Observing the hypocrites: Tesco and the wrath of God

Today the Guardian reported that 'fringe Christian pressure group' Christian Voice had attributed Tesco's falling profits to divine retribution for the supermarket giant's decision to sponsor a gay pride festival.* First of all, kudos to the folks at the Guardian who used 'fringe' as the very first adjective to describe Christian Voice. But even though the group makes a lot of noise for a bunch of people who wield little influence within British Christianity, their culture-war obsessions are unfortunately more widespread (as shown by Anglican Mainstream and the Catholic Herald on the same subject).

Christian Voice consider gay pride events 'divisive' and 'depraved', and have engaged in prayer that God would 'humble proud Tesco' through 'confusion in the Tesco boardroom' (says their chairman). What's so astonishing here is the total loss of perspective. There are three passages in the Bible that unambiguously discuss homosexuality - Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1:26-27. (That's three more than we have about abortion, incidentally.)

There's little there to suggest the idea of a dire homosexual threat - the Big Gay Menace - presaging the imminent downfall of western civilisation. What's so odd and hypocritical is that Tesco is indeed engaged in sinful practices, of a kind the Bible condemns hundreds of times. I don't just mean their strange failure to distribute all their assets to the poor, as demanded by Jesus.

No, as an international business Tesco routinely, systemically engage in exploiting and expropriating farmers at home and, more significantly, in the Global South, blackmailing them into accepting low prices and forcing them into chronic dependency by the threat of starvation (as exhaustively documented in Joanna Blythman's Shopped). They overwork and underpay their employees to secure fat profits for their shareholders. And while of course capitalism didn't exist in biblical times, the apparent ability of oppressors to live healthy, wealthy lives caused even the prophet Habakkuk to doubt God:

You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
   and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
   and remain silent when the wicked swallows up
   the man more righteous than he?
You make mankind like the fish of the sea,
   like crawling things that have no ruler.
He brings all of them up with a hook;
   he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his dragnet;
   so he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
   and makes offerings to his dragnet;
for by them he lives in luxury,
   and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net
   and mercilessly killing nations forever? (Habakkuk 1:13-17)**

It wasn't God's failure to punish gay people that caused the prophet's despair: it was the fact that cruel empires apparently enjoyed the fruits of their depredations, living in wealth, luxury and security while a good God, supposedly the protector of the lowly, seemed to do nothing. (Similarly, Jesus had exactly nothing to say about homosexuality, but quite a lot about those exploiting religious sentiment for their own ends.)

Where is Christian Voice's anguished cry over the misery of the wretched of the earth that Tesco preys on? Why do so few modern evangelical leaders see fit to echo Habakkuk? His confusion showed his humanity. Rather than rejecting his honest enquiry, God answered that the oppressor would not live in security forever, that the apparent triumph of the wicked was an illusion:

Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house,
   to set his nest on high,
   to be safe from the reach of harm!
You have devised shame for your house
   by cutting off many peoples;
   you have forfeited your life.
For the stone will cry out from the wall,
   and the beam from the woodwork respond.
Woe to him who builds a town with blood
   and founds a city on iniquity!
Behold, is it not from the LORD of hosts
   that peoples labor merely for fire,
   and nations weary themselves for nothing?
For the earth will be filled
   with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
   as the waters cover the sea. (Habakkuk 2:9-14)

Christian Voice's obsession with homosexuality and indifference to Tesco's real inhumanity is thrown in sharper relief by their other campaign: their Islamophobic attempt to brand halal meat as 'ritually slaughtered'. Despite their protestations - which they almost certainly believe themselves: the religious right are nothing if not good at convincing themselves they're reading the Bible literally - Christian Voice don't care much about what the Bible actually says.

Their hateful rhetoric is not biblical but plainly reactionary: they want a society in which we can all pretend all those gays and Muslamics don't exist. The call to love one's neighbour implies that that neighbour is different, seemingly alien, perhaps upsetting to your personal sensibilities: else the commandment would be unnecessary. God's wrath is reserved not for oppressed minorities (which Muslims and LGBTQ people most certainly are, whether we agree with them or not) but for the powerful exploiters, and it takes a degree of moral perversity to read the Bible any other way.  

