Tag: racism

FROM THE VAULTS: ISLAM, IMMIGRATION AND INVASION

March 13, 2013 by Kenan Malik

My book on the history of moral thought is all but complete (yay!). Hopefully, blogging will be back to normal next week. In the meantime, here is another old book review plucked from the vaults, this one of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on a Revolution in Europe. It was first published in New Humanist in July 2009. For more discussion of the myths about immigration, multiculturalism and Islam, see my Milton K Wong lecture, which is in two parts. In his classic […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: christopher caldwell, humanism, immigration, islamism, islamophobia, racism

GERALD SCARFE, ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE DANISH CARTOONS

January 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

How should we respond to the controversy over the Gerald Scarfe cartoon? Last Sunday – Holocaust Memorial Day – the Sunday Times published a cartoon by Scarfe, its regular cartoonist, depicting the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with blood-red coloured cement, in which were trapped Palestinians. The cartoon instantly created international outrage. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, denounced the cartoon as ‘shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: anti-semitism, danish cartoons, free speech, gerald scarce, israel, liberal hypocrisy, offence, racism

SCIENCE, MYTH AND HISTORY

December 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is the third in a series of extracts that I have been running from my book Strange Fruit. The extracts tell the story of ‘Kennewick Man’ and explore what the debate around a 9000-year old skeleton reveals about current ideas of culture and race. The first extract looked at questions cultural ownership, the second at the issue of race. This third extract links the two in a discussion of the relationship between science, myth and history, and the way […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, clovis, creation myths, human origins, indigenous culture, jonathan marks, kennewick man, native americans, paul martin, racial science, racism, romanticism, vine deloria

REACHING FOR A MORAL HIGH GROUND LONG SINCE CROWDED

November 11, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Today’s Premiership clash between Chelsea and Liverpool provides a good opportunity for me to write about something about which I have been thinking for a long time – the controversy over racism in English football. Chelsea and Liverpool are the two clubs at the heart of that controversy. Earlier this year, Luis Suarez, Liverpool’s Uruguayan forward, was banned for eight matches for calling Manchester United’s Patrice Evra a ‘negrito’. Suarez insisted that this was colloquial Spanish for ‘mate’. An FA disciplinary […]

Categories: Free Speech, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: anti-racism, football, hate speech, racism

ME. MY BRAIN. MY CRIME.

July 13, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘I’m going to assume that you accept the materialist view of personality, that character/mind is determined by both the brain and environmental factors. You used the examples of trust and anger as emotions that are not necessarily good for the former or bad for the latter. But what about indisputably pernicious tendencies like sexual predation/violence, psychopathy or homicidal urges? If one accepted a materialist conception of the mind, then wouldn’t it be an uncontroversial good to use medical/scientific means to […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, crime, free will, julian savulescu, liberties, materialism, mind, moral enhancement, morality, neuroscience, racism, sam harris

MULTICULTURALISM – THE BROADCAST

June 24, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My Milton K Wong lecture, ‘What’s wrong with multiculturalism?’, that I gave in Vancouver earlier this month, was broadcast on CBC on Friday. I have already posted the transcript of the talk, in two parts, here and here. (The broadcast has been slightly edited to fit the CBC schedule; the transcript is in full.) There is a Milton K Wong website dedicated to discussion and debate around the themes of the talk.

Categories: Multiculturalism • Tags: anders breivik, british asians, british politics, broadcasts, clash of civilizations, cultural diversity, danish cartoons, europe, far right, french politics, germany, guest workers, immigration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, riots, rushdie affair, turkish migrants

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 2]

June 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is the second part of the transcript of my Milton K Wong lecture that I delivered in Vancouver last week. I posted the first part earlier this week. The talk will be broadcast in full on 22 June on the CBC’s Ideas strand. The story I have told so far is of a Europe that is not as plural as many imagine it to be, and of immigrants less assertive of their cultural identities than they are claimed to be. Multicultural policies emerged not because […]

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: anders breivik, behzti, british politics, clash of civilizations, cultural diversity, danish cartoons, diversity, europe, far right, handsworth riots, isaiah berlin, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, riots, rushdie affair, will kymlicka

