Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has become deeply familiar with the global “war on terror.” Framed by the West’s ostensibly patriotic and “civilized” political narrative that conveniently expands their national security power and geopolitical interests, it also pins Muslims as savage, and Islam as a barbaric religion of people that want nothing but the destruction of the West.
This perception of Islam—and its followers—as wicked and violent, spread wide and far, especially in the United States, Great Britain and other allied countries. This doesn’t happen without the help of the media and influential public figures, who shape public opinion and reinforce stereotypes.
Peter Oborne, a renowned British journalist and author, has done much work throughout his career to challenge these myths that marginalize an already historically repressed group. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his latest book, “The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam.”
“It’s perfectly okay to smear Muslims in Britain,” Oborne tells Hedges. “Because that press arena is captured by people who regard Muslims as second class, third class… citizens, if not barbarians, there’s no mainstream corrective to a very dangerous narrative, and it’s getting more and more frightening.”
Oborne, for the work he has done on this issue, has himself experienced the consequences of Western Islamophobia. While working at The Daily Telegraph, Oborne’s editors refused to publish a lengthy investigation he conducted that exposed how “senior Muslim figures in [Britain] were having their bank accounts just taken away from them without any reason given.”
When he found out that “one of the [paper’s] advertiser[s] [was] the HSBC bank” and that they were one of the banks closing the accounts, he left his post. Soon after, when he wrote a book about Boris Johnson’s “lies and the collaboration, the complicity, [and] the client journalism,” it marked the end of Oborne’s career in mainstream journalism.
Yet the Islamophobia that accelerated after 9/11 has deep roots in Western thought. To truly understand its prevalence in Western society, “you have to go back to the Pilgrim fathers.” Fanatic religionism led the pilgrims to believe they were God’s chosen people, and enabled them to slaughter the Natives much like Israel is doing to the Palestinians today. Even the modern families who have furthered the goals of the Israeli state, such as the Bush dynasty, have distant relatives such as a pastor named George Bush from the 1840s that advocated for Christian Zionism and using the Jewish people as sacrificial lamb for a larger prophetic vision of Christianity.
Oborne takes Hedges on a deep historical journey, explaining that Islamophobia and the persecution of Muslims is far from a new phenomenon. By understanding their origins, Oborne helps put today’s tragedies, such as the genocide in Gaza and the riots in the UK, in crucial and critical perspective.
Host:
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos and Max Jones
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Peter Oborne was steeped in the ethos of the British establishment. His father was an army officer, as was his grandfather. His maternal grandfather served in the British Navy in both world wars. He was molded in exclusive British public schools and went on to Christ’s College Cambridge, becoming a journalist at the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Spectator, publications that amplified the prejudices of his class.
But he was astute enough, and honest enough, especially following the demonization of Muslims after the attacks of 9/11, to ask the right questions, to see that there was something terribly wrong with the vision of the world imparted to him by the ruling class and the institutions that buttressed it.
He embarked on a journey to understand the relationship between Islam and the West. He examined how the three major imperial powers, Britain, France and later the U.S. used racial and religious stereotypes to justify their domination of the Muslin world, especially in the slave trade where enslaved people could often be Muslim, and in the more modern efforts to conquer and control the Middle East.
Anti-Semitism, he found, is not limited to Jews. It includes Muslims. And since 9/11 it has become acceptable to say things about Muslims that could never be said about any other ethnic group or minority. Muslims have long been and remain cartoon characters in the West, branded often as barbarians. These caricatures are used to justify the racist musings of political theorists such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, as well as writers such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Christian nationalists, condemning Islam as Satanic, have joined forces with these neo-conservatives, old cold warriors who seamlessly replaced one enemy, communism, with a new one, Islam, to mount a cultural war on the Muslim world. This cultural war is used to justify the years of indiscriminate slaughter in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and now in Gaza. Although as Oborne points out “not a single one of the world’s fifty Muslim-majority countries has declared war on the US. Nor have we seen an Islamic coalition forming.”
The result of this exploration is Oborne’s remarkable book, The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam. His book shatters the lies and myths we tell ourselves about Islam, lies and myths that have led to diplomatic and military blunders as well as needless and horrific human suffering.
