Killing Live
8, Noisily: The G-8, Liberal Dissent and the London Bombings
Sheila Carapico
July 14, 2005
(Sheila
Carapico teaches political science and international studies at
the University of Richmond and serves on the editorial committee
of Middle East Report.)
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For
refutation of Thomas Friedman’s claim that no fatwa has
been issued against attacks like the London bombings, see
the list
of statements compiled by Charles Kurzman, professor
of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill.
Charles
Kurzman writes: Is Thomas Friedman right that “not one”
fatwa has been issued by a prominent Muslim cleric against
Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda attacks? Is he further correct
to imply that the Muslim clerical establishment has not
condemned al-Qaeda terrorism? Let us be precise. A fatwa
is an Islamic scholar’s response to a request for a scholarly
opinion on any subject imaginable. Historically, a mufti
(etymologically, one who issues a fatwa) is distinct from
a qadi, that is, a state-appointed judge whose rulings are
intended to be binding and enforced by the state. By contrast,
a fatwa is not binding on anyone, unless they choose to
obey or are forced by their neighbors to obey. The power
of a fatwa lies primarily in the reputation of the author
within the community of Muslims who regard him as an authority.
As the above list of statements shows, there was a fatwa
issued against the September 11, 2001 attacks by a group
of Sunni clerics including the well-known Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
in response to a query from the top Muslim chaplain in the
US military. In contrast to Friedman’s implication that
Muslim clerics have been quiet about terrorism, moreover,
the above list demonstrates that they have been quite outspoken.
Would the issuing of more fatwas and statements help to
end al-Qaeda attacks, as Friedman implies? Not necessarily.
Part of what distinguishes the radical strain of Sunni Islam
professed by al-Qaeda militants is precisely its rejection
of the clerical establishment’s authority.
For
further reading on Islamism, radical and otherwise, see
Charles Kurzman, “Bin
Laden and Other Thoroughly Modern Muslims,” Contexts
4/1 (Winter 2002). |
The organizers of Live 8, the week-long, celebrity-driven musical
campaign for increased aid and debt relief for poverty-stricken
nations, plugged their July 6 concert in an Edinburgh stadium
as “a celebration of the largest and loudest cry to make poverty
history the world has ever seen.” By rush hour the next morning,
four coordinated bombings in the London transit system had stolen
the show from the well-orchestrated international extravaganza
and handed the microphone to Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Talk
about a vast right-wing conspiracy: the London terrorists could
not have done more to strengthen the hand of the world’s richest
states against dissident voices in the West and beyond if they
had actually been in cahoots.
The July 7 bombings in London interrupted the sanctimonious conversation
between the British prime minister, the US president and other
“world leaders” at a luxurious Scottish resort concerning global
warming and what to do about those perennially poor Africans.
Instantly, the podium at the Group of Eight summit became a pulpit,
from which Blair and Bush preached against evil and claimed the
mantle of the Live 8 concerts for themselves. “It’s particularly
barbaric,” Blair intoned, “that this has happened on a day when
people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa,
the long-term problems of climate change and the environment.”
His American confrere concurred: “On the one hand, we got people
here who are working to alleviate poverty and to help rid the
world of the pandemic of AIDS and that are working on ways to
have a clean environment. And on the other hand, you’ve got people
killing innocent people. And the contrast couldn’t be clearer.”
The moral of their story is: either you are with the G-8 or you
are with the terrorists.
The us-against-them rhetoric relegated popular demonstrations
against the G-8’s managed haute finance to the sidelines,
and muffled the cry of the Live 8 concerts attended by tens of
thousands of rock fans and activists in cities across the globe
and watched by millions more. Timed to coincide with the
summit, and symbolically as much a strike at trappings of global
capitalism as the attacks on the World Trade Center, instead the
explosions silenced voices against forced debt repayment and the
war in Iraq. Blair got to pretend to be the patron, instead of
the target, of debt relief activists. The G-8 got to portray themselves
as civilized governments magnanimously doling out charity to Africans,
Palestinians and AIDS victims, rather than a resented club of
the geopolitically advantaged. Legitimate counter-narratives about
what “the West” or “the civilized world” are and ought to be doing
about pressing economic and environmental problems were hushed
by another act of senseless destruction.
