Johann Hari

 ...by clicking here, here and here. (It's in three parts; later in the show we discuss the British election and the war in Afghanistan.)

by clicking here.

...about the corruption of America's conservationists, Haiti, gay sportsplayers, and lots more. Just click here.

The great mystery of British politics is striding into the room, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. In the flesh David Cameron looks thinner and younger and smaller than on television. The caricaturists are wrong: his cheeks don’t appear full and ruddy at all. He looks sleek, and wired, with an intense gaze. He knows he could be a few months from Downing Street and the history books – so he is here to woo a crucial electoral block that is wary of falling into his arms, by giving an interview to Attitude, Britain’s best-selling gay magazine. He calls for coffee and dispenses with the photographer briskly: he poses for two minutes before saying, “Right, that’s enough,” and walking out of the shot. He places himself on his settee, in the shadow of Big Ben, and says: “Right. Let’s start.”

Until 2005, David Cameron was a conventional anti-gay Tory. He attacked Tony Blair for “moving Heaven and Earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools”. He mocked Labour for supporting the “fringe agenda” of equality for gay people. He supported the homophobic law Section 28 until its dying breath. But since he became Conservative leader, he has dramatically changed his position. He apologised for Section 28, got a Tory conference to applaud the principle of gay marriage, and has moved a flotilla of gay candidates into winnable seats. It seems at first glance like an amazing starburst of progress – making it possible at last for gay people to pick political parties from anywhere on the spectrum. The party of Norman Tebbit is now led by a man who poses for photographers outside a screening of Brokeback Mountain.

But a fat question mark hangs over Cameron’s Yellow Brick Road to Damascus. It is the same question mark that pervades so many of Cameron’s policies – and British politics itself. The Conservative leader has had conversion after conversion, on everything from the environment to SureStart to bank regulation. Is it for real? How can a man’s political views really change so far and so fast? Is his party behind him? Of his shadow cabinet team, 85 percent of those eligible voted for Section 28, and 90 percent voted against equalising the age of consent. By testing how honest he is about gay equality, can we tease out how authentic his claims to a softer, gentler Conservatism are?

I Shedding dead skin

He immediately starts with an apology. “I know there are gay people who have conservative values – like wanting us to be supportive of business and enterprise, wanting to have strong defence, believing in the strong defence of liberty and these kind of things – but in the past have felt held back because the Conservative party was sending them a signal that we didn't support them or their lifestyle,” he says in one long gulp of prose. “That has changed. I think we can look gay people in the eye and say you can now back us… because we now support gay equality.”

Cameron starts to list a range of ways he says the Tories have shed their homophobia like dead skin. “I would particularly point to that speech [at Conservative party conference] where as a Conservative leader I stood up and said I support commitment and marriage – whether it is between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Find me another Conservative leader not just in Britain but somewhere in the Western world who has done that – and been applauded for doing it. I didn’t have to stand up in front of my own party and say that. Politics is about taking some risks. That was a proper good old-fashioned, heart-in-the-throat moment. This is my chance. If you lead the party it’s your chance to put your own stamp on things and do things your own way. And sorting out this issue has been a complete pleasure in terms of that, and badly needed doing. Am I the first person to spot it? No. But I think we’ve done some big steps on that.”

He stresses that any benefits his government gives to marriage will also go to civil partnered couples, and there are now two people in his front-bench team who have had civil partnerships themselves. He is speaking fast and rhythmically, holding my gaze, like a debater sealing his case.

How did he get from backing homophobic laws to this public homophilia in just four years? “I think now looking back you can see the mistake of Section 28,” he says, talking about the Thatcher-era law that made it a crime to “promote homosexuality” to children, which he supported so strongly he put it in his election literature several times. “There’s only one thing worse than making a mistake and that’s not putting your hands up and admitting it.”

But what exactly is he apologising for? He insists he never believed that it was possible to ‘promote homosexuality’ or make children gay. So what did he think the law was about? “You know, we can go over history, but what it came out of was this concern that local authorities were getting too involved in messaging in schools.” Yes – about gay sex. “But look, you can have your arguments about what local authorities should and shouldn't be getting involved in,” he says, waving his hand. He says his mind was changed by a gay friend who told him: “You can argue forever about this but in the end it’s something that a lot of people in this country find very offensive, and on that basis it can't be a sensible thing to do.”

The more I ask about Section 28, the more he repeats this point – it was offensive, it was “finger-pointing,” so it had to go. Yes, but it wasn’t purely a symbol. It was a law that did real harm to gay people. It prevented teachers from stopping homophobic bullying; it prevented proper sex education for gay kids at the height of the AIDS crisis. He repeats it again: it was an insult. He isn’t going to venture deeper than that.

He says he didn’t know any openly gay people as a child, or even at university. The first openly gay people he met were at the Conservative Research Department, after he had graduated. Perhaps this explains how he formed the attitudes that kept him opposed to gay equality for so long. I start to go over his record beyond Section 28 – and slap into a brick wall. In 2002 he voted against allowing gay couples to adopt. Yet when I ask him why, he flatly denies it. He says: “No… we were three line whipped on that vote and I abstained on it.” I point him to Hansard, which records his vote against gay marriage in cold black ink. He says “my memory” is that he abstained, and that he now thinks “the ideal adoption is finding a mum and a dad, but there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents. So I support gay adoption.”

Even since his apparent conversion, he has voted to block a piece of progress. In 2008, he wanted lesbians who receive IVF treatment to be required to name a father figure – a requirement that gay equality groups say would obviously makes it harder for them to receive treatment. “No, I think that's a classic way to try to misinterpret what the vote was about,” he says. He insists he only wanted fertility clinics to have to “ask the question” about “the need for a father.” But why ask the question, if you don’t have an answer in mind? “I think those are important questions to be considered,” says, and looks away.

II A whistle-stop tour

On an hour-long tour of the policies he will make as Prime Minister that specifically pertain to gay people, Cameron is by turns impressive, mediocre, and worrying. He is at his best and at his clearest – to my surprise – when it comes to refugees who are fleeing homophobic persecution. He says: “If you are fleeing persecution and that fear is well-founded, then you should be able to stay. As I understand it, the 1951 Convention [on the rights of refugees] doesn’t mention sexuality but because it mentions membership of a social group, that phrase is being use by the courts, rightly, to say that if someone has a realistic fear of persecution they should be allowed to stay.”

At the moment, gay refugees are often told – under a Labour government – to go back home and hide their sexuality from police forces who would imprison, torture or kill them for it. I ask him if that is wrong – and he says unequivocally: “I think it is. If you have a legitimate fear of persecution, that it seems to me that is a perfectly legitimate reason to stay.”

Similarly, he is admirably disdainful of the ban on gay men giving blood. He says there is an independent investigation into this and he has to wait for its results, but “it sounds perfectly logical and sensible to make the change... Logic would dictate that it’s time to change.” He even tells the Church of England to follow his lead, saying: “I don’t want to get into a huge row with the Archbishop here… but the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through – sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential.”

Yet on perhaps the two biggest issues affecting gay people in Britain – violence in the playground, and violence on the streets – he doesn’t have much to say. Ofsted has found that homophobic bullying is “endemic” in our schools, and a Stonewall study found that 42 percent of gay kids get beaten up and 17 percent get told they are going to be killed. Cameron says: “I think there’s a broader question of bullying and how we deal with it. A part of it is about trusting teachers and head teachers more to instil a sense of discipline in their schools, which they find very difficult at the moment – partly because of all the bureaucratic rules and regulations about what they are and aren’t allowed to do.”

But how will he specifically tackle homophobic bullying? “The most important instrument of the state is to allow head teachers to keep order in their schools. To search for things, without having to have evidence that there’s weapons involved. To set proper punishments in schools, to exclude pupils who are bullies, or take part in bullying, without being overruled by an appeals panel.” He nods, as if agreeing with himself, and continues: “ I think you need a framework of what is taught from above, but the discipline and order and actually making sure that bullying is stamped out has got to be done by the head teacher and teachers.”

But I point out this is, again, talk about general bullying, rather than the hugely disproportionate amount directed at gay kids. Does he agree with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that schools should be required to teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless,” just as they respond to racist bullying by saying all ethnicities are equal? He pauses and looks a little sceptical. “I think the point is, there’s now proper guidance from the [Department of Education] about this and I think that’s right,” he says.

There is, however, some evidence Cameron’s policies will unwittingly make homophobic bullying worse. The keystone of his education policy is to allow any group of parents who want to set up a school, and can attract pupils, to receive state funding. But the National Secular Society warns that wherever this has been tried, there is a huge rise in religious fundamentalist schools. We know they are far worse for gay kids: the Stonewall study, for example, found that anti-gay bullying is ten percent worse in faith schools.

At first Cameron’s response to this is to sound bemused. He says he doesn’t understand why homophobia would be worse in faith schools. But I ask: is it so odd? Some of these religious groups – not all – believe homosexuality is a sin. For the only time in the interview, Cameron looks irritated. “That’s so wrong,” he snaps, his brow furrowed. “My daughter goes to a church school and it’s not like that.” He angrily says “a lot of what you’ve read in the newspapers is actually a lot of tosh.” With a firm glare, he says he will put in place “ground rules” to make sure new religious schools “teach equality,” and that’s that. He gets up to turns the radiator next to him down.

When it comes to how to tackle the sudden spike in homophobic violence – 40 percent in a year – Cameron’s answer seems strangely scrawny. He says: “Culture is important. Some of the things that rappers and others sing are completely unacceptable. I was sort of laughed at when I first made this point four years ago, but I do believe that it’s important.” He says he won’t ban the songs, but he will argue against them. “Don’t underestimate the power of the bully pulpit, it is important. The idea of social and cultural leadership in these things does make a difference.”

I assume that’s the first step in his answer, and he is going to list many more ways to reduce homophobic violence – but then I realise he is staring at me, expecting the next question. That’s it? What else will you do? “Well, I think we can stop some of these people [meaning rappers] coming in to the country.” When I tell him a Home Office study has found homophobia is “endemic” within the police, he looks surprised. He says the police force “is making some progress”, and “what is required now is leadership.” In the middle of hugely disproportionate violence against gay people, he’s offering a weak cocktail: more Prime Ministerial criticism of rappers, more power for headmasters, and a vague call for “leadership” in a police force where homophobia is rife.

III “He is not homophobic.”

Yet Cameron has most shocked gay people who want to support him when it comes to Europe, where he has allied with men who accuse gays of paedophilia and destroying Western civilisation. After he became leader, he pulled out of the European People’s Party (EPP), an alliance in the European Parliament with the moderate centre-right parties of Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, in favour of a new coalition of Eurosceptics, largely from Eastern Europe. His new grouping is led by Michal Kaminski, a Polish politician who has been filmed calling gay people “faggots”. When the interviewer expressed surprise he had used such an offensive term, he replied: “What can I say? They are faggots.” Tory MEPs now sit under his leadership in Brussels; he was invited to address the Conservative Party conference. Cameron said on Sky News: “He is not homophobic.”

When I raise the subject, he nods, sits up, and drinks from his coffee in a big gulp. “I think you should form European alliances on whether you agree with these people’s views on the broad direction of the future of Europe, that’s what its about,” he says. “Now, does that make it a more difficult message to explain to gay people who want to votes Conservative? Yes it does, I accept that. One of the reasons for doing this interview is hopefully to try and get across a sense that I have not joined with these people because of their views on social issues. I have not.” He stresses that he has joined with these groups because “there should be a centre right group in Europe that wants [the European Union to be] an open flexible trading Europe, rather than the endless progress towards a more federalised Europe.”

This is obviously true, and perfectly defensible. But Cameron has gone further than that. He has repeatedly said that Kaminski and his party are “not homophobic,” and he wouldn’t ally with them if they were. The evidence shows this is wrong – and shockingly so. A few days before we met, the MPs of this “not homophobic” Law and Justice Party demanded a crackdown on what they called “positive paedophilia by some homosexual circles.” Their senior MP Stanislaw Pieta said: “I’m not saying every gay is a paedophile, but in Britain 43% of paedophiles are gay and they only make up 1% of the population.” Their leader Lech Kaczynski says “the human race would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted.” There are hundreds of such statements from the party, all on video.

“Obviously, I don’t agree with that [statement],” Cameron says when I read it to him. So does he now admit they are homophobes? “I’m not allied with parties that have views on homophobia or racism that I think are unacceptable.” But these are the leaders of the party. They are not marginal. I read him more and more shocking statements. Poker-faced, Cameron refuses to address the contradiction in his position: he says he wouldn’t ally with anti-gay politicians, yet here they are, making blatantly anti-gay statements.

Whenever I raise it, he tries to change the subject. All the parties in Poland are equally bad on gay rights, he says. I tell him that’s not what the Polish gay equality groups say. The veteran gay activist Waldemar Zboralski says: “The Law and Justice Party is by far the most homophobic party in Poland and Mr Kaminski is the leading symbol of homophobia in this country. It’s very strange for Mr Cameron to deny this, it is indisputable.” So he throws into the air a confetti of different distractions. These aren’t “minor parties,” he says, “they were parties of government” recently. The Liberal Democrats have anti-gay allies too: “Where are the questions for Nick Clegg?” Finally, he says: “Funnily enough, who’s now in the EPP? Italian fascists. Would you be happier if we went and joined a bunch of Italian fascists? No.”