The result of this exploration is Oborne’s remarkable book, The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam. His book shatters the lies and myths we tell ourselves about Islam, lies and myths that have led to diplomatic and military blunders, as well as needless and horrific human suffering. Joining me to discuss his book is Peter Oborne.
So let’s begin with the book. Now, I love the book, and it reminded me very much of the way scholars had to dismantle the myths about African Americans, which came very, very late. W.E.B. Du Bois being one of the first in the 1950s, Kenneth Stampp with “The Peculiar Institution” on slavery. And this is a question I have for you, it seems to me that was, from reading your book, never really done about Muslims. That the old stereotypes, you go all the way back to the American Revolution, essentially have remained in force, and then after 9/11, turbocharged. Would that be correct?
Peter Oborne
I think that is rather true. I had never thought of that, actually, that analogy with the Afro-Americans. Or indeed, with the kind of Windrush generation, as we call it in Britain, where the anti-Black racial prejudices were dismantled after Enoch Powell, the British politician in the ’60s who tried to start a race war. And I think that the reason for it is that so many left-wing progressive intellectuals shared the bigotry of the racists. And so you get a collaboration between, say, Christopher Hitchens, who for many years was seen in Britain as on the left, or Martin Amis who is a sort of left… you know, seen as a trendy novelist, really, and nowadays, say The Observer newspaper, again, seen on the left. They articulate the same bigotry against Muslims as do the old fashioned racists as there’s very little correction against it. And the other reason why the kickback hasn’t happened, still hasn’t happened, despite my book, which has been completely ignored in the mainstream media or the BBC, is that the press, and in the wider sense, including the left-wing press, the centrist press, shares this Islamophobia. It regards it as normal, it’s perfectly okay to smear Muslims in Britain. And because that press arena is captured by people who regard Muslims as second class, third class, almost citizens, if not barbarians, there’s no mainstream corrective to a very dangerous narrative, and it’s getting more and more frightening.
Chris Hedges
Well, this also has a continuity. So Eugene V. Debs, the great socialist leader, they did not integrate, like the Pullman Porters strike, the Chautauqua movement was socialist. Rauschenbusch, again, it was segregated. David Lloyd George, the socialist Prime Minister who signed on to the Balfour plan and the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, again, had a very retrograde vision of Muslims. There’s a continuity there completely.
Peter Oborne
Well, David Lloyd George, who in American language he’s socialist, in British language, of course, he’s liberal and a very great Prime Minister in many ways. He really was a radical in the Old English sense of the word or Welsh, he was a Welshman in the turn of the last century. But he was also, and this is a massive theme of this book, he was very much guided by reading the Bible. The Welsh church had taught him, really, that Israel is the… the Jews are the chosen people, and Israel belongs to them. And so he was driven by a passionate belief in Zionism, right from the start of his life. And that applies, of course, to a great many of the the non-Jewish advocates for the Balfour Declaration in Britain, which, of course, gave Jews the national home and set in motion the creation of the State of Israel, and also the destruction of the Palestinian people, which we’re seeing at the moment.
Chris Hedges
Well let’s talk a little bit about Christian Zionism. It arises very early and is contiguous with, but in many ways, separate, of course, from Jewish Zionism. And as you point out, it is this vision of looking at the modern Middle East through the lens of the Bible, and many of the early British occupiers, like General Allenby and others, come out of this movement.
Peter Oborne
The Christian Zionist movement, because it is irrational and doesn’t make much sense to somebody who’s been educated in modern science and so forth, is very easy to underestimate. It is a massive political force. I’d say it’s more than that. I think it’s buried somewhere in the collective American subconscious. Indeed, when you want to understand why it is that Biden is behaving the way he is, you have to go back, not just to him as a young politician, but you have to go back to the Pilgrim fathers. And the reason why I say that, and it’s not just Biden, it’s all American presidents. It’s so deep in the psyche; the Pilgrim fathers, they came to the United States from Britain, embedded in the Bible, it was the only book I think they really read, in the early 17th century. And they saw themselves as the chosen people, very explicitly. If you look at the places they named Salem, Harlem, they tend to be biblical places based on the reading of the first six or seven books of Exodus in the Bible and this gives them a perspective that the world belongs to them, that the people they come across when they arrive in the United States, which is quite a well populated place at that time, are barbarian savages of no merit. And this idea enables them to kill, to destroy, to break treaties, and eventually, it goes into the American idea of Manifest Destiny, that the whole of that American continent belongs to them, and that anybody who gets in their way, Spanish, Mexicans, but above all, of course, the native Indians, are there to be destroyed. And I think this is a central guiding feature which comes through again and again in US history as even a character I discovered called George Bush, a pastor in 1840, writes a book about this idea. Actually, can I quote from it? So just delay a moment.
