Journalism’s tradecraft

‘Impartial’ BBC Newsroom Celebrates Whitto Sacking https://t.co/6PnPV3wvLB pic.twitter.com/GMqtYhtrYH

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) July 14, 2016

This tweet by the libertarian blogger Guido Fawkes (who is not under any circumstances to be taken seriously) got under my skin. It perfectly illustrates a common fallacy among political activists both left and right in most countries I’ve been to.

The fallacy goes something like this: if I can show a reporter to have a political point of view, his stance of neutrality is thereby nonsense. He is a partisan hack pretending to neutrality. A spectator columnist, making the same mistake, even straight out goes so far as to call BBC journalist Ed Ram, who tweeted the tweet above, a “hack”. 

Finding out that journalists have detectable opinions is like investigating to discover that journalists have brains, a heartbeat or are wearing clothes. Journalism is produced by well-informed humans and well-informed humans have opinions. Of course they do. And opinions congregate and create cultures. The BBC culture might very well be leftist or rightist or whatever, that’s not for me to say.  What matters is what goes on the air, what gets printed, what reaches the audience. (The data there seems to suggest a slight conservative bias in air time, but that’s not that important to me.)

What people like Guido Fawkes and the Spectator hack above seem to just fundamentally not get is that neutrality isn’t something journalists ever attain. It’s not a personal quality. It’s a professional technique. It’s something you learn. You create methods and organisational and editorial checks on reporters to ensure that you are pursuing and reporting news neutrally and without your own biases leading you.

The BBC tweet above (which appears to have since been taken down) can be interrogated about the extent to which it shows a culture of open hostility to a specific minister in the Tory government, but to be honest, I’d be surprised if the BBC did not have hostile attitudes to John Whittingdale, who wanted to shrink the Beeb to the size where he could drown it in his bathtub. (Though, to be fair, he did have some good ideas about inclusiveness.) The point is that it quite simply isn’t the journalist’s opinions you need to look at, it’s the output of the media they produce. If anything, I think the BBC is being too impartial.

You can have a news desk whoop and cheer and be perfectly neutral in output. My question will be: is that whoop apparent on the front page the next day? In the ledes? The angles? The stories? The pictures? That’s the question the critics need to answer. And they don’t want to, because it’s much harder and demands much more actual, you know, work and thinking. Easier to just have your prejudices confirmed, sling mud at some journalist and get on with your day.

Theresa May’s speech is bad news for Labour

Theresa May is safely behind the keyless door with no door handle of No. 10 Downing Street. This is bad news, not least for those of us who distrust the authoritarian impulses of the right.

Her first speech in particular is really interesting, and should be looked on with horror by the British left. The Guardian has an annotated edition here with interesting comments on the union bit and the one nation Disraeli thing.

All the same, this is the most radical speech from a Tory prime minister since John Major described his dream of a classless society. He was thwarted by a party to whom nothing was more important than Europe. May must hope that they have learned from history.

Here’s the whole thing, with my thoughts on it below:

I have just been to Buckingham Palace where Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new government and I accepted.

In David Cameron I follow in the footsteps of a great modern prime minister.

Under David’s leadership the government stabilised the economy, reduced the budget deficit and helped more people into work than ever before.

But David’s true legacy is not about the economy but about social justice.

From the introduction of same-sex marriage to taking people on low wages out of income tax altogether, David Cameron has led a one-nation government and it is in that spirit that I also plan to lead.

Because not everybody knows this but the full title of my party is the Conservative and Unionist party and that word unionist is very important to me.

It means we believe in the union, the precious, precious bond between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but it means something else that is just as important.

It means we believe in a union not just between the nations of the United Kingdom but between all of our citizens – every one of us – whoever we are and wherever we’re from.

That means fighting against the burning injustice that if you’re born poor you will die on average nine years earlier than others.

If you’re black you are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white.

If you’re a white working-class boy you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university.

If you’re at a state school you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately.

If you’re a woman you will earn less than a man.

If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s not enough help to hand.

If you’re young you will find it harder than ever before to own your own home.

But the mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone means more than fighting these injustices. If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise.

