Culture

Enough Carping About Gender Pay Inequality In Sports – End Segregation And Let The Market Determine Wages

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Olympic Games - Rio de Janeiro - Gender Pay Equality - Sports - Athletics

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As the Olympic Games get underway in Rio de Janeiro, in place of the usual social justice nonsense about gender pay equality here is a bold proposal to make gender equality in sports a reality

As Olympic fever starts to build in the run-up to the opening ceremony of the Rio summer games, the New Statesman is distracting itself with a long meditation on why female athletes are usually paid far less than men.

Tim Wigmore ponders:

In March, male and female cricket teams from across the world descended upon India, where the men’s and women’s World Twenty20 competitions were played simultaneously. The International Cricket Council funded all the men’s teams to fly business class, but only paid for the women’s teams to fly economy class.

The integration of the men’s and women’s tournaments only highlighted how differently competitors were treated. The total prize money for the men’s event was $5.6m – 16 times the $400,000 for the women’s tournament.

[..] Women’s treatment in sport has always been a manifestation of wider gender inequality and, as sports evolved and professionalised, became self-perpetuating. The huge funding disparity between male and female sport means that women have had fewer opportunities to play sport, have suffered from inadequate coaching and facilities compared with those enjoyed by men, and have been paid meagre sums, even for playing international sport. This has damaged the quality of sport – and therefore the attractiveness of the product to fans and broadcasters – in two ways. Those that have played have often not been professional, so had less chance to hone their skills; and the lack of financial rewards mean that many leading players have retired prematurely.

Women’s sport has been shaped by administration being almost exclusively a male preserve. This explains why, from 1928 to 1960, women were not allowed to compete in races of more than 200 metres, because it was felt that running for longer made them too tired. It took until 1984 for women to make up one-fifth of competing athletes in the Olympics.

But surely if we are going to look at issues of funding at the school and amateur level (Title IX issues, to an American audience) then we should be more animated about improving equality of opportunity at the grassroots rather than tearing our hair out because Serena Williams (a millionaire many times over) is paid less than Roger Federer?

If we could drop the leftist insistence on equality of outcome then it might be possible to have a meaningful discussion about precisely how the issues raised  by Tim Wigmore (inadequate funding, male domination of sports administration bodies etc.) actually filter through in terms of take-up of sport and the technical levels achieved. And we could then consider if measures should be taken upstream to address the gender disparity, and what (if any) role the state should play in correcting the imbalance, considering that this is supposedly a time of “austerity”.

But time and again the discussion seems to drift back to the question of prize money awarded at top professional events, which is frankly ridiculous. Wigmore continues:

Yet the most lucrative sports remain far away from equalising renumeration. Even in sports with equal prize money for marquee competitions, there are often huge discrepancies lower down. In tennis, Novak Djokovic, the men’s number one, earned twice as much as Serena Williams, the women’s number one, last year – although both won three of the four grand slams, the less prestigious men’s tournaments pay far more than the women’s events. In football the differences are even starker: there was £22m in prize money for the last men’s football World Cup, but only £630,000 for the women’s tournament.

The differences are far greater in club competitions, in which women’s teams have struggled to gain a following. The total attendance for the last season of the Women’s Super League was 57,000; for the Premier League, it was 13 million. The stark discrepancy explains why Steph Houghton, the best-paid female English player, earns around £65,000 a year, while Wayne Rooney receives £300,000 a week. Similar forces are at work in professional basketball in the US: last season, the maximum salary for a female player was $109,500; for men’s players, the minimum salary was $525,093, and the maximum $16.407m.

Wigmore answers his own question here by citing the attendance differentials between the men’s and women’s leagues in British and American football (soccer). The gulf in public interest between the two leagues is huge (even if unjustified – one of the most entertaining football matches I have seen was a women’s game at the 2012 London Olympics). If we are to break the link between popularity and pay, why should the link between talent and pay not be similarly abolished? Why not pay every football player, male or female, a flat salary regardless of which league they play for and which position they play in? If teams can no longer set wages based on value added then we essentially end up with communism.

If more people watch the male version of a sport (generally because it is played at a higher level in terms of physical capability and endurance, if not technical skill) then surely this should be reflected in the prize money awarded? Prize money, after all, comes from ticket sales and television revenues and commercial opportunities. If male players draw in a disproportionate amount of total revenue, why should the fruit of their labour be redistributed to women?

