In today’s Guardian, Tanya Gold recounts her experience of alcoholism as a middle-class teenager.

I know why I tried to drink myself to death. I was lonely and angry, and I felt worthless. Nobody knows exactly what causes alcoholism. I believe it is genetic, but triggered by trauma.

The details of Ms Gold’s “trauma” aren’t made clear, but what happens next is interesting, insofar as it follows much the same pattern favoured by, among others, Madeleine Bunting and Oliver James, whereby a particular unhappiness is assumed to be shared by all sentient beings and is then blamed on… capitalism.

Alcohol has never been so cheap. The supermarkets and the happy hours and the clubs can’t stuff it down our throats cheaply enough or fast enough or long enough; some supermarkets sell it at less than cost, to draw the shoppers in. They don’t treat it as a dangerous drug, but as a commodity that is great for business.

The fact that most people use alcohol in moderation passes oddly unremarked. As does the fact that, generally speaking, one ultimately chooses whether or not to get hammered into unconsciousness on an all but daily basis. Even the most decadent of nightclubs don’t yet strap their customers into chairs then funnel booze and pharmaceuticals down their throats. And inexpensive drinks still require time and inclination to be consumed in sufficient quantities. As Gold says,

To develop alcoholism you have to drink heavily. You have to put the hours in at the pub.

Well, quite.

After fingering supermarkets and nightclubs as the cause of human misery, we leap, erratically, to this:

There are wonderful new ways to make young women feel worthless. Sparkling advertisements and whispering editorials encourage them to aspire to an ever-receding fantasy. You can never be beautiful or thin enough for the fashion magazines of 2008. You can never be sexy enough for MTV, or pornography. You can never be famous enough for Heat.

Well, again, there is an element of choice here, and responsibility. My own exposure to Heat magazine is, it’s true, somewhat limited. I occasionally register the cover with bewilderment while waiting at the checkout of my local supermarket. Like many other men and women, I manage to find its influence remarkably easy to resist. It’s simply not of interest, and surely that’s the point. Even if a copy were taped to my face with a subsequent quiz on its contents, I doubt I’d feel inclined to emulate the people photographed within. But maybe that’s just me.

Ms Gold goes on to say,

Denial is the best friend of alcoholism,

Which, given the above, may well be true. And, 

Now we all collude.

Which, I think, is not.

When not preoccupied by alcohol and “society’s constant assault on female self-esteem,” Tanya Gold is also a “recovering dieter” and has issues with her smoking.

A few months ago, I posted a short extract from Vanessa Engle’s Lefties documentary series, which seemed to go down well, possibly due to the heady mix of affectation and farce. I watched the third episode again recently and, as it made me laugh and despair in more or less equal measure, I thought I’d share it in full. A Lot of Balls details the comically inept attempt in 1987 to launch a “radical” left wing tabloid, The News on Sunday. The project was, unsurprisingly, a disaster, but what’s interesting is why. Engle’s documentary teases out how staggering incompetence was a direct result of ideological pretension. This is perhaps best illustrated by the scene in which, with the paper’s first edition about to go to press, most of the staff is out of the office on a deafness awareness day. 

Enjoy.

Part 1:

Statement of intent. “Our truth.” Big Flame. Class consciousness.

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Part 2:

Wearing suits. Other people’s money. The proletariat in charge. “Because you’re black.”

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Part 3:

An unholy war. Avoiding London. Qualified staff. Black man versus white lesbian.

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Part 4:

“No, but…” Pilger’s horror. Dummies and factions. Ad hell.

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Part 5:

Indignation. Causes and committees. “Theoretical crap.” Deafness awareness.

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Part 6:

Remote concerns. Public sector money. Kinnock and competence. Falling apart.

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All three episodes –  Property is Theft, Angry Wimmin and A Lot of Balls  – can be viewed in full here.

Related: the rise of Thatcherism. (h/t, The Thin Man.)

Subsidise my mischief. It’s for the greater good.

In today’s Comment is Free, Jason Burke ponders various reactions to his Observer article on suicide bombing and attempts to fathom it.

Being called both a propaganda mouthpiece of “the war on terror” establishment and a hand-wringing liberal sympathiser with suicide bombers and evil Muslims suits me fine.

Why this should suit Burke, or anyone, isn’t made entirely clear, and to dismiss the writer as either of the above would be faintly ridiculous. Burke is often quite good on the political and social dynamics of extremism. What has very often been missing – conspicuously – is adequate reference to the role of theology as a key motive and the way Islam is taught and conceived by a great many people. As I argued at length here, the size of an extremist “fringe” and how it relates to mainstream conceptions of the faith, and its history, is a matter of some importance and has to be considered as it actually is, not as one might wish. And, as Tawfik Hamid, Tanveer Ahmed, Hassan Butt, Tahir Aslam Gora and others have explained, omitting the role of Islamic theology, whether for reasons of ignorance, ideology or embarrassment, leads one to inaccurate or simply perverse evaluations of what we are faced with and how it might be stopped.

Burke registers this omission:

What my piece in the Observer does lack, and it is something I was very aware of, is a section dealing with the role of Islamic theology in the process of radicalisation I was exploring.

But offers a less than satisfying explanation:

A longer version of the article – and here, no doubt, some will see evidence of either the politically correct Guardian–Observer liberal complex or the imperialist-capitalist state’s censorship or similar – did include a substantial section discussing this issue. But space in Sunday newspapers is, sadly, not unlimited, and my editors felt that most readers, in between Ikea and a post-lunch walk, would not be riveted by a long discussion of the concept of Dar ul-Harb Takfir, the argument over whether the Sword verses cancel out other, earlier Qur’anic verses, or concepts of nationalism in modern Islamic political thought. I do not think they were necessarily wrong.