You have a job, but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you worry about paying the mortgage.

You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school.

If you are one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know you are working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle.

The government I lead will be driven, not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives.

When we take the big calls, we will think not of the powerful but you. When we pass new laws, we will listen not to the mighty but to you.

When it comes to taxes, we will prioritise not the wealthy but you. When it comes to opportunity, we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few, we will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.

We are living through an important moment in our country’s history.

Following the referendum, we face a time of great national change. And I know because we’re Great Britain we will rise to the challenge.

As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold new positive role for ourselves in the world and we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few but for every one of us.

That will be the mission of the government I lead and together we will build a better Britain.

This speech is very, very bad news for Labour if followed up by policy to match. Corbyn’s left wing Labour would do better against the shamelessly redistributing government of David Cameron. If Theresa May is actually intending to go centrist on economic impulse – which is the strategic move to pull in a country like the UK – then Labour might be in more trouble.

Though they’ll be delivering more fairness and more redistribution with Corbyn’s economic agenda, they’ll also (I hope) refuse to address the regressive impulses of racism and conservative values which are still strong in the Labour electoral constituency. With Labour tacking left, that might make the Tories more interesting to a lot of centrists. With Scotland going to the SNP (or, for that matter, to the EU), that might create long-term strategic troubles for Labour.

I’m hoping that Corbyn and the members manage to clear trouble out of the house soon so they can bunker down for a long fight to the next general election. It’s going to be a long uphill fight, but if they win, we’ll get the Britain we all need, not least the Britons.

The Way The World Ends

What a striking and terrible thing this is: The Republican National Committee voting to declare that coal is a clean energy source, against all known science. This is what terrible policy looks like. It is not tense discussions and principled debates. It is a group of bored, banal people in a sweaty room. People who are tired as hell and just want to get through the day and go back to their air-conditioned rooms in the Hyatt Hilton and change their shirts and have a glass of sparkling mineral water.

Bad policies are made by people who don’t care. Who so thoroughly accept the false premises of their ideology that they don’t bother to discuss them. It is a room full of people being told the Earth is flat, and who then raise their hand to give their ayes, with barely contained yawns.

The world ends with a bunch of people who don’t care, don’t know, aren’t bothered to consider the fact that they are contributing to the end of the world. For them, it’s just another day at the ofice.

Questioning your own dogma and searching out opposing viewpoints is an act of public virtue. Citizenship, as Lawrence Lessig once remarked, is a public office. These men and women have ceased to perform it.

Labour of Love / Love of Labour

Tonight, in an extraordinary turn of events, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the group of Labour’s Members of Parliament (MPs), are mounting an attempted insurrection against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

I call it extraordinary since this is an incredible, skull-crushingly stupid thing to do.

The letters of resignation have been flying thick. The genre of letter of resignation is dreary to begin with (Many emphasise the respect they have for Corbyn. All are calling for a leader who will unite, not divide, the party.

In short, the coupmakers want to unite the party by ousting Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who was elected only nine months ago in an unprecedented landslide. With a stronger mandate than literally any other UK party leader in history. Whose campaign rallied over 180.000 new members to the party. That sounds very unifying and not divisive at all.

In all seriousness: what is the play here? Do they really believe that ignoring the voice of 60 % of party members will work? That giving the boot to the one thing that has really energised the party since the first blush of the Tony Blair years is a great idea? Is their idea of shoring up support and gearing up for the general election to start a war within the party?

I can tell them up front that this is really is a once-in-a-generation magnitude bad idea. In terms of stupid, it’s right up there with the Brexit vote. This is an unforced strategic error of cameronian proportions.

Corbyn has been leader for only nine months. This is quite simply not enough time to test a new leader. They are not interested in giving him a spin in a general election and then, if he loses, to have a fair contest against him with cause. No, they want him out in the midst of a public upheaval, while tempers are hot and passions are engorged.

So it’s not normal politics. What is the coup, then? Probably many things. For some, this is just the exploitation of a crisis to push a blairite political agenda. For others, no doubt, it is a genuine personal disagreement (tainted with political disputes as well). But I do suspect this is quite simply the Labour elite, the classical establishment,  reacting strongly to the anti-establishment style of Corbyn. Powerful elites are always rubbed the wrong way by strong anti-elitists. They look wrong, they talk wrong. They don’t want the same things. They don’t get the joke.

