Orlando - It's Not Terrorism.

It's Much, Much Worse.

~~~

It took far too long for the stupid and fatuous term War on Terror to be expunged from the lexicon of foreign policy. The political history of the United States is littered with silly declarations of hopeless domestic conflicts – on drugs, on poverty, on want, on crime – but the War on Terror is so asinine, so self-contradictory, so evidently impossible to prosecute that it could only have been created in and maintained by W’s White House.

What is war if not a terrifying prospect? What does it do if not utilize means and methods that terrify the sane? Has there ever been an account, from a civilian trapped in a conflict zone, that has not spoken in stark and candid terms of the terror they felt?

How can a War on Terror then be prosecuted when it involves us in a mind-numbing tautology. War involves terror; a war on terror must necessarily involve a war on the means of warfare., and yet not once did the Bush White House order the bombarding of an enemy with white poppies.

Bush, it seems to me, was at best half right. What he presented as a declaration of a new war, on terms and against an ‘enemy’ of a nature that made a mockery of the claim, should have been presented as a response to a declaration of war on civil society. Terror was never an enemy to be opposed; it is a symptom of war.

We, who are too often disinterested observers, would do well to keep this fact in mind. We are told of the “desperate search for answers” in the aftermath of acts that are commonly, and wrongly, described as “senseless” and “meaningless.” In fact, attacks like that on the Pulse nightclub (made bitterly ironic because a pulse is what the victims have been cruelly deprived of) should serve as reminders: that, whilst it is obviously ridiculous to say “on terror,” we are still participants in a war that predates, and goes well beyond, our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alright, if we are not at war on terror then against what, or with whom, are we struggling?

The  employment of the term terrorist actually predates the Bush White House by three decades or more. It is not as self-evidently self-defeating a term as War on Terror, which probably goes some way toward explaining why it is still in employ whilst the War on Terror is not. But it, too, is rank with contradictions and ripe for specious misuse. A terrorist cannot be defined in isolation from the concept and definition of terrorism and terrorism has no universal or binding definition.

It is commonly parsed as “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Yet this is quite obviously inadequate in a conversation which often involves a debate about the ‘backers’ and ‘financers’ and ‘enablers’ of terrorism. And it grants the holder far too much power whilst allowing for capricious and arbitrary application.

So it is that the Reagan White House could justify its interventions in Nicaragua on the spurious grounds that it was becoming a ‘terrorist state’ (thus admitting that terrorism can in fact be ‘authorised’) whilst at the same time making nice with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which actually do support, finance, back, endorse, enable and authorise acts of terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror cannot then be reparsed as a War on Terrorism because his related talk of a new axis of evil made no mention of the supposed allies who created and supported the Taliban and, more recently, Islamic State.

Furthermore, the definition requires that violence is used ‘in pursuit of political aims’. This, again, allows for advocates of political causes to be admitted as terrorists – whether they be Viet Cong, Sandinista, PKK, ETA (but not, curiously, - and here again the point about capricious and arbitrary standards – French colonialists, Bay of Pigs insurrectionists, contras, the Turkish government, the murderers of Salvador Allende, for all of whom the United States has found a use whilst denying that terrorism can be or has ever been ‘authorized’) – whilst precluding the application of the term to the very people we now most readily call terrorists, the invariably apocalyptic and messianic death cults of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State. These are groups which combine the ugly fatalism of the nihilist with the dangerous supremacist outlook of the fascist and the zeal of religious fanaticism. And one would have to be very generous indeed to allow that the desire to bring on the apocalypse could count as a ‘political aim’.

The injunction to ‘call things by their proper names’ has had an unusual progression through philosophy and politics, it being recommended to us by figures as diverse and removed from each other as Confucius, Orwell and Ted Cruz. Donald Trump claims prescience on this matter but it was Cruz who first and most often and most eloquently demanded that politicians describe their enemies without equivocation, only then to mischaracterise the nature of both the threat and its propagators.

“Radical Islamic terrorism” was and remains his classification of choice. One might, I suppose, give him the credit of trying; the response universally adopted by those on the liberal left-wing of politics has always been to resort to the lines “it has nothing to do with Islam,” “hate has no religion,” and words to that effect, a via negativa approach that does not attempt to provide an explanation or to give answers to those who so “desperately search” for them.

