Stephen Howe, Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the University of Bristol, looks at our enemy’s (for that is what they are) political programme and finds it wanting:

Even from within the confines of a violently polarised worldview, one might expect to find some sign of a desire to “know your enemy”: but here, among Islamists, that appears virtually nonexistent. But then this may just be a manifestation of the general, dreadful intellectual poverty of today’s political Islamism. The movement identifies itself as engaged in a global, world-historical struggle of the oppressed. The notion is that the world’s Muslim peoples share a common fate and destiny, insofar as they are victims of and must struggle against a common enemy. Yet serious thinking about that struggle’s roots, its character, what may be hoped for if it is won, or even who the oppressed and the oppressor really are, is amazingly rare. I have looked for it quite hard. I have gone to the writings of people usually described as the most important, substantial Islamist political thinkers – al-Afghani or Maududi, Shariati, Nabhani or Qutb – in, I hope, a genuinely enquiring spirit. Indeed I expected to find there far more than I did. I remain surprised, disappointed, puzzled at how thin the ideas are. Can that really be all there is?

More, the jihadists, from Bin Laden to the would-be British foot soldiers, simply have no social programme, no coherent vision of the new society they want to build. In that they are unlike not only almost all other revolutionary movements of modern history but even the earlier Islamist thinkers from whom they claim inspiration. The thoughts – and sometimes the seeming absence of real thought – relayed by our memoirists appear to uphold the view that jihadist violence is an indicator of the failure of political Islam, not its growth, strength or threat.

Frieday shit and that

Channel 4 is a funny old beast. Its two evening news programmes are ably presented by some top-notch broadcast journalists, and I especially welcome the recent move of Kylie Morris to lead the More 4 news bulletin at 8pm.

But some of these very same journalists are want to emit the occasional brain fart, and this evening was a classic example.

In a feature on the crackdown by Indian police on pro-Tibet protesters near Dharamsala – on the orders of a Delhi government fearful of antagonising their friends and business partners in Beijing – up popped Furedi cultist and Comment is Free favourite Brendan O’Neill to denounce those who support the Tibetan people against Chinese occupation and cultural liquidation.

I was enjoying my tea at the time, and what I saw and heard put me right off my food. What O’Neill was saying was that the Tibet lobby are a bunch of hippies who are “afraid of modernity”. Even for O’Neill this was rather strong. So strong, in fact, that he surpassed the usual RCP/Spiked hyperbole and went completely asymptotic.

But I suppose this kind of behaviour is only to be expected. If you invite one of these silly people with oversized gobs onto a serious current affairs programme, they are bound to want to maximise the impact of their precious seconds of primetime media exposure.

What annoys me is not so much the presence of O’Neill on my TV screen (he cuts a comical figure), but rather the decision of the More 4 News editors to invite him on in the first place. What useful purpose did it serve to have this tosser take up a minute or so of airtime when there are many knowledgeable folk they could have invited on to say something intelligent about Tibet?

As I say, it’s a kind of journalistic flatulence, and a right stinker too.