Equal Pay Sports - men and women

The New Statesman even concede the point here (my emphasis in bold):

The greatest cause for optimism is in the rising quality of female sport: the gradual increase in spending on women’s sports is now being reflected in a product that more spectators want to watch. When England Women played Germany at Wembley in November 2014, the match was a 55,000 sell-out. Dramatic improvements in the standard of women’s cricket led to the England team turning professional in 2014.

Rising quality. Dramatic improvements. These are blatant concessions that the current (or past) standard of female sport has in many cases not yet reached the level of the men’s game. But even if it did, and there was no discernible difference in terms of technical standard between men and women, why should privately owned sports leagues and teams be compelled to pay the same wages if attendance and viewing figures have not also equalised?

And here we are back to the leftist mindset of wanting to control how people think. Men and women are of inherently equal value, that much is indisputable. But the leftist believes that they must be equal in all regards and at all times, including in the outcomes they experience (such as prize money at top sports tournaments). And if the market does not value the women’s game as highly because the technical standard or endurance is lower, then the market (and the people who make up the market) are wrong and their views should be overridden in the name of equality of outcome. Until we all hold hands underneath a rainbow, singing Kumbaya and assigning equal worth to unequal products in the name of gender equality, the People Who Know Best must step in and set equal wages.

But when has the  coercive approach ever actually truly worked? When has it done anything more than patch over inequalities rather than truly removing them?

Would not the better approach to tackling “inequality” be for sports governing bodies to look at the potential for growth in the female game and then chart a practical, ambitious path to increase female participation and retention in the various sports from school and grassroots level upward, therefore feeding the pipeline with more future stars who would in turn attract more earned revenue?

The danger is that by doing what Wimbledon bosses did and unilaterally setting equal prize money for men and women (despite the fact that women play a maximum of three sets while men play a maximum of five in grand slam tournaments), we not only perpetuate an injustice (male players have to work harder for the same monetary reward) but we also take our foot off the pedal of change; we feel satisfied that we have “tackled” gender pay inequality before we have even looked at the systemic issues which create it in the first place.

So here’s a genuinely egalitarian idea (which the New Statesman will likely never go for, obsessed as they and nearly all leftists are with identity politics and competitive victimhood) – how about we scrap male and female segregation altogether and have mixed teams and leagues based purely on sporting ability and merit?

Sure, there would likely be fewer women than men on the field at, say, the football World Cup, but those who did take the field could say without dispute that they earned their place and their (equal) prize money. In some cases (or at least in some positions in team sports), women may even possess an advantage over men and drive them out of the top leagues and pay grades altogether. Why not find out?

When it came to racial segregation, those fighting for equality through history never satisfied themselves with “separate but equal”. The racist Jim Crow laws had to be fought and overturned and the Civil Rights Act passed in order for the American Founding Fathers’ decree that “all men are created equal” to be deepened and fulfilled in practice as in spirit. Why should we settle for any less when it comes to gender discrimination?

In the workplace, the just cry from those campaigning against pay discrimination is “equal pay for equal work”. So let’s make it a reality in sports. No more bleating for unfair privilege (equal pay for less-watched female athletes, playing at a lower technical level). If we are to be truly blind to gender, let us abolish gender segregation in professional sports altogether, and let women compete with men for places in clubs and teams, and for the top rankings in integrated professional leagues. And let every one succeed according to their merit.

But of course the leftists and the Social Justice Warriors don’t want that. They don’t want people to be blind to race or gender or any other characteristic, but rather want us to exalt in our identities as variously oppressed minority classes. The SJWs derive all their power from policing the boundaries and arbitrating the disputes that inevitably arise from the very toxic culture of competitive victimhood they perpetuate – and if we strip it away then they, together with the entire equality industry, suddenly lose their raison d’être.

But all people are created equal. So let us do what we can and what we should to ensure equality of opportunity in sports (commensurate with interest and good sense), and then end gender segregation in sports to unleash the world’s best female athletes to compete at the very highest level of the game. That would be the egalitarian thing to do.

Let anyone who opposes this step now come forward and explain why they believe women are too fragile and vulnerable to thrive in integrated sports, and why they should continue to be patronised and humiliated by being given unearned equal pay in segregated teams and leagues.

Let the equality campaigners Social Justice Warriors come forth and make their tawdry, outdated and morally dubious argument for the status quo.

 

WWCup Los Angeles Rally

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Top Image: BBC

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Pathologising Donald Trump Supporters Will Not Diminish His Appeal

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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The voices in this New York Times video of Donald Trump supporters may be “unfiltered”, but they were chosen very carefully indeed to reinforce every negative liberal stereotype about people who have the temerity to support Donald Trump

It is hard to understand exactly the New York Times thinks it is trying to accomplish with videos like this one, published today, scornfully “studying” Donald Trump supporters with a keen anthropologist’s eye, while tarring his many moderate supporters by associating them all with the most intemperate, rude and racist characters that their camera can find.

