Category Archives: International

A BROTHERHOOD INQUIRY IN BAD FAITH

April 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times is on David Cameron’s inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood. The full version I will publish on Pandaemonium next month. Imagine that an elected president is ousted by the military. That the president’s party is declared a ‘terrorist’ organization. That dozens of protesters are shot in the streets, thousands of people imprisoned and hundreds sentenced to death. How should a liberal democracy respond? Presumably, by condemning the coup, denouncing the violence […]

Categories: Britain, International • Tags: arab spring, britain, democracy, egypt, islamism, muslim brotherhood, saudi arabia, war on terror, western policy

THE MANY SHADES OF UKRAINE

March 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

When is an invasion not an invasion? When is sovereignty not sovereignty? When is an unelected regime more legitimate than an elected government? The answer, it seems, is when we are discussing Ukraine. The crisis in Ukraine has swiftly turned into a global stand-off. It has also become the focus for a war of words about the meaning of freedom, democracy, legitimacy and sovereignty. For many in the West, Russia’s operations in Crimea bear comparison to Hitler annexation of the […]

Categories: International • Tags: crimea, democracy, european union, far right, russia, ukraine, vladimir putin, western policy

THE LOST REVOLUTION

February 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

On the first of January,1804, Haiti became the second independent nation in the Americas. The Haitian Declaration of Independence was the triumphant culmination of the only successful slave revolution in history. The content of Haiti’s Declaration became well-known thanks to transcriptions and later printings, yet all copies of the official government-issued document disappeared from view in the decades following the revolution. Unlike the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, which has a deep history of symbolic significance […]

Categories: History, International • Tags: declaration of the rights of man, french revolution, haitian revolution

DIEUDONNÉ: THE CLOWN OF THE ANTI AGE

January 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Let’s be clear: The French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, at the heart of a contemporary storm about anti-Semitism, is a bigot. But the fact that he is a bigot does not mean that all his supporters are, nor that he should be banned. The debate about Dieudonné exposes much of the confusion and blindness that pervades contemporary politics. The latest controversy over the comedian began after the footballer Nicolas Anelka celebrated a goal with the ‘quenelle’, a hand gesture popularised […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: anti-semitism, bernard-henri levy, dieudonne, france, free speech, racism

BEYOND THE VOTE

January 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Two key elections are likely to dominate much political debate this year. The contrast between them helps throw light on the meaning of democracy. Later this year, between April and June, South Africans will go to the polls in the first elections of the post-Mandela era. Ever since South Africa’s first democratic poll in 1994, elections in the country have been defined less by political issues than by race and party loyalty. Blacks have overwhelmingly supported the ANC; whites have […]

Categories: Britain, International, Politics • Tags: democracy, marikana, nelson mandela, scotland, scottish independence, south africa

BUDDHIST POGROMS AND RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS

November 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

There is perhaps no religion that Western liberals find more amenable than Buddhism. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, celebrities seek out Buddhist meditation, many scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and human psychology. Even many of the so-called New Atheists have fallen for Buddhism’s allure, albeit as a philosophy rather than as a faith. For most of its Western sympathisers, Buddhism is a deeply humanist outlook, less a religion than a […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International • Tags: aung sang suu kyi, buddhism, islam, myanmar, religion, religious violence, rohingya, sri lanka

A POLICY WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE

October 9, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The Italian government declared last Friday to be a national day of mourning. President Giorgio Napolitano talked of the latest in ‘a succession of true slaughters of innocents’. ‘We must end this now’, insisted Jean-Claude Mignon, head of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly. ‘I hope that this will be the last time we see a tragedy of this kind’. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the disaster should be ‘a spur to action’. Pope Francis called it ‘a […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: fortress europe, immigration, italy, lampedusa, migration

THE WAR OF THE CYNICS

September 15, 2013 by Kenan Malik

There are two wars being fought over Syria. There is a civil war on the streets of Homs and Aleppo and Ma’loula and Damascus, a war played out in the currency of bombs and bullets and (possibly) sarin. The consequences of this war are, so far, 100,000 dead, seven million displaced and a nation turned to rubble. Then there is the war on the global stage between outside players, a war played out in the grand halls of the UN, […]

