Current mood:	analytical
Current music:	Le Tigre, "New Kicks"

[BRIEF NOTE] Making Enemies
Reading a recent post at Hurry Up Harry, I came across David Aaronovitch's (linked) article for The Guardian, "All Muslims are not the same". Two critical paragraphs from that article are quoted below:

Yesterday I watched the Van Gogh film on the internet. And the first thing that I thought was that it would never have been shown on British television as it was on Dutch TV. It begins and ends with the intoning of prayers to Allah. In between, the camera passes over the woman's eyes (the rest of her face is covered) and thinly veiled naked body, her voice telling us how she has been the victim of domestic violence, of rape by a relative, and how she dislikes having to cover her entire face. When her face is uncovered, it is bloody and bruised.

What the film suggests is that, somehow, domestic violence and rape are linked to specifically Muslim ways of seeing the world and the relationship between men and women. Given the fact that the film is made by a non-Muslim (indeed, by a noted critic of Islam), the effect is disturbing. What is the film-maker's intention? Who is the film aimed at?

Aaronovitch asks serious and important questions here, and certainly Van Gogh can be charitably described as abrasive. This Salon article goes into more detail about the man, while Submission can be viewed online, at iFilm. But then, as I previously noted, Van Gogh's co-creator Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the person who wrote the script for Submission, who in fact provided Van Gogh with the idea for the script in the first place. And no, contra the implicitly racist and misogynistic arguments of Rohan Jayasekera of (covered by me here and 2), she wrote that script of her own volition, drawing from her own personal experiences to that reflects her stated positions as a Dutch politician (namely, hostility to the internal trends that could lead to the isolation of the Netherlands' Muslim community by reactionaries, and to the deterioration of the statuses of women and children within the Dutch Muslim community). Hirsi Ali is the person responsible for the film, as even Van Gogh's murderer recognized; the letter pinned by the knife on van Gogh's body (available here, 1, 2, 3) was addressed to Hirsi Ali. She knew exactly what she did.

Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Muslim? She is; at least, enough of a Muslim to be labelled an apostate and made the subject of numerous death threats, like her Belgian counterpart the Senator Mimount Bousakla, currently also in hiding following death threats. She has a relationship to the Islamic religion of her birth, and to the various communities defined by that religion; it is an adversarial relationship, frequently shading towards hostility in relationship to certain figures and associated cultural practices. The relationship exists, though. The sort of relationship enjoyed by Hirsi Ali sounded rather familiar, actually, reminiscent of someone's relationship with something, but I couldn't identify the who or the what until today.

"if you want to stop Aids shoot the queers..." says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and besides they didn't think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and i'm carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there's a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and i'm waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in 'infected blood' and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastika's that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against Aids clinics in the nightly news

- from Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1988-89, black-and-white photograph, acrylic, text and collage on masonite; text taken from Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz is most famous for providing the cover of U2's 1991 single "One", along with inspiring an associated music video. Before he died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 39, though, Wojnarowicz had achieved a prominent position in New York City's East Village art scene, and lasting influence as a casual Google proves: a 1989 essay by Guattari, a page with quotes and a selected bibliography at ACT-UP New York, exhibition of some of his visual art at Queer Arts, a 1991 interview, a brief review of a recent exhibition</a>.

As the above quote makes clear, even without a perusal of his body of work, Wojnarowicz had a relationship with American culture that often become violently hostile, and that was strongly adversarial by default. He disliked the reality of an American culture that was excessively consumeristic, excessively homophobic, excessively complacent: "Scientists have discovered that if the head of a moth is cut off it can still continue to lay its eggs; somehow I don't think civilization is all that different; we are fossilized before we can even make further gestures; society is almost dead and yet it continues reproducing its madness as if there were a real future at the end of its collective gestures. Until the rude shock becomes magnified enough to wake us from this sleep we will continue to have more tiresome dreams."

Back in April, I noted in my post "Religion(s) of Peace, Religion(s) of Hate" that there is no such thing as an ideological system that exists entirely detached from messy reality, and that honest protagonists of any ideological system must recognize this reality, and this reality's consequence that the ideological system is responsible for bad acts committed in its name as well as the good. Islam encompasses Margaret Hassan and her killers; Marxism counts in its rank literary theorists and gulag guards; free-market capitalists should acknowledge New Zealand's experiences before claiming universal success.

I'd go further, and suggest that any ideological system has to be seen, by objective observers, as including its fiercest critics as well as its strongest supporters. Hirsi Ali has a relationship with Islam that is recognized by Muslims; Wojnarowicz (had in life, has even now) a relationship to American culture. Excluding the one or the other from those communities on the grounds of their hostilities is a senseless act, something that isn't a defensible act for anyone who claims objectivity and is borderline even for a given community's protagonist.

One more preliminary, uncontestable, conclusion, though: No enemy is so fierce as the former comrade-in-arms who was forced out into the cold.

EDIT (12:36 PM) : Minor errors including date changed.