The Times helpfully explains to its readers that “at Donald Trump’s rallies, some supporters express themselves with slurs and violent language”, before linking them to a video in which the absolute worst dregs of the Trump campaign are paraded before the Times’ liberal audience like it were some kind of Victorian circus freak show.

And sure enough, after the obligatory trigger warning from the Times, the video’s subjects make themselves look extremely stupid, as well as racist and misogynistic in places. But this in itself is hardly surprising – it is obvious that racists and other undesirables will be disproportionately (though not exclusively) drawn to a populist politician like Trump, but this does not mean that a majority of Trump supporters share these vile sentiments.

In fact, one wonders why the liberal media which goes to excessive pains to avoid linking all Muslims with the actions of Islamist terrorists, and which frets about broadcasting the names and biographies of mass shooting perpetrators suddenly loses all squeamishness when it comes to linking all Donald Trump supporters with the specimens shown in their video. Why does the Times titillate its readers by showing the worst side of the Donald Trump campaign rather than making a hard-hitting and informative piece  debating the issues with some of the many Trump supporters who turn up to his rallies minus white robes and burning crosses?

If anything, this video reveals the bias of the New York Times, and the desperate liberal (in the American sense of the word) need to paint anything contradictory to their own worldview as being seeded in intolerance, bigotry and hate. This bias is never clearer when the Times’ video attempts to portray Trump supporters as anti-immigration, period. At one point in the video, an editor’s caption reads “vitriolic language is often aimed at immigrants”.

If the filmmakers wanted to produce a respectable, balanced piece rather than juicy footage for their Trump freak show, they might have engaged those supporters in conversation. But had they done so, it would have quickly become apparent that the Trump supporters oppose illegal immigration, not all immigration. These days, of course, the decadent New York Times is completely incapable of distinguishing between the two. All immigrants are saintly figures holding hands beneath a rainbow to the Times, a newspaper which long ago ceased any mention of illegality and started talking about “undocumented” migrants instead (whoops, where did their documents go, one wonders). And so the camera rolls, the supporters chant “build the wall!” and New York Times readers are bolstered in their prejudice that anybody who opposes illegal immigration is a big fat racist who actually opposes all immigration.

And so it goes on, for issue after issue. Legitimate questions and concerns about Hillary Clinton’s conduct and record are ignored while footage of a Trump supporter shouting “Hillary is a whore!” feeds the narrative that Trump supporters are entirely unreasoning and uncouth creatures. Serious questions about how the American political establishment speaks about and responds to Islamist terror attacks are swatted aside so that we can focus on the redneck wearing a “Fuck Islam” shirt. Forget nuance. Forget the decent people who go to Trump rallies as a fun family day out. Just focus on the morons and reinforce the message: the people who support Donald Trump are as unacceptable as the candidate himself.

Watching the New York Times (and much of the establishment media) report on Donald Trump supporters is like watching a David Attenborough wildlife documentary in which the grizzled naturalist attempts to explain to us the feeding and mating rituals of some lower primate species – recognisably similar to us in some ways, but far more primitive and with rituals and customs which we civilised people cannot possibly understand without their expert interpretation.

Watch the video. I challenge you to watch it and come away feeling anything other than that this is an unbearably condescending hit piece on Trump supporters, a nauseating attempt by a Clinton-backing newspaper to “play to the gallery” with a compilation of all the worst Trump supporters imaginable rather than an attempt at serious journalistic enquiry.

I’ve said it before (in the context of the Brexit debate and, repeatedly, the US presidential election) and I’ll say it again: pathologising one’s political opponents and assuming (or at least publicly declaring) that they are motivated by hatred and malevolence is the sure path to defeat, and is no way to unite a fraying country. And prissy little video explainers like this one by the New York Times only serve to further divide Americans, giving liberals more reason to be smug and Trump supporters more reason to feel besieged.

Imagine that you are a wealthy, Times-reading East Coaster. Does this video make you question any of the beliefs which currently make you want to vote for Hillary Clinton? Does the video make you question whether the Trump supporters have even the kernel of a legitimate point about immigration, or trade, or national security? Or does the video boldly reinforce all of your existing prejudices about Trump supporters, reassure you that you are quite right to fear and despise them, and encourage you to keep shouting your own message louder and louder rather seeking dialogue with people the New York Times clearly portrays as being impenetrable to reason?

