Newsletter April 2007 #68

Table of Contents:

Worth Repeating

Victims now outnumber oppressors in our victim culture

We have become a nation of victims, with officially protected victim groups adding up to 73% of the population (p.6). According to a new book by the independent think tank Civitas, victimhood today is a political status that is sought after because of the advantages it brings, including preferential treatment in the workplace, the possibility of using police power to silence unwelcome critics, and financial compensation. Some groups are claiming to be victims of multiple discrimination: if their claims are taken seriously, 109% of the population have victim status (p.7).

According to David Green's book We're (Nearly) All Victims Now!, politicised victimhood undermines liberalism, weakens our democratic culture and subverts equality before the law, as well as police and judicial impartiality. From 2007, the government intends to establish a Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) that will protect six groups: women, ethnic groups and disabled people, plus those defined by sexual orientation, age, and religion or belief.

Victimocracy undermines legal equality

Many were surprised to learn in June 2006 that the law now considers the murder of a gay man as a more serious crime than the murder of someone who is not gay. The murderers of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common were given 28 years when, according to the judge, if they had voiced no hostility towards the victim's sexuality, the sentence would have been halved. The case sparked some media comment. Was it really worse than the murder of medical student, Daniel Pollen, in Romford, Essex in July 2005-a killing that was captured on CCTV and appeared to be without obvious motive? The judge thought so in June 2006, and the 'starting point' for calculating the sentence of Daniel Pollen's killer will be only 15 years. Is animosity to gays a worse motive than, for example, a calculated killing to silence a witness-perhaps when a rapist murders his female victim to prevent her giving evidence? Or is it worse than a drive-by shooting that takes innocent life at random? (p.vii)

Hate crime and homophobia against horses

Some recent events reveal the extent to which the leadership of the police has been captured by special interest groups who hope to use police power to suppress legitimate critics. Remarks about the Welsh by Tony Blair and Christina Odone, for example, led to police investigations (pp.49-50).

Sam Brown, an Oxford undergraduate who went out in May 2005 to celebrate the end of his exams, was also targeted by the police. Emboldened by a drink or two, Mr Brown said to a mounted police officer: 'Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay'. Two squad cars were sent to arrest him and he was detained in a police cell overnight and given a fixed penalty notice for £80, which he refused to pay. The case came to court in January 2006 and the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case at the last minute because there was not enough evidence. The police insisted that he had made 'homophobic comments that were deemed offensive to people passing by'.

The police claimed that the remarks were 'deemed' offensive and had led them to charge him under section 5 of the Public Order Act with behaviour 'likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress'. The case reveals the major difficulty with hate crime, namely that facts do not matter. The hate-crime manual of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) repeatedly states that the factsare immaterial. When speaking of secondary victimisation (when a person is dissatisfied with the police service) it says: 'Secondary victimisation takes place whether or not the police are indifferent or reject the victims if that is how the victim feels about the interaction. Whether or not it is reasonable for them to feel that way is immaterial.'

"By pandering to the desires of victim groups with an axe to grind, the police have stopped being the representatives of the 'reasonable person' and become the playthings of political activists or petty-minded members of the public (p. 53)… Group self-interest includes not only material benefits but also emotional pleasures such as righteous indignation and exerting power over others. Demands to be able to subject opponents to police action are perhaps the strongest examples of the latter: 'I'll get the police onto you for saying that'." (p. 73)

Victimocracy weakens our democratic culture

Our democratic culture has been based on discussion, compromise, give-and-take,and mutual learning. Victimocracy creates entrenched social divisions between victims and their oppressors. It makes the political process more of a battle for advantage at the expense of other people instead of a search for the common good. By trying to put some issues beyond rational contradiction, victimhood reduces the role of reasoned discussion, and thus the part that can be played by ordinary people in puncturing the pretensions of rulers and elitists with brute facts. Moral equality is the belief that every individual has the potential for rational autonomy and seeing right from wrong. From this view, it follows that people should not be treated differently solely because of inherited group characteristics (p. 29): "civilisation has advanced by individuals pushing themselves to the limit-pursuing 'transcendental' values: truth, goodness and beauty-not wallowing in self pity and delighting in blaming others" (p. 23)

Taking offence as a political tactic

An important part of victimocracy is the strategy to establish that the victimis the sole judge of when language is offensive. To keep oppressors and sympathisers on the hop, every now and then they change the words that cause offence. Recently the commonly-used term 'mental handicap' has been redefined as insulting (pp.32-33). But sometimes the tactic backfires. Stonewall in Wales has decided that the term 'openly gay' is unacceptable. Its web page on hate crime warns journalists that including phrases in reporting such as 'the victim was openly gay' or somehow 'flaunted her/his sexuality' suggests to readers that the victim is somehow responsible for the crime. It suggests they 'brought it on themselves' and can serve to 'endorse some people's prejudices'. However, the penchant of victim groups for changing at very short notice the words they find insulting not only traps oppressors, it can also catch out fellow victims. Word had obviously not got through to Stonewall in London, whose website displays the Stonewall manifesto for the 2005 general election. It regrets the fact that there are still only a 'tiny number of openly-gay MPs'. (pp. 33-34)

Freedom for groups undermines freedom for individuals

There is special danger in the variety of victimhood that demands equal respect for all group beliefs, as if none threaten the foundations of liberal democracy:

"But some beliefs, particularly Islamic precepts such as death for apostates or the inferior legal status of women, are not compatible with liberal democracy. If the core belief of liberalism is moral equality, then it assumes autonomous individuals guided by conscience and not merely obedient to authority. It contends that moral choice is only worthy of the name if it is a free choice, and that everyone, of any rank, must be considered capable of judging right from wrong." (p. 77)

'We're (Nearly) All Victims Now! How political correctness is undermining our liberal culture' by David G. Green is published by Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ, tel 020 7799 6677, www.civitas.org.uk, at €10.00 inc. p&p.