Categories: International • Tags: chemical weapons, imperialism, russia, syria, war on terror, western policy

ON PABLO NERUDA

September 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

It was forty ago today that Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, in a CIA-supported coup, replacing his democratically elected government with a bloody dictatorship. Twelve days after the coup, the poet Pablo Neruda died in mysterious circumstances, many believe murdered by the Pinochet regime. (Earlier this year a Chilean court ordered Neruda’s body to be exumed for forensic tests and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the man supposedly involved in poisoning the poet). Gabriel García […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International • Tags: chile, pablo neruda, poetry, salvador allende

SYRIA: MORALITY AND REALITY

September 4, 2013 by Kenan Malik

First, the British parliament rejects David Cameron’s demand for an immediate military strike on Syria. Then, Barack Obama, seemingly all set to bomb Syria, decides to postpone any action until it wins backing from Congress (which is by no means a foregone conclusion). The extraordinary flip-flops and u-turns over policy towards Syria on both sides of the Atlantic last week might seem to express the triumph of the democratic process over hasty belligerence. They speak also, however, to the confusion […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: arab spring, britain, cia, freedom struggles, imperialism, iraq, morality, syria, use, war on terror, western policy

ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

August 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

On 29 August 1966, Sayyid Qutb, the ideological leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was hanged in Cairo’s military prison, on the orders of Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser. Qutb and the Brotherhood had, in 1952, supported Nasser when he seized power in a military coup that overthrew the monarchy. In return for his support, Nasser offered Qtub a government post, which the latter declined. The two, however, soon fell out. Nasser, who came to personify Arab secular nationalism, bloodily repressed […]

Categories: International, Politics • Tags: anwar sadat, arab spring, egypt, freedom struggles, hosni mubarak, islamism, liberalism, muslim brotherhood, nasser

TYRANNY IS ALWAYS TYRANNY, WHOEVER MAY BE THE TARGET

August 1, 2013 by Kenan Malik

When, on 3 July, the Egyptian army ousted President Mohammed Morsi, and took control of the nation, many liberals and secularists rationalized it not as a coup but as the military acting on behalf of the people to protect the revolution. When the army imprisoned Morsi, and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, censored its media and suspended the constitution, many liberals and secularists rationalized it not as an authoritarian crackdown but as measures necessary to check the ambitions of the Brotherhood and […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: arab spring, arab world, democracy, egypt, freedom struggles, muslim brotherhood, tony blair, western policy

ON DEMOCRACY AS A GOOD

January 3, 2013 by Kenan Malik

If 2011 brought the promise of democracy to the Arab world, in 2012 democratic change appeared to founder on political reality. In Egypt, democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi has tried to gather into his own hands powers far greater that that held previously by Hosni Mubarak, and is railroading through a constitution that many fear will undermine the gains of the revolution. In Libya and Tunisia Islamist-influenced governments are promoting laws restricting rights, constraining speech, and maintaining social inequality. In […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: arab spring, democracy, egypt, freedom struggles, liberties, western policy

ON NUANCE AND ITS BAGGAGE

October 10, 2012 by Kenan Malik

On Monday I chaired an illuminating discussion called ‘Inside the Mind of the Taliban’ with Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn and Jason Elliot. Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, who until recently lived in Kandahar, have written a series of outstanding books on Afghanistan, including An Enemy We Created, which tells the story of how the American insistence that al Qaeda and the Taliban were in effect a single, unified enemy, and Washington’s view of the Taliban as just another […]

Categories: International • Tags: afghanistan, alex strick von lindschoeten, felix kuehn, jason elliot, relativism, taliban, universalism, war on terror

TO NAME THE UNNAMEABLE

January 22, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘A poet’s work. To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ So says the irreverent, satirical poet Baal in The Satanic Verses. What the storm over Salman Rushdie’s non-appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival reveals is that too few people these days think like Baal. Rushdie was due to have attended the festival – which is quickly becoming one of the most important global literary […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: free speech, hari kunzru, india, jaipur literary festival, milton, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses