Atrocity and 'Humanity'

In a Church Meeting discussion last night about what it means to offer a 'radical welcome' to people, someone made the point that we need to be able to see past the labels to the 'humanity' beneath. Stereotyping sells papers, makes complex matters appear simple, and appeases people's own tribal or pack instincts.

Seumas Milne, writing in today's Guardian (http://bit.ly/pyrUCF), dismisses the arguments of those who suggest that the Norwegian mass murderer Breivik is insane. I'm sure Milne is correct : Breivik had planned his 'political' strategy for years in consultation with extreme right-wing Islamophobic groups in England and elsewhere. He lives in a world in which a moderate Muslim is only a cover for violent extremist Muslims, a world in which any politician who makes a noise that they can construe as being sympathetic to Islam (in the words of columnist Melanie Phillips, whom Breivik apparently quotes at length in his manifesto) is "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process." (see http://bit.ly/neU37p ) This is the woman that the BBC chooses to put on 'the Moral Maze' - see earlier post - the woman who smells anti-semitism in every critical comment about the Israeli government who nonetheless condemns the British Muslim community for its "inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation". Am I glad I don't live in her world of stereotypes, labels and conspiracy theories.

I get the same sense of frustration when I read that 'all Christians believe X', 'all Muslims believe Y' - or at least, if they don't believe X or Y then they implicitly support those who do. It's not true. I remember a conversation I had with a respected Jewish rabbi who was telling me about a series of inter-faith conferences he attended. Within a couple of hours of assembling, the conservative and fundamentalist Muslims, Jews and Christians would have gathered at one end of the room, and the liberal-minded ones at the other. If Breivik hadn't been a "white Christian" fanatic, but born in Pakistan instead, he would have been a fanatical Muslim mass murderer. The skin colour and religion is just an excuse, irrelevant in itself. Every religion has verses in its scriptures that can be pressed into service to justify mass homicide, provided they are taken in isolation. You don't have to be insane to become a fanatic - just have . . . I don't know . . a profoundly low self-esteem, coupled with an inflated ego, a touch of an inability to see things from others' perspective and perhaps mostly an addiction to conversations that fuel that tribal sense of heroic self-righteousness (which I'm sure must be quite enjoyable and addictive).

Seumas Milne might have noted that the Guardian's immediate initial response to the atrocity as soon as the news broke was to identify the likely perpetrator as an Islamic extremist. Ironic that the same evening as the killing, the English Defence League firebombed a mosque (in Luton, I think) and daubed it with slogans. According to Melanie Phillips, as a white Christian I must be an apologist for such acts - irrevocably tainted as I am by racial and religious association. In fact it is people like her who are the apologists, not only for the EDL and the Breiviks, but for the Islamic fanatics too.

The problem with looking for the common 'humanity' in each other is that 'humanity' can be - as we see - both beautiful and gracious but also disgusting and brutal. There are choices to be made all along the line about what constitutes 'humanity' - something that I believe is a fundamental weakness in the (secular) Humanist project. For me, I'm inclined to follow the Quaker advice to 'look for that which is of Christ in everyone'.