But Mr Cameron, why can’t you simply condemn people who call us “faggots” and “paedophiles” as homophobic? If that isn’t homophobia, what is? How can we believe you are not the old Section 28 Tories underneath if you invest so much energy defending these bigots? His brow is furrowed. He says finally, in a quick, snappy tone: “The fact is, in some Eastern European countries they need to make progress towards equality and rights… Conservative parties have had to go through a real change over this issue. I think we’ve done it faster in the UK than some others. Will other European conservative parties be on a similar journey? Yes. Have they finished? No.” Finally, after a huge amount of wrangling and jangling, he argues these parties “are changing”, and will change more if he engages with them. But change from what? He won’t say.

IV The mystery

Is Cameron’s reinvention convincing, in the flesh, and in the end? He is a former corporate PR man, so you would expect him to be able to deliver a convincing sales pitch – and he does. He does have some real progress to sell: he talks about getting the Tory conference to applaud gay marriage, and the selection of gay candidates, with passion. His defence of gay refugees and opposition to the blood ban went further than he has to politically. Yet there was enough evasion and dissembling in his answers to sow doubts. He didn’t tell the truth about his own voting record, and he made ludicrously false statements about his anti-gay European allies. On the biggest obstacles facing gay people – the real, on-going violence – he had little to offer beyond words of condemnation.

David Cameron is a hazy cloud of charm and platitudes: no matter how hard you peer into him, you cannot find anything solid to focus on for long. There are flickers of apparently real pro-gay feeling, but they are soon followed by excuse-making for some of the most anti-gay politicians in Europe. Which is the real Cameron? On this issue, I suspect even he doesn’t know. But over the next four years, we are all going to find out: the beaming lights of power will part this mysterious and contradictory fog.

To read Johann’s full 6500-word interview with David Cameron, buy the latest issue of Attitude, Britain’s best-selling and most award-winning gay magazine.

...here.

Under the current Labour government, there has been a stunning sweep of progress for gay people – with civil partnerships, an end to Section 28, and openly gay people in the army and the government. The culture of Britain has been changed forever, and for the better. Yet when I interviewed Gordon Brown for Attitude last month, it became clear that – although he is genuinely proud of these advances, and eloquent in their defence – the internal pressure for further improvements has leaked away. He had few ideas for how to carry on beating back irrational prejudice against gay people.

So it is impressive that Nick Clegg has articulated – in full, and with striking passion – an action plan the next stage in the fight to make gay people truly equal. It starts with the few areas left where gay people are still unequal under the law. Civil partnerships should, he says, be called marriage, and have exactly the same rights, rather than the inferior second-rate option they represent today. The ban on gay men donating blood – as if we are all Typhoid Marys – would end.

But he also wants the government to begin the harder job of tackling homophobia out on the streets and in the playgrounds. He knows why: some 41 percent of gay children get beaten up in school, and they are six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings. So he says every school must teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless and something that happens”. There can be no religious excuses. He wants to see this tightly policed: “We need to put serious pressure on them. It needs to be a requirement.”

In the same way, he said the government needs to drive homophobia out of the police, where a 2005 Home Office study found it to be “endemic.” He compared several recent cases where gay people were murdered and the investigations appeared to go badly wrong to the Steven Lawrence tragedy, and said there needs to be a change of culture “on patrol, on the beat, in the changing room, in the officer’s mess, in the staffroom.”

And he defended the least popular and most vulnerable group of gay people – the refugees who reach our shores because they would be murdered at home for being gay. Today, they are often deported and told to “hide” their sexuality back home. When I asked if they had a right to remain, he said: “Of course! And, by the way, it’s not just me that says this, it’s international law that says it.”

This is genuinely brave, because Clegg is taking the fight to the last remaining bastions of bigotry. He will get a nasty kick-back from religious fundamentalists who say loving gay couples should never be allowed to marry, and who claim they have a “right” to teach homophobia to children in a way that produces such disproportionate rates of violent bullying and suicide. They right wing press will savage it as an attack on “freedom” – when in fact it is a defence of the freedom of gay people to live their lives free of irrational hate.

David Cameron claims he genuinely regrets his support for homophobic laws like Section 28. Clegg is sceptical, pointing to his recent decision to ally with “faggot”-baiting politicians in Europe – but he has also provided Cameron with an opportunity. When I interview the Conservative leader for Attitude soon, I will ask – will Cameron now support the Liberal Democrats’ bold programme to make Britain a genuinely equal country?

 

You can read my interview with the Prime Minister here.

You can read the interview here. You can also read the full text of the interview here.

Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

I. The Imam

My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasy spoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a young woman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan, but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His "crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secular Islam".

After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiously agrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in the middle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only £1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.

Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room. This building was once a factory, then a cinema; now, with Saudi money, it is a Wahabi mosque. Men are kneeling silently towards Mecca, rising and bending in reverential waves. "On Fridays, there are Islamists who stand outside and warn worshippers that their prayers won't count if they are led by me," he says as we squat in the corner, "because I'm supposedly an apostate. A fake imam." He looks away. "I get phone calls late at night. Threats. It's painful. You see, I was like them once."

And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived in Tottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he was five years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam to every nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principles in a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were very sheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.

He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – the Britain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have to understand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in the streets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use the Paki word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."

But Usama was offered a scholarship to the heart of the English elite – the City of London Boys' School, where he could practice cricket at Lord's. He bonded with the Jews at the school as outsiders and supporters of Tottenham Hotspur football team. He still speaks like the public schoolboy he was – in long, confident sentences.

Some berobed men are staring at us, so he takes me down to the mosque's office. "At that time, being a Muslim meant being an Islamist. It was taken for granted," he says. So when he was 13, he joined an Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociable conferences every weekend, they were told: you don't feel at home in Britain, but you can't go "home" to a country you have never visited. So we have a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows no boundaries and can envelop you entirely.

It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted by young Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I am nothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yet exist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.

Jimas told their members they were part of a persecuted billion, being blown up and locked down across the world. "It was a bit like a gang," he says. "And we had a strong sense of being under siege. It was all a conspiracy against Islam, and we were the guardians of Islam. That's how we saw ourselves ... A lot of my friends would wear the army boots, and carry knives." I realise now that for a nebbish intellectual boy, it must have felt intoxicating to be told he was part of a military movement that would inevitably conquer history.

For his summer vacation in 1990 – as a break from studying physics at Cambridge University – he went to wage jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan. He arrived with two friends from Jimas at an Arab-run training camp in the mountains of Kunar in Eastern Afghanistan. It was a sparse collection of tents and weapons left behind by the CIA in the snow and blood. They spent the days running up and down mountains learning how to fire Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. "When you fire a Kalashnikov, it echoes all around the mountain," he says. "After this boring life, you feel the adrenaline pumping."

The Arab fighters wore four layers of clothes and still shivered. They had never seen snow before, so every now and then, they would lay down their weapons to have a long, gleeful snow-fight. Once they had all learned how to kill, they were taken to the front line to shell the communist hold-outs. "One of the shells landed very close to us, about 100ft away." He fired in retaliation. "I hope we never killed anybody," he says quickly.

Usama tells his story fluently and fast, and rides over these difficult moments – a killing – like a speed-bump. He thought an earthly paradise would rise from the rubble he was creating – and remake the world in its image. "The expectation was that Afghanistan would become this dream Islamic state," he adds, "which would then spread all over the world." He returned to Cambridge University determined to convert as many of his fellow Muslim students as possible to Wahabism. "It was relatively easy to persuade them," he says. "People were looking for group identity. They were very confused: what does it mean to live as a Muslim in society like this? We had easy answers. Go back to the original sources, and [follow it] literally."

At the centre of this vision was the need to rebuild the caliphate – the Islamic state under sharia law persisted from the time of Mohamed until 1924. "It was a very dreamy, romantic idea," he says. "If anybody asked questions about how it would work, we would just say – the people that will make it happen will be so saintly, they will make the right decisions." It was the old promise of the revolutionary down the ages: there would be a single revolutionary heave in which all political conflict would dissolve forever, and a conflict-free paradise would be born.

Usama's job was to persuade people to go to fight in Afghanistan and, from the mid-1990s, Bosnia. He was one of the best – and he says, again very fast, that one of his successes was to radicalise Omar Sheikh, the man now on death row in Pakistan for beheading Daniel Pearl. "I set him off on his path to Jihad," he says. He looks a little excited, and a little appalled. The first thing he remembers about Sheikh – who he met at a Jimas study circle – is the fresh lemonade he made in his university rooms. "It was delicious. And we drank and drank. My first impression of him was that he was a clean-shaven, well-educated British public schoolboy. A lovely bloke."

Sheikh was furious about the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and demanded the study group lay down their Koranic debates and act. Usama told him: "If you're really serious, you can go and fight. I know people who have gone and fought. I can introduce you to them." And so his journey to torturing and murdering a Jewish journalist – simply because he was a Jew – began.

Usama doesn't want to talk about him any more: he changes the subject, and I have to bring him back to it. "Nothing is proved against him. He's fighting extradition," he says, after a long pause. "But ... " He has an awkward smile. An embarrassed smile. He quickly carries on speaking, ushering us away from Daniel Pearl.

People come in and out of the mosque office, and Usama lowers his voice a little. He says that as he was persuading young men to go and kill, he noticed something disconcerting: the Afghan mujahedin he had fought for were not building a paradise on earth after all. Instead, they were merrily slaying each other. "This great, glorious Islamic revolution – it didn't happen, at all ... they just killed each other."

As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt or Hamas suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more and more difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about the Jewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – human beings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity issues, and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist chants at demonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God," they yelled – something, he says, began to sag inside him.

The stifled language Usama is using to describe his past reminds me of a recovering alcoholic trying to piece together his fragmented memories and understand who he was. When he talks about anti-Semitism, he is clearly ashamed; he giggles almost randomly, looks away, and looks back at me with a puckered, disgusted look.

We have talked enough; we arrange to meet again. The second time I see him, in a café, he seems more guarded, as if he revealed too much. He shifts the conversation onto theology – the area where, I discover, every ex-jihadi feels happiest. He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bomb in his mind: "How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia."

Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he had to remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. "Jihad has many levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person you can be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kind of campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad." He signed up to the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom as anybody who died in an honourable cause. "There were martyrs on 9/11," he says. "They were the firefighters – not the hijackers."

He says he found himself making arguments he once thought unthinkable – like arguing that women should be allowed to show their hair in public. Jihadi websites run by his old friends started to declare him an apostate, a crime that under their interpretation of sharia is punishable by death.

There have been demands that he should be ousted from the mosque, but his father is its founder and chief imam, so he is protected for now. He says – leaning forward, his voice losing its public school composure – that the threats have only made him more sure of the need for reform. He has started to call for Muslims to abandon the "medieval interpretation of the sharia" that calls for the killing of apostates and homosexuals. He has said there should be a two-state solution in the Middle East. He has reached the conclusion that evolution is "a scientific fact".

And for the first time in his life, Usama has begun to allow himself to listen to music. "I was taught to believe it shouldn't be allowed. But now, I listen on the car radio." I ask him what music he likes, and he lets out a high-pitched giggle. "You'll get me killed!" he says. "Everything in the charts." He gives me some names, but then calls later and asks me not to print them: "That would be a step too far."

As the threats against him rattle across the internet, I like to think of this as my last image of Usama – a 39-year-old man slowly slipping off the Puritan chains in which he has been bound and finally, in his fourth decade, beginning to dance, as he is circled by the angry ghosts of his younger self.

II. The Prisoner

The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is Maajid Nawaz – a high-cheekboned 31-year-old who walks with a self-confident strut. I make an appointment with him through his personal assistant, and he strides into the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet in an immaculate and expensive suit. He seems to blend perfectly into the multi-ethnic overclass who use expensive hotels like this as their base; I have to remind myself with a jolt that, not so long ago, he was caught up in a murder in London, helped to plot a coup in nuclear-tipped Pakistan, and served three years in the most notorious prison in Egypt.

Maajid begins to tell me his story as if he is delivering a PowerPoint presentation. He has offered it before, and he will offer it again; it is his job now. He has distilled it into a script. When I try to poke beneath it with questions, he seems irritated, and returns to the comfortable form of words he has established as soon as he can.

His journey towards Islamism began, he says, at the sandy edge of Essex, in the dilapidated coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. It is an old, elegant Victorian resort town drooping under a century of disrepair, reduced to a smattering of tatty arcades and a long, neglected pier that reaches into a filthy sea. Maajid's parents were mildly prosperous first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. "My upbringing was completely liberal from the start," he says. "In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity." He went to mosque only once, when he was 11, and an imam hit him with a stick for speaking too loudly.

Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he had a large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajid turned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began – for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends were at the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group of young skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting "Seig Heil".

Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there", but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes. They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, they turned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking: "Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajid covered in his friend's blood.

The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cuts from the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kicking around on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is "8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a "Paki". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed, and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from his white friends, out of guilt. He drifted instead towards a group of young black people who were also being terrorised by Combat 18. They would meet at house parties and marinate themselves in hip-hop, Public Enemy, and cannabis fumes. He says: "Feeling totally rejected by mainstream society, we were looking for an alternative identity, and we found the perfect, cool, fashionable identity through listening to hip-hop and speeches by Malcolm X."

One day, his brother came home bearing a sheath of leaflets saying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia to Southend. He had stumbled on a stall in the High Street manned by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). They said he would never be accepted in irreparably corrupt, decadent and racist Britain: Combat 18 were the snarl hidden behind every net curtain. Western society was merely a purgatory for Muslims, and the only escape could be to migrate to a renewed and perfect caliphate somewhere in Arabia. He joined up that day.