That’s the real tragedy here. That the Labour party has ceased to be interested in the overwhelming, objective political questions of today. For at least twenty years now, it must have been possible to win an election in Britain on an anti-inequality non-elitist, populist-in-the-good-sense platform. Labour has not stepped up. That is the tragedy of the modern Labour party.

In Jeremy Corbyn? Surely that’s a bit harsh.

Modern political parties need to do two things in equal measure: lead and listen.

They lead the members and the voters on issues where the party elites are ahead of the electorate. Where public opinion is not quite there, or are not aware of the solutions to their problems. Or even where they are not quite yet aware of the problems. Gay marriage is a typical, recent example. Or equal rights. Parties are more or less modern information communication industry companies, informing the electorate and helping to shape public opinion. There need not be anything condescending or elitist about this. The parties act as representatives of their voters, also by helping the voters discover how their needs can be better met.

New Labour represents a profound lack of understanding of the party’s leading role. Tony Blair’s administrations represent a failure of leadership. During the New Labour era, the Labour party not just shifted to the centre in order to go where the voters where. They shifted the entire electorate to the right. When the party of working people tells them year after year that they need to back right-wing policies, present problems defined by the right wing and produce solutions that are centrist, you cede ground and change voter’s minds.

Parties also listen to the members and the voters on issues where the electorate is clearly sending a message loud and clear to the party. Like: the problem of social inequality and injustice needs to be adressed. Like: we are sick and tired of the elite class culture and structure that has dominated Great Britain since the days of Elizabethan England.

The voters, the members: they are sending the Labour party a message. I hope that the MPs can hear it. Because I’m pretty sure that the Labour members are starting to hear it.

 

The Bottom 10 Quintillion

“Are Insects Conscious?” The title of philosopher Peter Singer’s latest piece is quite provocative. It turns out that there is new scientific evidence that in fact insects have subjective experiences. They are not as crude as, say, jellyfish, which are more like ambulatory plants.

This matters because it might mean that there is far more consciousness in the world than we think.  There is, according to an estimate from the Smithsonian Institution, some ten quintillion, which is the same as — deep  breath — 10.000.000.000.000.000.000, or 10¹⁸ individual insects alive at any one time. That’s nine orders of magnitude more insect individuals than there are humans, a difference of magnitude similar to the difference to the numbers one and one billion.

Obviously human and higher-animal consciousness is far more advanced, so while no conversion measurement can be devised (Singer, a utilitarian, might think so, but I’m not quite there), presumably there is far “more” consciousness higher up the scale of complexity. But still, those numbers matter, and they matter a lot.

This is also ethically relevant for humans because it means that killing insects, as we do quite frequently, is a matter of quite different ethical value than we think. A little less like eating a grape or crushing a leaf and a little more like killing a dog or a chicken.

I mentioned my intuition that killing insects was morally relevant in this piece last year, it seems I was on to something.

I think expanding our capacity to feel compassion for other creatures is a good thing, and one of the most challenging things I can imagine. The end to Peter Singer’s piece hits on something that needs to be worked out and reflected on:

In the West, we tend to smile at Jain monks who sweep ants from their paths to avoid treading on them. We should, instead, admire the monks for carrying compassion to its logical conclusion.

Sanders & Clinton’s Israel Moment

 

The Israel moment that happened at the debate in Brooklyn on Thursday was interesting.

It is a sign of the irrationality of the US-Israeli relationship that this is considered, as many commentators have been calling it, a “defining moment”. Joe Conason, in a great post on The National Memo, called it “The most significant moment of the Democratic primary debate in Brooklyn – and perhaps any presidential debate this season”.

It’s amazing, quite simply unfathomable to me that the position taken by Sanders here can be at all controversial.  There is debate on the Israel question in my country, too. But this is quite simply an overwhelmingly mainstream position. It’s hard to disagree with these basic facts. That a peace involves treating the Palestinian people with respect. That being frank and honest about the inhuman and illegal policies of occupation and suppression of the Palestinian people  is the only way forward. I just don’t see that anyone can disagree.