Chris Hedges
And as you point out in the book, he is an ancestor to the Bush dynasty.
Peter Oborne
Indeed, I’m just getting the quote. It’s quite extraordinary, because it shows you how deep in the American consciousness the idea of Christian Zionism is located. Hang on. I’m just going to have to dig, I’m not finding it quite as quickly… Yeah, here we are. So he’s a religious scholar, Professor George Bush, direct ancestor of two U.S. presidents who share his name. He writes in 1844 a book, “The Valley of Vision, or the Dry Bones of Israel,” it calls for a revived Jewish state in Palestine. That’s in 1844. Not just to restore the Holy Land, but actually to link God and man. And there’s also some other elements here, which is antisemitism. He really, he wants the Jews to go back, to be offered, as he puts it, the same carnal inducements to remove to Syria as now promote them to emigrate in this country. Now Abraham Lincoln said similar sort of stuff. It’s a classic trope, and it’s deeply embedded in the American subconscious.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about the presence of Muslims. You point out that they are with us, not only in terms of enslaved people, that’s a very good point. Being Muslim who have their names, their religion, their identities, erased, taken from them. And you point out one of the reasons that enslaved Muslims are not able to perpetuate is that most of the women who come over on the ships don’t survive, so they form their own kind of nativist religion. But let’s talk about them. I think I even point out in the book that Muslims may even have predated the arrival of the Europeans, but talk a little bit about the presence among us, I’m talking about an American culture, of Muslims, and yet, at the same time, their identities are essentially erased from our consciousness and our history.
Peter Oborne
Yes, I mean, it seems that, actually, Columbus may well have used maps which were used by earlier Portuguese explorers, which are produced by Muslims. It seems quite likely, actually. And then they find it very hard to maintain an identity. There’s all sorts of reasons for this, you get better treatment if you’re Christian. And then we get the first mass emigration. So whereas the Muslim slaves tend to be erased, we do get, 100 years ago, as the Ottoman Empire starts to disintegrate, or maybe a little bit more than that, you get the first mass emigration of Muslims to the United States. But again, it’s quite difficult for them to get that as Muslims. It’s much more convenient that they change their names and also say that they’re Christian, and so they erase their identity in order to become immigrants in the way in which, say, you know, Irish or Italians, etc. don’t really need to do. So that you don’t really get a kind of Muslim consciousness, or any Islamic consciousness in the way you do have, you know, a very strong Irish, Italian consciousness in the States.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about empire. So in particular, the British and French, whether that’s in Algeria, whether that’s in India, it becomes part of the tools of empire to perpetuate these kinds of racist stereotypes. It’s in their interest to perpetuate those stereotypes. So talk about that.
Peter Oborne
Well, I think you have to make an enormous distinction between the French in Algeria and the British in India. The British colonized India, but they didn’t try to steal the land. There were very few British there and this was classic colonialism. What you’ve got in Algeria was something very dark, which is settler colonialism. In other words, they wanted the land. They became the natives of Algeria themselves. And this led to these terrible wars, you know, the wars when the French seized Algeria, incredibly bloody. And then the War of Independence after, in the 1950s and ’60s, when the French had to be extracted. Hundreds of thousands of people died, probably like half a million, I mean, really horrific wars. So you cannot explain Macron’s France or [Marine] Le Pen today without understanding that awful, bloodthirsty background in Algeria. The French were happy with Muslims staying there, in Algeria when they colonized the place, but only if they subordinated their own identity to France. Became an effect, sort of… I want to rephrase that, they were happy to make them French citizens, so long as they became French in their own country. And that’s what, more or less, the deal, which Macron is trying to duplicate today, edged on by the far right. You can be a Muslim in France, but you have to be French. You have to abandon your Muslim identity, your Islamic beliefs, you have to change the way you dress, to change the way you think and pray. And that is the idea of “laïcité”, which is now being applied against French Muslims and is, I think, very dangerous. Whereas the British concept is more that you can go on praying as you wish, dressing as you wish. You can live your own life, just under British rule and that explains the, I think, very benign idea of multiculturalism, which emerged in the post-empire Britain, where you were allowed to be Muslim and British, Jewish and British, Scottish and British, you name it, gay and British. It was a very warm and generous British identity, which emerged after World War II, and is now, as I argue, it’s very shocking, what’s happening now in Britain. That is now under threat. The far right in Britain is trying to bring in a kind of collective French analysis of how you are British.
Chris Hedges
But let me go back to the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, because Muslims were not granted the same kinds of political rights as the Jewish settlers, nor were they supported the way the Zionist settlers were supported. There was a two tiered system under the British towards Muslims.
Peter Oborne
It’s quite complex, the British mandate in the sense that it was British rule. The Arabs and Jews, they did try and manage them communally. But of course, the British favored the Jews. They’d given the Jews this promise in Balfour that it would be their national home and the Jewish people were very insistent on building up their own political structures, including private armies. And the Brits, on the other hand, repressed the Arabs and that led to the Arab revolt in 1936, which was a terrible business and eliminated a large amount of the local leadership, most of it. And so basically, the Arab fighters had been killed or locked up by the time that World War II comes along, and when you get the establishment of modern Israel, there’s not really that many experienced fighters there to deal with the Jewish militias, and afterwards and indeed later on, the Israeli army.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about the rise of the kind of modern Middle East and relationship in terms of how the West views Muslims. In the aftermath of World War I, you had, of course, [Woodrow] Wilson’s call for self-governance, the Austro-Hungarian empire is broken up and is not under the control of Western powers. That does not happen in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. And very much, again, this notion that Muslims only understand violence or they are incapable of governing themselves, these kinds of racial stereotypes further or are used as a justification for empire.
Peter Oborne
So President [Woodrow] Wilson insisted on self determination in the wake of World War I. It was a very noble vision, which he did apply to quite a number of states across the world, including in the Middle East. But not to what was called Mandate Palestine, which continued to be in the hands of Britain. And there was no attempt to give self rule to the local people. And the reason for that, I think, is that the British were trying to manage a situation which would enable the Jews to get the homeland which they sought. But obviously that was resented bitterly by the local Arabs, who started to realize, I think, that the Jews wanted more than just a bit of land. They wanted to run the country itself.
Chris Hedges
But you also had Syria, handed over to the French. You had Iraq with a Quisling government run by the British. You had Transjordan; these were all, you had Egypt, which remained an outpost of the British Empire, so…
Peter Oborne
There were elements of self government, though, about say, Iraq and even Syria. But you are right. The British, remember, installed a king in Iraq. It didn’t get on very well, but there was an attempt to enable these countries to become independent. That was not happening in Mandate Palestine. Of course, the wider Middle East was subject to this sordid series of deals and betrayals by the British and French, which, when they carved up Iraq, you’re right, Saudi Arabia, etc, for their own convenience.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about 9/11 because 9/11 is a kind of epiphany for you. Explain what happened, why, and you know that was really the genesis, I think, of this book.
Peter Oborne
Yeah it was. I mean, when you very kindly and generously introduced me, I just wanted to dispute one element of your interpretation of my journey.
Chris Hedges
I’m going to change the introduction. So tell me what I should change.
Peter Oborne
Curiously enough, I don’t think that I was representing… You’re right, that I did write for quite a number of, well, almost every kind of well known conservative publication in Britain. But I think at that stage, they were truly conservative. I mean, in the sense that they represented an old fashioned type of conservatism which has no kind of… I don’t think there’s an equivalent in the United States, it’s Burkean conservatism, you know, named after the sort of great polemicist and philosopher who created the idea of conservatism in the 18th century, supported the American Revolution, but called time when he foresaw the terror in the French Revolution. It’s based on the form of [inaudible], sort of suspicion of grand ideas, this sort of conservatism. It’s a bit, what’s the right word? Patriarchal? No, paternalistic is a better word. I think it is about…
Chris Hedges
Burke was a monarchist, we should be clear.
