritical. Partisanship is one thing; wilful blindness is quite another.

It is worth remembering that Shaw was writing at a time when cultural and ideological differences between East and West could manifest themselves in any place and at any time. Lysenko was to the East what Mendel was to the West: it was not uncommon to hear or to meet someone who genuinely believed that there was a difference between Eastern science and Western science, or communist science and capitalist science. But whilst Lysenko’s theories were eventually shown to be little more than nonsense wrapped in a thin layer of plausibility, the years in which it was the sponsored pseudoscience of the Stalinist state (which imposed  its ‘official science’ on large parts of the Eastern bloc) had already done immeasurable damage to knowledge and to society in the Soviet Union. Not so much a brain drain as a brain purge, the 1948 declaration that the whole field of genetics was nothing more than “bourgeois pseudoscience” led to the arrest, imprisonment and even the execution of an astonishingly large number of once-prominent and celebrated scientists.

That Shaw expressed much of his support for Stalinism in the years after Arthur Koestler had stumbled out of love with the regime, and after Victor Serge had been imprisoned by the state he once worked for, and after Rosa Luxemburg had penned many vital criticisms of the decline of Leninism, is something for which the English author deserves to be criticised. Serge, the man who exposed the Tsarist origins of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and who may well have coined the term ‘totalitarianism’, did not have the benefit of the same hindsight that could and should have been enjoyed by Shaw. It makes his criticisms of the secret police and of Stalinism in general all the more remarkable. And Orwell, who was by no means silent on the ills of capitalism or the follies of ‘The West’, could never be accused of having overlooked the equivalent flaws of ‘The East’. Much of what we now know about Stalinist Russia we owe to those brave individuals who did write, who did speak up, and who did not censor themselves out of fear for their own safety, much less of causing offense.

Judgements on the critiques of the two systems that originated on either side of the iron curtain could only be made after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; only after the communication of ideas ceased to be counterrevolutionary; only after introspection and self-criticism ceased to be so wholly un-American.  Shaw would have been wise to stay true to his principle: ‘the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.’

If the Cold War was a clash of civilizations, then we are now living through a clash between civilization and its antithesis. Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Jabhat al-Nusra: these are not glimpses of a proto-civilization informed by an alternative ideology. They are the sworn and self-professed enemies of the very premise of civilization.

When we grant even a modicum of respect to their nihilistic worldview, we assume that they are an expression – however vulgar, however loathsome, however perverted - of an idea that is fundamentally equal to the foundation of any civilization. And in doing so, we insult the memory of the many peoples, societies and cultures that once occupied and still occupy what we now misguidedly call ‘the Muslim world’. These, after all, are the people who destroyed the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, who bombed the al-Askari Mosque, who burned museums and their priceless collections and to whom countless historical documents and artefacts have been lost because their very existence was deemed to be an implicit criticism of Islam. We see a good deal of misplaced handwringing after attacks on ‘our own’ culture, but the masochists – those who prefer to blame Salman Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten, South Park and Charlie Hebdo than defend them – tend to have very little to say about the cultural atrocities inflicted on societies ‘over there’, atrocities that are not committed by ‘us’ but by the ‘them’ that we supposedly oppress and provoke.

But countries and regions and the legacy of the people who did so much to preserve the relics of ancient Greece and Persia, whilst the forces of Christendom were doing their best to wipe all traces of pre-Christian art and culture from the world, are not and will never be represented by the bin-Ladenists, by the Salafists and the Wahhabis, or by the followers of Khomenei or Zarqawi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And if we want, as we should, and as our friends in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan certainly do, to be allowed to enjoy the art and the writing and the music and the poetry of the region – whether that be the old, like Rumi and Tabrizi, or the new, like Khaled Hosseini and Kanan Makiya – then it is vital that we do not lessen our own commitment to freedom of speech and expression in some stupid attempt to appease the fanatics. Instead, we should hold to it and fight for it all the more, not just for us but for those who lack those rights.

Yet in Europe and the United Kingdom we are increasingly being told that we have a duty to be silent. That we have a responsibility not to offend. That we are morally obliged to keep our criticisms, thoughts, jokes and ideas to ourselves. As though the other side would simply disarm and go away if we only stopped publishing cartoons! Specifically cartoons depicting a certain illiterate peasant who lied about a revelation that never took place, and who built on that lie a military campaign with the aim of creating an empire. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions,” and there are few propositions more unintelligible than the premise of religion.