Nor can I see how anyone can reasonably disagree with the proposition that an intensive aerial bombardment of one of the most densely populated areas in the world is a war crime. Israel knew that the civilian losses would be unacceptable. And, as so many times before, as in their prior wars against the Gaza strip, their rules of engagement were not in accordance with international humanitarian law.

These positions should not be in dispute. As Senator Sanders is saying, the only way forward runs through everyone accepting these ideas, and building on this towards some kind of peace and stability.

As it is, the US has accepted the Israeli government’s talking points for decades now. The Israeli campaign of occupation and attrition, eroding Palestinian control of territory slowly but surely, has been a resounding success because of US support, including vetoes in the Security council.

As Conason writes,

Hillary Clinton knows that the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, responsible for the Gaza disgrace and more, is far closer in outlook to the ultra-nationalists who applauded Rabin’s assassination than to the peacemaker whose death she lamented. She knows that Netanyahu’s aim is annexation, not negotiation. She knows that our interests – indeed, those of the entire world — can only be advanced by a just peace that both protects Israel and relieves the suffering of the Palestinian people.

That Secretary Clinton would waver on this, cloud this particular issue, in order to pander to a Christian-Jewish conservative Democrat base quite simply shows a deep lack of character. I accept that some pandering is necessary to win elections. But you don’t pander about war crimes. You don’t turn the unnecessary deaths of literally hundreds of children into election bargaining chips. That’s deeply, profoundly unethical. It shows a lack of spine that is incommensurable with being commander in chief.

For An American America

STRONG. AMERICA. GREAT. FAITH.  UNITED. TROOPS. MURICA.

This is such a great spoof, made entirely with stock footage. They even manage to have a single candidate actor all the way through.

It’s not remarked upon often enough that election campaigns are public events made to generate collective emotions. Pointing at the theatre, the artifice and the rhetoric is good. When satire like this video point out the props and the greasepaint, it reminds you that someone is trying to change the way  you think and feel.

Today I seriously started to consider international-phonebanking for Bernie Sanders. And maybe I should. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to do with my time. Bernie is a fantastic candidate and would almost certainly take America in a far better direction. In a purely utilitarian cost-benefit analysis, I’m sure  it would be time well spent.

But I’m not an American, I’m European. I haven’t even lived in the US for over two decades. Why should this thing, this campaign, more than  a quarter of the globe away, capture my  attention in this way? It’s drama, storytelling, flash, show. We’re all watching.

The Panama Papers and the Tragedy of the Commons

Wake up , sheeple! Flickr: robin1966 (CC-BY-2.0)

The tragedy of the commons is an old economic theory from the 1970s  which basically says that if there is a shared resource, and some people in the community have an incentive to overuse that resource, they’re going to. Even if that means that the entire community,  including themselves, suffer.

 

The classic example is a public, common pasture – what they used to call “the commons” – which is being grazed on by the sheep or cows of the entire village. Each individual farmer has incentives to let way to many sheep onto the commons. The rewards of getting extra sheep to market go straight into the individual farmer’s pocket. But he doesn’t pay the full price for the damages. Oh no: the damage done to the entire community is shared by the entire community. It’s the classic example of private rewards versus socialised risk.

I’ve  been hearing a lot lately about the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond. A sociologist studying housing, poverty and evictions in the American urban poor who has managed to bottle something of the essence of poverty and made people see what it’s really like as an experience.

I thought this review in The Guardian made me want to read it, but also captured some defining insights into  poverty, which have been swirling around in my head too, these days, but for entirely different reasons:

What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I think this idea – what if the reason there is so much poverty is that it is profitable to other people? – is a profound insight. In fact, I think that one sentence is so deep you could build an entire economic policy around it. That sentence shows us how our economic life has devolved into a tragedy of the commons. Through overuse of certain kinds of public resources, the economic elites are creating a common, public tragedy. They are manufacturing poverty for their own good.  They’re probably not thinking about it in those terms,  but they’re doing just exactly that.