Peter Oborne
He was…
Chris Hedges
He was a defender of the monarchy. Let me put it that way. I just have to ask you, because it’s in the book, you worked for Boris Johnson. And what was your read of Johnson at the time? He was the editor, where? The Spectator, was it?
Peter Oborne
Well, when the French Revolution came along, he felt that the monarchy, and I agree with him, I still agree with him, is a source of stability, the form, the constitutional monarchy, which had evolved by the 18th century in Britain was a stable form of government. I think he valued and understood stability because he feared war. So I might call myself a Burkean conservative and that is the form of conservatism which survives in Britain right up to the late 20th century from the time when [Edmund] Burke was writing his great masterpieces. But what the central thesis of this book is that British conservatism gets captured by something called neoconservatism, which, despite its name, is not conservative at all. It’s imported from the United States, and it has its origins on the left, and it is about great schemes, such unwise projects, of which one of them was the invasion of Iraq. It doesn’t believe in the rule of law. It really sees the whole world as some sort of charnel house, where you need to win. If you have power, might is right. I think it’s a very dark analysis of how the world is, and it crossed the Atlantic before 2001 and it persuaded Tony Blair to join George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq. And that has defined the century ever since. He hired me and in fact, in about 2001 at The Spectator. And he was a very, very good editor of The Spectator. He wasn’t there all that much but he was very open to ideas, great fun. He was very quick, one of the quickest minds of anyone I’d ever dealt with. He saw the story. If you’re a journalist, to see a story, he saw the story at once. He’d seen everything when I explained an idea to him before I’d reached the end of the first sentence, it was remarkable, which caused me rather to misjudge him a bit later, because he didn’t progress from that situation. At that point, he was a liberal, you know, sort of a liberal, Metropolitan figure, Cosmopolitan, I should say.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about the difference between how traditional conservatives viewed Muslims and how neo-conservatives view Muslims. Is there a difference?
Peter Oborne
Very much so. So if you look at… Burke devoted, as you will recollect, about 10 years of his life to standing up for human rights in India. He didn’t agree with the British exploitation of India and abuses. The traditional conservatism of what is quite benign, it isn’t really a racist… I don’t think… it’s about, it’s a little bit of management here. You try and deal with people collectively and enable them to flourish. But it isn’t hostile, and it’s, in fact, not very knowledgeable. The great tradition of British scholarship about Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries and before, as there is about other religions, and you get a tradition, the idea of a gentleman diplomat, the gentleman scholar who who tries to manage, keep the world from falling apart and keep the British Empire, of course, from falling apart. That, I think, is traditional conservatism. There’s a great figure called [Marmaduke] Pickthall in the 19th century who converted, as a number of British figures did, to Islam, and then…
Chris Hedges
Oh, Richard Burton.
Peter Oborne
Richard Burton is another one, and actually they’re the ancestors of [St John] Philby who helped found, was very instrumental in founding modern Saudi Arabia. Who is the wonderful lady who taught herself Arabic and went and effectively ruled Iraq in the…
Chris Hedges
Gertrude Bell.
Peter Oborne
Yeah.
Chris Hedges
So talk about, not only the difference, but how that switch was made.
Peter Oborne
The switch is still going on. It is one of the… There needs to be a very big book about it, at some points. Because I lived through this, and it took me a while to understand, I think a lot of it was done through think tanks. I mean, there was a think tank in this country called Policy Exchange, which did a lot of the heavy lifting, the cultivation of MPs and journalists. You find it easier, suddenly, to get those sorts of ideas, you know, supporting the Iraq war into the newspapers than pieces opposing it. This idea was, the central idea of neoconservatism is that the world is divided between civilized and barbaric peoples. We, the Americans and the British, as the [inaudible] state, you know, got to keep civilization going. It was very, incredibly ignorant, if you read the pieces, about the richness of the Islamic intellectual tradition, they wouldn’t acknowledge it. It was very contemptuous of foreign countries and foreign peoples and foreign lives. I think we should say there was no value attached, really, to the lives of people who opposed themselves. We stopped talking around this time. I think there’s somebody you and I both know, Alastair Crooke. You know Alastair?
Chris Hedges
Yeah.