The trend is particularly worrying on this side of the Atlantic. Our lack of a written  constitution and a codified bill of rights, coupled with and partly caused by the position of the monarchy and its relationship with government, and exacerbated by our continuing involvement with a European Union that has no interest in protecting free speech and no constitution of its own that protects it, leaves us in a uniquely vulnerable situation. It adds significant and unnecessary weight to a burden we seem reluctant to bear. It requires us to stand as the sole protectors of our most important right, and the only defense against ourselves.

This is an exceptionally dangerous state of affairs. George Orwell’s essay, The Freedom of the Park, makes the point that the real threat to free speech in this country comes not from a capricious and totalitarian government but from a capricious and tyrannical compulsion toward self-censorship.

 “The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech... if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing.”

This can be allied with another of Thomas Jefferson’s statements—“the only security of all is in a free press”—to make, in summary, the case: If we are truly concerned with free and equal rights, not just for white middle-class men on this island but for everyone, then it is vitally important that we do not allow the censorship, by ourselves or by anyone else, of thoughts and ideas that offend a minority, and especially not the majority. Noam Chomsky is right when he points out that “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech.” 

This is an effective summary of Milton, of Mill, of Paine, of Voltaire, of Jefferson, and of the many others besides, whose work forms the scaffold on which the principle of free speech and a free press has been erected.

To adopt anything less than complete adherence to what those in the United States call First Amendment absolutism is to pre-emptively condemn the very people you think you are trying to protect. (The irony of that title is that, as Christopher Hitchens so eloquently put it, “It commits us to an unshakable principle while it obliquely reminds us that absolutism is what the freedom of speech actually makes impossible.”) The point is well made in the dialogue between Roper and Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All seasons. When Roper tells More that he would happily cut down every law in England to get after the devil, More issues the following response.

 “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ...Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

For the avoidance of doubt, I am fully aware of the logical consequences of this position. And I’ll make it very clear: I have no time for hate speech laws of any kind. The Austrian government might have congratulated itself for arresting the historian and holocaust denier David Irving for thought crime, but I would defend his right to hold, speak and publish his views even if he had no redeeming features whatever.

Nor do I have time for nonsense non-words like ‘Islamophobia’, the wilful conflation of race (which doesn’t exist) and religion, which is designed with the express purpose of silencing criticism of the latter. The reader is welcome to attack me with speech or in writing and on any topic they choose. It takes a lot to make me cry. But I reserve the right to reply in kind and I reserve the right to attack any person, any idea, any religion, any ideology, at any place and at any time.

Again, and whether it is an expression of self-flagellation or an imposition from outside: “The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” We may hope that this condition is reasserted and enforced by the governments – our own amongst them – that seem to be denying its proud entailments. But we must first recognise and acknowledge its value ourselves.

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

I am, as I write this, standing at the edge of a small crowd of people gathered on the steps of the National Gallery in London. It is one of a series of such gatherings now taking place around the world; a show of solidarity with the journalists and cartoonists of the magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered by Muslim fanatics yesterday.

It also purports to be a demonstration in support of free speech and expression. Paris briefly became the latest battleground in the fight between free speech and the forces of jihad, and it is a relief to see people on the streets in support of right side of that dichotomy. Never mind that many of them will not have read the magazine in question, and never mind that many of those gathered here, if they had seen some of Charlie Hebdo’s more risqué cartoons and caricatures, would have, under other circumstances, decried the magazine as a racist screed not worth the paper it’s printed on. Tonight at least, the principle is the right one.

The demonstration began some time before I arrived. I overheard one reporter as she was speaking to her camera; apparently there had been as many as seven hundred people in the crowd before I arrived. And there are still over a hundred of them here now, some holding pens and notepads, some holding cartoons, and some holding signs and placards bearing the Twitter hashtag that has come to represent the movement: #JeSuisCharlie.