Maajid climbed the ranks of HT fast, because – with his easy eloquence – he was especially good at recruiting new members. After a year, they sent him to live in London and conquer a sixth form college. Newham College is a sprawling glass-and-concrete school for 16- to 19-year-olds in the most depressed slab of London. There, Maajid found himself in a majority-Muslim environment for the first time. "I was like somebody who has been craving chocolate for a long time who ends up in Belgium. I thought: these are my people. I knew exactly how to manipulate their grievances. And I did it. We took over that college."

We are served tea by the kind of effusive waitress who works in high-end London hotels. Maajid does not acknowledge her. He says it was "unbelievably easy" to recruit young Muslims to Islamism at that time. He would start with lectures that "broke down the concepts they had been told they should hold dear – like freedom and democracy", he says. It was only in the second or third talk, once humanism lay in rhetorical rubble, that he would announce: "God is in a better position to set those limits than you are, because you'd always contradict yourself, being an imperfect human." So then he would announce: "Let me tell you what God says."

When Maajid enrolled, there were hardly any girls wearing headscarves; by the time he was thrown out a year later, most of them were. The stand-alones were jeered at and harassed.

Maajid was elected President of the college's student union and he was prickling with a Messianic sense of mission. He saw Newham College as a microcosm of the changes that were swelling in the world. "It literally felt revolutionary. We had taken over the campus, and that we were soon to take over the world ... We really believed the caliphate would be established any day soon." On the school's open day for prospective pupils and parents, they staged a massive prayer demonstration. Dozens of them stood in the main hall, yelling to Allah for vengeance. "We wanted to show the parents that if you're sending your kids here, these are the people in charge," he says.

I ask if anybody was arguing for a more liberal form of Islam. Maajid laughs. "Absolutely not. No way. In fact, the only people who were young that were articulating any form of Islam were the Islamists."

The only substantial push-back came from rival religious groups – especially students with a Nigerian Christian background, known universally as "the blacks". There was a racist hysteria that they were muggers and rapists and "somebody had to stand up to them", Maajid says. "Along came us, these crusading Islamists, who didn't give a shit. We'd stand in front of them and say – we don't fear death, we don't fear you, we only fear God." Allah was in their gang, and they were invincible. Young jihadis from outside the college started to hang around there, to defend the Muslims from "the Christian niggers". A tall, aggressive recruit from Brixton called Saeed Nur was appointed as their "bodyguard". He intimidated everyone into silence.

The news reports from the time confirm what happened next. One afternoon, a row broke over the use of the college pool table, as Maajid stood watching. A Nigerian student wanted to push the Muslims off it, and began making derogatory remarks about Islam. Somebody called Saeed to "sort him out". As soon as he arrived, the Nigerian student pulled out a knife – and Saeed produced a Samurai blade and thrust it straight into the boy's chest. As he fell, the other Muslim students set on him with hammers and knives and pool cues. They beat him to death.

How did he feel about the victim? Did he think about his family? He prods the questions away with a grunt. Maajid says he felt "indifferent" to the victim, but was pleased "the Muslims prevailed in the end". He adds: "We were heroes in HT ranks." And he is back to his story. He doesn't want to retrieve his emotions.

He was expelled, and spent the next few years ascending the ranks of HT, while pretending to study at various colleges. But he wanted to be at the heart of the jihad – and in 1999 he found a way. Abdel Kalim Zaloom, the global leader of HT, issued a command from his hidden base somewhere in the Middle East. Pakistan had just unveiled its nuclear weapons to the world. Zaloom wanted them to seize Pakistan, so when the caliphate came it would be nuclear-tipped. Maajid enrolled at Punjab University as a cover – and jetted off to the country his parents had left a lifetime ago.

In the sprawling slum-strewn chaos of Karachi, Maajid found "the first crack in my ideological armour ... I thought – oh, my God. I had idealised Muslim societies, but the people here know less about Islam than we do. And look at how disorganised it is."

He met with a slew of junior Pakistani army officers who had been training at Sandhurst, Britain's elite officer training academy. "They seemed like quite decent, amiable chaps, who believed in our ideology," he says. They had been recruited by other members to HT, "and I told them to rise up the ranks of the army, and when we had an opportunity, to mount a coup and declare the caliphate in Pakistan."

And then, in the strangely bland CEO-speak these ex-Islamists often lapse into, he adds enthusiastically: "It was a very exciting project. We thought it would happen in the medium-term."

Maajid won't be drawn – not now, and not in our later conversations – on the details of this coup plot. Perhaps this is because he is worried about compromising his ability to visit Pakistan. The Pakistani military spokesmen say it's a lie. The officers were, Maajid says, quietly arrested by Pervez Musharraf's government in 2003, and are currently in prison. Maajid decided to move on to Egypt, and arrived to study in Alexandria on 10 September 2001. When he saw the news from New York City, he felt – that word again – "indifferent". HT technically opposed the attacks, on the grounds they were carried out by private individuals rather than by the army of a renewed caliphate. But Maajid says "There was a huge wave of internal sympathy for [Bin Laden], because he's an ideological comrade, isn't he?"

He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."

Then, at 3am one morning, a cadre of soldiers smashed into Maajid's bedroom bearing machine guns and grenades. He was taken, blindfolded and bound, to an underground bunker below the state security offices in Cairo. There were around 50 other men penned in. For three days, he kneeled, and heard the men around him being tortured with electric cattle prods.

"I thought, 'This is something I have been mentally preparing for, for a long time. I knew this day would come,'" he says. On the third day, the guards dragged him into an interrogation room with another British HT member. They punched him in the face and whacked him with batons. They produced the cattle prod. Maajid told them they wouldn't dare to torture a British citizen. "So they took the cattle prod and began electrocuting my friend in front of my eyes."

The British Embassy called looking for its citizens. The interrogation stopped suddenly, and transferred them to prison. Maajid felt no gratitude. "All I thought was – why did it take them three days to find us? They obviously didn't care about the rights of Muslims." He laughs now – a cold laugh, at his former self.

In Mazratora Prison, Maajid was held in solitary confinement for thee months. It was a bare cell with no bed, no light, and no toilet: just a concrete box. Then he was taken out suddenly and told his trial for "propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" was beginning in the Supreme State Emergency Court. But Maajid's Islamist convictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions – the men who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.

HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.

"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."

For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat – Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dank cell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But "they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong".

After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.

These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.

Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphany excruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they would lead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being their fallen angel."

His trial was finally ending with the inevitable verdict: guilty. When he emerged from Mazratora Prison into the damp half-light of Britain, he was dazed. HT hailed him as a hero. "After four years of ignoring me, they wanted me to be their rock star ... I was asked if I wanted to be the leader." But in March 2007, he sent out a mass email saying he was resigning from HT, threw away his mobile, and went home to Southend.

He spent a long summer eating his mother's cooking, watching television, and seeing the school friends he had shunned more than a decade before. "It amazed me. These were ordinary British guys and they knew what I had become – that I had hated Britain. And yet when they saw me, they showed me such warmth," he says. "They remembered me as I was. They didn't care what I had done. They had time for me."

In September 2007, Maajid appeared on Newsnight – the BBC's flagship current affairs show – to announce that he recanted not just HT, but Islamism itself. "What I taught has not only damaged British society, it has damaged the world," he said.

With a small band of other ex-Islamists, Maajid decided to set up an organisation dedicated to promoting liberal Islam and rebutting Islamism. They named in the Quilliam Foundation after William Abdullah Quilliam, an English businessman who converted to Islam in the late 19th century and set up the first British mosque. They are taking the organisational skills and evangelical fervour of HT, and turning it against them. They are also taking nearly £1m from the British government – the only way, Maajid says, to do their work effectively.

The last time I speak to Maajid he is on the refugee-strewn North-West frontier of Pakistan, touring the country's universities. He is lecturing to huge audiences about his own experiences, and arguing against literalism in Islam. The massed ranks of the neo-Taliban are not far away. "People here and in Britain keep saying – we've been waiting for something like this for such a long time," he says over the telephone. "They're so happy people are starting to speak out. They're terrified to do it themselves, but this emboldens them."

A large audience of young Muslims is waiting for him. Maajid says assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joins the Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as he walks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.

III. Lost in liberalism

As the summer arrives and London begins to swelter, I sit with most of the "out" ex-jihadis in a slew of Starbucks across the city. We sip iced lattes and discuss how, not long ago, they tried to destroy Western civilisation.

They have different backgrounds: one is a Yorkshire girl with Hindu parents, another is a Northern boy whose father was a Conservative ultra-Thatcherite. Yet they are startlingly similar: they have all retained the humourless intensity of their pasts. And when they describe their Islamist former selves, they are distant and cold, as if describing a rather unpleasant acquaintance they did not entirely understand.

They wreath their stories in clouds of pointless detail: they talk for hours about the intricacies of seventh-century Meccan society, or the fine distinctions in the hierarchy of HT, willing you to understand it. It's a way of avoiding answering the hardest question – why? But from their scattered stories, I can trace something that seems genuinely new: an ex-jihadi way of looking at the world, that carries lessons about how to stop Western Muslims sinking into jihadism.

As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"

He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in this state of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it's Western society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."

Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I was in the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And I thought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that's in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?"

Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore the fact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build a paradise, but hell.

At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanistic nature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim", defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside. "Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on the outside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You pray five times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. You pay your charity – why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God of yours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if you don't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened. There's nothing to nourish you."

They had to go looking for other Islams – and often they found it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. "Wahabi Islam is totally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Usman says. "It lays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment of the day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separate and spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It is accessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence." In this new Sufi Islam, Usman found something he had never known before: a sense of calm.

Ed Husain insists: "There are a lot of Muslims who agree with us. A lot. But they're frightened. They see what's happened to us – the hassle, the slander, the death threats – and they think: it's not worth it. But you know what? When I first spoke out, I was alone. I had no idea that, a year on, there would be this number of people speaking out, and many more who are just offering resources and support. Once a truth is spoken, it takes on its own life."

IV. Not Strawberry Season

Anjem Choudhary waves his hand angrily through the air, and says that in the world he wants to create, the people I have been interviewing will be put to death. "They are apostates. I don't consider [them] to be Muslim in any sense of the word," he says. "Everybody knows the punishment for apostasy." My facial muscles must involuntarily react, because he leans forward and asks suspiciously: "Are you Jewish?"

Anjem is one of the last of the famous Islamists from the 1990s still walking London's streets, free and furious. A decade ago, this city hosted a stream of fanatical Muslims who kept cropping up in the tabloid press as semi-comic pantomime villains. But gradually, one by one, they have been deported or arrested, leaving Anjem as their final public face. He has said the Pope and the Mohamed cartoonists should be executed, and has lauded the 7/7 bombers as "the Fantastic Four".

I wanted to see what the people the ex-jihadis have left behind make of them – and to sense if they are seen as a real threat. Anjem suggests meeting me in the Desert Rose Café in Leyton, not far from Usama's mosque. The 41-year-old lives here on social security benefits, paid for by a populace he believes should – in large measure – be lashed, stoned or burned in the hellfires. A long beard covers his chubby face, and long white robes cover his swollen form. I was surprised he agreed to meet me. He rarely speaks to print journalists. The last time he did, he stormed out, accusing the reporter of being a paedophile.

He immediately launches into a lecture about how the ex-Islamists are all liars and charlatans. They are "government bandits, set up by them and funded by them to do their dirty work within the [Muslim] community ... They were never actually practising! They were ignorant of Islam."

When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits: "This is heresy ... The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of his life. If I start to say things like, 'I don't believe the sharia needs to be implemented,' then that's tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed ... To say that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement of apostasy."

Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. "I can't pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there's something that you don't like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they're in line with the sharia."

He describes what is going to happen to them with a grin: "After they've been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they will suffer the same punishment again and again and again."

I wondered if Anjem's biography fitted with that of the ex-jihadis' – or was there something different about them all along? Anjem says he was born in Welling in South-East London in 1967, where his father was a Pakistani immigrant who ran a market stall. He first realised the One and Eternal Truth when, one day in the early 1990s, he happened to hear a lecture at a local mosque by the Syrian-born Islamist Omar Bakri. Until then, Anjem had been living a life of sin as a young trainee lawyer, known to his friends as Andy. The British tabloids have exposed that he had sex with white women and dropped LSD.

But as he tells it, in the flames of Bakri's rhetoric, Andy was burned away, and Anjem was born. "Yeah, obviously, I had a period where I was not practising ... I have no shame at all in saying that I didn't always use to be like this. And I have great thanks to Allah that he guided me."

Yes, I say – but you would whip and lash and execute the person you were 20 years ago. His eyes flare. He pushes back his chair, half-rising to leave. "What I used to be like and what I used to say before isn't under discussion. If you're going to continue to ask about that, then I'll just stop the interview."

He then launches into half an hour of theological gobbledegook, where any question I try to interject is waved aside with a sneer. He has no interest in persuasion: with dull Torquemada eyes, he advocates the execution of anyone who disagrees. Is he scared of the ex-jihadis and their arguments? He is certainly angry with them – but he is so angry at everyone that it is hard to tell what this means.

He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternative is. "In the United States, bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home," he says. Paedophiles are rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Compare that with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says, "there were only 60 rapes".

Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by a tyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start fucking animals? Are you so rotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?

He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. "That is your last question," he says. And as I leave and look back at him through the glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.

They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?

This article appears in the Independent

A los 84 años de edad, el escritor y activista está confinado a una silla de ruedas, pero su rabia –contra su país, sus líderes y sus ciudadanos– arde con el furor de siempre.

En ruso, la frase gore vidal significa "ha visto penas". Al observar cómo acercan a Gore Vidal en silla de ruedas al lugar donde lo espero, en el vacío vestíbulo de un hotel de Londres, por primera vez me parece una traducción apropiada. En los ocho años transcurridos desde que lo vi por última vez, perdió a quien fue su pareja durante 50 años, a la mayoría de sus amigos y enemigos, y el uso de las piernas. El hombre que encontré en esa ocasión –irradiando brillantez, derramando sarcasmos como confetis– ha perdido vigor. Su piel se ha apergaminado, pero los famosos pómulos conservan su dureza. “Hace frío aquí –dice, a modo de introducción–. Mucho pinche frío.”

Gore Vidal no sólo se lamenta por la muerte de quienes lo rodeaban y por su decaimiento, sino por su patria. A los 83 años, ha vivido la tercera parte de la existencia de Estados Unidos. Si alguien encarna el siglo estadunidense que terminó, es él. Fue el más grande ensayista de su país, uno de los novelistas de mayor éxito y el alma de todas las fiestas. Vacacionó con los Kennedy, recorrió las calles en busca de galanes con Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt lo instó a postularse para el Congreso, fue coguionista de algunos de los filmes más icónicos de Hollywood, condenó la política exterior de su país, demandó a Truman Capote, fue felado por Jack Kerouac, observó a su primo Al Gore ser electo presidente y perder de todos modos la Casa Blanca y –como extraño final– fue amigo y defensor del autor de los bombazos de Oklahoma, Timothy McVeigh.

Y sin embargo ahora, dice, está claro que el experimento estadunidense ha sido "un fracaso". Fue todo para nada. Pronto el país ocupará "un lugar entre Brasil y Argentina, que es el que le corresponde". El imperio sufrirá un colapso militar en Afganistán, la nación se derrumbará en lo interno cuando Obama sea destruido "por el manicomio" y los chinos se presenten a cobrar lo que les deben. Un Estados Unidos en ruinas será entonces "la carga del hombre amarillo", y los chinos "nos pondrán a jalar corriendo sus carritos o cualquier medio de transporte que tengan."

Lo acercan a la barra y le sirven un escocés. “Yo estaba igual que todos cuando Obama fue electo: optimista. Todo lo que habíamos dicho de la integración racial quedaba reivindicado –dice–, pero es un incompetente. Será derrotado en la relección. Es una pena porque es el primer presidente intelectual que hemos tenido en años, pero no sabe enfrentar las cosas. No se lo propone. Está abrumado. ¿Y quién no? Estados Unidos es un manicomio. Deberían encerrarnos a todos… y ahora nos están echando afuera. Ya nada tiene sentido”. El presidente "quiere agradar a todos, y creía que para eso bastaba con hablar con la razón. Pero recuerden: el Partido Republicano no es un partido. Es un estado mental, como la Juventud Hitleriana. Está lleno de odio. No es posible subir al barco a los republicanos. No hay ni que intentarlo. La única forma de lidiar con ellos es aterrarlos. Obama es demasiado delicado para eso."

Menea la cabeza al comparar a Obama con su viejo amigo Jack Kennedy. "Es dos veces más intelectual que Jack, pero Jack conocía el gran mundo. Recuerden que pasó mucho tiempo en la armada, perdiendo barcos. Este muchacho [Obama] jamás ha oído un arma disparada con rabia. Los generales lo toman por sorpresa, le dicen mentiras y él las cree. No ha hecho nada. Si uno se enfrenta a un gran problema de química, encontrar el gas perfecto, gasear una población, pasará mucho tiempo sin saber si funcionará: tiene que guiarse por lo que otros digan. Así es Obama. No está preparado para el primer plano y está recibiendo demasiada atención todo el tiempo."

¿Hay esperanza? “Todos los signos que veo son de condena. Pero la gente me dice –adopta una voz chillona, nasal–: ‘ay, señor Vidal, es usted muy negativo. ¿No puede decir algo bueno de Estados Unidos? Es un país maravilloso; todos quieren vivir aquí’. ¿De veras? ¿Cuándo fue la última vez que vio a un noruego con su tarjeta verde que quisiera venir aquí atraído por la atención a la salud? Le pago si encuentra uno.”

Pero –agrega, animándose de pronto–, hay "una buena noticia. Afganistán será el fin del imperio estadunidense, sí. Es una manera alegre de verlo. Pronto dejaremos de jugar al imperio. Pero ya es demasiado tarde para el país y para la Constitución". Alza la copa y sonríe con ironía. "Por una república mejor", brinda, y la bebe de un trago.

I. La muerte de Estados Unidos

Vidal dice que cuando nació le predijeron que Estados Unidos moriría entre espasmos, como ocurre ahora, y que eso sólo se puede entender remontándose a ese tiempo. Su misión ha sido explicar el pasado a "Estados Unidos de Amnesia", mediante sus novelas y ensayos. Cuando habla, recorre dos milenios de historia –de Julio César a Obama– como si estuviera allí, salpicando sarcasmos desde una fila trasera. Hoy se ha detenido en Filadelfia, en el nacimiento de la república. “Benjamin Franklin vio venir todo esto –afirma–. Lo cito porque la mayoría de los estadunidenses de ahora ni siquiera saben quién era. Tendrá que explicarles a sus lectores.” Fue escritor, científico y soldado y uno de los "padres fundadores" de Estados Unidos. “En Filadelfia, en 1781, cuando se redactaba la Constitución, fungió como observador. No quería tomar parte, y cuando salió del Salón de la Constitución en Filadelfia unas ancianas le preguntaron: ‘Ay, señor Franklin, ¿qué va a pasar ahora?’ Él les contestó: ‘Bueno, tendrán una república, si pueden conservarla. Pero todas las constituciones como ésta han fallado desde el principio de los tiempos, por causa de la corrupción de la gente’.”

–Entonces, ¿los estadunidenses son corruptos? ¿No eran lo bastante buenos para la nación?

–Precisamente. Sólo eran buenos para ser una potencia colonial insubordinada o las heces de una.

La vida política de Vidal empezó allí… casi. Nació en la Academia Militar de West Point, en el seno de una familia pudiente de la cúspide del poderío estadunidense. Su abuelo fue Thomas Pryor Gore, senador por Oklahoma. El político era ciego, así que desde que tenía cinco años Gore le leía cartas y libros y lo guiaba discretamente por las reuniones de Washington DC. El senador era un populista que pugnaba por azuzar a la gente contra el poder concentrado de Wall Street y los grandes banqueros. Representaba a los algodoneros, que perdieron en la guerra civil sólo para ser aniquilados por los financieros de Wall Street que jugaban a la ruleta con el precio global del algodón. Sin embargo, siempre hubo una contradicción en su vida: "Mi abuelo no soportaba a los ciudadanos de su estado. Y ellos lo adoraban por eso. A ver, explíquese eso".

Un populista que no tenía fe en el populacho… lo que su nieto llegaría a ser. Gore Vidal comparte la creencia populista de que la gente es maltratada por los ricos, pero le parece que la población es tan cretina y está tan drogada por la televisión y la comida rápida que no se percata de ello. "Siempre hay que tener la esperanza de que de algún modo misterioso se llegue a educar a la gente. Bueno, ése es el vínculo. Pero la gente no sabe nada. Cuando nos volvimos un imperio, dejamos de ensenar geografía en las escuelas para que nadie supiera dónde quedaba ninguna parte. No es culpa de las personas: las han pervertido con formas imperiales de pensar para que sean trabajadores dóciles y fieles consumidores. Ése era el sueño y se ha vuelto realidad."

De niño, a Vidal le encantaba pasar tiempo con su abuelo el senador; una de las principales razones es porque así podía escapar un tiempo de su madre alcohólica, Nina. Cuando le menciono el tema adopta de nuevo el quejido nasal de un entrevistador imaginario y dice: “Ay, señor Vidal, su pobre madre no debió de ser tan mala como usted dice [en sus memorias].’ No, era mucho peor. No me meto con las mamás de otros, pero la mía tenía mucho que atacar.”

Nina estaba ebria constantemente, y cuando no estaba agrediéndolo o amenazando con suicidarse le contaba sórdidos detalles de su vida en una obsesiva y furiosa perorata. Cuando él tenía 10 años "me contó que el coraje le causaba orgasmos. No le pregunté si le pasaba lo mismo con el sexo". Cuando Gore apareció en la portada de Time, años después, ella escribió una larga carta a la revista para desacreditarlo. La revista la publicó con el título: "Amor de madre". Vidal parece haber heredado de ella su sardónica amargura. Cuando le preguntaron a Nina por qué no se había casado por cuarta vez, respondió: "Mi primer marido tenía tres bolas, el segundo dos y el tercero una. Hasta yo sé cuándo es mejor no presionar a la suerte".

¿Piensa Vidal en ella a menudo? "No", responde, con mirada de hielo. Después de todos estos años, ¿llega a sentir alguna compasión por ella? "No." El hielo se vuelve un glaciar. ¿Al menos cree que ella formó su personalidad? El crítico teatral Kenneth Tynan, viejo amigo de Gore, escribió en su diario: “Qué soberbia e impenetrable armadura lleva puesta, como corresponde a alguien cuya vida es una batalla permanente por la supremacía (social e intelectual)… Gore jamás podría rendirse (es decir, exponerse) ante nadie”. ¿Acaso la crueldad de su madre explica que a lo largo de su vida haya echado de su lado cuanto lo ha rodeado, sus constantes pinchazos? Tan pronto pregunto esto me doy cuenta de cuánto ha cambiado Vidal desde la última vez que lo vi. En ese tiempo habría respondido con una desdeñosa ironía, o reafirmado su supremacía con una cita en griego clásico. Ahora parece un poco herido –sus ojos brillan con tristeza– y responde: “Bueno… es lo último que me gustaría creer”. Y queda en silencio. De pronto me siento majadero y cruel.

Su abuelo se enfurecía de que Franklin Roosevelt arrastrara al país a una guerra innecesaria –así la consideraba– contra Alemania y Japón. Se oponía a todas las guerras contra potencias extranjeras, pues en su concepto eran promovidas por las grandes empresas para servir a sus intereses. "Creía que ninguna guerra en el extranjero valía la vida de un estadunidense", recuerda Vidal, con orgullo. Pero por esa razón –y por su oposición al Nuevo Trato– perdió su escaño en el Senado. Como un pequeño acto de venganza, Vidal dice que nunca ha puesto el pie en Oklahoma.

Se alistó en el ejército a los 17 años, feliz de escapar de su madre. Pasó la guerra asignado en Italia y, tres años en Alaska. No le sorprende que ese "infierno helado" haya producido a Sarah Palin, "el ídolo más reciente en el largo culto estadunidense a la estupidez". Alaska fue "el lugar adonde todos los rufianes del país se fueron a esconder. Y ellos produjeron a Palin".

Hoy se da cuenta, agrega, de que fue parte de un ejército enviado a construir un imperio global por el "César Augusto de Estados Unidos, Roosevelt". El viejo Estados Unidos fue remplazado por un pulpo militar con un brazo de metal en cada continente, y en lugar de la vieja Constitución se instaló un “Estado de seguridad nacional. No me hubiera alistado si hubiera sabido adónde nos llevaría –señala–. Pero allí estaba: terminamos la guerra como un imperio y azotamos la puerta. Y luego jodimos todo”.

Salió del ejército sin un centavo. "Mi padre y mi abuelo, como hombres que crecieron por esfuerzo propio, no iban a hacerme la vida. Yo lo sabía", relata. Así pues, se sentó a escribir una novela sobre la guerra, titulada Williwaw. A la edad de 20 años se halló convertido de pronto en un ácido escritor realista de gran éxito. Se le encomió como un soldado valiente, y su abuelo habló de sentarlo en el Congreso, pero él quería escribir una novela más audaz, basada en la única persona que había amado. Esa novela acabó con cualquier esperanza de una carrera política para él, pero lo convirtió en figura decisiva en la vida estadunidense.

Traducción: Jorge Anaya

In Russian, the phrase 'gore vidal' means "he has seen grief." As Gore Vidal is wheeled towards me across an empty London hotel lobby, it seems for the first time like an apt translation. In the eight years since I saw him last, he has lost his partner of fifty years, most of his friends, most of his enemies, and the use of his legs. The man I met then - bristling with his own brilliance, scattering witticisms around like confetti - has withered. His skin is like parchment, but the famous cheekbones are still sharp beneath the crags. "It is so cold in here," he says, by way of introduction. "So fucking cold."

Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his own fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America's greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists, and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got felated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and - finally, bizarrely - befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been "a failure". It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs." The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken "by the madhouse" and the Chinese call in the country's debts. A ruined United States will then be "the Yellow Man's Burden", and "they'll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport."

A Scotch is fetched for him as he is wheeled into the corner of the bar. "I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated," he says, "but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away - and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense." The President "wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember - the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that."

When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head. "He's twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He's absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn't done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry - to find the perfect gas, to gas a population - you won't know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He's like that. He's not ready for prime time and he's getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once."

