Whenever enthusiasts talk politics, there’s always someone who wants to do it John Major style. No, not with Edwina Currie. I mean with a soapbox.
Wistful politics junkies cast an eye back to the day when the power of the human voice alone inspired roomfuls of people to act! Political engagement! Bring it on!
The painful reality was brought home last night by Channel 4’s Dispatches. We were asked to suspend our disbelief and imagine that turgid, rambling monologues delivered with all the vocal power of a Tesco‘s till announcement were radicalising young Muslims in Birmingham.
Let’s be honest. The people filmed secretly may be preaching hate, but are their self-indulgent sermons really convincing? If an angry monotone is how you market terror, it really needs a new agency pitch. You’d need a devotion verging on suicidal just to sit through them.
As a teenager, bereft of violent hobbies that were socially acceptable, like rugby, I listened incessantly to Tommy Gun by The Clash. However, I didn’t decide to arm myself and engage in self-destructive acts of pointless rage. (There are countries where you can borrow dad’s gun and, without even needing to compose a religious or ideological justification, gun down unfortunate classmates…) The message and the anger were nothing without organisation.
In Dispatches the problem lies not with the sermons, it’s with the ability to organise the angry young men willing to sit through them. Political apathy never looked so appealing…
2 responses to “Preaching hate…”
Watched it on youtube.
Given the months they spent reporting, their footage appeared heavilly cherry-picked. You could do a similarly inciting expose on African-American preachers in the U.S., or, indeed, on white fundamentalist preachers calling for violence against some, lack of tolerance against others.
Basically, what the documentary shows is that Western mosques function as community centers, usually with multiple rooms for groups to use, and that this allows for a wide range of views to be expressed from religious leaders both at home and abroad.
As a result, you’re almost certain to find extreme points of view, if that is what you are looking for.
What the documentary doesn’t show, however, is most of the members of these Western mosques actively seeking out these kinds of extremist opinions.
It’s odd that so much of the video is attacking believers of Islam for having a word for non-believers, and believing that non-believers will go to hell. Pot. Kettle. Black.
At about 39 minutes into his November, 10, 2002 broadcast, popular American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart referred to the Prophet Mohammad as a “sex deviant,” a “pervert,” and a “pedophile,” and called for the expulsion of all foreign Muslim university students in the United States and for profiling of airline passengers ‘with a diaper on their head and a fan-belt around their waist.’
Of American Muslims, Swaggart said: “We ought to tell every other Moslem living in this nation that if you say one word, you’re gone.”
This goes some ways to explain why attacks against Moslems in America have gone up fivefold since 9/11. Islam hardly has a monopoly on religious hatred and intolerance.
You’re absolutely right on that front…