The reverent atmosphere here feels slightly out of place. The magazine in question, and its spiritual counterparts in countries around the world - the likes of South Park, the offices of which were attacked in 2010, and Jyllands-Posten, the Danish magazine that caused its country so much trouble when, in 2006, it printed a set of cartoons that were deemed offensive by rabid mobs in Pakistan and elsewhere – celebrate irreverence. That is the crime for which they have been deemed worthy of death and destruction, and that is the reason their offices are now, and have been for many years, under heavy police protection. These are the sorts of magazines that would shout to interrupt a vigil, and so, with that in mind, this seems to me to be a very quiet demonstration in support of free speech.

It is, though, pleasingly diverse. There will undoubtedly be people who want to excuse these attacks or misdirect the blame for them; people to whom the notion of moral responsibility is alien; people who will look at the attacks in Paris, and those that have happened before and will almost certainly happen again, and claim that they are in some way excused by our own actions. “We had it coming,” in other words, for our criminal governments and our oppression of Muslims and our drone strikes and our obsession with oil. Well, tell that the man who goes by the name of Ken, and who is one of four or five people here bearing the flags of the Kurdish YPG, and its women’s’ wing the YPJ. They have placed a sign on the floor, adding to the pile of newspapers, comic strips, pens, candles and placards, which reads: “The Kurds will never forget you.” These men and women are themselves an counterargument against the nihilists and the masochists who believe these attacks were a just response to imperialism.

I asked Ken whether he wanted to issue his own pre-emptive response to that line of argument, and he duly obliged. He told me he believed that what motivated him to stand there, in the cold and the wet, holding his flag, was the same thing that motivated his brothers and sisters in Iraq and Kurdistan. He is not in a position to take up arms, but he felt obligated to show, in some way, his support for the values that motivate the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in their fight against barbarism. And he made the point, so often missed by idiot commentators like Glenn Greenwald, that the fight against the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State – the fight against Islamic extremism in general – is not one of foreign imperialists against beleaguered freedom fighters, as the likes of Michael Moore would have us believe, any more than it is a regional, territorial struggle between competing tribes. The Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting against Islamic State are, as Ken rightly says, fighting for us in a war that much of our own public would rather not acknowledge or engage with; the war between the civilized world and the forces of jihad who would see it all burn.

It is not a conflict in which our allies in the region enjoy the unqualified support of Western governments, and it hasn't been for some considerable time. Since the US-led intervention became a bungled and, for then-President Bush, a near impeachable farce of an occupation, public opinion in the US and the UK has been marshalled far too easily by those from the ostensibly anti-war movement; those who spoke for far too many people when, in their guise as MoveOn.org, they glibly labelled the impressive General Petraeus “General Betray Us.”

The same bold cowardice provided ammunition for much of the success the Democrats enjoyed in the 2008 election, and was still seen as a sufficient giver of momentum when the Obama administration chose to sabotage the talks with the Iraqi government over the renewal of the Status of Forces Agreement. (I have yet to see anyone make the argument that the complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq made the current crisis less likely.)

But we do occasionally see tentative shifts in the direction of good sense. The crimes committed by the likes of Islamic State have, at the very least, deprived George Galloway of some of the platforms he once enjoyed. And time will tell whether this attack – an attack that took place not in some remote part of the world but in the capital city of France – will move us toward a little righteous blowback of our own. (By blowback, I do not mean the unfortunate and all but inevitable support for Front National, or the Pegida movement in Berlin.) The response has, thus far, been a vast improvement from that seen in 1989 and 2006.

But, still, many high profile news outlets have been reporting on the story – a story generated by images, from an attack which was itself a response to those images, and which has taken place in the age of the image – without showing the images in question. I have asked the question of three different media organisations, including the BBC and ITV: Will you show the cartoons when you report on this story (as the likes of Slate magazine have, to their credit) or opt for the cowards' approach; the one taken by outlets from CNN to The Telegraph? I almost succeeded in cornering Nick Robinson of the BBC, but he was dismissing all questions with the disappointing stock response: “Sorry, I'm in a rush.” The cameramen, who were more talkative, were unable to tell me whether their employers would stand up for the freedom of speech and expression and, as it transpired, the answer was disappointing.

As I finish writing this, I am sitting on the tube. I have looked at stories on the websites of those organisations I have already mentioned; I have not seen a single cartoon.

This is not brave, and this is not 'appropriate', this is capitulation to those who, at their most moderate, believe that free speech is licensed on condition of banality; on condition that it does not offend. Well, brothers and sisters: fuck that. I hope you agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't – or shouldn't – matter either way.