Nick Cohen's brains have turned to slush. posted by Richard Seymour

This link may not work at the moment, but it did when I read the article this morning. As usual, it involves a lot of glib insinuations about the Left - yeah yeah, heard it before, move on. But while reading the article, a thought that had been swimming around in my subconscious for some time came to the fore with blinding clarity: the reason Cohen and Hitchens et al resort to facile platitudes and snarling insults is because they haven't the slightest interest in, or facility with, either fact or analysis.

Take this:

Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do.

It is jaw-droppingly stupid to bundle up these three ideological formations, particularly since such a gesture owes itself to the banal and useless discours of 'totalitarianism'. What is even more idiotic is to refer to Islamism tout court as a "messianic cult of death". Sure, some of its manifestations fetishise death, but this doesn't even go the slightest distance toward explaining such a phenonomenon. And Cohen isn't interested in explanation, merely insisting that it "will send you to your grave whatever you do". Well, some forms of Islamism will, and some won't. Shari'a law will kill you in Nigeria, for instance. On the other hand, the Islamists involved in Stop Police Terror are generally peacable in nature: oh yes, they have twitchy beards and evil eyes, but by and large they won't kill you. Similarly, the liberal Islamist Tariq Ramadan would prefer it if 'Al Qaeda'-style groups didn't go round killing civilians, whether Muslim or not. Hassan Hanafi, a leftist Egyptian Islamist, argues for democracy and tends to value human life more than Cohen's insulting epithet would allow.

If Cohen is uninterested in such distinctions, it is partly because he is not interested in viewing Islamism as a diffuse and variegated movement with a history and with causes. The first modern manifestation of political Islam grew out of a number of factors, among them a rejection of British imperialism in Egypt, a revolt against the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, and a conviction that some kind of departure from 'true' Islam had led to the decadence of the Muslim world and its subjection to European colonialism. The solutions it proposed were initially profoundly conservative: certainly those advocated by Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brothers took the form of romantic anti-modernism, which involved contempt for parliamentarism and liberalism.

However, since then it has gone in all sorts of directions because - as I have argued before - the texts which it proposes to derive a formula for a new society from are too indeterminate, too open to interpretation, to provide merely one kind of ideology. By denying this, and treating Islamism as a sinisterly homogenous movement, Cohen effectively hands that argument over interpretation to the al-Zawahiris of Islamism: the Quran can produce only a millenarian 'cult of death' in this purview. He also refuses to acknowledge the contribution of Western imperialism to creating support for and recruits to the extreme Wahabbi brand of Islamism, the kind which is very probably behind the attacks on London.

Take this excerpt from a conversation Nick Cohen had with Tawfiq Chahboune for the Socialist Unity network:

NC: The so-called resistance, who you support, are nothing but Baathist fascists and theocratic fascists…

TC: I don’t support them, and, in any case, the Salvador Option wouldn’t be targeting those people. It would target the civilian population…

NC: The fascists.

TC: No…

NC: The difference is that you support fascism…

TC: I don’t know why you keep saying that…

NC: Look…You don’t seem to…We’re not going to agree.

It is not surprising to see Cohen reproduce the usual inaccurate description of the resistance as largely Ba'athist and theocratic ( ABC of resistance here ), but what is notable is that he has to invoke such a notion in order to vilify someone whose arguments he can't deal with and which he is uninterested in, and even repeats the accusation of supporting 'fascists' even when Chahboune has stipulated that he doesn't support them.

Cohen is dribbling from his ears, and the ritual insults, defamations, denunciations and insinuations sit alongside an ignorant and rancorous Orientalism as the chief symptoms of his present delirium. The column inches would be more profitably placed in the hands of Winnie the Pooh.