Is there any hope? "Every sign I see is doom. But then people say" - he adopts a whiny, nasal voice - "'Oh Mr Vidal, you're so negative, can't you say something nice about America? It's a wonderful country, everybody wants to live here.' Oh yes? When was the last time you saw a Norwegian with a green card who wanted to come here because of the health service? I'll pay you if you can find one."

But there is, he says with sudden perkiness, some "good news. Afghanistan will be terminal for the American empire, yes. Which is a happy way of looking at it. We'll be out of the empire game, rapidly. But it's too late for the country and the constitution." He raises his drink, and smiles ironically. "To a better republic," he says, and drinks in one long gulp.

I The Death of America

The current spasming death of America was foretold at its birth, Vidal says, and it can only be understood by whirling back there. It has been his mission to explain the past to the "United States of Amnesia," through his novels and essays. When he speaks, he sweeps over two millennia of history - from Caesar to Obama - as if he was there, forever spraying one-liners from the back row. Today, he was stopped time in Philadelphia, at the birth of the republic. "Benjamin Franklin saw all this coming," he says. "I quote him because most Americans don't even know who he was now. You'll have to explain to your readers." Franklin was a polymathic writer, scientist and soldier who became one of the founding fathers of the United States. "In Philadelphia in 1781, when the constitution was being put together, he was an observer. He didn't want to have any part of it, and as he was leaving the Constitution Hall in Philadelphia a couple of old ladies said, 'Ah, Mr Franklin, what is going to happen?' He told them: 'Well, you're going to get a Republic, if you can keep it. But every constitution of this sort has failed since the beginning of time due to the corruption of the people.'"

So the American people are corrupt? Americans weren't good enough for America? "Precisely. They were only good enough to be a restive colonial power - or the dregs of one."

Vidal's politics began here - almost. He was born at the United States Military Academy in West Point to a wealthy family at the apex of American power. His grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the Senator for Oklahoma. He was blind, so from the age of five, little Gore was reading letters and books for big Gore and guiding him discretely through Washington D.C. parties. The Senator was a populist, fighting to rally the people against the concentrated power of Wall Street and Big Finance. He represented the cotton farmers who emerged battered from the Civil War, only to be destroyed by Wall Street financiers playing roulette with the global cotton price. Yet there was always a strange contradiction to his life: "My grandfather couldn't stand his constituents," Vidal says. "And they loved him for it. Figure that one out."

He was a populist with no faith in the populace - precisely what his grandson has turned into. Gore Vidal shares the populist belief that the people are being shafted by the rich - but he thinks the population is too cretinous and drugged by television and fast food to figure it out. "It is always to be hoped that the people will mysteriously be educated, somehow. Well, that's the link. But the people don't know anything. As soon as we became an empire, we stopped teaching geography in the schools, so nobody would know where anything is. It's not the people's fault - they have been perverted them into imperial ways of thinking so that they would be docile workers and loyal consumers. That was the dream and it has come true."

As a child, Vidal loved spending time with his Senator-grandfather, not least because it meant he could escape for a time from his alcoholic mother Nina. When I raise the topic, he adopts the whiny nasal voice of a mock-interviewer again and says: "'Oh Mr Vidal, your poor mother can't have been as awful as you say [in your memoirs].' She was a lot worse. I don't go after other people's mothers, but my own was quite enough to attack."

She was constantly drunk, and when she wasn't savaging him or threatening suicide, she would tell her son the full details of her life in an obsessive angry blather. When he was ten, "she told me that rage made her orgasmic. I didn't think to ask her if sex did the same." When he appeared on the cover of Time magazine years later, she wrote a long letter to the magazine denouncing him. The magazine headlined it: "A Mother's Love." Vidal seems to have inherited his bitter wit from her. Asked why she didn't marry for a fourth time, she said: "My first husband had three balls, my second two, my third one. Even I know enough not to press my luck." Does he think of her often? "No." He gives me an icy stare. After all these years, can he feel any compassion for her? "No." The ice becomes a glacier.

Does he think, at least, that she shaped his personality? His old friend Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, wrote in his diaries: "What superb and seamless armour he wears, as befits one for whom life is a permanent battle for (social and intellectual) supremacy... Gore could never surrender (i.e. expose) himself to anyone." Could his mother's cruelty explain his life-long sweeping dismissal of everything around him - the constant goring by Gore? As soon as I ask this, I realize how Vidal has changed since I last saw him. Then, he would have responded with a witty put-down, or reasserted his supremacy with an obscure classical reference, quoted in the original Greek. Now he looks a little hurt - his eyes flicker sadly - and he says: "Well, it's the last thing I'd like to think about." Then he is silent. I suddenly feel rude, and cruel.

His grandfather became increasingly furious that Franklin Roosevelt was - he believed - dragging the United States into an unnecessary war against Germany and Japan. He was opposed to all foreign wars, which he believed were drummed up by Big Business to serve their interests. "He thought that no foreign war was worth the life of any American," Vidal says, with a smile of pride. But this - combined with his opposition to the New Deal - meant he was voted out of office. As a little act of revenge, Vidal says he has never visited Oklahoma.

He joined the army at the age of seventeen, glad to escape his mother. He spent the war posted in Italy and, for three years, Alaska. He is not surprised that this "frozen hell" has produced Sarah Palin, "the latest idol in America's long cult of stupidity." Alaska was, he says, "the place where all the crooks in America went to hide. And they produced her."

He says he realizes now that he was part of an army sent to build a global Empire by "America's Augustus, Roosevelt." The old America was replaced by a military octopus with a metal arm on every continent, and the old constitution was replaced by a "National Security State. I wouldn't have enlisted if I knew where it was going to lead," he says. "But there it was, and we ended [the war as] an empire and slammed the door behind us. Then we fucked it up."

He left the army with no money. "My father and grandfather, as self-made men, were not going to make any other man. I knew that," he says. So he sat down and wrote a novel about the war called 'Williwaw.' At the age of twenty, he was suddenly a hard-boiled realist best-seller. He was lauded as a tough young soldier, and his grandfather talked of setting him up with a Congressional seat - but Vidal wanted to write another, bolder novel, based on the only person he had ever loved. It pulled any hope of a political career down behind him - but made him a defining figure in American life.

II An Interrupted Love Story

When Vidal was fourteen, a boy called Jimmy Trimble moved into Vidal's dorm at his Washington boarding school. He was a blond, built jock; Vidal was a bookish intellectual. "His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great," he wrote years later in his memoir, 'Palimpsest.' They fell in lust and perhaps in love, and had sex in the forest at the edge of the school grounds. "It was the first human happiness I had ever encountered," Vidal wrote. He saw Trimble as his other half, the person who finally made him complete. Then Trimble was, at the age of nineteen, blown up by a hand grenade on the beaches of Iwo Jima.

For years, thoughts of Trimble still made Vidal tremble. I think they still do: his eyes turn distant and a little watery when we talk about him. So he wrote a novel - 'The City and The Pillar' - imagining what would have happened if they had met again after the war. It's a dark, bitter book: the sex is a failure, and one kills the other. But in 1950s America, to show two all-American boys - manly, self-assured - having sex was wildly bold. He was subject to a blackout in the "respectable" press and any hope of elected office died, but the book became a best-seller.

Vidal resolved that he would never again find what he had lost with Jimmy: "It would be greedy to expect a repetition. I was aware of my once-perfect luck, and left it at that." He says he had sex with more than a thousand "anonymous youths" by the age of 25. He never saw them twice; he never pretended there was any affection there. He was what they labelled "trade" - he did nothing (deliberately, at least) to please them. He was pleasured; that was all. "When I got too old, I paid for it gladly." After the death of Trimble, he seems to have emotionally cauterised himself. Even his closest friends have said there is an isolation at the core of his character. He once said: "I have known so many people, but it seems I have known nobody at all."

Strangely, though, Vidal has always resisted the idea that he is a "gay" champion. "I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is." He says he finds "these restrictions tiresome. In the centuries of Rome's great military and political success, there was no differentiation between same-sexers and other-sexers; there was also a lot of crossing back and forth. Of the first twelve Roman emperors, only one was exclusively heterosexual." The US today is, for all the fussing, full of sodomy, he says. "Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomising Arab boys? I thought, well that's been the case since the very beginning of the republic. They blamed the sodomy on those great forests out there which they said made them horny. There was nothing else to do but bugger boys, they said."

So homosexuality and heterosexuality are fictions? "Yes, of course." He adopts a camp faggy voice and adds: "But it makes a lot of girls happy." Why do so many people believe it to be true about themselves if it's false? "They believe in Jesus, and that's a much bigger fiction, with more money spent on it. Prettier clothes too."

When he was 25, Vidal met a younger man called Howard Austen, and they settled down together, on one condition - they agreed to never have sex, nor be romantic in any way. He and Austen were together for fifty years. He died last year, in a hospital in the Hollywood Hills. "He had lung cancer and he wouldn't stop smoking and then it went to his brain and he had brain cancer. That's... that's what happened," he says. Once, in an essay, he quoted the critic Edmund Wilson, who said of his dead wife: "After she was dead, I loved her." Can he say that of Howard? He affects not to hear. "Now I'm a gimp. I can't walk. I need hospitals. You know I have a knee made out of titanium." He taps his knee. "So you see, I need hospitals." And he looks away, a little absently, as if thinking of something else.

III Isolation

By his mid-twenties, Vidal was a best-selling author, and rich. He rented a property in Guatemala - far from his mother - and settled down to write his next novel. But in that small tropical central American country, he found he was going to have to dramatically reassess the country he had just fought for - and pull his grandfather's abandoned philosophy from the gutter of history.

Just before Vidal arrived, the poverty-wreathed Guatemalan people had elected a left-wing President called Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. They wanted him to introduce a minimum wage and start taxing the US mega-corporation the United Fruit Company that dominated the country's only industry, banana-growing. The outraged United Fruit Company acted to preserve its profits - by getting Washignton to topple Arbenz and install a dictator. The phrase 'bannana republic' entered the language.

"I was astonished," Vidal says. "I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was the past." He discovered that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was leading the charge, and "I didn't believe it. Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him." He says he realised then he had been fighting "for an Empire, not a republic". His grandfather, he resolved, had been right all along: wars only serve elites.

He rapidly became the leading left-wing critic of American foreign policy. He warned against every war from Vietnam to Iraq, often with extraordinary prescience. At the height of George Bush's post-9/11 popularity, he said: "Mark my words - he will leave office the most unpopular President in history." His essays on this subject are often great flares of truth and anger. His horror at US foreign policy can be summarised in one little scene. In the 1980s, the Sistine Chapel was being restored, and some VIPs were invited to view it on an elevated platform. He spotted that old serial killer Henry Kissinger inspecting the section depicting Hell, and said: "Look, he's apartment hunting."

Vidal started preaching his grandfather's gospel of isolationism. "I am a patriot of the old republic that has slowly vanished during the expansionist years and disappeared completely in 1950 when the National Security State replaced it," he says. "I want us to go from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, and restore the constitution. We should leave the world alone, before they make us."

The US is only menaced, he says, because it menaces others. "In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction." He stirs his Scotch and says: "There was no 9/11. I mean - our policies were such that we were going to have a lot of crazy people out there in the Arab world who were going to try to blow us up, because of crimes they feel we committed against them. Any fool could see it coming. And I'm sufficiently a fool to have seen it."

He sees his job as expressing "the unacceptable obvious," and says he is always ready to "turn the other fist." I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified - when some were not. He looks coldly at me. "Okay - name one." Pearl Harbour, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

His face tightens into a scowl. "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!" he snaps. "He taunted the Japanese so they would have to hit us, at Pearl Harbour, and they did... We have conveniently forgotten because we don't teach American history to anybody, but he sent an ultimatum to the Japanese telling them to get out of China, which they'd been trying to conquer for years. He was laying down the law to them, [saying they had to] surrender their rather proud nation's empire. And they said fuck you. And the next thing we knew the fleet was moving towards Pearl Harbour."

That's not how most historians read it - but I move on to an even more contested example. He says the Soviet Empire was "purely reactive" to American power, and only committed atrocities and invasions because the US "goaded them." Can that be true? Couldn't they be independently cruel, just as the US sometimes was? "They had a whole continent to play with, they didn't need any more space," he says, and changes the subject, rather oddly, to talk about the Dutch.

I try to pull him back. Yes, it's clearly the case that 9/11 was in part a blow-back response to US crimes in the Middle East, but he goes much further, and says the Bush administration was "probably" in on it. Where is the evidence for this huge claim? "It would certainly fit them to a tee, so you can't blame the rest of us for starting to think on slightly conspiratorial grounds. They did steal the great election of the year 2000 and they somehow fixed the Supreme Court of the United States, that sacred place and got them to go along with it, with the selection, not the election, the selection of George W Bush as president. He wasn't voted for, people didn't want him. And were somewhat mystified that he ended up with it."

But there was an earlier attack on America that he wants to discuss now - one he says was carried out by a "sane" and "noble" man.

IV A Noble Boy

On April 19th 1995, a former US soldier called Timothy McVeigh planted a massive truck bomb outside a government building in Oklahoma City, at the heart of Vidal's grandfather's old constituency. Some 168 people died, including a kindergarten full of children. McVeigh wrote to Vidal, saying he had been motivated, in part, by studying his work. He said he believed the US Constitution had been usurped by a National Security State that had to be defeated by force. Vidal wrote back - and they became friends. He started mounting passionate defences of the bomber in public. He says now he was not crazy, but "too sane for his place and time."