Recognising the humanity of the impoverished, and helping empower them to become a political force is a first step towards seeing a way out of it.

What is important is that Desmond takes people who are usually seen as worthless – there is even a trailer-dweller nicknamed Heroin Susie – and shows us their full humanity, how hard they struggle to retain their dignity, humour and kindness in conditions that continually drag them down.

The main condition holding them back, Desmond argues, is rent. The standard measure is that your rent should be no more than 30% of your income, but for poor people it can be 70% or more. After he paid Sherrena his $550 rent out of his welfare cheque, Lamar had only $2.19 a day for the month. When he is forced to repay a welfare cheque he has been sent in error and falls behind on rent, he sells his food stamps for half their face value and volunteers to paint an upstairs apartment, but it is not enough. People such as Lamar live in chronic debt to their landlord, who can therefore oust them easily whenever it is convenient – if they demand repairs, for example, like Doreen, or if a better tenant comes along. Sherrena liked renting to the clients of a for-profit agency that handles – for a fee – the finances of people on disability payments who can’t manage on their own. Money from government programmes intended to help the poor – welfare, disability benefits, the earned-income tax credit – go straight into the landlord’s pocket and, ironically, fuel rising housing costs. Public housing and housing vouchers are scarce. Three in four who qualify for housing assistance get nothing.

Flickr: tonythemisfit (CC-BY-2.0)

The reason I’m thinking about this idea of the tragedy of the commons so much, obviously,  is the recent revelations about the Panama Papers. I’ve already written a lot about them, but it’s worth noting that our entire economic system has been shown to be scaffolding built around a concealed structure intended to facilitate the tragedy of the commmons. The economic and political elites are dragging the rest of us down. They’re undermining our welfare states, our democracies.

It’s hard to estimate exactly, but most experts say that something in the range of $ 21 to 32 trillion is invested or secured in tax havens. That’s an insane amount of money.  It’s a number so big you can’t wrap your head around it, but maybe this will help: it’s roughly ten times an annual budget for the US federal government. Or a little under half of the gross world product for one year. That’s everything produced in the entire world in a single year. 

But that’s a static figure. Another estimate is more keyed into the dynamic production of values. It says that at any time, anywhere from 3 to 5 % of any country’s GDP is disappearing to tax havens. Or, by some estimates, as high as 20 %.

That’s actually, believe or not, worse. That means that at any given time, the public goods being produced are being dragged down. The government is being leeched so it can’t bear the economic burden of producing both a viable welfare state and other social goods, as well as a productive economy.

At any  given time, all countries are struggling to make ends meet, and we are locked into an endless cycle of needing to grow to cover the deficits produced by tax evasions.

This is unsustainable. And in fact, it is a classic case of a tragedy of the commons.

Let’s end by focusing on that one word, though: tragedy. Because that’s what this is. I just talked a lot about this as being a theoretical, economic problem. But economy is directly about the way we live our lives.

The urban poor in their decrepit housing, being evicted, unable to find stable footings: that’s the misery being produced by tax evaders. Every time a welfare state is unable to provide proper elder care to the old and dying, that’s capital flight. When the political elites cut public spending and schools, roads, police and child protective services need to be cut, the financial district is almost certainly to blame. The victims of all these cuts and disasters need to be seen for what they are: fully human, deserving of the chance to rise. But they are not seen as that. And they are not given that chance.

That’s the real tragedy underlying so many of our public ills. It is a tragedy that requires a common solution.

A Museum of Lost Sound: What The Ancient Churches Sounded Like

Interior dome of the Hagia Sophia under renovation, Wikimedia Commons.

A wonderful and strange project at the intersection of music, history and science: audio experts are “storing” the acoustic signature of certain spaces. Both for later recreation and for learning about past spaces. In the process, they are learning a lot about how ancient churches sounded. It gives a different, tactile knowledge to our ability to imagine ourselves into the past. Be sure to see the videos and hear the music embedded in the page I linked to.