NOT EXACTLY REVOLUTIONARIES
There was a time when peacenik rock stars glorified revolutionaries. In
the old days of the Algerian resistance and the Viet Cong, the
predecessors to the protesters outside the G-8 gathering had sympathy
for the rebels. Some of the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz
Fanon found expression in the crooning of Bob Dylan, John Lennon
and Bob Marley. Rock concerts resembled anti-war protests and
protest rallies sounded like rock concerts. In what in those days
was called a New Left analysis, which laced Marxism with anti-colonial
nationalism, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh were standard bearers;
as the anti-war movement gained momentum, they became folk heroes. In
counter-establishment pop culture, the armed vanguard of the anti-imperialist
resistance had a real panache. This is because the revolutionaries
offered a cogent and compelling analysis with wide appeal across
continents and cultures, one that spoke intellectually to Africans
and Europeans or Asians and Americans alike. There was a
basis for solidarity, a sense of common cause.
Al-Qaeda is transparently not the spearhead of a progressive
movement for peace and justice -- either in perception or in fact.
Osama bin Laden is not Che Guevara, even if in places like Honduras
and the Philippines one can buy T-shirts depicting him as such.
There is nothing in the statements of al-Qaeda and the other jihadists
that speaks to the G-8 protesters, nor even to the Afro-Asian
masses for whom they sometimes claim to speak. Actually,
they offer no coherent ideology at all, but only vacuous far-right
incitement like “death to Jews and Crusaders.” There is nothing
romantic or righteous about blowing up London trains. Nor is there
a shred of evidence that the bombers in London admire the protesters
or sympathize with their goals.
Al-Qaeda, or whatever spinoff group planned and executed this
none too daring exploit, is not lighting the way to relief of
African debt. They are not fighting for Palestinian, Iraqi
or Chechen independence, or for a revolution in Saudi Arabia,
or to free political prisoners in Egypt. They do not respect
or abide by Islamic law as understood by those who know what it
is about. They are reactionary nihilist-anarchists with no positive
vision or program: even the goal of an “Islamic state” per se
is more imputed than articulated. They want to destroy the nation-state,
the world system and the tourism industry. Issuing no manifestos,
they are rebels without much of a cause at all. In post-Orwellian
fashion, the medium -- detonating explosives -- is the message.
The goal is not even killing, as is so often said, but the cheap
thrill of making very loud noises, blowing things apart and letting
horrified audiences watch the mayhem replay endlessly on television.
The bombing tactic is not particularly directed against democracies.
Nor are democracies particularly vulnerable, as targets in Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Kenya and other places show. Nor, it has now been
widely recognized, is this a centralized operation: for all we
know, the London bombers were trying to show up bin Laden for
laying low these past few years. The tactic of randomly setting
off explosions is not going to go away, whether or not al-Qaeda
loses its patent.
The Live 8 musicians are not exactly revolutionaries, either.
Bono and U2, the specially reunited Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney,
Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Elton Jon, Bon Jovi and other stars with
a conscience hoped, in the words of Live 8 organizer and Irish
rocker Bob Geldof, that their show-biz blitz would “tilt the world
a little bit on its axis in favor of the poor.” Their modest
mission, in the Band Aid tradition, is to evince and thereby elicit
some compassion for the rest of humanity.
CASUALTIES OF “GLOBAL WAR”
But yet another high-profile bombing in the Western heartland
further limits the scope for even the Live 8 brand of consciousness
raising, by casting global conflict in cultural or civilizational
terms, not economic ones. That conflict, pace Blair
and Bush, is not about the wealth of the North perpetuating the
poverty of the global South, or the G-8 riding herd over the G-88,
or any material issues at all, but instead an ideological struggle
that pits East against West and Islam against Christianity, equating
this with those who love freedom against those who hate freedom,
or the civilized world against barbarism. Blair ascribed the London
bombings to people who “act in the name of Islam.” Though he hastened
to add that the vast majority of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere
are “decent and law-abiding,” his attribution of religious motivation
can only leave non-Muslims wondering what in Islam could
justify such acts even as every imam in the isles seeks to disavow
any connection between Islam and “violence.” The Islamist militants
exaggerate their own power by claiming to be backed by a billion
believers, princes and paupers alike. For their part, US, British
and Russian leaders perpetuate this telescopic magnification of
“the other side” in a “global war” because it positions them as
defenders of the Free World against a transcontinental army “over
there” rather than scattered cells of narcissistic anarchists
in their own midst. So even when the bombers turn out to be homegrown
Anglo-Asian cultural hybrids, as appears to be the case with the
London attackers, the problem has already been classified as “foreign.”