"He was a dedicated student of the American way, of the Constitution itself," he says. "You should read his writings - they're very good. Particularly on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1876, which forbids the Federal government ever to use its troops against the American people - but which they proceeded to do at Waco [a compound used by a religious cult that was attacked by federal troops in 1993]. They killed more people than he managed to kill when he blew up that building in Oklahoma City. He was a noble boy."

Noble? The man who consorted with far right militia groups and blew up all those children? Vidal scowls again, and almost hisses: "He didn't kill them deliberately! But the American government killed all those people at Waco, men, women and children deliberately! It was his gesture against the government he loathed. You know, he swore to me he had no idea there were children there. He said - 'How would I know? I walked by the place once and I knew that there was some kind of dining room, families might be there, or they might not be there,' and he wasn't counting, he wasn't out for a big count. But he was trying to tell the government - look, you have done this arbitrarily, contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act, contrary to American law, you've killed American citizens. Remember he was an army boy, and he loved it, and he was longing to get back in the army and the army was longing to get him back, he was the best sharpshooter they'd seen in years. But it was not meant to be."

But he knew he would kill hundreds of innocent people: that was the point. Doesn't that show a callous disrespect for human life? "So did Patton, so did Eisenhower!" he says angrily. "Everybody's rather careless about it once you start getting involved in wars. He saw this as a war to preserve the Constitution! You know what he said? But you don't, so I'm going to tell you. The judge [at his trial] quite liked him, and he was intrigued by the fact that this rather talkative kid who wrote tons of pieces for the press had not defended himself. So he said - Mr McVeigh, could we hear more from you? [McVeigh] said, 'Well, your honour, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists, in his opinion in Olmstead. There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government."

When did this happen to Gore Vidal? When did he go from righteous - and right - opposition to atrocities carried out by his own government, to justifying any atrocity against it, no matter how extreme? When I ask him, his scowl turns to a sneer, and he says I am ignorant and clearly haven't read anything. I decide to try a different approach. I ask him - if there were more people like McVeigh, would that be a good thing? There is a crack in his hauteur, and he says: "It strikes me as a perfect nightmare. Of course I don't want more people like McVeigh. Since Americans refuse to think about anything, being incapable I suspect of thought, then they're not going to come to any conclusions except mistaken ones."

I don't understand. I try again and again to tug him back and get him to say whether this means he thinks McVeigh was wrong to plant the bomb. He won't. Finally, he jeers: "You are trying my patience," and defies me - with a long stare - to change the subject.

V Pale Moonlight

Vidal is one of the last of his generation of American intellectuals standing (or, at least, sitting). I ask him about some of his rivals, who have died recently - John Updike, William Buckley, Norman Mailer - and he interrupts. "Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain." Then he smiles to himself: "You know, he used the word 'existential' all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned."

There is a vulnerability to Vidal now that didn't exist eight years ago. Before, I felt like I was shouting questions up Mount Olympus: he conducted the interview from above and beyond me, impervious to anything I said. Now, when I laugh at his jokes, he looks pleased, and laughs too. When we argue, he looks genuinely thrown, and hurt, and angry. He seems keen to return to the calmer waters of his memories, and we paddle together in his Kennedy anecdotes. Jackie was really secretly in love with Bobby, he says. He used to call Jack the President-erect. Jack once had sex with an actress friend of his in a bath, and suddenly rammed her head underwater, so she would have a vaginal spasm, and he would have an orgasm. "She hates him still," he says. But when I ask him what he made of the late Teddy Kennedy as a person, he snaps: "Who cares what they were like as people? That's just show business."

He has had to abandon his second home in the high hills of Italy, and says he misses it. "Italy is such a civilised country. Unlike America." But is the gap so great? Is Silvio Berlusconi better than Barack Obama? He snaps again: "Who cares? This is showbiz you're worried about. I don't care who's on television telling jokes on the Late Show."

Vidal seems exhausted and alone, living out his days in the Hollywood Hills. After an amazingly full life - "I have tried everything but incest and folk-dancing", he says - he has no more books gestating. He has travelled to London to receive applause on stage for providing the recorded narration for the new production of 'Mother Courage' at the National Theatre, but all his old London friends - Tynan, Tom Driberg, Princess Margaret - are dead. I ask what it's like to be here, and he says: "This isn't a country, it's an American aircraft carrier." He starts to talk about his old friends again. He is swimming with ghosts now - from Jimmy Trimble to Jack Kennedy to his drunken, scolding mother. As he declines, he announces that everything around him is declining - America, literacy, humanity itself.

In one essay, Vidal said the author William Dean Howells at 84 "lived far too long". He quoted a line Howells wrote to Henry James: "I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in pale moonlight." Does he feel this about himself? I stare at him and don't have the heart to ask. He tells me he is unafraid of death. "I'm the least primitive American you're going to meet, and you have to be pretty primitive to believe in hell. To me hell is the United States of today."

After two hours, his carer - a beautiful long-haired French boy who has been reading Celine in the corner of the hotel bar - indicates that our time is up. I tell Vidal I hope I will interview him in another eight years' time. "Another eight years? Oh, the monotony!" he exclaims, and begins to be wheeled away. The last thing I hear him say - as he vanishes across the marble lobby - is a curse to his carer: "It's still so fucking cold in here!"

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/johannhari101

He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of interviews by Johann Hari -- with everyone from Hugo Chavez to Salman Rushdie to Dolly Parton -- click here.

Gore Vidal is the narrator for Mother Courage, which is part of the Travelex £10 season at the National Theatre and continues in the repertoire until 8 December. For tickets go to www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Germán Leyens

“No estoy segura de cuántos días más seguiré en vida,” dice tranquilamente Malalai Joya. Los señores de la guerra que componen el nuevo gobierno “democrático” en Afganistán han estado enviando balas y bombas durante años para tratar de matar a esta pequeña mujer de 30 años proveniente de los campos de refugiados – y parecen aproximarse más con cada intento. Sus enemigos la llaman una “muerta andante.” “Pero no temo a la muerte, temo guardar silencio ante la injusticia,” dice simplemente. “Soy joven y quiero vivir. Pero digo a los que quieren eliminar mi voz: ‘Estoy lista, dondequiera y cuandoquiera que ataquéis. Podéis cortar una flor, pero no podéis detener la primavera.’”

La historia de Malalai Joya vuelve al revés todo lo que nos han dicho sobre Afganistán. En la retórica oficial, ella representa lo que ha sido el motivo de nuestra lucha. Es una joven afgana que estableció una escuela clandestina secreta para niñas bajo los talibanes y – cuando fueron derrocados – tiró la burka, se presentó de candidata al parlamento, y enfrentó a los fundamentalistas religiosos.

Pero ella dice: “Vuestros gobiernos os han echado polvo a los ojos. No os han dicho la verdad. La situación para las mujeres es ahora tan catastrófica como lo fue durante los talibanes. Vuestros gobiernos han reemplazado el régimen fundamentalista de los talibanes con otro régimen fundamentalista de señores de la guerra. (Es decir) que vuestros soldados están muriendo para eso.” En lugar de ser liberada, está a punto de ser asesinada.

La historia de Joya es la historia de otro Afganistán – el que está detrás de la burka y detrás de la propaganda.

“Somos las guardianas de nuestras hermanas.”

Me reuní con Joya en un apartamento londinense donde vive con una partidaria durante una semana, para hablar de sus memorias – pero incluso aquí hay que mantener en secreto sus desplazamientos, mientras va de un piso franco a otro. Me dicen que no mencione su ubicación a nadie. Está de pie en el pasillo, pequeña y delgada, con sus cabellos fluyendo libremente, y me saluda con un fuerte apretón de manos. Pero, cuando nuestro fotógrafo toma su foto, comienza a reírse como una niña: la tristeza que refleja su pálida cara se desvanece, y se deshace en alegres risitas. “¡Me cuesta acostumbrarme a esto!” dice.

Luego, cuando me siento con ella para hablar de la historia de su vida, el dolor vuelve a inundar su cara. Su cuerpo se tensa y sus puños se cierran.

Joya tenía cuadro días cuando la Unión Soviética invadió Afganistán. Ese día, su padre abandonó sus estudios para combatir al ejército comunista invasor, y desapareció en las montañas. Ella dice: “Desde entonces, todo lo que hemos conocido ha sido la guerra.”

Su más temprano recuerdo es que estaba agarrada de las piernas de su madre mientras los policías registraban de arriba abajo su casa buscando evidencia del lugar en el que se ocultaba su padre. Su madre analfabeta trató de mantener vivos lo mejor posible a sus 10 hijos. Cuando la policía se hizo demasiado agresiva, llevó a sus niños a campos de refugiados al otro lado de la frontera en Irán. En esas inmundas ciudades de carpas ubicadas en la antigua Ruta de la Seda, los afganos se aglomeraban y eran tratados como ciudadanos de segunda clase por Irán. De noche, animales salvajes entraban a las carpas y atacaban a los niños. Allí, la familia recibió la noticia de que el padre de Joya había sido muerto por una mina terrestre – pero estaba vivo, después de perder una pierna.

No había escuelas en los campos iraníes, y la madre de Joya estaba determinada de que sus hijas recibieran la educación que ella nunca había tenido. De modo que huyeron de nuevo, a campos en Pakistán Occidental. Allí, Joya comenzó a leer – y fue transformada. “Dime lo que lees y te diré quién eres,” dice. Desde los primeros años de su adolescencia, inhaló toda la literatura que podía – desde la poesía persa hasta los dramas de Bertolt Brecht y los discursos de Martin Luther King. Comenzó a transmitir su recién descubierta alfabetización a las mujeres mayores en los campos, incluida su propia madre.

Pronto descubrió que le encantaba enseñar – y, al cumplir 16 años, una obra benéfica llamada Organización para la Promoción de las Capacidades de Mujeres Afganas (OPAWC) le hizo una atrevida sugerencia: ve a Afganistán y establece una escuela secreta para niñas, bajo las narices de la tiranía talibán.

De modo que tomó la poca ropa que tenía y fue llevada secretamente a través de la frontera – y comenzaron “los mejores días de mi vida.” Odiaba tener que ponerse una burka, ser acosada en las calles por la omnipresente policía “de vicio y virtud”, y estar bajo la amenaza constante de ser descubierta y ejecutada. Pero dice que valió la pena por las pequeñas. “Cada vez que una nueva niña entraba a la clase, era un triunfo,” dice, resplandeciente. “No hay nada mejor.”

Apenas logró evitar ser descubierta, una y otra vez. Una vez estaba enseñando a una clase de muchachas en el sótano de una familia cuando la madre gritó repentinamente: “¡talibanes! ¡talibanes!” Joya dice: “Dije a mis estudiantes que se acostaran en el suelo y permanecieran totalmente silenciosas. Oímos pasos arriba y esperamos mucho tiempo.” En muchas ocasiones, hombres y mujeres corrientes – extraños anónimos – le ayudaron enviando a la policía en la dirección equivocada. Agrega: “Cada día en Afganistán, incluso ahora, cientos si no miles de mujeres comunes realizan esos pequeños gestos de solidaridad mutua. Somos las guardianas de nuestras hermanas.”

La obra benéfica quedó tan impresionada con su persona que la nombró directora. Joya decidió establecer una clínica para mujeres pobres justo antes de los ataques del 11-S. Cando comenzó la invasión estadounidense, los talibanes huyeron de su provincia, pero las bombas siguieron cayendo. “Se perdieron innecesariamente muchas vidas, igual que en la tragedia del 11 de septiembre,” dice. “El ruido era aterrador, y los niños se tapaban los oídos y gritaban y lloraban. El humo y el polvo llenaban el aire con cada bomba que caía.”

En cuanto los talibanes se retiraron, fueron reemplazados por los señores de la guerra que habían gobernado Afganistán justo antes. Joya dice que, en ese momento: “me di cuenta de que los derechos de las mujeres habían sido traicionados por completo… La mayoría de la gente en Occidente ha sido llevada a creer que la intolerancia y la brutalidad hacia las mujeres en Afganistán comenzaron con el régimen talibán. Pero es una mentira. Muchas de las peores atrocidades fueron cometidas por los fundamentalistas muyahidines durante la guerra civil entre 1991 y 1996. Ellos introdujeron las leyes que oprimían a las mujeres, seguidas por los talibanes… y ahora volvían al poder, respaldados por EE.UU. Volvieron de inmediato a su antigua costumbre de utilizar la violación para castigar a sus enemigos y recompensar a sus combatientes.”

Los señores de la guerra “han gobernado Afganistán desde entonces,” agrega. Mientras “se ha creado un simulacro de parlamento en Kabul para uso en EE.UU.,” el verdadero poder “está en manos de esos fundamentalistas que gobiernan en todas partes fuera de Kabul.” Como ejemplo, nombra al ex gobernador de Herat Khan. Estableció sus propios escuadrones de “vicio y virtud” que aterrorizaron a las mujeres y destruyeron casetes de vídeo y música. Tenía sus propias “milicias privadas, cárceles privadas”. La constitución de Afganistán es irrelevante en esos feudos privados.

Joya descubrió exactamente lo que eso significaba cuando comenzó a establecer la clínica – un señor de la guerra local anunció que no sería permitida, ya que era mujer y crítica del fundamentalismo. Lo hizo igual, y decidió enfrentar a ese fundamentalista presentándose a la elección para la Loya jirga (“reunión de los ancianos”) para elaborar la nueva constitución afgana. Hubo un gran movimiento de apoyo para esa muchacha que quería construir una clínica – y fue elegida. “Resultó ser que mi misión,” dice, “sería denunciar la verdadera naturaleza de la jirga desde adentro.”

