Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Peace is always a harder option than war

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2006-03-27T15:31:00Z

After 119 days in captivity, Norman Kember, 74, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, did not fall on his knees in euphoric gratitude for our troops in Iraq - the least he could do, some say, after they damn well rescued him from his cruel captors who had already murdered Tom Fox, another hostage.

When he did get round to it, Kember's words were restrained, and he reminded the world of the anguish of the ordinary people of Iraq, as their country remains mired in violence. He himself has asked: "Was I foolhardy or rational?" There are no easy answers. Motivation in these cases cannot easily be unravelled (I personally find the Christian mission here a little awkward) and bold, individual involvement brings up challenging questions. (...)

- / Independent

If only the warmongers had been right

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2006-03-20T09:40:00Z

We told you so. There, I've said it, having resisted the urge for many months. Soon after the statue of Saddam was toppled the outburst of vulgar, bawdy triumphalism from the pro-war brigade was a cautionary moment. In the tragic tale of Iraq, the end cannot yet be imagined or predicted, but each phase calls up dirges and pessimism. The "liberated" country is driving at speed towards anarchy and chaos and ever more blood swills in streets and gutters.

We, the anti-war millions, were absolutely right to oppose the neo-con mission to destroy Iraq and the British Government's maidenly acquiescence to the macho superpower. Winning the argument brings no exultation. For this is one political battle it would have been better for us to lose. If only the hawks had been right, if only the fall of that statue had symbolised a new dawn. (...)

- / Independent

The double standards over free speech

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2006-02-06T19:20:59Z

This staged clash of fundamentalisms now has an audience of billions. The climax is likely to be grisly. European journalists have got the show fight they wanted, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Denmark's Jyllands-Posten, sought out controversial cartoonists to create caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed, not because they had something bold and compelling to say, but simply to enrage, like bullfighters goading a bull. Other newspapers have reprinted the cartoons in a supposed act of solidarity. What they have done, in fact, is belittle freedom of expression. They have taken something precious and turned it into a licence for the intelligentsia to behave like yobs.

These liberal warriors, high on conceit, want to demonstrate that Muslims can never be a part of Europe, because, well, they are too backward to hoot aloud when their revered prophet is shown with a bomb for a turban. I am not amused either, so should I pack the bags? Many of these countries were infamous for their state terrorism against Jews. Since then they have systematically mistreated generations of Muslims. (...)

- / Independent

The betrayal of Richard Pryor's legacy

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-12-12T14:10:00Z

His death marks the passing of a fiery, authentic black American political generation

I was ironing a pair of silk trousers - an early birthday present - when I heard of the death of John Lennon. I had just come home after celebrating my birthday in the West End with my family when I heard of the death of Richard Pryor. I felt the same blow in my gut. Pryor was not cut down in his prime by an assassin. He was 65 and had been ill with Multiple Sclerosis, unable to talk his talk for a number of years; the first major African-American ever to address racial injustice in his wicked, sharp, sometimes intolerably in-your-face acts.

It was hard to like this performer who was often gratuitously obscene and confrontational, sometimes simply for shock value. He was a drug addict, a man of destructive excess and obviously a lover from hell, in and out of bruising (mainly for the women) marriages and relationships. His children couldn't have had much ordinary peace in their lives with a dad who was perpetually high on substances, politics and a flaming sense of injustice. But many of us international anti-racists found him awesome; this angry black man who could never be bought off with the spoils of success, who got more, not less, incensed as he became popular and rich. (...)

- / Independent

The ghosts of our imperial past haunt Iraq

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-11-21T13:41:00Z

Britain left the subcontinent bleeding. Some wounds, like Kashmir, remain unhealed today

The end game in Iraq is nigh. Britain, the US and the Iraqi government, all now beleaguered in different ways, are scared witless by the diabolical violence in the "liberated" country. When withdrawal happens it will be both too late and too soon. More of Iraq, I fear, will turn into a killing field. Its oil resources will fall to even more bandits (commercial ones from the West and guerrillas with arms from around the entire region) and once more, a legacy of perpetual instability, dependency and desolation will have been left by colonial powers who have never given a damn about the people whose lands they grab to run and ruin.

It happened in India. In 1942, the quit India agitation was gaining momentum. Militant nationalists attacked public buildings, post offices and police stations. Trains were derailed and havoc was seen across the country. The British shot dead about 1,100 "insurgents" and arrested 72,000 others. Gandhi and Nehru wanted a united India with all races and faiths living under a free state. Other Indian politicians began plotting for a divided nation. The imperialists and a handful of self-serving indigenous leaders saw to it that independence burned on a pyre as Partition took its dreadful toll. The Muslim League was encouraged by the British to demand the creation of Pakistan, which duly happened. (...)