*A decision which, for the record, was achieved by grassroots pressure from LGBTQ employees.
**See also, for example, Psalm. 10, 12, 14...

Once upon a time in the Middle East

The recent slew of films on Lebanon has focused on the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country: Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2009) both dealt with Israeli soldiers' experience. Incendies (2010) is a high-profile film from a Lebanese perspective, based on a play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, that is singularly uninterested in Israel (the 1982 invasion is mentioned in a throwaway comment), presenting instead an odyssey of civil war, family and reconciliation.

Québec, 2009: at the opening of the will, Jeanne Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and her brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) discover that their recently deceased mother wants them to pass on letters to their father, whom they believed dead, and their brother, of whose existence they were unaware. Simon, angry at his mother's unusual request, refuses to return to the unspecified Middle Eastern country, but Jeanne decides to find out the truth in a country whose language she doesn't even speak.

This is interwoven with the story of her mother, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), a Christian from the south of the country, who in around 1970 conducts a love affair with a Muslim refugee. Members of her community kill her lover, but Nawal is already pregnant. She consents, ath the insistence of her grandmother, to give her newborn son to an orphanage and is sent away to university. As the country descends into sectarian strife, she leaves in search of her son but finds the orphanage destroyed. Pretending to be a Muslim for safety, she travels in a group that is eventually massacred by Christian militias. Having escaped only by revealing she is a Christian, Nawal joins a Muslim warlord's forces to wreak vengeance on the killers.

For much of Incendies, I was confused by the film's refuseal to name its setting, for the fictional Middle Eastern country is clearly Lebanon, the place of Wajdi Mouawad's birth. The specific situation of a civil war between Christian and Muslim militias over large numbers of refugees in the south, interrupted by a 'foreign invasion', is not what you'd call vague. By the end I understood. There is a plot twist that is grossly unlikely 'in reality', but brings home the theme of the film:

Jeanne and Simon's brother (Abdelghafour Elaaziz) is also their father, Nawal's son who, rescued from the destruction of his orphanage by a warlord, became a soldier and, after switching sides, eventually a torturer in the service of the government. In this capacity he raped his mother, rendering her pregnant. Further, he no longer lives in Lebanon, having left the country for Québec after the conclusion of the civil war.

This twist, an allusion to Greek myth, necessarily throws the film into unreality. Nor, for a film about Lebanon, is Incendies terribly interested in judging that conflict: it is neither pro- nor anti-sectarian, but treats the events of civil war as fate. This attitude is best encapsulated in the retired Muslim warlord Wallat Chamseddine (Mohamed Majd, in a terrific scene-stealing performance), who is neither regretful nor proud of his actions, only wary of the possible consequences. Incendies depicts the civil war as terrible but nonetheless unalterable: its focus is on family shaped by conflict.

All the same, Incendies is a harrowing indictment of inhumanity. A number of scenes dealing with rape as prison torture and its aftermath are very difficult to watch, as is the massacre of a passenger bus by militias, including the shooting of a child. The acting is excellent, especially Lubna Azabal, who portrays Nawal as a person driven by love and, increasingly, revenge for her suffering that leads her to participate in the civil war on the 'other side'. The fluidity of her identity is signalled by a scene in which she quickly hides her cross necklace and puts on a headscarf to approach a group of Muslims.

The writing, adapted from a play, it is perhaps too 'literary': 'L'enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge' is great writing, but it rings false in the film's setting. (Incidentally, I was pleased to discover my French appears to have gone from abysmal to merely bad, as I was able to understand most of the French dialogue.) The often over-elaborate style points to the film's mythic quality: though rooted in the Lebanese Civil War, it becomes a parable of conflict in the region.

'Host populations'

Will Hutton thinks that the left needs to smarten up its attitude towards immigration. The argument: the far right is gaining ground across Europe. The notion that 'the left must make the case that immigration is a force for good – it makes Europe richer' is 'denial'. If we are to win the debate on immigration, the left must argue for 'a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment' and 'accept that immigration offends basic attitudes to fairness' by allowing immigrants to 'get benefits without paying anything into the collective pot'.

Let's set aside that the likelihood of a 'good capitalism' is slim. Let's also set aside that Hutton is a liberal who has a deep fear and distrust of 'the mob'. His argument is a fairly standard one, one that has been repeatedly touted by the last Labour government and is now being championed by Maurice Glasman: in order to prevent a violent, barbaric racism we must embrace a legal, enlightened racism. In other words, we must wean racists from the racist far right by showing them their demands are being addressed.

But I really feel the need to seize on the term 'host population', which Hutton uses quite casually. It hardly needs saying that this phrase has two meanings, and this ambiguity serves the right. First, a host is someone who puts up guests and looks after them. Second, a host is the victim of a parasite. That, of course, is how the far right (fascist or otherwise) perceives 'the British': as a host body (the nation as an organism) that is being sucked dry by foreign leeches. Using a term like that is to walk right into racist discourse. One can only advise Hutton to stay away from it.

Why we shouldn't celebrate Osama's death

At 1am on May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was attacked at his compound in Pakistan by 20 to 25 helicopter-borne Navy SEALs. In a forty-minute operation Osama was shot in the face twice, killing him. The body was quickly dropped into the Arabian Sea.

The reaction in the West was euphoric. Celebrations broke out in the United States. The media were hardly more reticent and celebrated anything from the end of the 'War on Terror' to Obama's now allegedly guaranteed re-election. Osama bin Laden, that incarnation of evil, was finally gone.

I feel personally deeply uncomfortable with the cheering on of the targeted killing of a human being - any human being. At the risk of preaching: breaking forth in joy should never be our reaction to death. That we live in a world in which it may sometimes be necessary to kill other human beings is a terrible fact, one that ought to occasion a fundamental critique of the way we live on this earth. Joy at death is never justified, merely a symptom of our sickness. To gloat over the bodies of our dead enemies, of someone who has been hunted for years, is the opposite of humanity. Osama bin Laden, like Saddam Hussein before him, has been hounded to his grave and beyond, and that should lead to some deep soul-searching in a society that professes to be civilised.

That much is, I hope, uncontroversial; controversy follows. Osama bin Laden was not a demon, not evil incarnate. Fighting him was not some sort of historic challenge the West had to pass. He was a human being with hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations. His millennial outlook stemmed from an understanding of the history of the Middle East - specifically, the history of Western imperialism in the region. As he said in 2004, in the video address in which he first admitted to planning the 9/11 attacks:

Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example...
God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed - when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US sixth fleet.
In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

 Of course this is propaganda. But at its bottom is undoubtedly a real situation: namely, the Western partition of the Middle East that followed the First World War ('Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated', Osama said in 2001), and the sordid history of imperialism (first predominantly British, then chiefly American) that continues to this day. Osama's analysis is flawed: he assumes imperialism constitutes a 'crusading' assault on Islam, when it is really a question of economic interests and strategic paramountcy. From this incorrect analysis stems the viciousness and futility of al-Qaida's struggle. That real Western domination and subjugation of Muslims lay at the bottom of the Jihadist attacks was of course never acknowledged by the United States and its allies, who preferred to ascribe their enemies' determination to blind fanaticism. All this, of course, while massively adding to the grievances with the hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced from Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

So here's my second reason for rejecting the joy at Osama bin Laden's death: it is another act of silencing the voices crying out in protest against the violent and continued suppression of the people of the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was never worthy of our respect. He was a ruthless mass murderer, but he became so in reaction to real injustices. We should feel uneasy about joining in the celebrations when the world's greatest power - the power that turned Iraq into a graveyard and even now aids in the suppression of pro-democracy uprisings in the region - kills one of its enemies. Osama was never a threat to 'the world'. Throughout the 'War on Terror' Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were always the weaker party, hunted with the most modern weaponry. al-Qaida's weakening was always the likely outcome.

There is, however, hope in all this. As al-Qaida is becoming less relevant, the Middle East is being overtaken by democratic uprisings. Terrorism was the political and military expression of Middle Easterners' impotence and oppressed state; Tahrir Square is the expression of their coming to freedom - real popular freedom, not 'governance' at gunpoint, almost everywhere in defiance of the United States' wishes. It is good that Jihadism is taking a back seat; it is better that democracy has a chance of taking its place.