The Passive-Aggressive Jihad

-- David Thompson, Florida journalist and blogger, Posted March 12th 2007=

Last week, I noted how the language of religious coercion has undergone a softening since the era of William Berkeley, and how old struggles for censorship and dominance are now routinely couched in the rhetoric of personal injury: "No-one would use words like 'authority' and 'power.' Not about Islam. Not out loud. Now we hear about much fluffier things, like 'feelings', 'prejudice' and 'sensitivity.' It's the passive-aggressive approach." Efforts to control what can be said about Islam – and by extension what can be thought about it - have been recast in termsof supernatural sensitivity and an allergy to criticism. Or, no less shamefully, as a reaction to 'racism.'

As, for instance, when the Abu Bakr Jamia mosque in Cambridge invoked a "compassionate and merciful" Allah to intimidate staff and students at a Cambridge college, while describing an innocuous student newspaper as "hate speech" and an "incitement to ethnic hatred." Or when that tragicomic convert to Islam, Yvonne Ridley, pompously declared: "My faith is my nationalityand when you attack it you are being racist." Some have resorted to other, no less tendentious, ploys; most recently with the notion of "cultural racism" – a term that's used freely in certain quarters and without clear definition, but which nonetheless imprints on the reader an unmistakable suggestion of nefarious intent.

"The word 'Islamophobe' - like its pseudo-synonym, 'racist' - has acquired the status of a declamatory WMD. Deploying the term, even by vague insinuation, can generally be counted on to shut down the frontal lobes of pretty much anyone on the left, like some rhetorical kryptonite."

In his recent Civitas report, We're (Nearly) All Victims Now, the criminologist Dr David Green explains how, "politically-recognised victim status... has begun to do lasting harm to our liberal culture. Groups who have been politically recognised as victims are starting to use their power to silence people who have had the cheek to criticise them." Green goes on to argue: "Modern victim groups create entrenched social divisions by defining opponents as oppressors who not only must be defeated by the state, but silenced by the state."

These efforts to short-circuit realistic debate have proved all too successful, not least among those whose political outlook is premised on Designated Victim Groups and claims of collective guilt. Loaded as the term 'Islamophobia' is with connotations of irrationality, those who brandish it as a talisman of virtue may suppose they're defending the weaker party against unfair attack. In practice, they may simply be excusing the party with the weaker argument, or no argument at all.

Thanks to Franklin at Artblog, I stumbled across another textbook example of this passive-aggressive pantomime, this time involving the cartoonist Doug Marlette and his "offensive" cartoon 'What Would Muhammad Drive?'; The background for the cartoon and the "outrage" that followed – inflamed and co-ordinated by the dubious "civil rights" organisation CAIR – can be found here. The piece is worth reading in full, not least for some tips on how to deal with being denounced as a toolof Satan. But I thought I'd share some of Marlette's comments on the incident as they illustrate the mechanics of professional victimhood:

"Can you say 'fatwa'? My newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet Muhammad — or else. Some spelledout the 'else': death, mutilation, internet spam. 'I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother's ass.' 'What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell.' 'Just wait . . . we will see you in hell with all Jews.'

The onslaught was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR bills itself as an 'advocacy group.' I was to discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. At any rate, its campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down servers at my newspaper, as well as viruses aimed at my home computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns, web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League.

The threads that connect CAIR and the literary fatwas… are entreaties to 'sensitivity', appeals to institutional guilt, and faith in a corporate culture of controversy avoidance. Niceness is the new face of censorship in this country… We are in deep trouble when victimhood becomes a sacrament, personal injury a point of pride, when irreverence is seen as a hate crime…"

It's difficult to adequately convey the dishonesty of this flourishing grievance industry andthe scoundrels who exploit it. But such is its effectiveness in coercing genuflection and self-censorship, a precedent has been set. As has previously been noted, the Bishop of London and the Dean of Southwark have all too readily embraced the rhetoric of victimhood practised so expertly by our most prominent Muslim lobby groups, whereby howls of bogus injury are accompanied by vague threats of "social disorder" and demands for special treatment.

Crudely summarised, that rhetoric runs along the following lines: "Poor us. Feel our pain. We're victimised by words, even statements of fact. You owe us for our injury. So do as we say." Perhaps we'll soon have a grievance arms race on our hands, as various Tribes of Perpetual Hurt and Indignation follow the Islamic model and vie for the upper hand, with tearsin their eyes and a list of unilateral demands: "Feel my pain." "No, feel my pain!" "My pain is the greatest! Feel it! Feel it now…!" And with each exhortation to empathise and comply, a little more freedom may well be lost, perhaps irretrievably, along with a little more honesty and a little more self-respect.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca