Pearls and Irritations

Viktor Orbán’s obsequious letter to Benjamin Netanyahu offering him sanctuary from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hungary is not a surprise. It is another red flag in the Islamophobic world of the transnational Right. The mass and prolonged slaughter of Palestinian Muslims (and Christians) cannot be seen as a crime committed against other humans in this worldview. The bloodshed must be revered as a form of “moral courage” in defence of the West.

At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC) in London last year, one attendee told Rod Dreher that Hungary is our “Israel.” Rightwing circles were depicting protests on British streets against the Western-aided Israeli violence as an existential threat. Soon, Dreher’s interlocutor meant, “Christians” would need to seek sanctuary in a state that repelled Muslims and other non-White people.

Rod Dreher is an American ultra-reactionary who converted to Catholicism, and then to Orthodox Christianity when Rad Trad Catholicism proved too soft. He has moved to Budapest. There he interacts with a circle of Westerners around Orbán-funded think tanks. Another of the intellectuals in the circle is John O’Sullivan who has been instrumental to funnelling Orbánism into Australia through the Quadrant Journal where he remains International Editor. Nick Cater, The Australian columnist and Atlas Network junktank apparatchik, has just spent the northern summer in Budapest as a guest of the Orbánist organs, following Tony Abbott and Greg Sheridan.

Both Dreher and O’Sullivan were drafters of the National Conservative (NatCon) Statement of Principles alongside Israeli Jewish Nationalist Yoram Hazony. They incorporate Hindu Nationalists into this movement, and the three religions are made to stand in for “race.” This coalition targets Muslims as the eternal Other that cannot be incorporated into the broadly “Western” world.

Ethnic cleansing statements and actions accompany the civilisation clash propaganda.

And NatCon (alongside interconnected organisations like ARC) cannot be dismissed as peripheral. NatCon and ARC both boast prominent political actors, thought leaders, junktank affiliates and big money amongst their supporters. Peter Thiel is a signatory of the NatCon statement. JD Vance’s Vice Presidential nomination was soft launched at the latest NatCon conference.

The ARC Advisory Board includes John Howard, Tony Abbott, John Anderson, Amanda Stoker and Andrew Hastie amongst its numbers. ARC co-founder John Anderson hosted fellow Board member and divisive activist Douglas Murray on his influential YouTube channel last year. Over one million people have viewed the grim piece of hysterical fear mongering about Muslims.

Also on the Board is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is undoubtedly genuine in her personal trajectory from Muslim to atheist to Christian. It is coincidence that the older New Atheist promotion of Islamophobia has given way to a new religio-ethnonationalist movement where Christians are joined by Jewish and Hindu nationalists in demonising Muslims. Hirsi is one of their tools. 

Another Board member (and funder) is Evangelical Brit Paul Marshall, who was disgraced last year when his Islamophobic twitter use was exposed. He now owns The Spectator as well as investing in media platforms including Britains’ Fox News: GB News. Hirsi was hosted by Marshall’s Unherd publication, speaking about the importance of her conversion to Christianity and the “fragility” of the West which must be “defended” against Muslims. (Unherd, like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, is represented in the NatCon signatory list. Hirsi is also connected with NatCon.) This conversation has just been boosted into wider anglophone thought space by the Intelligence Squared podcast, as just another opinion in the marketplace of ideas, rather than the funnelling of harmful prejudice.

The conversation with Hirsi dwells extensively on the decades-old attacks that marked the beginning of the “war on terror.” The focus works to amplify Murray’s ideas that the West harbours jihadis if it harbours any Muslims within its populations.

In this propaganda movement, the vast variety of Muslims around the world is reduced to stereotypes and enemies. This genteel-washing of bigotry promotes sympathy in the chattering classes for the conspiracy-infused hatred fostered by online influencers. It promotes acceptance of violence against Muslims.

Israel’s continuing and gruesome persecution of Palestinians is concealed by a Western sense that Muslim lives do not matter. Our politicians do not dare to confront the bloodshed in any but the most mealy-mouthed fashion. The mainstream media barely covers the facts to prevent politicians facing the appropriate mounting horror at our complicity in these crimes against humanity.

In Britain, Yorkshire Tory MP Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has just published a book called Muslims don’t matter. In discussing the growing threat to British Muslims being promoted by Tory politicians and rightwing media, she explains that British Muslims with the resources to afford it are exploring whether they need to invest in sanctuary properties overseas to escape to when the growing bigotry in Britain becomes too dangerous to ignore.

They might be sensible; we look back at Jewish people in 1930s Europe now and wonder why many did not emigrate when the signs became so foreboding.

The fact that mainstream politicians and media echo the talking points of scoundrels who promote dehumanising bigotry is shameful; it emerges slightly sanitised in these spaces making such opinions a valid choice for the influential actors of the professional classes. They mouth polite iterations of the shocking bigotry of the grievance-filled “gammons” on social media.

In Australia, the same unalloyed focus on Israel’s rights is conveyed regularly in the pages of The Australian. Attempts to confront the bloodshed, the intentional starvation and deprivation, the overt planning to “cleanse” and settle Palestinian land, receive thundering condemnations of moral cowardice in those pages. For The Australian, Muslim lives apparently are not human lives, but merely an impediment to Israel’s safety and goals.

It would be grim indeed if this dehumanising of Muslims exists primarily for the pursuit of the goal of resource extraction, continuing a long tradition from the blood-stained beaches of Gallipoli.

NatCon, ARC and the Orbán sphere are all interconnected with fossil fuel interests. Murdoch’s campaigning for Israel seems not unconnected to fossil fuel too.

The ICC (like the UN, the EU and other transnational bodies) is rejected by the contemporary Right. Such entities constrain corporate action as well as rogue nations’ efforts to harm their inhabitants or neighbours.

For Orbán, as for Murdoch columnists, it is crucial to discredit any action that harms the religio-ethnonationalist (and resource) project that the movement has made central to its identity politics. They work to discredit any body that threatens to hold the Israeli government to account.

In doing so, they illustrate that there is no limit to the number of Muslims who can be killed to achieve their goals.

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