This is coastal elitist mockery of flyover country writ large. It is unbearably sanctimonious, and does nothing to further understanding and dialogue between Americans of different political and cultural backgrounds. It serves to further validate the accurate perception among Trump supporters that they are looked down on and belittled by the rest of the country. And, if another external economic, security or political shock turns this election into a dead heat between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the high-handedly arrogant way in which the establishment media treats the insurgents could push Donald Trump over the line on Tuesday 8 November.

This blog has no time whatsoever for Donald Trump. But I have endless time for his supporters, the majority of whom are decent people – to think otherwise would be to write off a massive proportion of the country based on their political views. And while I firmly believe that Trump’s simplistic solutions, policy ignorance and prickly ego would do immense harm if set loose in the Oval Office, right now I am more offended by the New York Times’ portrayal of all Trump supporters as though they are somehow less than human, less intelligent, with less self control and possessed of unique and grievous character defects which are supposedly entirely missing from their more enlightened, liberal compatriots.

One expects this kind of two-dimensional, good vs evil, sanctimonious ra-ra nonsense from the Huffington Post or other leftist agitprop sites. But the New York Times supposedly aspires to something higher, something more closely resembling journalism.

Everything about this video fails that test.

 

Donald Trump Protesters - St Louis

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The Greatest Threat To American Democracy Is The Sensationalist, Ratings-Obsessed Television News Media

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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It took two monsters to create Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate Edition: the debased Republican Party of Sarah Palin, and the slavish, contemptible American television news media

After getting heartily sick of watching the British rolling news channels the past few weeks, I decided to spend the last couple of days watching CNN (the US version, not the godawful international version).

It wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was almost enough to make one long for the BBC’s barely concealed hysteria at the thought of Brexit and being forcibly ripped apart from their beloved supranational European political union, or Sky’s never-ending quest to be the first news organisation to get their newscopter hovering directly above anything which may or may not turn out to be of interest.

Take today as an example.

For the past four hours, CNN has been reporting the “breaking news” that Donald Trump claims that his campaign has “never been more united” when various Republican talking heads that CNN was able to lure into the studio were willing to say the exact opposite – and hardly surprising, since their presidential candidate is is a proudly ignorant egomaniac with a borderline personality disorder.

This couldn’t even be charitably described as “breaking news” when I first tuned in at around 8PM London time, and it certainly isn’t breaking news four hours later. But still, there it is: “Awaiting Trump Rally In Florida” proclaims the banner, while five disembodied talking heads float on a giant screen behind Wolf Blitzer, waiting to air their opinions.

What you notice watching American news – besides the constant advertisements for dubious pharmaceutical products whose long lists of compulsorily recited side-effects often outweigh their curative properties – is the degree to which everything, and I do mean everything, is about Donald Trump.

(At this point it is worth pointing out to uninitiated British readers that CNN is the closest you’ll get to “objective” cable news reporting in America, with fair ‘n balanced Fox News skewing firmly to the right and MSNBC leaning forward equally firmly left. Not being overt partisan shills for one or other of America’s two main political parties is a nightmare for CNN executives who need high ratings, and so in desperation CNN latches on to every single technical gimmick you can imagine – drone cameras! holograms! – in a desperate bid to make their offering more exciting to fickle viewers).

It is fair to say that were it not for the American television news media, Donald Trump would be filming a new season of The Apprentice and lending his name to another shoddily-made range of “luxury” businesswear right now, rather than facing Hillary Clinton as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

This blog has already raked the GOP over the coals for their pitiful part in these dismal proceedings. But in despairing at the intellectually and morally debased Republican Party we should not let the media off the hook.

For the fact is that America’s news networks failed to fulfil their democratic duty by treating a presidential election like it was sweeps week rather than a serious decision with long-term consequences for the future of the republic. Donald Trump makes a great television candidate because he is willing to do and say things – exciting, attention grabbing things – which no other candidate will say. Unfortunately, this nearly always involves Donald Trump being rude, immature, spiteful or wrong about something or someone. But the news networks don’t care. It makes for great TV. And so they show more and more Trump, and less and less of everyone else.

When the Republican Primary campaign was still being fought, at one point we reached the ludicrous position where Senator Marco Rubio made the tactical decision to emulate Donald Trump’s style and start making gratuitously offensive insults and statements of his own, just to try to wrest the attention of the television cameras away from Donald Trump for one wretched moment. Needless to say, it backfired – Rubio could never match Trump’s ability to mock and belittle people, and so he ended up tarnishing his own reputation while doing nothing to halt Trump’s rise.

