Martin McGuinness for President?

 government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, prejudice & discrimination, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Oct 042011
 
Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, always good for a soundbite, is certainly making some interesting news stories these days.

His effective admission yesterday (3 October) that the Provisional IRA did commit murder when innocent people died as a result of their activities is another – major? – step forward in Northern Ireland’s unsteady and decidedly volatile route to a lasting peace. McGuinness told The Independent: “The IRA were involved in quite a number of incidents which resulted in the accidental killing of innocent people and the term used by the relatives of those people who were killed was that they were murdered. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m not going to disagree with their analysis of what happened to their loved ones…. I accept that, in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, then it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.”

Of course, McGuinness maintains that the army and police personnel and Unionist paramilitaries blown up or gunned down by the IRA were legitimate targets in a ‘bitter war’ - to say anything other would be to disrespect both his own past and the hundreds of IRA members who died or served jail sentences for their cause. Much as his ORANGE ambition is driving him in his quest for the Irish presidency, his PURPLE loyalties and BLUE devotion to the cause will not let him go that far.

Nonetheless, at a rally at Free Derry Corner a few days earlier (29 September), the deputy first minister, after telling a crowd of some 2,000 that his heart went out to all those who lost loved ones as a result of the conflict, added: “I am also conscious of many British soldiers, members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, and my heart goes out to all their relatives.”

It’s easy to dismiss his remarks as the kind of crass manipulation typical of the ORANGE vMEME. McGuinness, however, claims the remarks were genuine and unscripted. If so, then maybe there’s some 2nd Tier thinking emerging in McGuinness’ head if he can genuinely empathise with the former enemy…?

McGuinness the Reconciler?
As  he gets serious about his campaign to become the Republic’s president, McGuinness is presenting himself more and more as a peacemaker, someone able to bring reconciliation to the still-divided peoples of Northern Ireland.

Certainly the close working relationship he formed with the once-hated Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government of 2007 - they were lampooned as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ by some of those close to them! - is an indicator of how much McGuinness wanted  the devolved government of the province to work. When Paisley’s successor as  first minister, Peter Robinson, had his career rocked by very public marital problems, McGuiness was one of the first to offer personal support.

McGuinness  has even reached into the thorny realms of the religious schisms fuelling much  of the suspicion, distrust and outright contempt between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists.

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Martin MgGuinness and David Latimer at the ard fheis, September 2011 [Copyright © 2011 BBC

This  September he got the Reverend David  Latimer of the First Derry Presbyterian Church to be a guest speaker at Sinn  Fein’s ard fheis (annual conference)  in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. It was a ground-breaking event on 2

accounts. Firstly, it is the first time Sinn Fein’s ard  fheis has been held north of the Irish border. Secondly, it is the first  time a Protestant clergyman has been a key note speaker at the ard fheis. McGuinness told the ard fheis: "In my experience of recent years, many within the Unionist  community are up for a journey of reconciliation and dialogue." Latimer  referred to McGuinness as his ‘brother’ on that journey.

Both  the bravery of the move and the complexity of the issues involved are reflected in the vociferous criticisms of Jim  Allister, MLA for North Antrim and leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice. He called Latimer a ‘latter day Lundy’. (Robert Lundy was the Governor of Derry in 1688 who tried to persuade his Protestant ‘Orange’ forces that resistance to the Catholic Jacobites was  useless - acts portrayed in Unionist tradition as outright treachery.)

This  weekend Latimer endorsed McGuinness’s candidacy for the Irish presidency, saying McGuinness is a man on a journey, able to bring a community attached to the gun and bomb in the direction of democracy and peace. Given the reverend probably doesn’t have the Special Branch bodyguards the deputy first minister has, it’s to be hoped he doesn’t become the victim of some extremist Unionist gunman!

McGuiness the Terrorist?
McGuinness told The Independent most people don’t care if he was in the IRA. This, unfortunately, seems to be a cack-handed  attempt at disingenuity.

It  certainly matters to Jim Allister and others like him. "This latter day Lundy [Latimer] may see McGuinness as ‘one of the great leaders of modern times’, I see him as one of the most unrepentant terrorist godfathers of modern times.”

Which begs 2 questions:-

  1. is McGuinness a terrorist?
  2. can McGuinness be trusted by Unionists?

Martin McGuinness, 1972

McGuinness  doesn’t deny he was once in the IRA. It is claimed by British Intelligence that McGuinness was an influential member of the Provisional IRA Army Council. The Saville Report (2010) indicated it was likely McGuinness had a Thompson submachine gun at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstration on 30 January 1972 but was unable to establish whether he had used it against British soldiers. He was jailed in the Republic for attempting to transport explosives across the border. It is rumoured McGuinness pulled the trigger on several executions – though no credible evidence has ever been produced.

While McGuinness undoutedly saw himself as a ‘freedom fighter’, the actions he undertook, in the eyes of the British state, were undoubtedly terrorism. Directly or indirectly, it is almost certain he is responsible for deaths - murders?

We don’t know for sure, but let’s assume he does have ‘blood on his hands’. Does that mean he hasn’t proved  a very capable deputy first minister? Does that mean he doesn’t now want a form of reconciliation and dialogue between Republicans and Unionists? Can people change?

According  to Sean Kay (2011), McGuiness told him anyone wanting to go back to violence in Northern Ireland would have to go through him.

Nelson Mandela: an example of change
It’s  instructive here to look to South Africa. Nelson Mandela, now regarded as one of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century was jailed in 1962 for conspiracy to carry out a bombing campaign in opposition to the ruling whites’ policy of Apartheid. It is rumoured that, from his prison cell, he helped organise the Church Street bombing in Pretoria on 20 May 1983 in which 19 people died and more than 200 were injured - though insufficient evidence has been produced to substantiate such claims.  However, it is unequivocal that Mandela’s then-wife Winnie endorsed the practice of ‘necklacing’ - ie: placing a tyre around a suspected collaborator and setting it alight to burn them to death. This was stated in a speech on 13 April 1986 as an explicit follow-through of Nelson’s declaration that some hideous punishment must be found for ‘traitors’, exposed during the 1962 trial.

Like McGuinness, it is likely that Mandela had ‘blood on his hands’…yet he became, with the help of Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (among others), one of the staunchest advocates of peace and reconciliation the modern world has ever seen. He is a true visionary that people around the world call for time and time again, even though his age and health problems clearly limit his potential to nothing other than the most nominal involvement.

So, if Mandela could change, why can’t McGuinness? Mandela never compromised his principle of majority rule for South Africa. But, in changed circumstances and with different voices talking to him, he found a different, more peaceful way of approaching the problem. There is no doubt that McGuinness’ objective is an ‘island of Ireland’, separate from Great Britain. But, if he’s looking at some different ways of working towards that objective than killing Unionists and British soldiers, should we forbid him from pursuing those different ways?

Understanding the milieu
McGuinness and Gerry Adams have, for some considerable time, promoted the view that there is a peaceful - though rather more prolonged - course to achieving the island of Ireland. In promoting that view, they have undermined the hard core who want to bomb and shoot their way to it. In committing themselves to democratic means, McGuinness, Adams and their like are also committed to the principle that they cannot achieve their objective until the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland also want it.

That means patience - the island of Ireland might not happen in their lifetime, if indeed ever. It also means persuasion. Adams has shown himself repeatedly to be a master of persuasion. McGuinness tends to be more straight-talking, with a tendency, in the words of the old proverb, to wear his heart on his sleeve.

That straight-talking could prove endearing if, as he appears to have done at Free Derry Corner, it leads him to an unscripted acknowledgement of the pain and misery of others, of which he is, in some small part at least, a cause. But simply dismissing his past with a bland assertion that most people don’t care about it is either crass disingenuity or a gross misunderstanding of the same PURPLE-BLUE vMEME harmonic driving the core of Unionist thinking that drives Republican thinking. As Derry priest Father Michael Canny has pointed out, McGuinness has a great deal to explain about his relationship with the IRA.

Like Mandela and his aborted bombing campaign, McGuinness has come an awful long way from the IRA gunman who toted a submachine gun on Bloody Sunday. He is one of the true architects of Northern Ireland’s fragile peace and he has been a key participant in making it work. As president of the Republic, with his knowledge of Northern Ireland politics and government, he could be an invaluable asset to the governments of both north and south in promoting greater harmony and cooperation.

To progress his campaign, though, he needs to find it within himself to reconcile his own past with the image he wishes to promote of peacemaker.