- / Independent

The West is not alone in failing quake victims

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-11-07T17:28:47Z

An envelope sits on my desk. It is yet another cheque to post to the Pakistan earthquake appeal. What good will it do, I ask? How pitifully small is the sum I am sending compared to what we spent on Eid last week and what we are about to squander on Christmas. These are self-indulgent mediations, immoral even when millions of people - old, young, newborn, able, disabled, sick and fit - wait out in the wintry mountains of Kashmir, their still faces turned to the probability that death will get them after they miraculously survived the violence of the tremor that blew down their world four weeks ago.

All I know of Kashmir is what it once was in the Hindi movies I saw as a child, a surreally beautiful place on celluloid, with garish lovers who invaded its peaceful lakes and mountains for a song or two. When I was young and in love with my ex-husband, I imagined going to a houseboat in Kashmir for our honeymoon. This was paradise, in its way, though not since India and Pakistan turned the region into a battleground. And now this. (...)

- / Independent

Hitler couldn't have put it better

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-10-31T13:51:33Z

Let me try and describe to you my reactions since the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made his deplorable and inflammatory remarks last week. My brain feels as if it is a squash court, balls hitting various points, then another, and another with confusing speed and force, a repetitive condition if you are, as so many of us are, people who seek to push for a more equal and decent world where might is not right and universal rights and obligations are incumbent on all.

Ahmadinejand said Israel should be "wiped off the map". Hitler couldn't have put it better. The Führer would have played the audience similarly - a conference of emotive students marking Jerusalem Day, who would readily rise to imagine the glorious obliteration of the Jewish state. You know the type, furious people like millions of others across the Middle East, disenfranchised and stamped on by their own leaders, who displace their anger by turning their eyes on Israel, lusting for its annihilation in a kind of political pornography which provides temporary relief but can only lead to a greater sense of hopeless impotence and homeless rage.

So the president picked the right crowd for his demagoguery, the right place too. Tehran is always willing to join in with "spontaneous" agitation, flag burning and marches to register defiance of the West while their own liberties are strangled noiselessly. (...)

- / Independent

We must unite to face the next attack

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-07-25T13:55:00Z

British Muslims are again being made to feel they are not entitled to the same rights given to others

Don't blow it, not now, I want to say to the police, intelligence services, the media and politicians. The swell of Muslim support they managed to marshal in the aftermath of the first bomb attack on London is receding since the second wave of attacks, because the people charged with keeping us safe within the rule of law are themselves succumbing to hysteria, unlawful acts, scapegoating and double talk.

On 7 July, howls of shared pain and disbelief arose in London bonding Britons of all hues. Muslims and non-Muslims were united, revolted and determined to beat the bastards. Perhaps that is why the second, hastily arranged series of attacks was executed. These Islamicist nihilists probably never understood what London means to Muslims the world over. However, leading up to and since the second violation, the mood among Muslims is altering. The killing of an innocent man - a poor law-abiding Brazilian electrician mistaken for a Muslim terrorist - has made us Muslim parents intensely fearful, much more than the bombs. In this situation the targets are selected within set physical profiles (Arab and Asian), and the shots came from a police officer, a professional who should, in these chaotic times, have had better information than he did. (...)

- / Independent

My City, my faith, both abused

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-07-08T13:35:00Z

[...] By eleven- thirty I had buried my head under pillows to stop the noise of the telephones and faxes, all asking for interviews. Shaking, feeling cold and overwrought, I had nothing to say to those who would ask me what I thought of these atrocities and why Muslims did such things and whether we Muslims condemned such actions. New Yorkers were left with a massive psychological wound; now it is our turn.

Every time these dreaded events occur you find yourself disintegrating, one part deep human compassion for the victims and their families, another calling you to the truth that our governments too shed blood for no good reason and create conditions for hate to infect life.

Yet another part reminds you that all lives are of equal value and that the pain we feel on behalf of our own citizens is not a licence for cruel revenge. My city, my faith, my city, my faith, I love them both, both traumatised, both abused. Where to turn? (...)

- / Independent

The triumph of Uncle Toms (and worse)

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2005-05-09T05:00:00Z

[...] The bigger politics is what concerns us activists much more than the race and/or gender profile of an MP. And so to the Tories. The election ushers in the first "black" Tory MP, Adam Afriye (half Ghanaian and half English) and Shailash Vara, the Ugandan Asian who has done time as deputy chairman for a party which has always repudiated equality and diversity policies and produced a string of racist politicians, including Winston Churchill.