But Cruz fails the standard he claims to value so dearly. For one thing, terrorism is (as we’ve seen) a stupid and inadequate category that affects specificity but is in fact staggeringly vague. For another, it does not distinguish between different forms of Islamic, or Islamist, fundamentalism. Islamic State is born of Wahabbism which is itself a strand of Sunni Islam; should Hezbollah achieve its stated wish  - the destruction of the state of Israel – it would have achieved a goal of Shiite extremists. And for another, it encourages jumping to a conclusion without consideration for the facts. Remember how quickly people declared Anders Breivik’s slaughter in Norway an act of Islamist terrorism?

There is no easy, immediate, catch-all definition which answers our burning questions. Life, like the perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity, is not so forgiving. It is not blowback; the LGBT community so pointlessly massacred in Orlando have no more invaded another country than had the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, killed not by any Islamist terrorist but by a mentally deranged American citizen. It cannot be justified by citing the alleged crimes committed in the name of foreign policy, nor can it always be said that the perpetrator is gripped by a fervour that is explicitly religious.

Where any of these things can be proved to be true, we should then call them by their proper names. The shooter in Orlando did apparently offer a pre-emptive declaration of affiliation with Islamic State. But what if he hadn’t? What if he had been motivated by Shiite fervour? Would it still have been ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ had this man, with a ‘Muslim name’, instead been a devotee of some crazed, millenialist sect?

No, ‘terrorism’, whether Islamic or anything else, simply will not do. There can be no guarantee of motive, no pre-emptive classification. There can be no certainty, and that is a terrible thing. Nihilism, the pointless taking of life, the wanton destruction in and of this world by those to whom life has no value except as preparation for the unknowable and non-existent beyond; this is what we are faced with. Not a clash of civilizations but a war between civilization and its enemies ; enemies who view all of us, gay or straight, man or woman, adult or child, black or white, civilian or military, as combatants to be targeted.

It has no political aim, it has no realisable dream, it has no goal to be justified. It’s not terrorism; it’s much, much worse.

Saudi Arabia is Going to Execute a Poet.

On the Perversions of our ‘Allies’ and a Defence of a Poet.

(This piece was originally written for The Heythrop Lion's 'THIS' Magazine

 

There are few occasions on which the United Nations is able to disgrace itself more effectively than when it comes to making appointments to committees and sinecures. Iraq, for example, was due to take the chairmanship of the special committee on disarmament in 2003; a move prohibited not by any common sense on the part of the U.N. but because the US-led intervention in that same year made such an appointment impossible. Iran has recently been re-elected to a seat on the U.N’s Commission on the Status of Women. Robert Mugabe, the subject of a wide-ranging travel ban, was asked to be an ambassador for tourism in 2012, and the Human Rights Council  - which counts amongst its membership such bastions of human rights as Pakistan and Uganda and the Holy See – is currently chaired by Saudi Arabia.

It should come as no surprise that the U.N., which makes no firm commitment to anything save the moral imperative to create ever more useless, ever more profligate committees, will express no opinion on the matter of Saudi Arabia’s chairmanship. Rather more depressing, though, is the silence on the part of our own government (which, by taking part in tactical vote-trading with Saudi Arabia, ensured that country’s elevation to its current lofty position) on the crimes against humans and human rights being committed almost every day by the head of the UNHRC.

The Kingdom’s recent history – and by recent I speak of the past few months – is a hideous collection of sundered heads and bloodied bodies. The execution of the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was at least granted some coverage in the Western media, though the Obama and Cameron administrations declined to condemn it in anything but uncertain terms. The sentencing of the human rights blogger Raif Badawi to 10 years in prison and one thousand lashes (a punishment that has had to be staggered given the very real chance that it might have killed him) has received less attention than that, possibly due to the fact that it did not cause embassies to be closed or burned, but it, too, has been covered.

But whilst the first example can be understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of its not-so-cold war with Iran, and both cases can be seen as the desperate actions of a regime seeking to re-establish sure-footing following the death of King Abdullah and the destabilizing effects of Islamic State (and how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!), it is the impending execution of the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh which speaks most clearly to the character of the House of Saud.