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, religion, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Apr 122010
 

Are Western leaders and the Western media missing a critical opportunity to exacerbate the divisions in our Muslim communities, between the minority who advocate the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of an Islamic hegemony and the majority who do not support such tactics and may even abhor them…?

For about 5 hours on 2 March it was hot news: Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, had issued a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. He said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam.

He regretted the fact that the Islamic teachings, which are based on love, peace and welfare, are being manipulated and quoted out of context to serve the designs of vested interests (such as al-Qaeda). He said that Islam spelled out a clear code of conduct during the course of war and gave complete protection to non-combatants including women, the old, children, etc – with trading centres, schools, hospitals and places of worship deemed to be ‘safe places’.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is far from being the first to condemn terrorism. As a reaction to 9/11, just days later Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar, Tariq Bishri, Muhammad Awwa and Fahmi Huwaydi, all from Egypt, Haytham Khayyat of Syria and American imam Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani issued a combined statement: “All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorise the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment. … [It is] necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and [punished] appropriately. … [It is] a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means.” Their statement was just one of many condemning fundamentalist terrorism at the time. In July 2003 Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of the Al-Azhar mosque of Cairo – considered the highest authority in Sunni Islam – said groups which carried out suicide bombings were the enemies of Islam. In January 2004 Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Shaykh ‘Abdul-’Azeez Aal ash-Shaykh told 2 million pilgrims: “Islam has forbidden violence in all its forms. It has forbidden hijacking airplanes, ships and other means of transport and has forbidden all acts that would undermine security.” Later that same year a group of prominent scholars (including ash-Shaykh and ul-Qadri) got together to issue ‘The Amman Message’ and a number of scholars, including ul-Qadri, have issued shorter, simpler denunciations since then. What makes ul-Qadri’s new fatwa different is the sheer depth and breadth of religious and legal scholarly argument it goes into to support its pronouncements. Also it declares someone who undertakes terrorist activities to be an unbeliever who cannot go to Heaven.

Ul-Qadri has effectively refuted all the fundamentalist arguments that the radical imams put forward to support terrorism. These arguments essentially cluster around 2 key ideas:-

  • It is a Muslim’s duty to use violence to relieve fellow Muslims from oppression by unbelievers (Sura 2: 191, 193). What tends to get twisted or ignored, though, is the ending of 193: “…if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.”
    ‘Oppression’ clearly is the tricky word here. Civilian Afghans being slaughtered by American helicopter gunships is unequivocally oppression…while the act is taking place. Is it still oppression when the act is stopped and the American military apologises and takes measures to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again? Living by choice as a minority under a government which allows you freedom to worship but doesn’t espouse your religious values in its social policies – the position of the Muslim communities in the UK, for example – is that oppression?
  • The belief that a warrior slain in battle for Allah will go to Heaven and be wedded to 72 beautiful virgins. This last highly-effective meme is created by putting together disconnected verses – eg: Sura 9:111 with Sura 55:46-78. This running together of different concepts to create a new idea is typical of the way religious philosophers manipulate ‘holy book’ text to create something the original writer(s) may not have intended. Radical imams certainly do it – but they’re not the only religious leaders who do it or have done it in the past. From the Crusades and before through to World War II and after, Christian leaders have manipulated Bible text in a similar same way to justify slaughter of the ‘enemy’ (including civilians).
    Sura 4: 29-30 makes it clear that suicide is wrong for a Muslim. So the imams have to twist it that a ‘suicide bomber’ blowing themselves up to destroy the ‘enemy’ (civilians) is not actually deliberately ending their own life (suicide) but is a martyr dying in battle in the service of God. Otherwise, the suicide bomber can’t expect to go to Heaven and claim his virgins.

Ul-Qadri can’t rule out jihad but he can and does hedge it about with teachings about how war is to be fought in a way that protects the innocent and preserves the integrity of both the cause and God’s will.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is the unequivocal Islamic denunciation of terrorist tactics Tony Blair called for from Britain’s Muslim leaders in the wake of 7/7. (Ul-Qadri’s choice of London to launch his fatwa was undoubtedly a deliberate part of his strategy.)

So how come the Western media has paid it so little attention? And, by largely ignoring it, are Western governments missing a key opportunity?

Helping out a different perspective on religious leadership
Unlike the Christian churches, there is no clear and rigidly defined hierarchy of leadership in either Sunni or Shi’a Islam. Rather leadership is envisaqed as a trust (Rafik Issa Beekun & Jamal Badawi, 1999). Leaders have to win and maintain the trust of their followers and their leadership is then recognised – eg: ‘Ayotollah’ is a Shi’a term of recognition for an expert in Islamic studies who will usually hold a teaching post. ‘Mullah’ and ‘immam’ are terms that roughly equate to ‘priest’; but there is no hierarchy equivalent to, for example, curate, vicar, deacon, archdeacon, bishop, archbishop in the Church of England.

Islamic scholars and teachers tend to gain influence from the numbers of their followers and the respect the followers show for the cleric’s teachings, rather than simply from the position they hold.

Thus, Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is not to Muslims like the edict of the Pope to Catholics. He is but one of hundreds, if not thousands of Islamic scholars, seeking to establish influence from their interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. So it is not a case of Ul-Qadri has pronounced; now all Muslims will oppose terrorism. Those Muslims who follow Ul-Qadri should now take his position as the definitive statement on the matter. Those who are unsure whether terrorism can be justified from scripture now have a very powerful voice giving them the soundest theological arguments as to why it can’t possibly be. Other open-minded scholars, hopefully, will test Ul-Qadri’s arguments and find they can support them and disseminate his messages through their own followers.

Since Ul-Qadri’s position is not like the Pope speaking to millions upon millions of Catholics through a hierarchical route of command expected to produce obedience, surely it is in the West’s interests to help Ul-Qadri spread his message and increase his influence?

For all we know, the intelligence agencies (CIA, MI5, etc) may be working covertly to support anti-terrorism Islamic leaders; but in public at least there is the proverbial deafening silence. There has been scant media coverage of Ul-Qadri’s fatwa and its reception in the Islamic world – which is where it really counts – beyond the day of its launch. To me, this is decidedly puzzling.

Other Muslim-sponsored events which take an anti-terrorist stance also tend to go unreported on in the West – eg: the Anti-Terrorism/All India Conference of February 2008, the National Peace Conference in Pakistan (April 2009). And attention is rarely given to Muslim anti-terrorism web sites such as the Free Muslims Coalition.

The general impression given in much of the Western media is that the majority of Muslims go along with or are indifferent to the extremists. In fact, there is real evidence that there are distinct anti-terrorism movements amongst the Muslim communities around the world and that there is an intellectual and spiritual battle on for how Islam deals with its relations with both ‘oppressors’ in particular and unbelievers in general.

So, why, oh, why are Western leaders and the Western media largely ignoring these movements when they offer ways to engage with peace-supporting Islamic leaders with the means of influencing millions of Muslims around the world and isolating the extremists?

Just think: if the news bulletins covering last month’s suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro had carried interviews with ul-Qadri quoting the Qur’an to denounce the terrorists as ‘unbelievers’ and stating that they would not go to Heaven…. How powerful a message would that have been?!?

The likes of Ul-Qadri being consulted on TV would increase their influence – especially amongst the millions of Muslims living in the West. Surely we want their views to be more influential than, say, Osama bin Laden’s?!?

If the neo-Christian West wants a peaceful relationship with Islam, both within and without its own domains, then we need to engage actively, supportively and publicly with Muslim leaders who are anti-terrorism in their views.

Seeing the likes of Ul-Qadri denouncing terrorists on TV will also help to ‘normalise’ the concept of Muslim leaders airing their views via a national medium and will present a much more positive image of Islam to the non-Muslim majorities in the Western countries.

Isolating the Extremists
At the beginning of this Blog post, I talked about exacerbating the divisions in the Muslim communities. This means isolating the extremists and shrinking their numbers while boosting the standing of Muslims who want to pursue their faith in a manner which allows for co-existence with unbelievers and at least tolerates, even if in disgust and seeking change through peaceful means, the laws of a country in which they are clearly the minority population.

This inevitably means that the extremists will attack the non-extremists as ‘traitors to the cause’ and will force the non-extremists to defend themselves.

The Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) Don Beck (2003) developed from running the vMEMES of Spiral Dynamics through Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland’s Social Judgement Theory (1961) demonstrates that the more extreme someone’s position on a policy or philosophy the more likely they are to see moderate positions on their own side as being more like positions on the other side. From the extremist perspective, this Contrasting Effect puts greater distance between extremist positions and more moderate positions on the same side, even to the point of demonising the moderates as effectively being in league with the other side. (The Assimilating Effect is seen when moderates from different sides minimise or turn a ‘blind eye’ to very real differences between them, in order to accentuate their commonalities. An example of this are the inter-faith movements.)

To some considerable extent the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have already demonstrated the Contrast Effect by carrying out ‘takfir’ on moderate Muslims opposed to them. Takfir is the act of declaring another Muslim to have committed aposotacy and become a ‘kafir’ (unbeliever); since apostacy is punished by death (Qur’an 5:32), this enables the Taliban (and al-Qaeda) to justify killing moderate Muslims. (In ACE terms, this is the ‘Zealot’ punishing those who deviate from what it decrees is ‘the one true way’.)

Since Islam is a brotherhood and Muslims are obliged to support and protect one another (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622), from a theological point of view takfir is necessary for one Muslim to kill another. However, ul-Qadri’s fatwa effectively declares takfir on terrorists and suicide bombers. Thus, moderate Muslims who subscribe to fatwas such as ul-Qadri’s, can now legitimately kill terrorists and suicide bombers because they are apostate.

To further this division between the extremists and the moderates, the neo-Christian West must increase the commonalities with the moderate Muslims – thus, increasing the Assimilation Effect between moderate Muslims and Westerners willing to engage with them as respected equals. As those commonalities are increased, so a common identity needs to be developed - as per Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993)  Common In-Group Identity Model (1993) – which separates the moderates from the extremists in conceptual terms.

Western ignorance, Western arrogance or Western scheming?
With ul-Qadri’s fatwa having the potential to change the entire relationship between Islam and terrorism, it remains a baffling mystery why so little attention seems to be being paid to it.

Could it be that potential is not recognised?

In which case, people in high places and their advisors are not paying attention. Perhaps their attention is elsewhere – Barack Obama fretting over his health care bill; Gordon Brown consumed with how to salvage the general election…? Perhaps, after nearly 9 years of the ‘War on Terror’, there still aren’t enough senior figures in the White House or Whitehall who understand Islam and how it works, to recognise the significance of ul-Qadri’s fatwa…?

As for the media, as we know all too well, bad news sells more newspapers than good news – and it’s a lot easier to drag a story about ill-equipped British troops in Helmand out for several days than it is to explore the subtleties and nuances of a scholarly and religious exposition day after day.

Perhaps it’s due to arrogance – the West can sort it out without understanding Islam?

The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) displayed the West at its most arrogant and foolhardy. Well over a million Muslim lives and the lives of several thousand Western military personnel have been lost since 2001 because so little detailed consideration was put into the follow-throughs. As military operations, both invasions could hardly have gone better; but the soldiers have paid the price since because the politicians and the strategists didn’t understand. They didn’t understand Islam and they didn’t understand tribal cultures; they simply thought they could impose Western-style Democracy and that it would work more or less smoothly from the off. Just how many lives might not have been lost had those politicians and strategists not been so arrogant and bothered to understand before they decided…?

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the first signs of acknowledging diversity and wanting to understand the local varieties of Islam and to get to grips with local tribal cultures are coming from frontline intelligence officers in the US Army. In their paper, ‘Fixing Intel: a Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’, Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger & Paul Batchelor (2010) describe pilot schemes of bottom-up engagement with local tribal elders in Southern Afghanistan which have transformed relations between the tribespeople and the military and seriously disadvantaged local Taliban. And now Colonel Fred Krawchuk – a commander in the Baghdad ‘Surge’ (2007-2008) who used Spiral Dynamics for insight into dealing with local factions – has asked Don Beck to go to Afghanistan to advise the intelligence effort.

But, as Flynn et al argue, this new, developing approach has to go right up through the chain of command to the top – to president and prime minister. We simply can’t afford for the arrogance which led to years of failure in post-invasion Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq to continue to blind us to on-the-ground realities. (No wonder both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and Abraham Maslow (1956) considered 1st Tier ways of thinking to be delusional!)

Is the West scheming – do Western leaders actually want there to be moderate Muslims?

Perhaps there is an agenda suited by the term ‘Muslim’ equaling the term ‘terrorist’? In which case, moderate Muslim leaders who have the influence to undermine the arguments of the fundamentalist clerics are not people Western leaders would wish to support and promote.

We’re clearly on the verge of conspiracy theories here – George W Bush’s use of the term ‘crusader’ in 2001 was a parapraxis (‘Freudian slip’) – there really is a crusade against Islam; the 2003 invasion really was all about getting control of Iraq’s oil; etc, etc. I’m not about to indulge in such speculation but there are numerous instances in recent history of democratically-elected governments manipulating information and  the way it is presented to sell dubious ideas to their populations.

While it’s every government’s job to put the interests of its people above all others, in today’s interconnected world, with economic meltdown triggered by overlending banks halfway around the world, plagues able to travel around the globe on passenger aircraft and nuclear obliteration of the planet still a real (if probably receded) possibility, the days of Bismarckian scheming to set one lot warring against the other for your own national advantage should be long gone.

Which leads us back to the central question: why then so little attention paid to Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s 2 March fatwa?

Designing our Future

 community, education, human rights, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Dec 102009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

I am thrilled to be able to publish another contribution by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

If there is one thing that is certain, it is change.  And that is not about to change.  In fact, the rate of change in the world is increasing all of the time.  The rate of creation of new technology is increasing all of the time and this is leading to an ever more complex interrelated global society.

So how can we design our future when we don’t know what is coming?  Well, we can prepare for change.  What kind of change should we prepare for?  We don’t know, except that it will be big!

It does not sound like there is actually a lot of planning that we can do.  But, there is something very important that we can do. And that is being prepared for change when, inevitably, it does come.

We have recently seen large scale failures in the global banking system and we are threatened by global warming and terrorism to name just two current issues.  There are many other large scale issues facing us right now and these will change and their number will surely increase.

There is one vital ingredient for being prepared for change.  That ingredient is having enough people who cope well with change and complexity.  Of course we can’t just invent people who are good at coping with change out of thin air.  And that, I propose, is where we must design our future.

Strange Times
We are currently living in very strange times.  For many people in the West, we have an incredible standard of living. All of those global problems are mounting up around us and yet most people continue with their daily lives in blissful ignorance of the number and magnitude of the issues that are facing us here and now early in the 21st Century. Hopefully, most people may never need to see the full reality of just how complex and dangerous we have made our world; but therein lies a very real danger.

The difference between our global reality and the common man’s view of life is immense. Despite the current times of instant communication through the internet.  It is strange indeed.

Enough People
Going forward, if we do not have enough people who understand the issues and act to overcome them to take us forward into our next years of comfortable civilisation then the concerns of ordinary people, focused on the issues of their daily lives, will drive our society down a dead end.  A dead end from which there may well be no easy return. A dead end that may see our great civilisation stagger or even fall.

Perhaps that sounds too dramatic..and maybe it is; but I feel a real sense that, to get through the next few decades intact, humanity must start to take more conscious control of the direction in which we are heading.  And, as I said earlier, I believe that the best way to do that is to have enough people who can cope with large scale changes.

Preparing the Ground
So how exactly do we make sure we have enough people who can cope with change?

The question takes us straight back to Spiral Dynamics (SD) or, if you prefer, the human nature that SD models.  Clare Graves spoke of a great leap for mankind.  Those individuals who take that leap open up to the ever changing nature of human values.  By definition, to take this step you must be accepting of the complex nature of what it is to be human and to evolve.

It will not be an overnight process but; if we are to succeed as a race into the distant future, we must prepare the ground by building a society that allows as many people as possible to make this great leap that Clare Graves spoke of.

Dissonance
It turns out, according to Graves’ theory, that people grow through the Spiral of changing values when they are faced with increasing complexity.  New value systems emerge in individuals to help them cope with the problems that arise when an old value system starts to fail them.  In concrete terms, their behaviour, based on an old set of values, fails to maintain their life in society to their satisfaction.  The name used in Spiral Dynamics for this state is dissonance – the state where people start to become uncomfortable with themselves and/or their lives.

So, to grow through the stages of life that individuals need to achieve their full potential and ultimately take that great leap, people must grow through a series of steps, with dissonance at each step.

Dissonance Failure
One of the great values of modern civilisation is our equality and rights. We strive to make sure that everyone has somewhere to live, something to eat, is treated fairly and has equal opportunity.  Unfortunately this is having a rather unpleasant side effect.  When taken to it extremes it removes the natural dissonance that our societies have and creates a rather bland space that lacks complexity, at least in many people’s everyday lives, especially those of children going through an ever more safe and sterile early life.

Where have the rites of passage gone?

Of course, we have not taken all of the challenges out of life.  There are new challenges in life like getting famous and rich.  The trouble with these challenges is that most people fail to pass through them.  They never come out of the other side, having learnt the lessons of life.  Far too many people are unhappy and miserable nowadays.

The Answer?
The answer is, in fact. rather simple…at least on the surface.

The challenge facing us now is to provide our children, young people and those of us a little older with a deliberately designed set of challenges that will lead us all onwards and upwards through the complex Spiral of values to the great leap.

In practice that means massive investments in all kinds of education and social programmes designed to help us all help each other and our children to grow as effectively as possible.

It means education for educators: parents, teachers, managers, trainers, coaches and, in fact, all of us – so that we can produce an environment for learning values.  An environment that will provide security and challenge, at the appropriate times, for each and every individual.

It must be a programme designed to allow each and every one of us to reach our best potential so that as many people as possible will be ready to help humanity cope with the many changes that will surely come.

Children are the Future

Choice
We could of course choose to allow mankind to evolve unconsciously.  Either way we, and our children, have an interesting time ahead of us.

A growing Spiral Dynamics influence in the Middle East

 international conflict, Middle East, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Aug 222009
 

As proud as I am of Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) , as grand as our ambitions are – and partially redesigning the United Kingdom is pretty ambitious!! – as committed to them as I am and as daunting as the challenges we face are, it seems at times relatively ‘small beer’ compared to what the Center for Human Emergence Middle East (CHE-ME) is up to.

Our members don’t live in a semi-hot war zone, with the ever-present threat of real violence (whether terrorist activities – suicide bombers and rockets – or heavy-handed military responses such as in Gaza at the start of this year). The UK might be bothered about corruption in government, desperate to recover from what is being labelled as the worst recession since the 1930s, very unsure of itself as a multi-cultural society in certain parts of the kingdom and iffy in its relations with the EU whilst at the same time being uncertain as to the changing constitutional relationship between its 4 constituent countries. But CHE-ME is faced with a real and frequently violent conflict between one country (Israel) and the stateless land of a dispossessed people it occupies (Palestine), with that stateless land split both geographically and politically. CHE-ME is faced with 2 wars – Israel vs Palestine and Fatah (aka Fateh) vs Hamas – both in fragile ceasefires that threaten to boil over into murderous warfare at any moment.

So it’s a pleasure for me once again to draw attention to the work of Elza Maalouf and CHE-ME – which, it should be stressed, is strongly supported by Integral Israel. In the 5 years since Rafael Nasser first invited Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck to present to Integral Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, enormous progress has been made behind the scenes – particularly in terms of building Palestinian capacity for self-government so that Palestine can be a full and competent partner to Israel in designing a viable and sustainable 2-state solution.

As Elza reports in her article for the Common Ground News Service, ‘6th Convention Fateh’s and the Building of a Nation’, the Convention has made clear recommendations to the Fatah-led government of President Mahmoud Abbas that a new national agenda needs to be designed based on economic development. Many of those who voted for positive change at the Convention had been through some form of training and/or briefing by Maalouf & Beck.

What it seems CHE-ME is beginning to bring about is a major shift in sections of the Palestinian consciousness. That shift is from the old anti-Israeli/Palestinians-as-victims ethos PURPLE and BLUE had got them locked into – which RED demagogues have so ruthlessly exploited for the past half-century and more – into the first stirrings of an ORANGE-driven entrepreneurial culture. The old Palestine, an alienated and divided society embittered with hatred towards Israel and split into its own warring factions, all but invited Israel to occupy and suppress. A new Palestine geared towards the well-being of its people and the economic prosperity of the region must be an attractive proposition as a trading partner for Israel.

The emergence of the ORANGE vMEME, as Beck lays out in his development of Muzafir Sherif’s Assimilation-Contrast Effect, breaks up the log jam of intractable positions by working towards a new and better future.

But, in her big picture perspective, Maalouf knows that Hamas can’t be left out of these developments. So, in her Common Ground article, she points out that the olive branch needs to be offered to Hamas. (Though their work to date has been mostly with Fatah, she & Beck have made some inroads into Hamas and know that there are potentials for change and voices of reason all too often missed in the Western media’s portrayal of that terrorist organisation.)

So, some wonderful news of progress in one of the world’s most troubled and dangerous regions!

For those interested in progress in the Middle East, may I also recommend Bitter Lemons, an EU-funded site dedicated to helping Israelis and Palestinians understand each other’s points of view on the issues which are seen to divide.

Don Beck’s got who at his workshop this weekend…?!?!?!

 American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, NLP, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Mar 062009
 

This weekend Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has got Lt Colonel Fred Krawchuk attending and presenting at his workshop programme at the Integral Centre in Boulder, Colorado. WHAT?!?!?

This man is a killer! He’s been heavily involved in the ‘surge’ in Baghdad. There will be more than a few innocent men, women and children killed by his troops. And suspected insurgents summarily executed without a shred of evidence.

What the fuck is Don doing having this man presenting at his workshop?!?!? And, fercrisakes, what were all those supposedly-TURQUOISE Buddhist types at the Integral Center doing letting this mass murderer through their doors?!?!?!? Have they all gone mad? We’re supposed to be about building a better world, not endorsing the work of ruthless killers!

I tell you, my GREEN vMEME really went off on one!!

I was going to e-mail Don and tell him he was a disgrace! I was going to cancel my ticket to Don’s London workshop on 14 March. I was gonna…! I was gonna…!

 

And then, while seething, I caught sight of the Key Update notification on my home page of the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’. In that article I had advocated the ruthless extermination of terrorists whose peak BLUE made them closed to other, more reasonable points of view.

 

…er, hang on. I wrote an article advocating pretty much what Krawchuk had been trying to do??? Was that the same me having histrionics about this mass murderer presenting at Boulder?

 

Different vMEMES value different things

Well, yes, it was. And, when, I read it again, there isn’t anything I feel the need to change.

 

The me who advocated killing unreasonable and unmovable terrorists was the same me who got so offended by Beck having Krawchuk present at his workshop. Well, it sort of was the same me. But not quite the same me….

 

Put simply, the selfplex – your concept(s) of who you are – bends, twists and morphs according to which vMEMES dominate in your vMEME Stack in any one context. Thus, it was my GREEN which was indulging in histrionics over Krawchuk. However, I’d claim it was 2nd Tier thinking which was behind ‘Killing the Terrorists’. Research to date shows that 2nd Tier thinking will sacrifice a few for the good of all. Thus, I was in a state of outrage over Krawchuk; but, when authoring ‘Kill the Terrorists’, I was coolly aware of both the need to say that and the huge responsibility I was taking upon myself by saying it.

 

Having worked practically with Spiral Dynamics for over 10 years and researched intensely into how it fits into the broader world of the behavioural sciences for over 5, being an NLP Master Practitioner and having undergone all the self-examination that goes with that training, I thought I pretty much understood how human beings work – how I work! Getting to understand just how and why I had reacted so strongly to the news of Krawchuk’s involvement at Boulder has been an important learning for me. And once again it brings home to me to just how much vMEMES shape our current state.

 

Now I look at Don Beck’s blurb about Krawchuk with interest – that he “has been in our SDi series before. He played a major role in revealing the underlying  tribal structures and demonstrated how to relate to Shia and Sunni factions, as well as integrate the military with the civilian elements.” Krawchuk used Spiral Dynamics-rooted strategies in Baghdad…? Wow! I almost wish Krawchuk could be at London next weekend – and I’m certainly pleased Don intends including Krawchuk’s work in his briefings.

Israeli Stupidity in Gaza!

 international conflict, schemas & memes, terrorism  4 Responses »
Jan 102009
 

Want to seem like brutal stormtroopers butchering children? Want to undermine a relative moderate (Mahmoud Abbas) and turn his people against him? Want to have Arab governments with no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas forced into denouncing you by the protesting hordes flooding on to their streets? Want to swell the ranks of al-Qaeda with bitter young men and women dedicated to killing Jews and Americans? Want to have massive anti-Israeli demonstrations in the capitals of all the countries you used to call your friends?

 

 

OK, let’s really go for it: want to seem like the SS in the Warsaw ghetto?

 

Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni could not have got it more wrong. Of course, Livni is right: Hamas need to be destroyed (“toppled” is the word she reportedly used). As do all terrorist organisations locked into rigid RED-BLUE thinking – see the feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’ in the Global section. But this brutal onslaught on the Gaza Strip, one of the poorest and most populous places on the planet, is not the way to do it.