Donald Trump - Ratings Machine - CBS - Les Moonves - CNN - Television News

My point, I suppose, is this.

There is nothing funny or entertaining about this American presidential election. Voters are faced with a rather dismal choice between a far from universally loved Democratic Party candidate on the one hand and an absolute megalomaniac on the other. And they have been put into this position of not having a decent choice between two valid, honourable but competing political philosophies largely thanks to the decision of the television networks last year to break into their regularly scheduled programming every time Donald Trump raised an eyebrow, while giving the other Republican candidates (let’s face it, many of whom were so hopeless that they really needed a media leg-up of their own) almost zero screen time.

The other candidates had to drop what they were doing and go to Washington or New York if they wanted to be featured on the Sunday shows. Trump was permitted to appear by satellite link or even telephone, so eager were American news executives for a bit of Trump’s verbal gold. And whenever Donald Trump has been interviewed, the questions have frequently been of the most depressingly softball variety. America does not have a Jeremy Paxman figure, or even an Evan Davis (God help them). Nor do they have as strong a tradition of confrontational political interviews as we have in Britain – the tradition of deference to authority is, rather counter-intuitively, very strong in America. And so during all of his unearned media time, Donald Trump has very rarely been faced with a single question which caused him to stumble, despite his lengthy back catalogue of cruel and ignorant public pronouncements. Rarer still has Trump faced a searching follow-up question when he replies with one of his repetitious, opaque defensive statements.

All of which makes Amy Goodman’s excoriation of the American news media very true, and rather refreshing:

The media manufactures consent – for war, for candidates in elections, by bringing you more, for example, of one person. Like Donald Trump. He is pumped into everyone’s home. He can just stay in a gold gilded mansion in New York or one of them in Florida. The rest of the candidates trudge from one state to another. Why does he get this unfiltered pipeline into everyone’s brain, into your eyes and to your consciousness?

It matters. The Tyndall Center did a report in 2015, they looked at the whole year, and they found Donald Trump got 23 times the coverage of, say, Bernie Sanders. They found ABC World News Tonight did something like 81 minutes on Donald Trump and I think they gave Bernie Sanders 20 seconds.

[.] In this high-tech digital age, with high-definition television, digital radio, all we get is static, that veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half truths that obscure reality, when what we need the media to give us is the dictionary definition of static. Criticism. Opposition. Unwanted interference. We need a media that covers power, not covers for power. We need a media that is the fourth estate, not for the state. And we need a media which covers the movements that create static and make history.

Obviously Goodman’s interest was promoting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders (the video was made several months ago before he officially dropped out of the Democratic primary contest), but her critique of the wildly excessive time and attention lavished on Donald Trump by the television news media is dead accurate.

As a Brexit campaigner during the EU referendum, representing an organisation (The Leave Alliance) which was the only group to actually offer a comprehensive Brexit plan yet struggled to get any meaningful media attention, all of these same criticisms apply to the British media too. It’s nice to know that these problems are universally felt on either side of the Atlantic, I guess.

As a small campaign organisation it was almost impossible to get our word out when the television news was racing to cover every last syllable which dribbled from the mouth of Boris Johnson, while our own esteemed experts – including one of Britain’s foremost authorities on the EU – struggled to get journalists to show up to a launch event right in their own Westminster back yard.

Nobody expects perfection from the media. Media companies have to pay the bills too, and often keep shareholders happy. But for so long as telegenic ignoramuses dictate television (and print) coverage to the extent that they do, our democracy will remain vulnerable to demagogues like Donald Trump.

On election night in America, we will see (as we always do) the great and the good of American TV journalism pat themselves on the back and endlessly congratulate themselves about the moving spectacle of democracy which they are helping to transmit to a grateful nation. Brian Williams, Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, Diane Sawyer, Lester Holt, Dana Bash, Joe Scarborough, Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, Greta van Susteren, Andrea Mitchell and all the rest of them will be churning out platitudes about the beauty of democracy faster than you can stick knitting needles in your ears.

This year, they might consider dwelling on the role they have played in debasing and jeopardising that democracy in the tawdry pursuit of ratings.

 

Donald Trump - Make America Great Again

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The Pope Is Dangerously Naive To Absolve Islam Of Responsibility For The Islamist Murder Of A Catholic Priest

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Pope Francis - Aeroplane Press Conference

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Islamist terror alone cannot defeat Western civilisation. Only we have the power to do that – and some of us are doing our darnedest to try

It is difficult to see how Western civilisation and enlightenment values can fight back against the forces of fundamentalist, Islamist terrorism when the spiritual leader of 1.27 billion Catholics worldwide – my spiritual leader – desperately refuses to accept that Islam is connected in any with with Islamist terror attacks, and doggedly insists that there is no real difference between “Catholic violence” and Islamist violence.