But here’s the thing. If Islamic theology is deemed unlikely to rivet readers of the Guardian and Observer, then those same readers are necessarily ill-equipped to fathom Islamic radicalism, its ambitions and associated atrocities. If the subject is ignored and omitted as dry, somewhat esoteric and ever so slightly bonkers – as indeed it is – then those doing the ignoring and omitting are in a poor position, perhaps no position at all, to hold opinions of any seriousness on the phenomenon’s “root causes”.

I’ve mentioned Tawfik Hamid before and his latest article, a first hand account of the development of a jihadist worldview, is well worth reading. Hamid explains how his own religious education laid the ground for his later involvement with the terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiya. Here’s a brief extract:

I attended the private Al-Rahebat primary school in the area of Dumiat, which is about 200 kilometers north of Cairo, when I was six years old… Before each Islamic lesson began, the teacher would dismiss the Christian students, who were then obliged to linger outside the room until the lesson was over… it was the first time I perceived that my Christian friends were not my equals… In secondary school I watched films about the early Islamic conquest. These films promoted the notion that “true” Muslims were devoted to aggressive jihad… 

I remember one particularly defining moment in an Arabic language class when I was sitting beside a Christian friend named Nagi Anton. I was reading a book entitled Alshaykhan by Taha Hussein that cited the Prophet Muhammad’s words: “I have been ordered by Allah to fight and kill all people [non-Muslims] until they say, ‘No God except Allah.’” Following the reading of this Hadith, I decisively turned toward Nagi and said to him, “If we are to apply Islam correctly, we should apply this Hadith to you.” At that moment I suddenly started to view Nagi as an enemy rather than as a long-time friend…

These doctrines [of jihad] are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue. They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West. Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited.

The whole thing.

A flavour of the school textbooks to which Hamid refers can be found in an essay I posted here last year:

During a recent visit to San Francisco, the Dalai Lama told a group of religious leaders that “[Islam is] like any other tradition – same message, same practice. That is a practice of compassion.” Certainly compassion and horror can be found among adherents of any religious ideology. But there is a difference between monstrous acts that ignore or invert the exhortations of a religion’s founder and monstrous acts that are entirely in accord with that founder’s stated vision.

For instance, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood directs young believers to a children’s website that celebrates homicidal ‘martyrdom’, just as Muhammad is said to have done, and exhorts young Muslims to imitate a prophet who “waged jihad against the infidels.” The site also informs youngsters that “the Jews” are responsible for all of the “corruption and deviance in the world” and that “murdering children” is “part of the Jewish religion.” It’s not clear how this message is to be reconciled with the Dalai Lama’s statement, or with the claims of the Brotherhood’s vice-president, Khairat el-Shatir, who, in an article titled No Need to be Afraid of Us, informed Guardian readers that “the success of the Muslim Brotherhood should not frighten anybody; we respect the rights of all religious and political groups.”

The Dalai Lama is presumably unaware of the severe limits to compassion demanded by several Islamic schoolbooks. One Egyptian textbook, Studies in Theology: Traditions and Morals, Grade II (2001), cites Muhammad and reminds children of their duty to “perform jihad in Allah’s cause, to behead the infidels, take them prisoner, break their power and make their souls humble…” (pp 291-22). Young readers are also reminded that “the concept of jihad is interpreted in the Egyptian school curriculum almost exclusively as a military endeavour… It is war against Allah’s enemies, i.e., the infidels.” Another cheering gem, Commentary on the Surahs of Muhammad, Al-Fath, Al-Hujurat and Qaf, Grade II (2002), warns youngsters against being “seized by compassion” towards unbelievers.

Contempt for non-Muslims is also commonplace in Saudi school textbooks. In July 2004, the Guardian reported the persistence of supremacist indoctrination, despite assurances to the contrary from the Saudi foreign minister. Six-year-olds are instructed that “emulation of the infidels leads to loving them and raising their status in the eyes of the Muslim, and that is forbidden.” Similarly xenophobic instructions have been found in contemporary schoolbooks in Palestine, Jordan and Pakistan, and in judicial texts endorsed by Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the nearest thing to an Islamic Vatican. Again, the size of an extremist ‘fringe’ and its relationship to mainstream conceptions of the faith have to be considered as they actually are, not as one might wish, or assume.

Andrew Bostom has more.

Tawfik Hamid is the author of The Roots of Jihad. His writing and audio material can be found at his website.

Related. And.

Further to this comment on the obligation to “mingle”, and via the Devil’s Kitchen, here’s Madsen Pirie on bright children as collective property. 

“It is wrong to allow bright children to go to special schools. This deprives the ordinary schools of their beneficial influence.”

If you regard children as the property of the state, existing to serve it, then it is explicable why the bright ones should be regarded as a scarce commodity, and rationed accordingly. The idea of allocating their “beneficial influence” equally through society follows from the same twisted logic. It is a pity that this is only applied to intelligence. Why should not the good-looking children be shared out equally, so their peer group has equal access to the pleasant sight of them? Perhaps the kind ones should be spread so that all may benefit equally from their sweet disposition?

The vicious notion is that children, whether bright or not, should be regarded as the instruments of the ends of others, instead of ends in themselves. Children do not exist to serve the purposes of the state; it is the other way round. The concern should be with what is of benefit to the individuals concerned, rather than with how they can be made to serve some ideological view of society. Behind the idea often lurks the doctrine of egalitarianism, and the feeling that children really ought not to be brighter than each other. With this comes the determination that nothing should be done to encourage it.