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 1]

June 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I gave the Milton K Wong lecture in Vancouver on Sunday. I very much enjoyed the event- it was a stunning venue, a superb audience and a good discussion of the issues. My thanks to the Laurier Institution, University of British Columbia and CBC for inviting me. Entitled ‘What is Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perpective’, the lecture pulled together many of the themes about immigration, identity, diversity and multiculturalism of which I have been talking and writing recently. It was […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: british asians, british politics, britishness, christopher caldwell, europe, french politics, germany, guest workers, immigration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, parekh report, racism, turkish migrants

‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’

May 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This! seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. (The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full.) The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Multiculturalism • Tags: alain benoist, alain finkielkraut, black culture, charles taylor, cultural diversity, enlightenment, france, herder, identity politics, isaiah berlin, multiculturalism, native son, nouvelle droite, racism, richard wright, romanticism, tariq modood, walter benn michaels, will kymlicka, yugoslavia

THREE MYTHS OF IMMIGRATION

May 8, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I am giving the Milton K Wong Lecture in Vancouver in June. Entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perspective’, it will try to explain to a Canadian audience, for whom multiculturalism has a very different meaning than it does to a European one, the contours of the European debate, as well as my disagreements with both sides. In particular I want to show why both multiculturalists and many of their critics (particularly their rightwing critics) buy into the same […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: british asians, british politics, britishness, christopher caldwell, europe, french politics, immigration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racial science, racism, secularism, tariq modood

THE SPECTRE OF LE PEN AND THE SHAME OF THE LEFT

May 1, 2012 by Kenan Malik

The incumbent candidate falters badly. His main opponent fares barely any better. The candidates from so-called ‘fringe’ parties garner more votes than either of the mainstream ones. The far right gains its biggest success. The only thing striking about the first round of the French elections was that there was nothing striking about it. It followed the pattern of almost every election across Europe over the past few years. This Sunday Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande will slug it out […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: austerity, communist party, democracy, euro crisis, european union, francois hollande, french politics, front national, geert wilders, immigration, jean-luc melenchon, marine le pen, nikolas sarkozy, pcf, racism

WHY HATE SPEECH SHOULD NOT BE BANNED

April 19, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I gave an interview last year to Peter Molnar for a book on the regulation of hate speech that he was editing with Michael Herz. The book comes out of a series of conferences and seminars organised by New York’s Cardozo School of Law and the Central European University in Budapest. (I presented a paper at a seminar in Budapest). Other contributors include Jeremy Waldron, Ronald Dworkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nadine Strossen and Bhikhu Parekh. The book is finally published this […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: blasphemy, far right, free speech, hate speech, holocaust denial, homophobia, incitement laws, james watson, liberties, race relations act, racism, religion, religious hatred law, rwanda

CLR JAMES, FRANTZ FANON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERATION

April 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-imperialism, black politics, claude levi-strauss, clr james, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, herder, imperialism, negritude, racism, sartre, separatism, universalism

SHAWSHANK WITHOUT THE REDEMPTION

April 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Imagine being held in solitary confinement, not for a day, not for a year, but for forty years. Imagine entering a cell, four paces long, three paces wide, when Richard Nixon was in the White House and still being confined to that cell, as Barack Obama gears up for re-election. Imagine being confined to that cell for every minute of those forty years apart from time out to shower and a walk around an outdoor cage three times a week, […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties • Tags: angola 3, injustice, liberties, prisons, racism, usa

LIBERATING FREE SPEECH FROM THE SHACKLES OF BAD FAITH

April 2, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘I have definitely become a free speech fundamentalist,’ says Flemming Rose. Perhaps that should not be surprising. It was, after all, Rose who, as culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005. He had picked up on a story about the difficulties that children’s author Kåre Bluitgen had faced in finding an illustrator for a book he was writing on Islam. Every illustrator that Bluitgen had contacted had been worried that he would end […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: behzti, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, index on censorship, islamism, islamophobia, jytte klausen, kenan malik's books, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, locke, racism, rushdie affair