From the Huffington Post:

Pope Francis said on Sunday that it was wrong to identify Islam with violence and that social injustice and idolatry of money were among the prime causes of terrorism.

“I think it is not right to identify Islam with violence,” he told reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome after a five-day trip to Poland. “This is not right and this is not true.”

Francis was responding to a question about the killing on July 26 of an 85-year-old Roman Catholic priest by knife-wielding attackers who burst into a church service in western France, forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat. The attack was claimed by Islamic State.

“I think that in nearly all religions there is a always a small fundamentalist group,” he said, adding “We have them,” referring to Catholicism.

“I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I look at the papers I see violence here in Italy – someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law. These are baptized Catholics,” he said.

“If I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent,” he said.

The Pope, like every apologist for Islamist terror, is arguing against a straw man here – nobody but people on the lunatic fringe believes that all Muslims are violent. This is simply not an argument being advanced by any serious person or organisation, yet time and again the forces of denial (particularly strong among the political Left and the church) seem to feel the need to waste precious time reminding us of the fact that most Muslims are immensely peaceful and decent.

Newsflash: we get it. Unfortunately, that does not erase the fact that the small proportion who harbour violent and murderous intentions are called to do so by a highly literal and entirely valid (if not mainstream in the West) interpretation of Islam. To take the actions of Al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists and strip them of their religious justification is to remove the only context in which they make sense and can be properly understood.

The people who flew airplanes into the twin towers, blew up the London Underground, killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, massacred Parisian concertgoers at the Bataclan, used a truck to mow down families celebrating Bastille Day in Nice and who last week slit the throat of an elderly Catholic priest while he celebrated Mass did not commit these barbaric acts because of social isolation or economic deprivation. Other people bear far worse isolation and deprivation stoically, and do so without resorting to mass murder. Religion is the catalyst – in this case, a fundamentalist and literalist interpretation of one religion in particular. To deny this much is insane.

And yet Pope Francis proceeds to do just that. “I think it is not right to identify Islam with violence,” he tells us. Well nobody is seriously suggesting that all Muslims are violent, or indeed that Islam has a monopoly on violence. But to deny the causal factor which links hundreds of deadly terror attacks across the world over several decades is sheer lunacy.

Of course all religions have a fundamentalist sect within them, Christianity included. But in the year 2016 there are no armed groups of fundamentalist Christians seizing sovereign territory and declaring their own theocratic state in which horrendous Biblical punishments are meted out to gay people, adulterers, shellfish eaters, blasphemers, those who work on the Sabbath or those who are rash enough to wear clothing made from more than one type of cloth. And while you might get the odd lone wolf deciding to blow up an abortion clinic, there is no worldwide Christian jihad underway – despite Christianity being less favoured and more under threat in Western societies than has been the case for centuries.

Most concerning, though, is when Pope Francis says “if I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent”. Firstly, it is not necessary to balance any criticism of Islam with an equal measure of Christian self-flagellation. This isn’t a children’s party game, ensuring that everyone gets equal time is not an important prerequisite. So no, on does not have to speak of Catholic violence when one speaks of Islamic violence.

Francis then goes on to literally equate “someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law” with Islamist terror attacks. Now, of course murder is murder in God’s eyes, just as all life is sacred. But murder and domestic violence have sadly been with us for as long as humans have existed – since Cain killed Abel, in the Bible. Islamist terror, on the other hand, is not an inherent part of the human condition. It is a political and religious phenomenon which must be closely examined and confronted in isolation, not merely swept up together with all the other violence in the world.

By and large, Catholics who kill do not attempt to use their faith as a pretext or justification for their actions – their faith is incidental to their crime. But with terror attacks and honour killings it is quite the opposite. Islam is placed front and centre as the justification for the crime, not by the evil Islamophobic media but by the expressed words and sentiments of those people who carry out the attacks. It is they who insist that they murder in the name of their Islamic faith. It is they who bring death to those they regard as infidels based on the literal teachings of their holy books. It is they, not the racist and Islamophobic media, who call their organisation the Islamic State.

Why are we so unwilling to take the actions of these mass murderers at face value? If a man turns himself in to a police station and admits killing his neighbour for having an affair with his wife, after corroborating the basic facts we would take the man at his word as to the motive. We would not waste endless days and column inches wringing our hands trying to come up with other, far-fetched reasons why the defendant might have killed the man he caught sleeping with his wife. And so it is with radical Islam.

When Islamist terrorists force an elderly priest to kneel at the altar of his own church before slitting his throat in front of his congregation and do so in the name of the Islamic State, we should accept their sincerity (and their declared religious motive) just as we accepted that those terrorists who brought death to civilians, politicians and soldiers during the Troubles did so because of their desire to bring about a united Ireland. To stubbornly refuse to accept the reality of Islamist terror direct from the mouths of the terrorists is to patronise and condescend to the Islamists, stripping them of agency (and responsibility) for their own actions and turning them into helpless pawns, “forced” to commit their terrible atrocities by dark and mysterious outside forces.

This is dangerous nonsense, which would be bad enough coming from the mouths of cookie-cutter leftist politicians. But coming from the heir to St. Peter and the ultimate boss of the slain Abbé Jacques Hamel – the man who more than anyone should be pained by his murder and determined to confront and root out the violence which caused it – it is doubly depressing. When Islamist terrorists strike, we must take their declared motives at face value just as we would do for any other terrorist or criminal. And then we must harden our resolve to destroy the scourge of fundamentalist Islamism once and for all.

To do anything else is not only to bury our heads in the sand as to the nature and severity of the threat that we face, but it is also to dishonour the memory of the many victims of Islamist terror attacks. For they are casualties in a clash of ideologies and cultures – progessivism versus fundamentalism, moderate Islam versus militant Islam, the enlightenment versus the dark ages – which too many people, nominally on “our” side, seem more than willing to deliberately lose, so long as they can avoid giving offence to certain mystifyingly protected classes and ideas.

 

Postscript: It appears that the Spectator’s Damian Thompson has been thinking along the same lines:

In the 21st-century Middle East, Christianity has been suppressed on an astonishing scale. Countless atrocities have reduced ancient Christian communities to shrivelled and terrified ghettoes or underground churches. Although this persecution has been reported in the West, it is of no great interest to secular politicians or the media. It is, as Neville Chamberlain said in a different context, part of ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’.

On Tuesday, the blood of a martyr was spilled at the other end of the Channel Tunnel. Now Christians in the West have had a glimpse of what it’s like to be a follower of Jesus in the lands of the Bible and many other countries — not all of them Muslim, but a troubling number of them ‘close allies’ who benefit from British trade deals, foreign aid and general diplomatic brown-nosing.

Will the murder of Father Hamel awake Christendom from its torpor? Let me refer you to the Twitter account of one Dr Austen Ivereigh, hagiographer of Pope Francis and former spokesman for the English Catholic Church. He referred to the ‘pointless banality of the Rouen murder’ and urged us not to glorify it by ‘ascribing religious motives’. There’s your answer.

God help us.

 

Fr Jacques Hamel - Catholic Priest

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Top Image: NCR

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Not All Muslims

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

Muslim call to go to Sunday Mass

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After the appalling terrorist murder of a Catholic priest committed in the name of Islamic State, a moving gesture of interfaith solidarity by French Muslims should be acknowledged and applauded

It is important, I think, when criticising the fundamentalist element of Islam and the degree to which it is often tolerated or tacitly encouraged by parts of the mainstream, to give credit where it is due and acknowledge work done and gestures made against extremism by the Muslim community.

One way that we have been doing that this week is by celebrating again the life of slain US army capt. Humayun Khan and his gold star parents, who appeared on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week to repudiate the anti-Muslim rhetoric spewed forth by the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

And another way should be to acknowledge the moving gesture of so many French Muslims attending Catholic Mass at their nearest church or cathedral, showing solidarity with a Catholic community still reeling from the murder of a beloved parish priest at the hands of Islamist terrorists.

From the Daily Mail, displaying unusual magnanimity:

Muslims in France and Italy flocked to Mass on Sunday, a gesture of interfaith solidarity following a drumbeat of jihadi attacks that threatens to deepen religious divisions across Europe.

From the towering Gothic cathedral in Rouen, only a few miles from where 85-year-old Rev. Jacques Hamel was killed Tuesday by two Muslim fanatics, to Paris’ iconic Notre Dame, where the rector of the Mosque of Paris invoked a papal benediction in Latin, many churchgoers were cheered by the Muslims in their midst.

[..] French television broadcast scenes of interfaith solidarity from all around France, with Muslim women in headscarves and Jewish men in kippot crowding the front rows of Catholic cathedrals in Lille, Calais or the Basilica of St. Denis, the traditional resting place of French royalty.