 

The Israeli military are doing their best to keep foreign journalists out of Gaza; but, in these days of the internet and video uploads from mobile phones, it’s impossible to impose a complete news blackout. We certainly know it’s bad, with an estimated 800 Gazans dead already and thousands more injured and maimed. Just how bad we might never really know if the Israelis manage to clean up a lot of the mess before the news crews arrive on mass. But it’s bad.

 

Ostensibly it’s Jews having a field day killing Arabs. That’s how it comes across on thousands of TV channels and internet news sites right around the world. Just imagine what the radical imams are ranting in the mosques!

 

So Israel alienates its friends and empowers its enemies. If Osama Bin Laden is still alive, he must be laughing and slapping his knees with delight!

 

Of course, we can safely assume the Israeli military are not deliberately targeting innocent civilians – so the Warsaw ghetto analogy is mischievous on my part – but the impression is one of complete, callous indifference on the part of the Israeli military to the loss of innocent lives and the suffering. It’s on a par with the Americans counting American and British dead in Iraq but no attempt to count Iraqi dead. The message taken by millions around the world is that Iraqi and Palestinian lives are not as important as American and Israeli lives.

 

And, for many, that has a racist sub-text: if Arab lives aren’t as important as American and Israeli lives,  that must be because they are considered inferior.

 

Add to all this the fact that most Palestinians and Iraqis are Muslim and it’s all too easy to portray the Israelis and the Americans as anti-Muslim. So, for hundreds of thousands of Muslims all over the world, the Gaza video footage and the ranting anti-Zionist rhetoric that usually goes with it becomes a call to arms to rescue or avenge their Muslim brothers from the oppression of the Great Satans, America and Israel.

 

Of course, Hamas show an equal lack of concern for the lives of the Gazans they are supposed to govern. In their RED-BLUE zealotry, they refuse to sign up to the Franco-Egyptian ceasefire plan because it would mean the end of their arms supply route through Egypt. So being able to resume their war against Israel is more important to them than the deaths and suffering of their own people.

 

But Hamas have got better PR than the Israeli military. They’re the plucky little guys with peashooters taking on jets and tanks in the name of Allah. And, when they’re killed, why, they’re brave warriors for Allah, guaranteed a place in heaven.

 

And the ordinary Gazans who survive through this…will they spit on the name of Hamas? Unlikely because the memes which are replicating fastest are that it’s the evil Jews, with their American sponsors, who are responsible for the carnage. And Hamas were heroes who fought for Allah and the Palestinians.

 

Why now?

The Israeli military have an enviable record for surgical missile strikes taking out Hamas officers and officials with a relative minimum of civilian casualties.

 

With the aid of American spy satellites, couldn’t the Israelis simply step up the surgical strikes? Every time a Hamas rocket takes off for southern Israel, it leaves a heat trail a spy satellite in anything like correct position should be able to pick up. It’s doubtful the Israelis could take out all the Hamas rocket sites this way but they could certainly inflict serious damage on Hamas’ capacity.

 

As to the supply tunnels from Egypt, couldn’t the Americans and the Israelis have incentivised the Egyptians to close them down? (I’m sure Hosni Mubarak would far rather have done that than have the streets of Cairo filled with outraged demonstrators!)

 

Or what about covertly beefing up Fatah to take Gaza back from Hamas? (Not very democratic – since Hamas were actually elected into power – and Fatah would have to be resourced to beat Hamas quickly and decisively to avoid a neo-civil war.)

 

If the Israelis really felt there was no alternative to going into Gaza, wouldn’t it have been better to go in without all the ‘shock & awe’ and hunt Hamas down in the streets and apartment blocks. For sure, the Israeli casualties would be much, much higher but the Palestinian dead would be a lot less and perhaps there wouldn’t be yet another generation of Palestinians growing up determined to kill Jews. How many more Israelis, Americans and probably Europeans too will die in the future at the hands of Palestinian terrorists because the Israelis blasted into Gaza the way they did? PURPLE will tell the tale again and again of how the Jews slaughtered innocent Gazans until it is yet another key tragedy in Palestinian folklore and yet another reason why the Arab can never trust the Jew.

 

Of course, Tivni is facing an election and her Kadima party is under pressure (in no small part because of Olmert’s incompetent handling of the 2006 Lebanon war and the corruption scandals he is implicated in). So truckloads of dead and wounded soldiers arriving home would not be conducive to a strong election campaign.

 

But something had to be done about Hamas resuming large-scale rocket attacks and a ‘shock & awe’ spectacle showing how strong a leader she is should have made good TV. Only Tivni’s myopic, power-seeking RED clearly hadn’t thought things through. That and/or she really doesn’t care – about Palestinian loss of life or about how she and her country are perceived in the outside world. Since rumours are starting to circulate that the Israeli military were to some extent unprepared for the kind of assault they’ve made on Gaza, it may indeed be that Olmert and Tivni did bounce them into it.

 

800-and-counting, plus all the lives that will be lost in the future for Palestinian/Muslim vengeance, with destabilisation of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and unrest in Egypt and Jordan, is a hell of a price to pay for looking good in an election campaign!

Abu Ghraib, Auschwitz and Mumbai

 cross-cultural, international conflict, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 282008
 

It is, of course, decidedly early to pronounce on just who is behind the terrorist attacks in Mumbai; but it is almost certainly radical Islamists of one persuasion or another. One senior Indian military officer has claimed that the attackers came from Pakistan – yet one of the gunmen in the Oberoi Trident Hotel managed to get hooked up to a TV channel and told them he was from the ‘Deccan Mujahedeen’, a (previously-unknown) group of Indian Muslim extremists.

 

Given the marginally-improved state of the usually-hostile/often-verging-on-war relations between India and Pakistan, one might almost be forgiven for hoping it was an internal Indian operation that could not so easily be a catalyst for open military confrontation between the two nuclear powers. However, in light of the Hindu orgies of violence against Muslim communities which have followed previous Islamist terrorist incidents on Indian soil, thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths might prove equally unpalatable.

 

Where ever the attackers originated from, few will be surprised if they didn’t have at least tacit assistance from radicals in Pakistan. And few will surprised, given the sophisticated level of organisation in the Mumbai attacks, if the hand of al-Qaeda isn’t to be found somewhere in the pulling of the strings.

 

What makes people so willing to do such dreadful things to other people?

As part of teaching a new specification to my A-Level Psychology students, we’ve been looking at the notorious Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals of 2003-2004. (See also the Blog entry, Prisoner abuse and the mess in Iraq) To the credit of the new specification, it attempts to apply psychological theory to ‘real life’ situations – in this case Stanley Milgram’s Agency Theory (1974) and Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979) to Abu Ghraib.

 

It was as we were discussing the application of Tajfel’s ideas that I had what Abraham Maslow  (1956) would have called a ‘peak experience’ – though a rather chilling one! Tajfel’s proposition was that, simply by categorising people into different groups, you predispose those groups to inter-group conflict. We looked at how the American guards at Abu Ghraib saw themselves as the in-group – the ‘good guys’, self-sacrificing liberators, democrats, Christians, sophisticated, trouser-wearers – while the Iraqi prisoners were the out-group – ‘bad guys’, terrorists, tribesmen, Muslims, primitive, dress-wearers. Etc. Etc. Etc.  One of the students commented: “The Americans must have seen the Iraqis as that much further down the evolutionary chain!” And then it struck me: This isn’t that far from how the Nazis made the Jews out to be such an inferior – yet dangerous! – species and so paved the way for a kind of tacit acceptance of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps from many Germans.

 

Returning to Abu Ghraib….having established the theoretical superiority of the in-group American guards to the out-group Iraqi prisoners, what then symbolised that superiority? The answer, of course, was power. The Americans had it. The Iraqis didn’t. All it needed was a ringleader high in Psychoticism and thereby likely to enjoy cruelty – in the case of Abu Ghraib, Specialist Charles Graner – for that power to be exercised in a terrifying manner.

 

The in-group/out-group effect is the work of the PURPLE vMEME. PURPLE’s motivation is to find safety in belonging. To belong, you have to know to whom you belong. Which also means you need to know to whom you don’t belong. Which means you need clear markers to separate the (in-)group to which you belong and other (out-)groups to which you don’t belong.

