STATES OF MATTER. The curse of imperial hubris

Few expect today’s boundaries to survive when order is finally restored in the Arab world after years of turmoil. There is rich irony that the Anglo-French deal that created these boundaries completed a century of infamy on May 16, with every commentator marking the occasion with strong denunciations.

Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, two obscure civil servants of the British and French empires, would have faded into the mists of history had they not earned renown for the cartographic aggression that bears their name. The governor of Iraq’s Erbil province was recently quoted saying that “hundreds of thousands have been killed because of Sykes-Picot and all the problems it created”. It was an act of imperial arrogance that “changed the course of history, and nature”.

A centenary is an opportunity for stocktaking, but there is little of that in evidence as Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande double down in their quest of regime change in Syria, leaving untended other festering sores such as the brutal occupation of Palestine.

When US President Barack Obama recently visited Britain, the incumbent mayor of London, Cameron’s Conservative Party colleague Boris Johnson, added his own quirky bit to the mood of imperial hubris. Obama’s insistence on Britain remaining in the European Union was an inheritance of his Kenyan parentage, said Johnson. Principal exhibit in this extraordinary slur against a visiting dignitary was Obama’s purported decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the presidential office, signalling his undying resentment of the British empire.

Obama’s grandfather was part of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, brutally suppressed during Churchill’s post-war premiership with immense loss of life and widespread torture, all to protect a few thousand white settlers in the country’s most fertile lands. Johnson’s remarks were well over the borderline of racism, but attracted humoured indulgence rather than censure.

Similar gentleness was not in evidence with politicians who called into question other aspects of the British legacy of settler colonialism. Recent weeks have witnessed a rash of media reports on how the Labour Party, under its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, has become a haven for anti-Semitism.

Corbyn and his Labour colleagues have been veteran campaigners for Palestine who have scrupulously honoured the red lines between racial baiting and legitimate criticism of Israel. Blurring these political demarcations has been a favoured tactic of Israel’s most fervent defenders, including extreme elements within who have enjoyed an uninterrupted run in power for long years.

At the Holocaust remembrance on May 5, Israel’s justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, warned grimly of the new anti-Semitism which had assumed the form of the global “boycott, disinvestment and sanctions” campaign against Israel. Within the Israeli political spectrum, Shaked represents today’s mainstream, having paved the way to her current ministerial perch with virulent outbursts likening Palestinians to snakes.

It is a heavy burden of selective perception that apologists for Israel have to carry. The Balfour declaration, which paved the way for the colonisation of Palestine by European Jewry, is another legacy of British imperialism that will soon mark its centenary. There is little evidence though of any honest stocktaking.

Anti-Semitism accusations went up several notches when Labour fielded Sadiq Khan, the son of an immigrant Pakistani bus driver, in this month’s London mayoral election. Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, whose sister was once married to yesteryear’s Pakistani cricket icon Imran Khan, further stirred the toxic broth with a series of bizarre media rants targeting immigrants of the Muslim faith. Defeat brought contrition. And Goldsmith’s mother pointed out how racism just could not be in the make-up of a man so devoted to his sister’s two sons.

On the rather different stage of university politics, April witnessed a brief prelude to this ugly clash. Malia Bouattia, born to immigrant Muslim parents from Algeria, contested the presidency of the National Union of Students (NUS) and won despite a sustained campaign accusing her of anti-Semitism and terrorism sympathies. A number of university unions have threatened to break off NUS affiliations since her election.

If hate speech is the template against which allegations of anti-Semitism are assessed, Britain has a law in place prohibiting “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”, when there is clear intent to “stir up racial hatred”. Implementing the law has been quite another thing, since there are concerns about a possible abridgment of free speech and the constriction of the political rules of engagement.

The British philosopher Jeremy Waldron has cut this Gordian knot with an interpretation that is attentive to the circumstances in which a speech act occurs. The touchstone here is equal citizenship, a premise that Waldron shares with the 20th century’s most renowned theorist of justice, John Rawls.

Rawls looked at how a “well-ordered society” could be created by introducing a “veil of ignorance” that obscures all existing and inherited systems of inequality. Waldron goes further and considers the process by which a fair social order could be created. Norms of equal citizenship, he says, need rigorous observance in the transition from a state of inequality. All forms of “group libel”, which question the rights of certain ethnicities to equal citizenship, would be classified as hate speech in the circumstances.

By this criterion, the crusaders against anti-Semitism — who gladly tar entire immigrant groups and left-leaning politicians — seem to lurk perilously near the hate speech threshold. To endorse statements from Israeli politicians condemning Palestinians to not merely lesser status but non-citizenship would comfortably clear that threshold. Silence in the face of such rhetoric too would be a crime of omission.

S ukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer based in Gurgaon

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