“Nunca volví a estar segura.”

Al pasar ante las cámaras de televisión del mundo hacia la Loya jirga, lo primero que Joya vio fue “una larga fila con algunos de los peores abusadores de los derechos humanos que nuestro país haya jamás visto – señores de la guerra, criminales de guerra y fascistas.”

Pudo ver a los hombres que invitaron al país a Osama bin Laden, los hombres que introdujeron las leyes misóginas que después fueron seguidas por los talibanes, los hombres que habían masacrado civiles afganos. Algunos llegaron allí mediante la intimidación del electorado, otros mediante el fraude electoral, y aún más que fueron simplemente nombrados por Hamid Karzai, el ex petrolero instalado por el ejército de EE.UU. para que gobernara el país. Pensó en un antiguo dicho afgano: “Es el mismo asno, con montura nueva.”

Por un momento, mientras esos viejos asesinos comenzaban a pronunciar largos discursos congratulándose por la transición a la democracia, Joya se sintió nerviosa. Pero entonces, dice: “Recordé la opresión que enfrentamos como mujeres en mi país, y mi nerviosismo se evaporó, para ser reemplazado por la cólera.”

Cuando le tocó su turno, se levantó, miró alrededor a los ensangrentados señores de la guerra y comenzó a hablar. “¿Por qué permitimos que haya criminales presentes? Son responsables por la situación en la que estamos… Son ellos los que convirtieron nuestro país en el centro de guerras nacionales e internacionales. Son los elementos más contrarios a las mujeres en nuestra sociedad que han puesto a nuestro país en este estado y quieren volver a hacer lo mismo… En su lugar deberían ser procesados en los tribunales nacionales e internacionales.”

Esos señores de la guerra – que alardean de ser duros – no pudieron hacer frente a una esbelta joven que decía la verdad. Comenzaron a gritar y a aullar, llamándola “prostituta” e “infiel”, y a arrojarle botellas. Un hombre trató de golpearla en la cara. Le cortaron el micrófono y la jirga se convirtió en un disturbio.

“Desde ese momento,” dice Joya, “nunca volví a estar segura… Para los fundamentalistas, una mujer es medio ser humano, que sirve sólo para satisfacer todas las voluntades y deseos de un hombre, y para producir niños y trabajar en la casa. No podían creer que una joven mujer les estuviera arrancando las máscaras ante los ojos del pueblo afgano.”

Una turba fundamentalista apareció unas pocas horas después ante su alojamiento, y anunció que había ido a violarla y lincharla. Tuvo que ser puesta bajo inmediata guardia armada – pero se negó a ser protegida por soldados estadounidenses, e insistió en que fueran policías afganos.

Su discurso fue transmitido a todo el mundo – y vitoreado en Afganistán. Recibió un inmenso apoyo de la gente de su país, feliz de que finalmente alguien haya expresado su opinión. Una aldea pobrísima reunió dinero y envió un delegado a cientos de kilómetros de distancia para expresar su agradecimiento.

Una mujer extremadamente anciana llegó acarreada en una carretilla desvencijada, y explicó que había perdido dos hijos – uno ante los soviéticos, el otro ante los fundamentalistas. Dijo a Joya: “Tengo casi 100 años, y me muero. Cuando supe de usted y de lo que dijo, supe que tenía que verla. Dios la proteja, querida.”

Le entregó su argolla de oro, su única posesión de valor, y dijo: “¡Tiene que aceptarla! ¡He sufrido tanto en mi vida, y mi último deseo es que acepte éste mi regalo!

Pero los ocupantes de EE.UU. y la OTAN instruyeron a Joya que debía mostrar “cortesía y respeto” hacia los otros delegados. Cuando Zalmay Khalilzad, el embajador de EE.UU. le dijo eso, ella respondió: “Si estos criminales hubieran violado a su madre o a su hija o a su abuela, o matado a siete de sus hijos, para no hablar de todos los tesoros morales y materiales de su país, ¿qué palabras utilizaría contra semejantes criminales que estén dentro del marco de la cortesía y el respeto?”

Se inclina y cita a Brecht: “Brecht dice: ‘El que no conoce la verdad es sólo un idiota. El que conoce la verdad y dice que es una mentira es un criminal.’”

Los intentos de asesinarla comenzaron con un francotirador – y no se han detenido desde entonces. Pero ella dice sencillamente, con su puño cerrado: “Quería que los señores de la guerra supieran que no les tenía miedo.”

De modo que se presentó a la elección para el parlamento, y ganó por gran mayoría. “Volvería de nuevo para enfrentar a los que habían arruinado mi país,” explica, “y estaba determinada a mantenerme erguida y a que nunca volvería a doblegarme ante sus amenazas.”

“En cada rincón hay un asesino”

En su primer día Joya observó todo el nuevo parlamento afgano y pensó: “En cada rincón se esconde un asesino, un títere, un criminal, un lord de la droga, un fascista. Esto no es una democracia. Soy una de las pocas personas en este lugar que ha sido auténticamente elegida.” Comenzó su discurso de introducción diciendo: “Mis condolencias al pueblo de Afganistán…”

Antes de que pudiera continuar, los señores de la guerra comenzaron a gritar que la violarían y la matarían. Un señor de la guerra, Abdul Sayyaf, le gritó una amenaza. Joya le miró directo a los ojos y dijo: “Aquí no estamos en [el área que él gobierna por la fuerza] así que contrólese.”

Le pregunto si tuvo miedo, y sacude la cabeza. “Nunca tengo miedo cuando digo la verdad.” Ahora habla rápido: “Me siento verdaderamente honorada por haber sido vilipendiada y amenazada por los salvajes que condenaron a nuestro país a una miseria semejante. Me siento orgullosa de que, aunque no tengo un ejército privado, ni dinero, ni potencias mundiales que me apoyen, esos déspotas brutales me teman y comploten para eliminarme.”

Dice que para los afganos de a pie no hay diferencias entre los talibanes y los señores de la guerra igualmente fundamentalistas. “Qué grupos son etiquetados como ‘terroristas’ o ‘fundamentalistas’ depende de lo útiles que sean para los objetivos de EE.UU.,” dice. “Existen dos lados que aterrorizan a las mujeres, pero los del lado anti-estadounidense son ‘terroristas’ y los pro-estadounidenses son ‘héroes.’”

Karzai gobierna sólo por permiso de los señores de la guerra. Es un “títere desvergonzado” que ganará las elecciones presidenciales del próximo mes porque “no ha dejado de trabajar para sus amos, EE.UU. y los señores de la guerra… En este punto de nuestra historia, los únicos que llegan a servir como presidentes son los elegidos por el gobierno de EE.UU. y la mafia que detiene el poder en nuestro país.”

Cada vez que llegaba a desesperar en el parlamento, encontraba a más mujeres afganas corrientes – y volvía a la lucha. Me habla de una muchacha de 16 años, Rahella, que escapó a un orfanato que Joya había ayudado a establecer en su circunscripción. “Su tío había decidido casarla con su hijo, que era drogadicto. Ella se espantó. De modo que ciertamente la aceptaron, la educaron, le ayudaron.” Un día, apareció el tío y se disculpó, diciendo que había comprendido su error. Pidió si podría volver a casa por el fin de semana para visitar a su familia. Joya aceptó – y cuando volvió a su aldea Rahella fue obligada a casarse y fue llevada a otra parte de Afganistán. Meses después supieron que se había bañado en gasolina y se había quemado viva.

Ha habido una epidemia de suicidios de mujeres en todo el “nuevo” Afganistán en los últimos cinco años. “Los cientos de mujeres afganas que se han quemado no sólo se suicidan para escapar a su miseria,” dice Joya, “claman por justicia.”

Pero no se le permitió presentar esos temas en el supuestamente democrático parlamento. Los señores de la guerra fundamentalistas no pudieron derrotar a Joya en las urnas o matarla y buscaron otra manera de silenciarla. Mientras más hablaba, más se enfurecían. Pidió secularismo en Afganistán, diciendo: “La religión es un asunto privado, que no está relacionado con temas políticos y el gobierno… Los verdaderos musulmanes no necesitan dirigentes políticos que los guíen hacia el Islam.” Condenó la nueva ley que declaró una amnistía para todos los crímenes de guerra cometidos en Afganistán durante los últimos 30 años, diciendo: “Vosotros, los criminales, simplemente os estáis dando licencia para salir de la cárcel.” Por lo tanto los parlamentarios simplemente votaron para expulsarla del Parlamento.

Fue ilegal y antidemocrático – pero el presidente, Hamid Karzai, apoyó la exclusión. “Ahora los criminales señores de la guerra ya no son cuestionados en el parlamento,” dice Joya. “¿Eso es democracia?”

En Occidente nos han servido “un montón de mentiras” sobre lo que es Afganistán actual. “Los medios son ‘libres’ sólo si no tratan de criticar a los señores de la guerra y a los funcionarios,” dice en su libro:

“Raising My Voice” [Alzando mi voz]. Como ejemplo, nombra a un señor de la guerra específico: “Si escribes algo sobre su persona, al día siguiente serás torturado o muerto por los señores de la guerra de la Alianza del Norte.” Es “un mito” cuando se dice que ahora las muchachas ahora pueden ir a la escuela fuera de Kabul. “Sólo un cinco por ciento de las niñas, según la ONU, pueden continuar su educación hasta el 12º año.”

Y es “falso” decir que la cultura afgana sea inherentemente misógina. “En los años cincuenta, hubo un creciente movimiento femenino en Afganistán, que se manifestaba y luchaba por sus derechos,” dice. “Tengo una historia” – revisa sus notas – del New York Times en 1959. ¡Aquí está! El titular es ‘Mujeres en Afganistán levantan el velo’ Estábamos desarrollando una cultura abierta para las mujeres – y luego las guerras e invasiones extranjeras lo aplastaron todo. Si podemos recuperar nuestra independencia, podremos reiniciar esa lucha.”

Muchos de sus amigos la instan a abandonar el país, antes de que uno de los aspirantes a asesinos tenga éxito. Pero, ella dice: “Nunca podré partir mientras toda la gente pobre que amo viva en el peligro y la pobreza. No voy a buscar un sitio mejor y más seguro, y dejarla en el infierno.” Mientras me pide perdón por su inglés – que, en realidad, es excelente – vuelve a citar a Brecht: “Los que luchan fracasan a menudo, pero los que no luchan han fracasado siempre.”

Actualmente, Joya lucha por la democracia desde afuera del parlamento. Pero, dice, todo demócrata afgano está actualmente “atrapado entre dos enemigos. Están las fuerzas de ocupación desde el cielo, lanzando bombas de racimo y uranio empobrecido, y en tierra están los señores de la guerra fundamentalistas y los talibanes, con sus propias armas.” Quiere ayudar al creciente movimiento de afganos de a pie que se encuentran entre medio, que se oponen a ambos: “Con la retirada de un enemigo, las fuerzas de ocupación, será más fácil luchar contra esos enemigos fundamentalistas interiores.”

Si fuera presidenta de Afganistán, comenzaría por enviar a todos los criminales de guerra del país ante la Corte Internacional de Justicia en La Haya. “Cualquiera que ha asesinado a mis hermanas y hermanos debería ser castigado,” dice: “desde los talibanes, a los señores de la guerra, a George W. Bush.” Luego pediría a todas las fuerzas extranjeras que se fueran inmediatamente. Dice que es un error cuando se dice que Afganistán simplemente caería en la guerra civil si eso sucediera. “¿Y qué me dicen de la guerra civil actual? Hoy en día la gente está siendo asesinada – muchos, muchos crímenes de guerra. Mientras más tiempo permanezcan en Afganistán las tropas extranjeras haciendo lo que hacen, peor será la eventual guerra civil para el pueblo afgano.”

El público afgano, agrega, está de su parte, refiriéndose a un reciente sondeo de opinión que muestra que un 60% de los afganos desea una retirada inmediata de la OTAN. Mucha gente en Afganistán, dice, tenía esperanzas en Barack Obama – “pero en realidad está intensificando la política de George Bush… Sé que su elección tiene mucho valor simbólico en términos de la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por igualdad de derecho, y esa lucha es algo que admiro y respeto. Pero lo que es importante para el mundo no es si el presidente es negro o blanco, sino sus acciones. No se puede comer simbolismo.”

La política de EE.UU. es impulsada por la geopolítica, dice, no por personalidades. “Afganistán está en el corazón de Asia, de modo que es un sitio muy importante para tener bases militares – para que puedan controlar con mucha facilidad el comercio con otras potencias asiáticas como ser China, Rusia, Irán, etc.”

“Pero puede ser cambiado por los estadounidenses,” agrega. Ahora se apasiona, su voz aumenta de tono. “Digo a Obama – en mi área, 150 personas fueron muertas por bombas de EE.UU. en un solo incidente en este año. Si su familia hubiera estado allí, ¿enviaría más soldados e incluso más bombas? Su gobierno está gastando 18 millones de dólares para construir otra cárcel de Guantánamo en Bagram. Si su hija pudiera ser detenida allí, ¿la estaría construyendo? Digo a Obama: cambie de ruta, o de otra manera la gente dirá mañana que es otro Bush.”