 

I was asked by one student if Tajfel’s theory meant that racism was natural. My answer was that it’s natural to use markers to differentiate between those to whom you belong and those to whom you don’t belong. One marker could be colour of skin, another could be religion, another could be county of origin (eg: Yorkshire vs Lancashire) – anything which could indicate I belong, you’re not of our tribe. Of course, as higher vMEMES emerge and dominate in the selfplex, the need for marking difference in belonging mutates until it reaches the point where GREEN declares all are equal and all should belong. (See: Is Racism Natural…? for more on this.)

 

Both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and William Samuel  (1996) have commented on the essentially non-aggressive nature of tribalistic thinking – though Marilynn Brewer & Donald Campbell (1976), in a study of 30 East African tribal groups, found competition for resources – grazing land, water wells, etc – significantly increased confrontational attitudes towards the geographically-closest out-groups.

 

Generally speaking, it would appear that, while PURPLE itself is largely non-aggressive, it is vulnerable to manipulation by a RED-driven individual establishing themselves as leader and using the tribe for personal aggrandisement (supposedly in the interests of the tribe). Equally, PURPLE is vulnerable to having its prejudices codified by BLUE into a system – which is what tends to happen when religions formalise around PURPLE’s rituals and traditional practices. But, whereas, PURPLE tends not to assert itself, except under pressure, BLUE is highly evangelical, determined to convert all to the one true way it advocates inflexibly.

 

Thus, the explosion in Islamic fundamentalism over the past 20-plus years can be seen as driven by RED-led mullahs – as typified by Iraq’s Muqtadah al-Sadr – who use the BLUEST interpretation of Islam to bind the faithful PURPLE of their followers to them in doing ‘the right thing’.

 

Modern inter-communal violence between Indian Hindus and Muslims stretches back at least to the end of the British Raj and has been a recurring problem greatly exacerbated by the rise in Islamic fundamentalism. More recently the surge in Hindu fundamentalism, which began in the 1990s, is adding to the tensions and the potential for large-scale bloodshed.

 

Remove the causes of terrorism and the terrorism will stop…?

The Mumbai gunman who got himself on TV said: “Muslims in India should not be persecuted. We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?”

 

Like most religions, there’s a part of Islam which contains a persecution-and-martyrdom-for-your-faith ethos. Islam, like Christianity, also carries the sense of brotherhood. Ie: for the Christian, all fellow Christians are my bothers; for the Muslim, all fellow Muslims are my brothers. With brotherhood goes responsibility – viz:-

A Muslim is a brother of another Muslim, so he should not oppress him, nor should he hand him over to an oppressor. Whoever fulfilled the needs of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs; whoever brought his (Muslim) brother out of a discomfort, Allah will bring him out of the discomforts of the Day of Resurrection, and whoever screened a Muslim, Allah will screen him on the Day of Resurrection.” (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622)

 

Unlike Christianity – but like Judaism – Islam calls explicitly for violence in defence of fellow Muslims – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Qu’ran Sura 2: 191, 193)

 

Muslims in India have long complained that the government has not acted fairly in its treatment of Hindu rioters in what have virtually amounted to pogroms against them during phases of inter-communal violence. (In the Mumbai riots of December 1992-January 1993, members of the city’s police force were observed arbitrarily executing Muslims in cold blood on several occasions.)

 

What those outside Islam so often fail to understand is that, from his perspective and the perspectives of a great many Muslims, the Oberoi Trident gunman who complained “…when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?” was not a terrorist, his BLUE was doing its duty in fighting for oppressed fellow-Muslims.

 

When Muslims look around the world, there are numerous instances – not least Iraq and Afghanistan – where Muslims are being oppressed and killed by non-Muslims. What should a good Muslim do? For many, the answer is to fight for them.

 

So, if we could somehow eradicate the causes of injustice perceived by so many Muslims, would that put an end to Islamic terrorism? The answer, is, unfortunately, no. There will still be those hard line evangelists, zealots driven by a harmonic of RED self-aggrandisement and BLUE desire to convert all to their way of thinking – those who will not stop until the world is a global caliphate in which they play uber-powerful roles.

 

However, eradicating the causes of injustice will undermine the extremists, taking away their means to fuel hatred of the non-Muslims, the out-groups. Without injustices to focus on, the radical mullahs’ message of hate can be countered by moderate Muslims wanting to de-radicalise their young men and women.

 

Alternatively, every prisoner abuse scandal, every wedding party annihilated by American planes acting on faulty intelligence, every Hindu cop who executes a Muslim suspect, acts as a recruiting drive for al-Qaeda and adds more credibility to the concept that Muslims will not be safe until they all live in an Islamic caliphate.

 

Of course, for those non-Muslims who are charged with deciding how to deal with Islam, it’s not quite that simple as the bloodshed between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims in Iraq shows only too clearly. But, by taking away their grievances against non-Muslims, they lose the obvious target of non-Muslim oppressors to shoot at and their own differences are more clearly exposed.

 

The hand of al-Qaeda?

If al-Qaeda isn’t in any way implicated in Mumbai, then it would appear they are certainly the inspiration for the methodology and organisation of the attacks. Meticulous planning, ability to think ahead and develop strategy are indications of the BLUE vMEME at work. Possibly there is even some ORANGE emergent – such is the quality of the design of the attacks.

 

The specific targeting of American and British nationals as a follow-on to a general slaughter of any Indians about and the fact that the attacks were against targets which tended to be more associated with Westerners and Western values may also be an indicator of al-Qaeda involvement (or inspiration). Previous Islamic terror attacks, by and large, have tended to hit the less wealthy sections of the Hindu communities.

 

As indicated earlier, bad treatment of Muslims by non-Muslims  is the lifeblood of al-Qaeda. Take that away and they look pretty much like religious megalomaniacs that most Muslims would tend not to support.

 

But events happen; and, in a world that is less than perfect, events are going to happen which cause offence to Muslims. Unfortunately, that’s life! So we need al-Qaeda and their like out of the way so they can’t use events as propaganda. Since it’s not possible to negotiate with them, they have to be destroyed. Utterly.

 

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has now both offered full co-operation to the Indians in bringing the Mumbai perpetrators to justice and recommitted himself to fighting Islamic terrorist groups located in Pakistan. The Indians would do well to show goodwill and go along with him. Following the assassination of wife Benazir Bhutto, Zardari has every reason personally to want to close down Islamic terrorist groups. The fact that most of the world is outraged by Mumbai gives him some leverage with his more moderate constintuency. Co-operation lowers the risk of military confrontation between the two countries and also makes it less likely that the inevitable Hindu backlash on the streets of Mumbai will be as vicious as on some past occasions. 

Mumbai is a tragedy at many levels; but, hopefully, it will give some of the key players pause for thought and the opportunity to take a fresh look at how we can support those Muslims who want to de-radicalise their religion, and undermine and destroy the likes of al-Qaeda.

The Critical Link between Failed States and Values

 Africa, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  6 Responses »
Jul 042008
 

Written by ALAN TONKINI

 

I am honoured once again to publish AlanTonkin’s work as a ‘guest blog’. Alan wrote this piece for the Global Values Network web site he runs but also thought it would be appropriate to publish it here. GVN is one of the most advanced projects in the world at using Spiral Dynamics to monitor shifts in societies and assess impacts at national, international and even global levels.

As the world seems to become an ever-more dangerous place, Alan offers this consideration as to why so many ‘Third World’ states fail to develop in positive and healthy ways for the benefit of their own peoples and the international community.

 

The latest edition of Foreign Policy magazine for July/August 2008, in conjunction with The Fund for Peace, has just published their latest rankings of Failed States with Africa occupying seven of the top ten positions. These include Somalia (1), Sudan (2), Zimbabwe (3), Chad (4), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6), the Ivory Coast – no 8 - and the Central African Republic (10).

 

The non–African countries are Iraq (5), Afghanistan (7) and Pakistan (9) which are in the Middle Eastern region (see map below – copyright © 2008 The Fund for Peace).  A further eleven African countries are included in the critical Alert list of 32 countries.  This is a total of 18 or 56% of the total and raises the question of why is this the case? The balance of 34 fall into Warning and only South Africa currently falls into Moderate.

 

Failed States Index 2008

In order to more fully understand this situation it is necessary to fully appreciate the direct link between  Failed States and Values and why the two issues are so closely intertwined. 

 

Dr Don Beck, in his ground breaking work on ‘values’ in ‘Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change’ (co-authored with Christopher Cowan and first published in 1996) explains this link.  The book is based on the original work by Professor Clare Graves at Union College in New York in the 1950s and shows how different values require different levels and approaches to leadership. 