It serves no purpose as an act of geo-realpolitik. Nor is it part of a wider attempt at suppressing political dissent. The sentence of death in this case, for the related but distinct crimes of apostasy and ‘spreading blasphemous ideas’ in his art (charges he denies), are symptoms of a deep-rooted loathing of art and music and freedom of thought and expression; a loathing which is a necessary consequence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist iteration of Sharia. It should be of great concern to all of us that that is the iteration which we in the West are made to import into our own countries, often through Saudi-printed and Saudi-approved copies of the Quran with which we stock our prison libraries, and also in the form of ‘generous’ donations to mosques and madrassas made by the Saudi state. The exporting of evangelization and religious coercion, often in radicalizing forms, is one of the largest and least spoken-of facets of Saudi trade policy.  

(And it is no coincidence that the same aversion to aesthetics and thought can also be found in wide swathes of Pakistan, in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and in the territories in Iraq and Syria governed by Islamic State. But, of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.)

I cannot attest to the quality or beauty or insightfulness of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry. I cannot read his works in the language in which they were written and I am increasingly of the opinion that poetry can never be properly translated without suffering some essential loss. I cannot even support Ashraf’s claim that he is innocent of the charges levelled against him. Fortunately, I do not need to. For it should go without saying that apostasy and blasphemy are not considered crimes under any sane system of justice, and the decisions by the Saudi authorities to deny Ashraf anything like a fair trial, not to mention access to a lawyer, are so obviously in contravention of international law and of human rights as enshrined by the UNHRC – yes, again, the very body now chaired from Riyadh – that there really is, on our side, no case to defend.

But there is undoubtedly a case to be prosecuted, and every passing day on which the wider international community remains silent is one in which our supposed commitment to support human rights and values is side-lined by spreadsheet morality; by concerns over arms deals and oil exports. Remember when, following the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the streets of Paris were treated to a parade of world leaders, all of whom voiced their commitment to uphold the rights of freedom of thought and expression? Well, where are they now? Where is their support now?!

It should be beholden upon all of us, and not just those who claim to speak for us, to combat the forces who prefer and who act in the hopes of achieving an unfeeling, unthinking, beauty-less world. But it should be particularly important for us, we subjects of this disunited kingdom, to speak more loudly and with an especially firm commitment to purpose in matters such as this. For we have known its antithesis, and it has cost us dearly in the past.

The case of Ashraf Fayadh bears the hallmarks of the affairs of both Salman Rushdie and Oscar Wilde. The facts of the former should be so well-known that they need no restating here – the sentencing to death of a writer for the crime of writing is abhorrent to us, isn’t it? Laws against blasphemy and ‘offensiveness’ are loathsome and infantile, are they not?

But the second might perhaps require something more by way of explanation. Indeed, its inclusion here caused me to think and think again, but I have concluded that it is right to include it and the point it makes is more than salient. For the ruin of Oscar Wilde, like the attack on Mr. Fayadh, are both proofs that can be used against W.H. Auden’s fatuous claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ And both are examples of individuals sent down by forms of love. To quote from Alfred Douglas’s fateful poem: a love ‘that dare not speak its name.’

The ‘Shame’ spoken of and felt (and, yes, acted upon) by the likes of Wilde and Bosie, which was a crime (and remains a crime in places like Saudi Arabia), is just as natural and vital to us as the ‘crime’ for which Ashraf Fayadh has been condemned. It is natural to us because it is of our nature! The dignity of our species, in other words, demands that we use and are able to use, free from fear of punishment, our ability to think and to write what we think, and to portray beauty, and to practice it and feel it with all the pain and reverence and hard work befitting any fundamental Love. To deny the freedom to think is to deny the freedom to love. They are, in that sense, two forms of the same virtue. And it allows one to accuse the House of Saud, and religion, as being opposed to love. Which it is; which they both are.

I have penned a poem – The Ballad of Burning - which shares its sentiment with that expressed within this piece.  I had thought to close with it. But as there is a place set aside in this august journal – a poets’ corner, of a kind - for works of rhyme and rhythm and metre (and sometimes those that lack the same, but that is an argument for another time), I have decided instead to close with the words of another.

Part of the title of this piece is taken (and then reworked) from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s polemic, published posthumously, entitled ‘A defence of Poetry.’  It is amongst the most eloquent cases ever made for art and for the meaning and the importance of art. I encourage the reader to peruse it in its entirety, but it closes as follows:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The point, if I have done my job, is clear. And I hope that you will join with me, and with the good people at PEN International, and Amnesty International, and the innumerable poets and writers and musicians and ordinary human beings in doing what our government is too cowardly to do on our behalf: condemn this sentence, condemn this crime, and work for the freedom of Mr. Ashraf Fayadh.

'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?”

#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.