There is no evidence of a mass following or widespread public
support in North Africa, the Levant or the Arabian Peninsula for
a group calling itself al-Qaeda, much less al-Qaeda in Europe.
To be sure, Islamist parties have flourished above ground and
underground in many countries, often thanks to their governments’
campaigns to obliterate what a generation ago was a flourishing
Arab left. A number of Arab despots feel threatened by Islamism,
as well they might, since nationalism and national solutions to
the challenge of social order have been discredited by the likes
of Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian sovereignty conundrum and downright
crummy governance. A strong majority of Arabs and Muslims undoubtedly
share European disgust with the Iraq war, and most deplore uncritical
US support for Israel. So yes, they hate US and Western policies.
But al-Qaeda is not representative of Islamism and its pronouncements
are not consonant with those of any major Islamist party. Nor
do the political sentiments of Arabs and Muslims make them natural
al-Qaeda constituents, and anyway many more Arabs than Westerners
have died at the hands of the violent salafi fringe. There is
no sense conjuring the jihadists as a vast military machine capable
of inspiring masses of volunteers and conscripting huge infantries,
comparable to the Third Reich or Communism.
If insight is the first casualty of this quasi-war, humanitarianism
is the second. Those who would forge North/South alliances, challenge
the economic tyranny of the G-8 or march against world hunger
have been thrown back on the defensive after only a weak recovery
from the blow of the September 11 attacks. The Islamic catchphrases
on jihadist websites, the political reaction, especially in the
United States, and the failure of progressive and/or Arabist scholars
to publicize a more accurate analysis of the problems that face
the world in the twenty-first century leave a broad swath of the
Euro-American public unable to identify or sympathize with Arabs
or Muslims at all. Instead, cracks from Thomas Friedman that “only
the Muslim world can root out [this] death cult” again insinuate
a pan-Islamic responsibility for the loss of innocent Western
life. Friedman’s confident, but completely erroneous pronouncement
that “to this day -- to this day -- no major Muslim cleric or
religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden”
puts off more heat than light. Meanwhile, scholars who write knowledgeably
about Arabs and Islam, but not terrorism, are open to suspicions
of sympathy or even collusion with the enemy.
SETBACK
When the G-8 summit concluded, Blair, who used to represent the
once social-minded, left-leaning Labor Party, announced that loans
and technical assistance from the world’s wealthiest nations to
Africa would be raised to a whopping $50 billion by 2010. While
reminding Africans that they alone are responsible for their impoverishment
and must pull themselves up by their sandal-straps, he also promised
future cuts in the massive farm subsidies G-8 governments use
to fertilize domestic agriculture in violation of their own free-market
mantras and at the expense of farmers in poor countries. Fifty
billion dollars sounds like an impressive sum until it is divided
by five years and among three dozen countries, or until it is
compared with the $82 billion allocated by Congress in May for
one more year’s prosecution of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In any case, it is far less than activists had hoped for, and
everyone knows promises are not budgetary appropriations or subsidy
reductions. Summiteers acknowledged that global warming may be
a problem, but bowed to the Bush administration’s fears that doing
something about it might interfere with wealth creation inside
the world’s richest economy.
It is too early to tell whether the British public will respond,
as Spaniards did after the March 2004 Madrid bombings, by blaming
the government that allowed such a thing to happen. Initial reactions
indicate that, to the contrary, Blair’s tarnished public image
may regain its shine, as did Bush’s after September 11, 2001.
Bono himself blessed Blair’s African aid pledges by saying that
“the world spoke and the politicians listened.” So much for liberal
dissent from the G-8’s poverty policy.
Already it would seem that death and destruction in downtown
London have tightened central, self-interested management of global
capitalism at the G-8 level and shored up the reactionary national
security state within both the US and Britain while obliterating
British, American and international voices calling for a
more genuinely global sense of justice and fairness. Together,
the violence and the rhetorical response sow distrust and “racial”
fears within the West as well as between East and West, bolstering
nativism and rationalizing the retraction of civil liberties.
The attacks of July 7 ultimately strengthen, not weaken, the power
centers of theworld system their
targets ostensibly represent. This episode, like the September
11 attacks and the Madrid bombings, set back the cause of peace
and justice.