Peter Oborne
Probably talk to him on this. I mean, he was thrown out of… It’s reported, he’s never told me this, but it’s been written that he was thrown out of the British Secret Intelligence Service for talking to Hamas on the orders of Tony Blair. Now, in my old fashioned way of seeing the world, one of the jobs of intelligence agents would be to speak to Hamas, you know, to terrorists or to resistance groups. That’s that. And yet there seemed to be a closure at some point about 20 years ago. And if you want to understand what’s going on today, you have to understand this very dangerous transformation in the process of thinking and dealing with abroad, which suddenly happens. The neoconservatives seem to have felt that the world should be like New York City, and with the values of New York City, the carelessness of New York City and the greed of New York City and the fun of it, too. I’m not going to be completely negative about New York City, but they felt threatened if they went to Istanbul or to East Jerusalem or to Hebron or Damascus. And it produces this awful language from George W. Bush, a disgusting figure, in my view, who has done, you know, his axis of evil and bumping blindly into a war, into invading blindly a country he doesn’t understand.
Chris Hedges
Would it be fair to characterize the old form of conservatism as paternalistic and the neoconservatives as provincialism?
Peter Oborne
I think they are, intellectually, a provincial. And you start to look into the deep origins of it, I think it comes out, some of it out of despair at Weimar. You know, that the liberal, a sense that the liberal institutions just were incapable of standing up to the Nazi nightmare. And really you had to abandon the commitment to representative democracy, due process, rule of law, and you had to fight. It was kill or be killed. And I think that is part of the sense that the neoconservatives brought to the world in, well, it starts, doesn’t it, in the sort of late ’90s, the late 20th century, and then it becomes the ruling, it captures George W. Bush when he becomes president in 2000.
Chris Hedges
Yes, although it does capture Bush, but in essence, there’s no deviation from that ideology, through Barack Obama, through Biden, through Starmer, through…
Peter Oborne
It’s absolutely still in control. And one of the fascinating things actually in Britain, and I suspect it’s true too in the United States, that if you look at the people who gave us the Iraq War, which is still the greatest crime of the 21st century, it’s a lot of competition now. Absolutely, there’s a continuity. This is very obvious in Britain too. If you look at the figures who gave us the Iraq war, they are still rewarded. They occupy high positions of state, whereas the opponents of the Iraq War, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is the most notable in many ways now in Britain, forgotten and destroyed. And Corbyn, remember, was right again and again. The Stop the War movement, he was right about Afghanistan, he was right about, everybody agrees about this, Afghanistan. He was right about Iraq. He is virtually one of the very few people who voted against the disastrous Libya intervention, and one of the very, very few parliamentarians who will stand up and talk about the atrocities now taking place, the horror in Gaza. He’s one of the very few. That tradition has almost been wiped out. And so if you want to protest against Gaza now, you’ll rise out there on the edges of public opinion. You know the Stop the War marches. You know you’re risking your career now, if you’re an academic or a politician or a journalist.
Chris Hedges
Well, let’s talk about your own career, because you make this deviation. You actually wrote a series of books that took down the ruling establishment and they made you pay for it.
Peter Oborne
I don’t know about that, actually. I was very open eyed when I left The Daily Telegraph, I discovered they were… I’d written a very long investigation. It had taken me ages to expose the way that senior Muslim figures in our country were having their bank accounts just taken away from them without any reason given. I discovered this by chance, and it’s outrageous. It’s a bit like having, you know, you can’t survive without a bank account. And I couldn’t get it published at The Daily Telegraph and I was furious about it, and then I discovered that it was because one of the advertisers, the HSBC bank, was, well, closing the bank accounts, and they were a major advertiser. And so I resigned. Now, what do I expect? And then I had another problem when Boris Johnson became prime minister. He was as bad as Donald Trump, and I wrote about that. And of course, I couldn’t get that in the British mainstream right wing papers at all. And that really, I wrote a book about Johnson’s lies and the collaboration, the complicity, the client journalism, you can only lie if people are there to protect you in the media and to pass on your lies. And that was the end of my career. I haven’t been able to clamber back on board, not that I want to anymore, the British mainstream media or the BBC. I can’t do that anymore. I write for Middle East Eye, which is a fantastic website in the Middle East, it’s so interesting. And I write for Declassified a bit, which is, I’m sure you’re aware of it. It’s a very interesting website, which…
Chris Hedges
They’re both great. I just interviewed David Hearst, yeah.