There were similar scenes in Italy, where the head of Italy’s Union of Islamic communities — Izzedin Elzir — called on his colleagues to “take this historic moment to transform tragedy into a moment of dialogue.” The secretary general of the country’s Islamic Confederation, Abdullah Cozzolino spoke at the Treasure of St. Gennaro chapel; three imams also attended Mass at the St. Maria Church in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, donning their traditional dress as they entered the sanctuary and sat down in the front row.

Ahmed El Balazi, the imam of the Vobarno mosque in Italy’s Lombard province of Brescia, said he did not fear repercussions for speaking out.

“These people are tainting our religion and it is terrible to know that many people consider all Muslim terrorists. That is not the case,” El Balazi said. “Religion is one thing. Another is the behavior of Muslims who don’t represent us.”

This blog and others often focus, reasonably, on the failings within the Muslim community – failure of integration and assimilation, failure to stand up for British values (though we are often just as much at fault for failing to transmit those values), failure to confront and root out the extremism in the midst of families and communities. These things are important.

But it is also sometimes the case that we fail to acknowledge those times when the Muslim community does come out strongly in condemnation of fundamentalist, Islamist terror. Anti-extremist counter-protests by Muslim groups often do not receive the media coverage extended to telegenic extremists and their “behead those who insult Islam” placards. Hard and difficult work accomplished in communities goes unrecognised.

And so, as an outspoken opponent of fundamentalist Islam and as a practising Catholic, it is important that I choose to be magnanimous and welcome this touching gesture made by so many Muslims in France and Italy.

Archbishop Cranmer is also moved:

Praying before a blasphemous icon of another Jesus, standing in the shadow of a sacrificial cross which they deny, beneath the dome of a cathedral church steeped in idolatry, myths and deception, Muslims throughout France and Italy attended Mass yesterday. From Rouen, Nice and Paris to Milan, Naples and Rome, hundreds flocked to express solidarity and compassion with Europe’s Roman Catholics, many still reeling, weeping and mourning the loss of a much-loved elderly priest, Abbé Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit by Islamists as he celebrated Mass last week.

All Muslims are exhorted to the greater jihad, to strive against the flesh and persevere in the purposes of Allah, but not all jihad is holy war. All Muslims are not Islamists, but Muslims are becoming terrorists. It is futile, patronising and dangerous to deny it. Islamists are extremists who kill the innocent; Muslims who are moderate and enlightened seek to worship in peace. Islam is not all about oppressing, torturing, murdering and slaughtering. It just seems like it. And no wonder, when the news dishes up a daily diet of Islamic State videos exhorting the faithful to attack the enemies of Allah; Western Muslims who fight for their country are condemned as apostates; hotels are bombed; ancient shrines blown up; ‘spies’ are beheaded; oil fields blaze; and British imams preach to young boys that it’s okay to have sex slaves. That’s just today’s coverage of degradation and destruction.

Amidst all this global trauma, suffering and strife, it is a cause of great hope that so many Muslims can put aside their theological scruples and multifaith ecumenical aversion to attend the Sacrifice of the Mass. It is profoundly offensive to their beliefs, and utterly repugnant to their teachings: Jesus is not the Son of God; he is not divine; he did not die on a cross; he does not become a wafer; praying with wine is haram.

[..]

There were tears during the sign of the peace. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself‘ (2Cor 5:19). In their shared humanity, Muslims and Christians bore witness to the humanity of Jesus, his sacrifice and death, his reconciling love, his resurrection and glorification. ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them‘ (Mt 18:20). The Living God is present in the world, if not in bread and wine. We can meet Him, pray to Him and listen to Him. That is our privilege through Christ. And in that communion we stand with all believers in the world and throughout all history. And we stand with all participant peace-loving Muslims, too. ‘This is my blood…‘

Wordless interfaith dialogue is the best remembrance.

In a sign of just how bad things have gotten in Europe, this blog was actually surprised when there was no major, high-profile terror attack last Friday, perfectly timed to dominate television coverage leading into the weekend, when previous weekends had seen such attacks.

No matter how routine this destruction and insecurity may become in the short and medium term, we should not allow this “new normal” in Europe to become in any way acceptable or excusable, and we should hold European leaders firmly to account for the whole range of bad decisions they have made – from social policy and a lack of focus on protecting national culture and encouraging assimilation right through to the migration crisis – which have increased the risk of Islamist terror attacks on our soil.

But as we witnessed at Catholic Masses across France this Sunday, it is not all bad news – a fact which those of us who report or comment on human events should be careful to acknowledge.

 

Fr Jacques Hamel - Catholic Priest

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Top Image: Time

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