Have we got snooze for you

I had a new experience on my way back from the eve-of-Labour Conference anti-war march in Manchester. Marooned for hours at Liverpool’s John Lennon airport, I cracked and picked up an abandoned copy of the Irish Daily Mail which some incoming traveller had obviously discarded in fear of being seen in its company in the outside world.

I found a pic of the U2 front-person moving in mysterious ways, on his arm the comely Ashley Judd, five foot seven in her bare feet, which she was, carrying four-inch spike-heels in her hand, while his three-inch crepe soles enabled him to tower by half an inch at least above her. The caption told that Bono is ‘notoriously sensitive about his lack of inches.’
At Manchester, the two guys identified by Little Big Man at the 2004 Labour Conference as the Lennon and McCartney of British politics were circling one another, daggers in hand, each alert for the deft moment to drive the blade into the other’s back, but making plain that if there’s one thing they are agreed on – and maybe there is only one – it’s that you couldn’t kill enough of them A-rabs and Reactionary Muslims.
On another page of the same paper, I discover Tom McGuirk gnawing at the altar rails of respectability, incanting clichés about a ‘Fatwa on Freedom’ and pouring praise on the Pope – a ‘distinguished theologian and philosopher’, apparently.
Muslims are a mindless lot, McGurk reckons: ‘Seemingly like clockwork, large sections of the Muslim population can be switched on to riot or not...The moderate Islamic community...must turn on those in its own communities’ who foment this violence.
This regurgitated the undigested essence of Benedict’s crude rant against Islam at Regensburg on September 12th. It echoed exactly Blair’s comprehensive justification of the War on Terror (WoT) in his speech at Los Angeles on August 1st.  

This seemed to me the most striking aspect of Benedict’s philippic – the way it harmonised perfectly with the propaganda line of Bush and Blair.
The pope has previous in this regard. In the immediate aftermath of September 2001, the then Cardinal Ratzinger declared that: ‘The history of Islam...contains a tendency to violence, but there are other aspects, too. It is thus important to help the positive line...to prevail and to have sufficient strength to win out over the other tendency.’
Compare this with Blair’s LA justification of the WoT: ‘What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future...It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam....We want Moderate, Mainstream Islam to triumph over Reactionary Islam.’
The conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, said Blair, were part of ‘the wider struggle for the soul of the region,’ a contest ‘about the values which will shape our future.’
The Independent’s longtime Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn commented: ‘I only hope al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas do not translate (the) speech into Arabic, since every paranoid paragraph confirms their claim that they are battling a western crusade against Islam.’
The same can be said of Benedict’s assault on Islam on September 12. This is the reason many Muslims were outraged. It hadn’t got to do with Islamic automatons being switched on to violence by sinister imams, or, as John Waters had it in a particularly ignorant piece in the Irish Times (September 25th), with ‘fury...carefully orchestrated by forces of extreme ugliness.’
Waters alleged that, in contrast to the ‘cowardly and irresponsible’ Muslim leaders who have failed to condemn violence in the name of religion, ‘The Holy Father’ believes that ‘God is love.’ Pass the sick-bag, Alice.
Aggressors in all wars lie in order to elevate their own purpose, while demonising their enemy. Benedict’s specific charge at Regensburg, the assertion which slotted perfectly into the public rationale for the WoT, was that, historically, Islam has justified ‘spreading the faith through violence.’ Such dishonesty was not unexpected from Benedict, Protector of Paedophiles, but was nonetheless breathtaking in its brazenness.
How have the values which Bush, Blair and Benedict bring to the struggle for the soul of the region been expressed other than through massive, pitiless violence?
Benedict reached back to the 14th century for his killer illustration of the tendency of Islam to proselytise through violence. Did he not notice as he surveyed the centuries that it was in preparation for western invasion of what we now call the Middle East that the notion of suicide killers being rewarded by instant entry into paradise was sucked from the thumb of a pope? Urban II, raising an army in 1009 to avenge the destruction by the caliph al-Hakim of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, promised a Plenary Indulgence to any Crusader who died in battle. Almost two centuries later, in 1198, Innocent III extended the offer to those who didn’t fancy the trek to the Holy Land themselves but paid for somebody to go in their place.
Almost a millennium was to pass before a tiny minority of Muslims took up the idea pioneered by the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church that those who die as they slaughter the enemies of god are instantly up-zapped into heaven. So, if the time-scale holds, it will be some years yet before a wild-eyed imam tells worshippers in some obscure mosque that they can pick up the suicide-bomb sponsorship forms on the way out.  
Nor is the idea of killing for Jesus in the expectation of salvation a quaint episode from the dusty history of discredited popes. There’s scarcely been a western army gone into battle in the last millennium without some version of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ speeding them on their way. It is still common to hear Christian clergymen proclaim that the young men who were lured by lies to spill their lives on the murder fields of Flanders were engaged in God’s work and assuredly will have earned an Eternal Reward. Some of us can remember Cardinal Spellman of New York ceremonially blessing US warplanes on the runway before they set off to napalm villagers in Vietnam, urging the aircrews to see themselves as ‘warriors for Christ.’
All religions are religions of peace, in that they can provide the personally troubled with an ersatz sense of ease. They are all, too, and more importantly in the context of Benedict’s address, ideologies of war, supplying a justification for violence transcending all earthly considerations. Institutionalised religions have ever been available to endorse wars waged by their patrons.
Benedict’s Regensburg speech was war propaganda. That’s why millions of Muslims – which is not to say only Muslims – were angered by it. The likes of McGurk and Waters, who pip-squeak their support from the sidelines, are in the long tradition of journalists who put themselves at the service of their ‘own’ ruling class once war is declared.
Best moment at Manchester was jigging along singing, ‘Blair is a liar, Get the fuck out, People are dying, Get the fuck out’ in a contingent including Irish lesbians, Scottish trade unionists and a hijab-ed mob of young Muslim women.
Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.