 

Beck also visited South Africa over 60 times in a fifteen year period extending from the early 80’s to the mid – 90’s during a period of rapid political change and transition. These visits generally were on average a minimum of 15 days in length giving him an in depth exposure to South Africa covering a total period of over two and a half years.  

 

During his visits Beck interacted with a wide variety of organisations and individual leaders including top politicians from both the leading ANC and National parties as well as other political parties and groupings. He also had wide exposure to leaders in both business organisations and NGO’s.

 

How Different Values Influence Democracy and Leadership.

Beck has produced an interesting graphic to illustrate his approach and we will use this to show how different values produce different leadership.  It is also important to note that different ‘values mixes’ exist in both developing and developed countries.  This helps explain why bodies such as the United Nations are often unable to agree on how to facilitate and resolve global problems due to widely differing worldviews.

Stratified Democracy

South Africa has a dual profile with both a developing and developed component.  This scenario is often described by commentators as the 1st and 3rd World components of the South African economy.   However, even South Africa as the largest and most developed economy on the African continent still has a majority of its citizens who exhibit the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values. 

 

In looking at Sub-Saharan Africa it becomes clear that the reason why many African states behave as they do is due to the values systems present.  In considering the African countries represented in the top ten Failed States they all without exception exhibit high levels of tribalism and the influence of ‘warlords’.  Until this changes with increased stability democratic values are simply not possible. 

 

The Zimbabwe Issue

The current problem of Zimbabwe lies in the values struggle between ZANU–PF and Robert Mugabe filling the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power space with the MDC being more centred on BLUE Stability and ORANGE Growth.  The shift from Tribal Order and Warlords took place in Europe over two centuries ago.  However, until a larger number of Africa’s leaders and people make the shift into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise the continent will continue to remain a serious global concern. 

 

This is best illustrated in the graphic shown below illustrating the influence of values in The Competitive Impact of Values updated in 2002 from the World Competitiveness Report of 1992.  This shows how countries move from collective

individual values over extended periods of time going back centuries.

 

.  

It is important to note that Africa is still moving into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise and helps to explain the reasons for the dictatorships and corruption still prevalent on the continent.  At this stage much of Africa broadly compares to Europe during the 18th and early 19th Century.

 

Some Conclusions

The countries of the developed world need to more fully understand the reasons why African countries and leaders behave as they do.  They need to encourage positive change by demanding positive action on democracy and its institutions in return.  The days of not setting achievable outcomes on both aid and project financing should change to positive outcomes being rewarded by the developed economies. 

 

At the same time, the new younger generation of emerging African leadership who were not part of the transition from colonial to nationalist politics must take responsibility for the required values shifts in Africa.  This includes providing the correct messages for the population of their countries and encouraging hard work and responsibility, as has occurred in countries such as Singapore and China. 

 

At this stage many African politicians avoid criticising irresponsible RED Power language within their own countries in order to avoid confrontation with rogue elements.  Until there is a significant change in the values of the leadership in these countries this essential challenge is unlikely to happen.  In addition, there is a real risk that existing democratic institutions such as the courts may be threatened if there is no support for a set of more ‘developed values’.  This equally applies to African leaders who support advanced values criticising those who are in denial of these.

 

The new South African Constitution is an example of an ideal being ahead of the values of the broad population.  It is generally accepted that the Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world.  However, the thrust of the South African Constitution is on the BLUE Order, ORANGE Enterprise and GREEN values set.  At the same time the bulk of the population are in the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power range and this is why it is critical that the emerging ‘black middle class’ continues to grow and move into the values range as set out in the Constitution.  

 

What is also required in South Africa is a visionary leader who can integrate the wide spread of values present and move the values spread of the whole country forward.  This will involve an understanding of the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values while at the same time moving the majority of the population into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise.  A young version of Nelson Mandela is urgently required who can mobilise all the differing levels and build a shared vision of the future.  This type of leader is the one who operates at the Integral YELLOW level.    

 

If Africa is to move forward as a continent its leaders have to take more responsibility for their actions. They also need to avoid falling back into the habits of the past by accusing the developed world of not understanding its positions. We all operate in a global economy and common standards are being applied on an equal basis.  However, equally there needs to be a better understanding of the developing world by those holding economic power in order to move the development process forward.  

 

It should also be realised that this is a journey, not an event and that values change over time due to the existing life conditions.  This includes the fact that we often  only change as individuals and countries only when it is too uncomfortable to stay where we  are. This is where positive pressure and encouragement from the developed world can move developing countries forward on the values continuum.  This is also a key step in the ongoing movement against global terrorism and other threats.  

 

This process can significantly accelerate change in developing countries which can results in the shifts that have taken centuries in some regions being compressed into a shorter time frame. This is the key opportunity in the 21st Century for both the developed world as well as in those countries and their citizens currently occupying the areas of most concern on the ‘Failed States’ league table. See also Failed States Index on www.foreignpolicy.com

 

De Menezes: was it Policy pulled the trigger?

 human rights, international conflict, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 102007
 

It beggars belief. It really does. On 22 July 2005 one policeman holds an innocent man down while two others execute him. A total of 11 shots are fired – 7 into his head. The bullets used are ‘dum-dums’– illegal in warfare under the Geneva Conventions – with flattened noses so they cause maximum damage. The man’s head is effectively blown apart. The execution takes place in full view of the passengers of a tube train.

No one is tried for this MURDER – because that’s what it was.

In this country: England, the ‘mother of democracy’, with one of the most respected justice systems in the world…?

For all the subsequent revelations about his drug use and migrant status, in this context Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent; he was not doing anything to indicate he was about to commit an offence of any description. The police officers had decided he was a suspected suicide bomber and respresented an immediate threat to the public.  So they deliberately killed him without warning.

Whatever happened to that centuries-old axiom of English law that a man (or woman) is innocent until proven guilty?

Last week’s Old Bailey ruling that the Metropolitan Police were guilty under Health & Safety law of very serious operational/procedural failings which put the public (and de Menezes) at risk is a relative side show to the decision made in July 2006 by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). On the basis of a 2-part investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), they took the decision not to prosecute either any of the officers directly involved in the muder or any in the chain in command – policy-making or operational – whose decisions led to the murder.

As London mayor Ken Livingstone said after the Old Bailey decision: “At the end of the day mistakes are always going to happen in situations like this.”

Few procedures are perfect and the human beings who operate the procedures certainly aren’t! Unfortunately it was a particularly bad series of errors at nearly every level of communication which led to the officers putting their guns to de Menezes’ head and pulling the triggers. Believing they were chasing a suspected suicide bomber – in the bowels of Stockwell Station, cut off temporarily from their colleagues – they would almost  certainly have been driven by the RED vMEME’s gung-ho express self now without thought of consequences motif. As they were most likely the kind of ‘action men’ who volunteer for that type of firearms duty, it is quite plausible that they were high in the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism.

Given these factors and the overall desperate mentality of the Metropolitan Police in their search for the failed suicide bombers of the day before, in the wake of the very real attrocities of 7 July, it is not entirely surprising that something like de Menezes’ execution occurred.

The failings of the Met put those officers and de Menezes on that fatal collision course. From a 2nd Tier ‘Big Picture’ point of view, it is entirely right that the Met’s failings in this respect have been exposed so that there is substantial pressure on them to improve the procedures, the communication systems and the training of the men and women who have to operate them.

But, how ever much the operational aspects need to be improved, are they the real issue?

2 days after de Menezes’ murder Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick told community leaders in Stockwell he could not guarantee a similar error would not happen again. The reason such a guarantee could not be made…? As Met supremo Sir Ian Blair told Muslim community leaders the following day, the force’s shoot-to-kill policy for suicide bombers was to remain in place.

Changing Precedent?
The question for me is whether the officers who executed de Menezes were acting on their own initiative, on orders or on policy.

If they can be said to have acted on their own initiative, then are they culpable?

Although some commentators have recognised the implications almost from the immediate aftermath of the Stockwell tube murder, it has not been widely discussed in the media; but the 2006 decision of the CPS not to prosecute, if not challenged, may change one of the fundamentals of English law by precedent.

It would appear that, if police officers have a suspicion that someone is a dangerous and/or violent suspect (the police had apparently mistaken de Menezes for Hussain Osman, one of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers) and they think that person represents an immediate and serious danger to themselves or to others, they may now kill that person legitimately.

The next time a police officer kills an innocent person they think may be an immediate and dangerous threat, in their defence, will they be able to cite the de Menezes killing as precedent?

