Ruth Wishart: Dogma and certainty are hindering how we engage in political debate

The drive to outlaw any anti-Jewish ­sentiment in Labour ranks was admirable. The consequent and current ambivalence over what’s happening in the Middle East is most certainly not.

From the Holocaust, through the killing fields of Cambodia, the Balkans, and the sheer horror of Rwanda, the international community belatedly wrung its hands and intoned that we would never again be ­bystanders to such wanton death and ­destruction.

Yet we are. Worse still, we make all ­manner of sympathetic noises about the plight of the Palestinians, while ­continuing to send arms to Israel to aid the current conflict.

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Let’s be clear: two members of the ­current Israeli cabinet live in illegal ­settlements in the West Bank. Several others have evinced lifelong hostility to a Palestinian homeland.

These right-wing ideologues are ­embedded in the Netanyahu cabinet and, indeed, are the only thing left ­standing ­between him and a richly deserved ­political demise. They have openly described the residents of Gaza as animals and fervently desire their disappearance.

Their views are not echoed by the many Jews in Israel who marched against their government’s attempts to gag the ­judiciary. Nor by many in the UK and US who are collectively horrified by what is being ­enacted in their name.

But such was the nature of the ­appalling events of last October, that the Israel ­Defence Forces’s disregard for civilian lives in Gaza is rarely questioned.

Only the anguished families of the ­remaining hostages feel able to suggest in public that bombing Gaza to destruction is unlikely to be the most effective course for returning their loved ones alive.

They observe that the only wholesale ­hostage release took place during the last “humanitarian pause”. Meantime, as ­another Commons vote on a ceasefire looms, the Israeli president has ordered his negotiating team back from the table.

The other morning, I heard it suggested that any elected Labour official who heard the then Labour candidate for Rochdale recycle an offensive conspiracy theory, but did not publicly call him out, should also get their jotters.

This way madness lies. Such is the ­febrile nature of such topics these days that many people stay schtum out of self-preservation rather than tacit approval of tasteless remarks. Putting your head above these philosophical parapets is a fast route to a crew cut, or worse.

Which brings me to the other issue which dare not speak its name for fear of eternal banishment by the thought ­police. There is currently a move afoot to de-select Simon Fanshawe after his ­being named the latest rector of Edinburgh ­University.

That campus has form. It tried to stop the showing of a film called Adult ­Human Female, aka the usual ­dictionary ­definition of a woman. Heaven ­forfend that a university should be a place of ­discussion, debate and toleration. Those who might want to see such a film must, by the protesters’ definition, be ­transphobic and therefore beyond the educational pale.

Mr Fanshawe has many long-standing connections with the Scottish capital ­including, for many years, serving on the board of the festival Fringe. His “crime” however is that he was a ­founding ­member of Stonewall when it was a ­standard bearer for gay and lesbian rights, but left when it became instead the self-­appointed guardian and principal promoter of trans rights.

In that latter guise, it devised a score sheet to determine which organisations were properly diverse. Among its ­previous clients were the BBC and the Scottish Government. Subsequently, Fanshawe made a speech at the launch of the LGB Alliance, a new group which embraced gender critical theory.

For anyone living in a cave these past couple of years, people signed up to this theory believe that biological sex at birth and preferred gender thereafter are not ­interchangeable concepts.

In my book, subscribing to basic ­biology while accepting gender fluidity and trans rights does not make you transphobic.

Say so out loud (or in print) however and prepare to be cast into the outer ­darkness. Have been there. Have the somewhat shop-soiled T shirt.

It’s a mystery why women who have spent most of their adult lives supporting minorities – and in the case of women, underprivileged majorities – should be ­labelled hopelessly prejudiced.

I suppose we should be grateful not to be issued with a bell to indicate our uncleanliness while ambling about. Or marching for equality.

These two issues are among many where rational folk often fear to tread since it seems almost anything can be ­construed to cause offence to almost ­anyone.

I know for a fact that there are many folk of a Labour persuasion who are ­genuinely conflicted about the evidence of their own eyes versus the tablets of stone from the party hierarchy vis a vis the situation in Gaza.

Just as there are many Tories, as ­former Conservative chair Baroness Warsi has often noted, who fail to engage in debates about Islamophobia, not least when ­random acts of terror lead to law-abiding Muslims being cast under a cloud of ­collective suspicion.

I know too that there are many women who could not for a nanosecond deserve a transphobic label who will, ­nevertheless, not dare to engage in any conversation about trans rights lest they inadvertently utter a word out of place.

In short, they are feart.

They have been cowed. They have watched assorted women being publicly trashed for daring to speak up and have concluded that silence is the safer option.

Hardly surprising given the level of ­violence towards anyone who has had the temerity to turn up to a ­demonstration brandishing a placard which failed to ­endorse the “correct” viewpoint.

WE are living through an age where common sense and a civilised exchange of differing views has essentially been binned in favour of a certain brand of righteous indignation.

These implacable “activists” are strangers to nuance and discursive light and shade. Their world is black and white so few people risk hoisting a flag in favour of grey.

The erstwhile Bishop of Edinburgh, the quintessentially civilised Richard ­Holloway, once wrote of why he feared fundamentalism and fundamentalists. He distrusted their certainty; he thought doubt and curiosity were the products of an inquiring mind. An intelligent mind.

He was not wrong, this wise man. Yet the fundamentalist visigoths are not just at the gate, they’ve taken over the castle. Espouse the “wrong” views about pretty well anything and expect to be metaphorically chucked over the battlements.

Thinking back to early days of feminism, I can remember many fevered debates about womanhood and the acceptable relationship to the male of the species. The opinions expressed were never less than passionate. Yet there was no suggestion that opposing viewpoints should not be aired or, for that matter, basically respected.

Disagreeing with what people say, yet defending their right to express an ­opinion out of sync with your own, used to be the bedrock of democracy. It was certainly the founding principle of universities which are a forum for lively debate.

There are charitable souls who think this descent into hardline them and us philosophy is merely a passing phase. That when peace breaks out in trans wars and the Middle East, all will be sweetness and light.

Frankly, I hae ma doots.