Unless you’re an audio engineer, you’ll have little reason to know what the term “convolution reverb” means. But it’s a fascinating concept nonetheless. Technicians bring high-end microphones, speakers, and recording equipment to a particularly resonant space—a grain silo, for example, or famous concert hall. They capture what are called “impulse responses,” signals that contain the acoustic characteristics of the location. The technique produces a three dimensional audio imprint—enabling us to recreate what it would sound like to sing, play the piano or guitar, or stage an entire concert in that space.

…

The project not only allows art historians to enter the past, but it also preserves that past far into the future, creating what LaFrance calls a “museum of lost sound.” After all, the churches themselves will eventually recede into history. “Some of these buildings may not exist later,” says Kyriakakis, “Some of these historic buildings are being destroyed.” With immersive video and audio technology, we will still be able to experience much of their grandeur long after they’re gone.

That little echo of Palmyra saddened me: “some of these buildings may not exist later”. Indeed they may not. Those who hate history are doomed to live without it. The piece in the Atlantic is actually better, but has less audio:

Even before their technical analysis began, it was clear that these ancient spaces were designed to shift a person’s sensory experience.

“You cross the threshold and your eyes immediately have to adjust,” Gerstel said. “It seems pitch black inside. The first thing you notice is images of saints, who are your size, staring at you. Gold halos against dark background, and they seem to loom. It smells of incense. You’re in this world of myrrh. The temperature is different as well. Inside, you’re in a much cooler space. Your entire body adjusts … and then to have music at the same time? That hits every sense.”

“What was truly surprising for me,” Donahue said, “was going into a space that was ancient, and to crawl around the ceiling and look at the walls and realize that they were looking at things acoustically. It wasn’t just about the architecture. They had these big jugs that were put up there to sip certain frequencies out of the air … They built diffusion, a way to break up the sound waves by putting striations in the walls. They were actively trying to tune the space.”

“They also discovered something that we call slap echo,” Donahue added, “when you have walls fairly close to one another and the frequencies go back and forth. It goes ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. [In the ancient world,] they described it as the sound of angels’ wings.”

Charlie Foxtrot

Sometimes you really want to defend the indefensible. And this is one of those times, for me.

When the atrocity was committed against the offices of Charlie Hebdo, in January of last year, my heart was crushed. Apart from the sheer human agony and the sense of tragedy that always accompanies human beings murdered over what is, essentially, differences of opinion, I was also struck deeply by another feeling. A feeling of solidarity with my fellow journalists, writers and publishers now dead and bloody on the floor of the staff editorial meeting.

I used to work in the media, and the sense of belonging to a profession hasn’t left me. I think it’s hard to work for any length of time in a publication and not feel a devotion to freedom of speech and care for the wellbeing of the democratic public. So when everyone said Je suis Charlie, I was right there with them, whole-heartedly.

I still am, obviously. When Charlie Hebdo, or any other publication, is being shot at or shut down I will be proud to count myself among their supporters. Even for publications I disagree strongly with.

Like Zaman, a conservative, Turkish, islamic newspaper. About a month ago, the Turkish government – NATO member, western ally – just plain seized control of the newspaper, following a spate of criticism against the Erdogan government. Two days after the takeover, Zaman published a paper full of pro-government articles and featured a smiling Erdogan on the cover. About the only thing I agree with Zaman about is an opposition to Erdogan’s authoritarianism and a support for an open and democratic conversation and a free press. The takeover was an international disgrace, and I’m outraged that there wasn’t more outrage. There was very little je suis Charlie spirit when it came time to say Ben Zaman duyuyorum (literally Google translate, my apologies to any Turkish speakers).

I liked a lot about Charlie Hebdo. I liked that they didn’t give a shit and that they were so dead serious about grinding everybody with an opinion’s face in the dirt. I defended them against some of the charges against them, and believed the people defending them, explaining that their jokes weren’t racist but rather making fun of racists.

That defense has become harder to trust now. Last wednesday, Charlie Hebdo published an editorial about the terror attacks in Brussels. The editorial was informed by what I can only describe as a racist attitude towards Muslims. In essence, it gave European Muslims the collective guilt for the attacks.

In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale.