So is this the nasty party shedding its repulsive past? Not a bit of it. These results, for me, are a damning manifestation of the splintering of the anti-racist struggle, a triumph of uncle Tomism and worse. To witness the son of illegal Jewish immigrants strategically mobilising mob instincts against immigrants was bad enough. To then have the sons of an African and a Ugandan Asian reiterate these obscene prejudices made me suicidal. (...)

- / Independent

Demonising Mugabe only aids his cause

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2004-11-29T14:14:00Z

Sick, sick, sick of this British obsession with the wicked Mugabe and his malign power over Zimbabwe. I want to stamp viciously on the toes of that smug Peter Hain when he denounces the "murderous" regime in Zimbabwe. He may have been a respected anti-apartheid warrior and a champion of justice and democracy, but that reputation is now like an old suit which no longer fits the person he has become. His voice sounded overwrought this week as he toured the broadcast outlets to damn the England Cricket Board for sending the national team to play in Harare, for their unethical foreign policies in effect. (...)

- / Independent

I dread what is going to happen in Fallujah

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2004-10-25T14:20:00Z

It is not that I am ungrateful for minute mercies. It is a little heartening that some members of the hitherto pusillanimous herd of new Labour MPs have mooed in protest at the latest Blair/Hoon folly - the decision to send 850 British soldiers in to support the much-anticipated US assault on Fallujah. These Labour politicians and most commentators who object to the decision are anxious about "our boys", about what will happen to the soldiers in this volatile area. (...)

- / Independent

The loss of Muslim lives matters, too

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2004-10-04T14:25:00Z

Just before the party conference, the irrepressibly New Labour Peter Hain breezily dismissed Iraq as a "fringe issue". Not a clever remark when the nation was gripped by the Kenneth Bigley crisis. He was forced to reverse out of the controversy (for he does have a reverse gear) but after a couple of days in Brighton, it was obvious to me that Mr Hain had mouthed a truth, a rare thing in this spinning party.

The automatons in the hall clapped as instructed, evoking the well-ordered Soviet Union. They looked ecstatic that their leader was once more deceiving them on Iraq and the state of the world with absolute conviction, his USP. A minority dissented - in particular at the Tribune rally where both Mr Hain and I were speaking. They wanted a hearty debate on the immorality of the military action and the occupation but were easily sidelined. The other delegates, ministers and special advisors I met were most satisfied that the planet was a safer place since the war and, with the job almost complete, they were ready to wave the issue away. It was passé.

Well, I am certainly not living on that planet, and nor are millions of others who watched this pantomime with a mixture of rage and incomprehension. It was offensive smugness at a time when Mr Bigley was begging for his life, other hostages were disappearing and reappearing headless, our bombs were ripping open ordinary Iraqis, and parts of Samarra, Fallujah and Sadr City were being pulverised.

In the middle of the New Labour revels came remarks which should have forced people into sobriety. But it didn't happen. The party went on as the serious warnings came from the delegation of British Muslims in Baghdad seeking Mr Bigley's release. One of them, Dr Daud Abdullah, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said the indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi civilians is "causing a lot of discontent among the people. They think they are innocent victims, like Ken Bigley."

Few politicians and commentators appear to comprehend the profound shift that is taking place in the too-long solipsistic Muslim leadership across the West, and elsewhere too. Beslan, endless kidnappings in Iraq and the barbaric decapitation of aid workers and other civilians have forced these leaders into a new activism. In France, since the kidnapping of two journalists in Iraq, Muslims of influence have pushed their people to embrace French nationhood even though there are serious conflicts between them and their state.

Here, the Muslim Association of Britain has issued straight statements condemning the inhumane hostage-taking by Muslims worldwide. Dr Ghayasuddin Siddique of the Muslim Parliament has, in my view, emerged as the most radical and informed Muslim scholar to confront the ignorance and malevolence within modern Islam. And the delegation in Iraq was yet more evidence of this striking and important development. This could mean real progress, a decisive step to lead us out of global chaos.

But only if there is reciprocity. Muslims have put their lives and reputations on the line to save Mr Bigley and others. The allies hold thousands of Muslims in illegal incarceration; they are tortured and killed too. The uncensored letter from Moazzam Begg in Guantanamo Bay tells us about the duress and inhumanity, the alleged deaths during interrogations of two inmates in that hellish concentration camp. Mr Bigley has been dressed in the costume of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. His ruthless captors know that this will play well with furious young Muslims because it reminds them of the iniquitous double-standards the West has imposed on the world since September 2001.