The de Menezes family have been threatenting a private criminal prosecution against the Metropolitan Police for some time; the Old Bailey decision opens the way for them to sue the Met under civil law. It is to be hoped the family do choose the more arduous route of criminal prosecution because the issue of whether police officers  as individuals do have the right to summarily execute a suspect needs testing in full court proceedings.

Because if a police officer does have the right to kill someone on the grounds that they might be dangerous, does a suspect, in the established right of self-defence, have legitimate cause to kill a police officer they think might be about to kill them?

If we generalise that line of thought, don’t we all have the right to kill someone – anyone! – we think may be about to harm us? In which case, shouldn’t we be allowed to carry weapons to defend ourselves against people we think may be about to harm us?

If our society should eventually descend into a widespread state of paranoia, where we kill each other merely on suspicion something might be done to harm us, then our society will have failed and the terrorists will have won.

Further comments made by Ken Livingstone on the Old Bailey verdict are very telling…

“I think this is disastrous. If an armed police officer believes they are in pursuit of a terrorist who might be a suicide bomber, and they start making reasonable calculations based on this, ‘how’s this going to be seen, am I going to be hauled off to court?’”

For Livingstone, it would indeed appear that ‘might be’ is sufficient grounds for summary execution of a suspect.

Policy more than Procedure
The Old Bailey trial was largely concerned with errors in operational procedure – of which clearly there were many. Since the Met’s failings put those officers in the invidious position of being face to face alone with a man they believed was most likely a suicide bomber and able to detonate himself, for all that de Menezes was murdered, it might be that the right charge to be brought against the officers individually and certainly against the Met as a corporation is manslaughter. After all, no one intended that an innocent man called Jean Charles de Menezes should die on that day. So what to do? The police and the government have a duty to protect the citizenry from harm – and some would argue: even if that means occasionally executing the wrong person. (Some apologists make a similar case for the death sentence.)

Undoubtedly the officers who killed de Menezes did so on their own initiative; but there was confusion as to just what their orders were and the information they had been given. Certainly they did not intend to kill an innocent man; but, in the ‘adrenaline rush’ of the moment, they certainly did intend to kill the man they suspected of being a suicide bomber.

So, in its bunglings, the Met, as a corporation, is culpable also.

However, I would contend that the real issue is at policy level: should the police have the right to execute someone merely on the suspicion they might be about to commit a highly-dangerous offence?

Of course, armed police officers and their commanders sometimes do have to take difficult decisions very, very quickly – sometimes virtually at the level of automatic response! – and tragically they do sometimes make the wrong decision. The fatal shootings of Harry Stanley in 1999 (when in semi-darkness police mistook the chair leg in his hand for a shot gun) and Derek Bennett in 2001 (wielding a cigarette lighter that was a convincing replica of an automatic pistol) are examples of such desperate mistakes. But in such cases the person was acting in an aggressive manner, warnings were given and the officers had tangible evidence on which to base the assumption that they and others were at serious and immediate risk. The policy in such instances was essentially correct and the procedures were examined by the IPCC to see if they could be improved.

Unfortunately the rise of the suicide bomber puts police officers in the position where the evidence of intent to commit a highly-dangerous act is not always tangible – and that puts us as a society in the position where we have to decide whether we are going to authorise our police to execute suspects with no tangible evidence of intent. Ie: on mere suspicion.

Metropolitan Police policy in regard to dealing with suspected suicide bombers is codenamed Operation Kratos and is in part at least derived from Israeli and Sri-Lankan tactics in dealing with suicide bombers. The policy of shooting in the head with a highly-destructive dum-dum round comes from the determination to destroy the suspected suicide bomber before they can detonate the explosives they are thought to be carrying. Shooting to the head rather than the usual police marksman’s target of the upper toros is not only so much more likely to result in instant incapacitation and very likely a quick death but avoids the risk of the bullets hitting the explosives belt (usually worn across the torso) and unintentionally triggering the explosion.

But there is a fundamental difference between the Israeli and Sri-Lankan situations and that of the British.

Israel and Sri-Lanka are effectively engaged in low-level wars with terrorists from different ethnic groups than their majority populations. While there undoubtedly is a significant GREEN voice in Israel that objects vociferously to such policies, the PURPLE/BLUE religious/nationalist harmonic which dominates much of Israeli national culture doesn’t place the same value on a Palestinian life as an Israeli one. Thus, if an Israeli policeman makes a mistake and shoots dead an innocent Palestinian on suspicion they might be a suicide bomber, it’s not much of an issue. For many Israelis, the occasional mistaken execution of an innocent Palestinian is a price well worth paying to stop the suicide bombers.

And, as the Sri-Lankan government has been getting away with some pretty brutal oppression of its ethnic-Indian Tamil population for at least a couple of decades, it’s probably safe to assume that many Sri-Lankans don’t overly value Tamil lives either.

(In both cases the PURPLE-BLUE devaluing of the other side’s lives also strongly influences the actions of Palestinian and Tamil extremists.)

In multi-ethnic Britain, where GREEN’s egalitarianism and valuing of all life influence much political thought and social commentary and where the threat of suicide bombers comes from within our own citizenry, executing citizens on mere suspicion of intent gives the police and the government a huge problem.

A highly-significant number of people in this country, most of the intelligensia and the greater part of the media consider what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes simply unnacceptable in a ‘decent society’.

The IPCC report on the de Menezes execution, released this week, makes it clear that Kratos was not formally sanctioned on 22 July but expresses concerns that its ethos of shoot-to-kill-suspected-suicide-bombers has permeated the culture amongst Met firearms officers. As IPCC commissioner Deborah Glass said at the report’s launch: “The difficulty with having an operation called Kratos that is specifically about suicide bombers is that there is an implicit assumption that you are going to be always dealing with suicide bombers,” she says. “You are giving it a level of certainty that does not appear in real life. So the problem can well be that if you create a mindset in firearms officers that you are dealing with a suicide bomber then the concerns commanders would have about what is the level of the threat may well be overtaken.”

So we can conclude de Menezes was killed by a combination of adrenaline-rushed officers, misinformed and badly let down by bureaucratic bungling, all operating with a policy-bred-but-undiscriminating maximum lethal force ethos.

A 2nd Tier Solution?
And it could be argued that, while GREEN would be totally against allowing legitimate execution on mere suspicion of intent on the grounds that all life is precious and a few cannot be sacrificed for the many, true 2nd Tier thinking would sanction it as a lesser evil than letting the suicide bombers wreak their carnage. From the little known about it, it is claimed that the TURQUOISE vMEME is indeed prepared to sacrifice parts of the whole for the overall good of the whole.

However, TURQUOISE will also know that the agents of the law taking the law into their own hands and engaging in summary executions, whatever the immediate justification, can only work as a very short-term measure in a democratic society supposedly based on the rule of law . If widespread respect and support for the law is undermined and BLUE fails at a macro-cultural level, then, in a cultural jungle, RED will indeed assert itself. Then we do risk the nightmare scenario of police officers and ordinary members of the public trying to kill each other on the mere suspicion that the other intends them lethal harm.

Small wonder IPCC chair Nick Hardwick has called for a public debate on the shoot-to-kill policy and the very real difficulties facing the police in combatting terrorism.

Clearly there are no easy answers. The terrorists would indeed appear to have us in a dilemma of moral ambiguity.

But what about YELLOW? We know a fair amount about YELLOW thinking, thanks to the work of psychologists like Clare W Graves and Abraham Maslow (who termed the effects of this vMEME ‘Self-Actualisation’, 1943). One of the characteristics both men attributed to this level was its incredible problem-solving capabilities – four times greater than GREEN, according to Graves (1971/2002).

So, if the suicide bombers really do leave us with no option other than to incapacitate through execution on the mere suspicion of intent but that option is unnacceptable in our kind of society, we need to get YELLOW problem-solving to work on changing some part of this paradoxical equation.

One possible avenue YELLOW might pursue is the manner in which West Midlands Police arrested another of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers, Yasin Hassan Omar, just five days after de Menezes’ execution, using a Taser stun gun. While Sir Ian Blair publicly criticised the use of a Taser as there was a risk the electric charge could have detonated any explosives on Omar’s person, the fact West Midlands incapacitated their suspect without lethal force does suggest their methodology should be studied.

Clearly, when his own force had made such an appalling mistake, it suited Blair to rubbish the other force’s achievement – and it may indeed turn out that West Midlands took an absurdly-silly risk and were astonishly lucky to pull off their coup. Nonetheless, at a time when we are putting innocent lives at risk in our efforts to combat the terrorists, it behoves us to study any possible means of incapicating a suspected suicide bomber that doesn’t cause that person serious harm.