Peter Oborne
And David Hearst is fantastic, isn’t he? The editor in chief. I feel, myself, very lucky. I’m not quite as well off. You know, Chris, if you write for, if you run a column in my heyday, for, you know, The Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail, you’re quite well paid. You know, not massive, but you’re comfortable. And nowadays I have to scrape by, but I can’t tell you how much happier I am.
Chris Hedges
Peter, I think your book is kind of foundational for two events: One are the anti-immigrant riots in Britain, and the second is Gaza. But let’s start with the riots.
Peter Oborne
I completely agree. When I watched the riots happening, I realized, to say I predicted them isn’t quite right, but I’d explain the background to them. And this is the creation of a far right consciousness, a racist consciousness targeting Muslims across the entire British political media class in the last 15 years. It’s been going on for a very long time. And one of the things which you… it’s quite odd to hear oneself say it, but Britain has become, when you look at the main political parties and certainly the media, a far right country when it comes to talk discourse around Muslims, the ease with which you can smear Muslims, invent stories and fabricate. Keir Starmer, in the general election did it. He introduced dog whistles about Bangladeshis. The Tories did it all the time. And so it’s not surprising that you got these attacks mainly in the north and midlands of Britain, attacking mosques, targeting Muslims and nor is it surprising that the political class can’t talk about it because they are the reason. They are the, how should I say it? They are actually the leaders of it. They have made it happen. And there’s no capacity to analyze it within the discourse of the media grandees or the politicians, because they’re behind it.
Chris Hedges
And let’s talk about Gaza, because it’s the same phenomena where the Palestinians are demonized as terrorists, all of them. You can’t raise the issue of Israeli genocide. You can get arrested in the United States for using the phrase “the river to the sea,” but I think again, it is something that is kind of foundational to the work that you did in your book.
Peter Oborne
Yes, I this is utterly horrifying, the way that Palestinians have been dehumanized. Palestinian lives, Muslim lives, count for nothing at all, and we’ve seen the preliminaries to this. We saw it with the Rohingya genocide about seven or eight years ago now. It happened, Britain supported the Burmese government while it was going on as the Burmese army, with the local militias, was going from village to village, rounding up, separating, raping, burning and was supporting what is happening now in Gaza. And that is because of the rampant Islamophobia that has enabled otherwise very intelligent and wonderful people, in some ways, simply to think that Palestinian lives have no meaning. There is nothing worthwhile about them. They are not human. I think they have blown up every mosque, haven’t they? I mean, we see the pictures from it. It’s a very dark time. I think it’s telling us, Gaza, about who we are, as America and Britain, that we are countries which tolerate genocide. And of course, we’ve tolerated this one, which is in real time. Of course there will be others. And that is, I think, what I was intuiting when I was writing some of the book, because in the EU there is such a tolerance of this rancid language about vulnerable minorities, particularly at the moment in this world of ours, when they’re Muslim. And it has to be said, you cannot report what’s going on. It’s just not reported in the mainstream media. The Times for instance, which is supposed to be our primary paper of record, all but ignored the sensational finding, the historic, momentous finding, the announcement from the International Court of Justice that it was going to be investigating Israel for genocide. It ignored it a few weeks ago, when it came back and said, the ICJ said that the occupation is illegal and Israel should pull out of a West Bank. That was just, it was given three paragraphs, one of which was a statement by Ben-Gvir saying that the ICJ was antisemitic. And these awful stories emerging now from, you know, the torture camps, which Israel has set up or is running now with the use of sodomy to torture prisoners, and it’s very well authenticated now. And yet some of the prisoners who are accused of it have become sort of figures on breakfast TV in Israel. This is a very sick society. And yet, bizarrely, the British papers won’t cover it. To be fair, Haaretz has been doing, the Israeli papers have been doing a good job, some of them. But in Britain, it can’t be discussed. The same as in the United States, some new rule, which has been imposed on us. We cannot see our own… the evil things which our allies are doing.
Chris Hedges
Great that was Peter Oborne on his book “The Fate of Abraham.” I would like to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones] who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