Where are the "official" Christian delegations to protect Muslim victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay? Why do our baying newspapers not call for these faith communities to condemn the savagery perpetrated by the allies?

How they poison possibilities, these hypocrisies. Decent citizens of the world are being asked to sign up to values which are abhorrent, absolutely unacceptable. In his debate with John Kerry, George Bush talked of "the enemy" that attacked America and that is now in Iraq. The enemy for him is an amorphous mass of any Muslims who refuse his version or vision.

To be on side with Bush and Blair, it seems we must agree that Western lives, particularly white lives, matter vastly more than others. That all those who are resisting the occupation are the children of Satan, "insurgents", "extremists", "terrorists" and "foreigners" who hate the idea of democracy. (Psst: we are foreigners too in Iraq.)

Sami Ramadani, the respected UK academic, an exile from Saddam's regime, rejects this as propaganda by the allies who pretend that the thousands of attacks on them every month come from a few sodding troublemakers who hate progressive government. There is a real, popular resistance going on by Iraqi people who simply want their country back.

That makes absolute sense. We have destroyed so much since we went in and before that too with the sanctions which killed. Fallujah has been under siege for months; countless women and children are dying there and elsewhere but the news is of little interest if they die as a result of our weapons.

Zeinab is a bright little Iraqi girl from Basra whose family was murdered by our bombs which took one of her legs too. I had her come over to play with my daughter. How she hates our soldiers. Hundreds of such children, orphaned and limbless, are seen on the streets according to her Iraqi doctor who came with her.

With all this going on, some commentators still insist that nothing our side does is worse than what Saddam Hussein did to his people. That is how low this debate has sunk. We compare ourselves favourably with the butcher dictator - that is our standard now. In truth, even that base comparison is now no longer sustainable.

Read the book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker journalist. He describes, powerfully, the rape and torture used to break people in Iraq and Afghanistan. We in the West are protected from gazing at these facts - we have such delicate natures. But Iraqis and others know them well enough and now believe exaggerated stories because they cannot trust what they are told by official sources.

Guantanamo Bay has only made it worse. Those who went in as innocents must now be terrorists after such treatment and complete lack of due process.

These are the realities of this war against terror. And they are known worldwide. While researching his latest book on British Muslims (The Infidel Within), the historian Humayun Ansari discovered the extraordinary speed and spread of "cyber-Islam". These connected-up Muslims are questioning Islam itself as well as the ploys and games of the West. They understand the need to reform but call upon the powerful nations to reform themselves too.

That is the deal. It is the only one which can start a process of new international co-operation. Thoughtful Muslims have made their move. Your turn, Mr Blair.

- / Independent

There's another way to defeat terrorism

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2004-09-13T13:54:30Z

Has it been only three year since the Twin Towers collapsed? It feels like many traumatic lifetimes. The world is becoming impossibly complicated and unpredictable. So much bad and worse goes on happening. Even though I think it is travesty to assert this was the worst crime in recent history, just because it victimised Americans on their soil, it is undeniable that everything changed that day.

As the planes moved through the blue skies and pierced the towers one after another - symbolic rapes - they blew out Western complacency, post-Cold War triumphalism, the absurd myth that all human beings ever want is the right and means to shop and have sex.

It also roused somnolent Muslims, most of whom were unaware that while they lounged, some of their sons and daughters (many educated, middle class, free to shop and have sex) were seething and plotting to shatter the world order which, though grossly unjust, had kept full world wars at bay for half a century.

I suppose it is a consolation that we are still a long way from the unutterable horrors of the two world wars, in spite of the vainglorious and provocative foreign policy decisions taken by the bellicose leaders of the US and the UK. But there are more and more people across the globe who today believe the fanatics were right to do what they did on 11 September 2001.

The Americans deserved this for electing Bush, they say, for failing the Palestinians again and again, for supporting dictators who then oppress and torture their own people, for US greed and might. The most demented among them play and replay the footage, get pornographic thrills as they watch the humiliation of the hyperpower. The illegal Iraq war, in particular the evidence of torture by coalition troops, has only helped to legitimise such views and to sanction such acts.

One teenager I know, the perfectly amiable son of a Muslim friend, has become alarmingly obsessed with this footage. He has a video he claims he bought at an Islamic bookshop. The video contains endless re-runs and speeches by Bin Laden and one gruesome decapitation of a kidnap victim in Iraq. His father works as an investment banker for a US company; his mother is involved with an NGO that reaches out to victims of bad governance, the majority of them in Muslim countries. This boy loved going to America, to Disneyland, to New York, to Yosemite national park. Now he tells me his friends all "hate America".