…

Take this veiled woman. She is an admirable woman. She is courageous and dignified, devoted to her family and her children. Why bother her? She harms no one. Even those women who wear the total, all-encompassing veil do not generally use their clothing to hide bombs (as certain people were claiming when the law to ban the burqa was being discussed). They too will do nothing wrong. So why go on whining about the wearing of the veil and pointing the finger of blame at these women? We should shut up, look elsewhere and move past all the street-insults and rumpus. The role of these women, even if they are unaware of it, does not go beyond this.

Take the local baker, who has just bought the nearby bakery and replaced the old, recently-retired guy, he makes good croissants. He’s likeable and always has a ready smile for all his customers. He’s completely integrated into the neighbourhood already. Neither his long beard nor the little prayer-bruise on his forehead (indicative of his great piety) bother his clientele. They are too busy lapping up his lunchtime sandwiches. Those he sells are fabulous, though from now on there’s no more ham nor bacon. Which is no big deal because there are plenty of other options on offer – tuna, chicken and all the trimmings. So, it would be silly to grumble or kick up a fuss in that much-loved boulangerie. We’ll get used to it easily enough. As Tariq Ramadan helpfully instructs us, we’ll adapt. And thus the baker’s role is done.

…

The taxi heads for Brussels airport. And still, in this precise moment, no one has done anything wrong. Not Tariq Ramadan, nor the ladies in burqas, not the baker and not even these idle young scamps.

And yet, none of what is about to happen in the airport or metro of Brussels can really happen without everyone’s contribution. Because the incidence of all of it is informed by some version of the same dread or fear. The fear of contradiction or objection. The aversion to causing controversy. The dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist. Really, a kind of terror. And that thing which is just about to happen when the taxi-ride ends is but a last step in a journey of rising anxiety. It’s not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension.

This is unacceptable.

The piece is full of well-mapped ideas of the islamophobic, racist right. The basic trope of the piece is that Muslims are collectively (and possibly semi-consciously), destroying Europe from within with foreign values. The physical presence of Muslims and their values in Europe, even when participating in public life with their own traditions and cultural signifiers, becomes a problem to be dealt with. Law-abiding, democratic citizens like the intellectual Tariq Ramadan, a hijab-wearing woman and a baker are complicit in the bombings. They are, the piece argues, fostering a climate of what I guess US conservatives would call “political correctness.”Muslims, in short, carry collectively guilt for the bombings.

So, to put this bluntly, this is racist. I don’t know if Charlie was radicalized by victimhood, but in a sense that’s an excuse that infantilises them. I’d rather they took responsibility for what they wrote and apologise.

So, to start with the obvious thing, Muslims in Europe do not carry collective guilt for the bombings. It’s not just morally wrong, it’s a profoundly dumb idea in practical terms.

Jean-Leon Gerome, Prayer on the Rooftops of Cairo, oil on canvas, 1865

The moral case for it: collective guilt is only relevant insofar as the group is actively working to promote a moral wrong. So if, say, you are a fine and upstanding member of the NSDAP in 1942, someone who did nothing morally wrong yourself – you nonetheless legitimized and supported an organisation that carried out great evils.

But, since I’m not an idiot, it’s hard to see a hijab-wearing womanor a baker being a member of ISIL, supporting ISIL, or being an ideological cheerleader for ISIL without actively doing any of those things. Muslims of Europe aren’t secretly or negligently helping ISIL. They aren’t eroding democracy – what kind of a weak-ass democracy would that be? Instead, the Hebdo piece seems to argue that Muslims in general help foster terrorism by their faith. That makes no sense. 1.3 billion people can’t carry collective guilt for the actions of a bizarre minority of their faith. Even if you only count the roughly 45 million European Muslims you’re stretching it.

The strategic case for it: Do you really want to further alienate the Islamic minority? There are very few things you could do that would actually increase the likelihood of there being more terrorism in the future, but apart from making sure minorities have poorer living conditions, I’m pretty sure that fomenting cultural alienation is one of them. And studies of Islamic radicals seem to agree with me.

I’m sorry I had to write this. I really am. I hope Charlie will take all of this back. But maybe they won’t, so let me say this: if they ever come back to shoot at you, Charlie, I’ll be there for you. But I can’t accept this.