ALL RACISTS NOW?
how the Rushdie affair has put Labour on the rack
THE Labour Party, I suspect, will come to shudder at the very mention of Salman Rushdie. The affair is already becoming a festering sore on Labour's recently reunited body politic, and its first real inflammation is likely to occur at this year's Party Conference in Brighton. It would not be surprising, for instance, if the frustrated supporters of Black Sections made com- mon cause with the frustrated Muslim militants and together branded the party leadership as 'racist'. Interestingly enough, both sides of the internal Labour Party argument about Rushdie have accused each other of racism. Those who have advocated no further editions of the book and cancellation of its appearance in paperback are accused of 'racist' appease- ment of one ethnic section of the commun- ity at the expense of Britain's liberal traditions. Equally, those who say that Muslims, being now in Britain, will simply have to lump it, are branded as 'racist' for denying the principles of a multiracial, multicultural society.
In fact no one in the Labour movement is being particularly racist. The middle- class intellectual element, while overwhel- mingly white, is simply trying, as usual, to have its cake and eat it: it supports multiracial/culturalism except when it con- flicts with the still more cherished doctrine of absolute freedom to publish (left-wing) views, especially the right to spit in the face of religious belief. As for the Labour politicians, they are plainly motivated by simple self-interest. Those who have large numbers of Muslim constituents tend to be in favour of leaning on Rushdie to get his inconvenient book suppressed. Those who do not have to worry about the Muslim vote tend to take up an ostentatious posture of ultra-liberalism. All in all, the spectacle of Labour's divisions is not edify- ing.
Moreover, the problem is liable to be- come more intractable as time goes by. The fanatics on both sides will not let it fade away. The middle-class white intellec- tuals poured petrol on the flames by staging their pro-blasphemy programme on the BBC. In the long run this may well turn to be a major strategic error. The BBC
purports to be a national broadcasting service, in return for which it has the statutory privilege of extorting £65 a year from anyone who owns a television set. Muslims now see it as a partisan organisa- tion, run in the interests of a particular sociallracial group: like everyone else they are forced to pay their licence fee while the recipients are permitted to insult their deepest beliefs. The episode reinforces their sense of isolation and thus accelerates the process whereby the Muslim commun- ity is being alienated and radicalised. In short, the Rushdie Affair is acting as a catalyst, goading British Muslims into the fundamentalist camp. And not just Mus- lims either. I was struck by a sentence in a letter on the affair from a Mr Gautam'Sen, published in last week's New Statesman: 'I was not born a Muslim, but I have to say that we blacks are all Muslims now.' Last Thursday, not far from where I live in Bayswater, a young Muslim blew himself up while priming a bomb, apparently intended for Rushdie or one of his associ- ates. If white middle-class intellectuals continue to insist on the righteousness of securing the maximum possible distribu- tion of The Satanic Verses and to mount further provocative agitprop plays and broadcasts — which will be seen as de-
signed to teach their Muslim intellectual inferiors who are the masters — then we must expect Muslim fundamentalists, domestic as well as foreign, to resort to violence. We may even face the prospect of a Muslim terrorist movement developing in Britain. Is that really what the advocates of freedom-to-publish-at-any-price are pre- pared to ask the country to pay for their beliefs?
In my view absolute freedom of publica- tion is no more defensible than absolute freedom to sell lethal weapons. For words are weapons and they can be lethal. Two historical episodes in particular are instruc- tive. In 1881 the Third Republic in France passed a law which freed publishing from virtually all restraints, including long- established ones penalising incitement to violence against political and religious groups. This had the unintended effect of making possible the establishment of news- papers, such as La Croix (founded 1883) and La Libre Parole (1892), partly or wholly devoted to antisemitic propaganda, and publication of such works as La France juive (1886), which became the bible of the antisemites. The law, in fact, led progres- sively to the Dreyfus Case, which ultimate- ly found expression in the enthusiasm with which Vichy France co-operated with Hit- ler's race-extermination programme. Again, the ulta-liberalism of the Weimar constitution in post-1918 Germany made possible the flowering of Berlin's culture in the 1920s but it also made possible the rise of Hitler by permitting the virtually unres- tricted publication of extremist political newspapers and tracts, often combining obscenity and racism. (Hitler, Labour Par- ty militants might well note, was the prime beneficiary of three phenomena now held by them in the highest esteem: absolute freedom to publish, the Green movement and proportional representation.) Those who take an absolutist position on freedom of publication try to meet these points by their enthusiastic support of the Race Relations Act. But this, of course, by imposing legal restraints on debates about race undermines their absolutist position or rather shows it to be hypocritical: they are prepared to suppress the freedom of speech of those who challenge their own beliefs. Moreover, the Race Relations Act does not work, as the Rushdie affair has now concluSively demonstrated. Marketing The Satanic Verses has done more damage to race relations in Britain than any other post-war act of publication, but it is appar- ently not covered by the act. The young Moroccan who died last week is (it seems probable) the first person to die in Britain as a result of the Rushdie affair. He is unlikely to be the last. As the victims mount, public pressure will oblige us to legislate not indeed against blasphemy but against any form of incitement by publica- tion which is liable to lead to violence. Meanwhile Labour is on the rack and deservedly so.
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