There were no anti-Western terrorists in Iraq before we went there to occupy the land. Now the country has become a favoured destination for terror tourism. Few people can doubt that Bin Laden has succeeded in causing exactly the chaos he had planned and that his network has destabilised domestic and international politics, the UN, business, the Arab countries, the West, Islam itself.

In his erudite new book, The War for Muslim Minds, the French writer Gilles Kepel says, "By provoking a massive reaction from the US ... Bin Laden and his followers succeeded in stirring up unprecedented hatred of America throughout the Muslim world." That in turn has led to disillusionment with democracy, which then benefits the corrupt Muslim potentates. "The Bush administration's ineptness in the region could not have led to a more complete dead end."

All the genuine concern, the real horror, the shared humanity that arose around the globe three years ago has vanished. The President of the US and his acolytes saw to that.

It could have been so different. I think that if Al Gore been elected, we would not be in the state we are in today. I think that if Tony Blair had been as ethical and bold as he thinks he is, he might have pulled Bush back from launching the inflammatory doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

Without the backing of his devotee Blair, Bush would have found it harder to sell his disastrous strategy on the "war against terror". I think that many of his brash policies would have been toned down and finessed, if Bush had selected sophisticated diplomats to advise and guide him instead of manic zealots and crude military men (Powell among them).

Even now, Bush and Co seem incapable of understanding how they kill the meaning of America by incarcerating untried men in concentration camps and by kicking away basic constitutional guarantees. Is it any surprise that millions today mistrust and detest the hyperpower?

Do you know what I would have done after 11 September? I would have invested in an American network similar to the British Council, an institutional web across Muslim countries providing tangible educational and cultural benefits, real cross-fertilisation of ideas, a worthwhile counterforce to US imperialism. To depend on McDonald's to spread the word is about as foolish as you can get in geopolitics.

The world we are now nervously inhabiting deserves better from the media too. In the autumn of 2001, there was a breakout of good sense and responsibility, even in the Sun, which ran an astonishing spread explaining the tenets and history of Islam and pointing out the dangers of Islamophobia. It didn't last. Across the media today, an impression has cumulatively been built up that all Muslims are a danger to civilisation.

If journalists repeatedly described Ariel Sharon as "the ruthless Judaic leader" there would be hell to pay. Yet every day, the most serious of our outlets carelessly describe as "Islamic" the worst of crimes by people who are identifiably Muslim. Racism increasingly underpins the coverage of terrorist acts. No Australians died in Indonesia, but that fact got more coverage than the faceless Indonesians who perished. The two Italian women kidnapped in Iraq matter; the two Iraqi women taken at the same time don't. It doesn't matter how many thousands we have killed in Iraq( they are only Arabs, who cares? ), but we know exactly how many white Americans and Europeans are dying.

The Muslim world has also been guilty of squandering that moment three years ago. We needed to, but did not, ask ourselves the difficult questions. It was easier to talk in terms of "small minorities of extremists" and to protest (rightly) that the faith was being unfairly vilified. We should have been more troubled than we were about why Muslim societies today breed so many vengeful, ruthless warriors. It is only now, since the revulsion over Beslan, that Muslim leaders - political and spiritual - are starting to confront their own failures.

Oh yes, they are good at issuing bland condemnations (a ritual which demeans both Muslims and the victims of violence perpetrated by Muslims) and looking out for signs of Islamophobia and pointing out Western hypocrisies and pitiless exploitation. But what about a more honest appraisal of Islamicist malevolence, the growing tendency to seek out conflict and the unspeakable supremacist rhetoric which you now hear among "true" Muslims? Regeneration programmes need to be launched by concerned Muslims worldwide to rediscover the spirit and humane values that connect us to others.

So the audit three years on is depressing, the future full of fearful foreboding. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we learn from history or historical events. We don't. That is the ultimate human tragedy.

Count me out of this anniversary

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — 2004-08-30T15:47:00Z

Sound and fury start to rumble as the most fetishised remembrance day of our times fast approaches. It is about to be that month again when I just want to disappear down a shaft, into some quiet, contemplative darkness away from the politicians and media maniacs who still cling to the conceit that the appalling attacks on 11 September 2001 were worse than anything that has happened in recent history, incalculably worse even than the deaths of thousands of innocents who have been killed since in retribution. (...)

- / Independent