“Cuesta ser fuerte todo el tiempo”

“No es bueno mostrar alguna debilidad a mis enemigos, (pero) cuesta ser fuerte todo el tiempo,” dice Joya suspirando, mientras se pasa las manos por los cabellos. Ha estado hablando con tanta insistencia – con semejante coraje preternatural – que es fácil olvidar que era sólo una muchacha cuando fue lanzada a la lucha contra el fundamentalismo. Nunca se le permitió ser adolescente. La bravía concentración en su cara se desvanece, y parece un poco perdida. “Sí, mi madre se siente orgullosa de mi persona,” dice, “pero ya sabe cómo son las madres – se preocupan. Cada vez que hablo con ella por teléfono, su primera y última frase siempre es ‘¡Cuídate!’”

Hace dos años, se casó en secreto. No puede nombrar a su esposo, porque lo matarían. Hubo que revisar las flores para su boda a la busca de bombas. Sólo dice que se conocieron en una conferencia de prensa, “y que él apoya todo lo que hago.” No lo ha visto “durante dos meses,” dice. “Nos encontramos en casas seguras de nuestros partidarios. No puedo dormir en la misma casa dos noches seguidas. Es una casa diferente cada noche.”

¿De dónde sale tanto valor? Actúa como si la respuesta fuera obvia – cualquiera lo haría, afirma. Pero no lo hacen. Tal vez provenga de su creencia de que la lucha es larga y que nuestras vidas individuales son cortas, de modo que sólo podemos hacer progresar nuestra causa de a poco, sabiendo que otros tomarán el relevo. “Cuando yo muera, otros vendrán. De eso me siento segura,” dice.

Ciertamente tiene un fuerte sentimiento de pertenecer a una larga historia de afganos que lucharon por la libertad. “Mis padres eligieron mi nombre por Malalai de Maiwand. Fue una joven quien, en 1880, fue a la línea de fuego en la segunda guerra anglo-afgana a tratar a los heridos. Cuando los combatientes estaban cerca del colapso, levantó una bandera afgana y condujo a los hombres a la batalla. Fue herida – pero los británicos sufrieron una derrota importante y, finalmente, fueron expulsados.”

Cuando se presentó como candidata, tuvo que elegir un apellido, para proteger la identidad de su familia. “Me puse el nombre de Sarwar Joya, el poeta afgano y constitucionalista. Pasó 24 años en la cárcel y finalmente lo mataron porque no estuvo dispuesto a comprometer sus principios democráticos… En Afganistán tenemos un dicho: la verdad es como el sol. Cuando asciende, nadie puede taparla u ocultarla.”

Malalai Joya sabe que la pueden asesinar en cualquier momento, en nuestro recién liberado ‘istán’ de los señores de la guerra. Me abraza para despedirse y dice: “Tenemos que mantenernos en contacto.” Pero me quedo preguntándome tristemente si volveremos a vernos algún día. Tal vez lo nota, porque me insta a volver a leer el último párrafo de sus memorias “Raising My Voice.” “Es realmente como me siento,” explica. Dice: “Si muriera y queréis continuar mi trabajo, venid a visitar mi tumba. Echadle un poco de agua y gritad tres veces. Quiero oír vuestra voz.” Miro su cara y ella me da la sonrisa más valerosa que haya visto en mi vida.

As the long war in Northern Ireland has ended, the IRA has emptied its weapons dumps – but will its memory dumps ever be opened? When I was a child, Gerry Adams was presented as a bearded demon, personally responsible for every bomb that blew up across my city, London. His voice was not allowed to be broadcast on British television, as if he could hypnotise us with his Irish drawl. Today he is widely regarded as an international statesman, a man who risked his life to make the journey from Armalite to peace. He has just received a fresh batch of threats from the "Real IRA", pledging to execute him for his "treachery" in accepting a compromise with the British. It is as though a younger, violent version of Adams has risen up to smite the peacemaking older man he has become. But even now, Adams has not told the full story of how he played perhaps the key role in ending a conflict that had squalled bloodily for 400 years.

Adams lives in a Shakespearian mist of ambiguity where the recent past is obscured from view. He has not explained how he went from cheering the bombing of Downing Street to being a regular visitor. Is he a thug who took his chance to go legit, or is he a principled warrior against anti-Catholic persecution who took up arms when he had to defend his people, and laid them down when he could? I could not find the answers in his oblique autobiography, filled as it is with gaps and elisions, or in the strangely-distanced comments of people who know him. For that, I had to go to the man himself.

Adams suggests that we meet in a community centre at the heart of his grey, dilapidated West Belfast constituency, where he is speaking in praise of a local trade union that fought to keep a car plant open. This, he seems to be saying, is the life I live now, the life I always wanted to live – a peaceful man of the left.

He is preceded by two Sinn Fein security men – big and burly, in casual clothes – and he strides up the stairs behind them with an almost athletic air. He is surprisingly tall. His beard is peppered with shades of grey and white, but he looks younger than I expected and more vital. He leads me into an empty room and settles down at a round table. The security men pace outside, like vaguely aggravated bouncers, watching out for gunmen.

i: Where's My Photo?

He starts with a story – a small story, but one that perfectly distils how he would like us to see his wider life. "Not long after the photos of the torture in Abu Ghraib prison [in Iraq] came out, I wrote an article asking – where's my photo? Because when I was taken and battered by the British squaddies, they took photos of us. The photos were trophies.

"So somewhere in the British Army Museum, or regiment headquarters, or on the top of somebody's wardrobe, in a shoebox, there's a photo of me, being treated like that. A few days after I wrote it, I got into the lift in Stormont [the castle where the Northern Ireland Assembly sits], and a British man got in after me. We were the only people there. I nodded at him, and he said, 'You don't recognise me, do you?' I didn't. He said: 'I want you to know that I'm one of the soldiers that beat you.'"

Adams lets this hang in the air, his face expressionless, unreadable. "So I said – do you promise not to do it again?" And he bursts out laughing, a genuine, relief-filled laugh. "We shook hands and had a wee laugh about it."

Is this tale – of Adams as a victim who magnanimously forgives his persecutors – true? It has a tang of truth when it comes to Adams' early life. He was born in 1948 into a dirt-poor Catholic family, in a statelet run by Protestants for Protestants. "It was a one-party state," he says. Catholics were given the worst houses, locked out of the best jobs, and threatened by marauding loyalist militia, while the political system was gerrymandered to ensure Catholic votes didn't count. "The sense of exclusion was immediate," he says. The Adams family lived in what he calls "our miserable little slum room" in "another jerry-built dumping ground for many young families". The Ballymurphy estate was "badly built, badly planned and badly lacking in facilities, but it nonetheless possessed a wonderful sense of openness, there on the slopes of the mountain. Beyond us, the city of Belfast stretched towards the lough." The family was so poor that Gerry was sent to live with his grandmother down on the Falls Road. He became a nervous, stammering boy.

The other Gerry Adams – his father – was determined to overturn this imposed squalor and fear by force. At the age of 17 he had joined the IRA and shot an officer of the RUC, the almost entirely-Protestant police force. He was released from prison only a year before Gerry Junior was born. His father had been humiliated. "Whenever he was sent looking for a job by the employment exchange they informed his prospective employers of his record and status," his son says. He ended up travelling door to door, selling fruit and vegetables from a cart.

Adams says he didn't really understand the divisions in Northern Ireland. Why was there this strange suspicion in the air? Why was he supposed to stop fumbling around with the Protestant girls across the street? But then an angry Protestant Reverend called Ian Paisley stormed into his life. When Adams was 16, a shop owned by Catholics in Divis Street put the Irish flag, the tricolour, in its window. Paisley – a local firebrand evangelical who claimed that Catholics worshipped "the Antichrist" – announced that if it was not torn down within two days, he would lead a mob to do it himself. The RUC smashed their way into the shop and took the flag. Local Catholics started to riot, and they were bludgeoned and beaten. Watching this brouhaha, the young Adams was bemused: "Why did it need to be so illegal to fly a flag? What kind of state was this?" Within a week, he had joined Sinn Fein – and many believe, the IRA, an organisation that was at that time tiny and had only a few rifles left in its rusting arsenal.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality. Adams dropped out of school, working in a Protestant pub in the evenings, and campaigning for Catholic equality during the day. "There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in," he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.

"I was here when it all happened," he says, looking out the window, into the distance. "I was here when the pogroms took place." On 14 August 1968, a loyalist mob gathered on the Shankill Road and marched on to the Catholic streets, throwing petrol bombs and shooting at fleeing residents. The next morning, "The old familiar streetscape was shattered. The environment I had grown up in was gone. For ever. The self-contained, enclosed village atmosphere of the area and its peaceful sense of security had been brutally torn apart. A sense of devastation entered our hearts. Barricades were going up everywhere."

Adams isn't exaggerating when he says the sheer number of Catholics who fled made this "the biggest forced movement of population in Europe since the second world war" at that time. The IRA barely existed any more and those old gunmen who lingered had mostly run away. Indeed, many Catholics joked sourly after the attacks that the initials really stood for "I Ran Away". Did Adams experience this as a humiliation, and a spur to rearm? "No, I didn't have that feeling. Because I remember, actually, being one of the young people that resented the fact that other people who didn't do anything were blaming the IRA. If you militarise a situation, you beg for an armed response. And then, after a short while, what had been a very passive and legitimate campaign for a very, very basic rights, then becomes 'terrorism'. And then, the whole machine kicks in ... Once the armies are in it, there will be a natural resistance. If there is an army occupying Britain tomorrow, there will be exactly the same response: people who would be passive normally, people who would be law-abiding normally, will fight back." The graffiti at the time said: "God made the Catholics, but the Armalites made them equal."

He is impassioned now. "You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened. And it's no accident that wars are fought by 18-year-olds. I think that the conditions were ripe here for what became, certainly from 1969, a popular uprising. People came here from Palestine or South Africa and they said they'd never seen anything like it. Every one of these main roads had huge Army tanks, there was choppers everywhere, and a shoot-to-kill policy. So the point I'm making is: in those conditions, it's almost inevitable. And war is horrible. War ... some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from."

He is talking quickly, angrily. "I remember, in the middle of Iraq crisis, I was going to London, I was watching on TV what was happening in Iraq, and I was meeting with the people who were responsible for that. And in their souls or in their minds, they were not affected by it. Here we were affected every day. Our homes were being bombed or raided, our offices were being shut up, our friends were being shot. I think there is a huge responsibility upon governments to understand the consequence of their decisions."

Most people in Northern Ireland believe that Adams joined the swelling wave of young Catholic men who signed up to, as they saw it, defend their community. So what did he do? Some people claim that as he rose through the IRA – which was structured on the model of a national army, and imposed "discipline" on its own ranks and on the wider Catholic community – he became crazed with power and hateful. Sean O'Callaghan, who became a British informer within the IRA, claims he bragged: "I'm prepared to wade up to my knees in Protestant blood to get to a United Ireland." Adams says this is "ridiculous". The Irish Times reporter Kevin Myers says that he once saw Adams settling a bar-room brawl in which a man had his eye gouged out by identifying the man who started it and saying to a local IRA volunteer: "Shoot him." (This would have meant shooting off his kneecaps, not murdering him.) Adams says this is "rubbish".

I don't want to get into a sterile round of defensive denial, so I try asking a different question. If there was a truth and reconciliation commission in Northern Ireland – one where all sides, including the British military, admit what they did – are there things you would like to get off your chest that you can't talk about to me now? At first he wriggles. "Well, South Africa's different, you see, because ... in South Africa, it was a matter of domestic policy. The South Africans were in charge. So, so ... " Yes, yes. But would you want to talk to it? "I don't quite know whether 'commission' would be the right word ... " Oh come on! "If there was an international-run, neutral, objective process with terms of reference that could be agreed, then I think everybody has a responsibility to talk to it."

Adams will talk freely about the period up to 1968, and the period after 1998. But when I ask about the 30-year gap in between, his flowing sentences often dry into staccato clichés. Did you do anything in this conflict you later regretted? "Well, I didn't have to do things, but I do think that there are actions that were carried out, and not even retrospectively, but at the time, that I knew instinctively were wrong, and were surely wrong, and where I could, I said so. I either said so privately, or I said so publicly, if that was the appropriate thing to do." It is an answer designed to shut down the issue, rather than open it up – an attempt to seal the memory dump with steel.

II. The Body in the Attic

The British state certainly thought Adams was a leading figure in the IRA – and they tortured him for it. He knew what would happen if he was captured, so for several years he lived on the run, in disguise. "The British Army were threatening to shoot me on sight, so I was always on the alert," he wrote in his autobiography. "Very rarely did I turn directly down a street; instead I crossed the street and as I did so I would look down first. I avoided streets where there were stretches without doors."

He describes a surreal world, where he was the bearded Pimpernel of Belfast, always one step ahead of the squaddies. At one point, he says, the Brits kidnapped his dog, Shane. "Not long after, I saw him going up the street with a patrol, and I waited until they were a good distance away before I whistled to him. He went mad, broke away, and came to me." But some responses were less funny. His family's house was attacked repeatedly. "CS gas was fired into it, and neighbours had to come and rescue the children [his younger siblings]. My youngest brother Dominic developed a speech impediment in the trauma of that time. On another occasion a firebomb was thrown at the house from a Saracen and hit the post of the porch. If it had come through the window all inside would have been burned to death."

He met his wife, Colette, while in hiding: she was active in Sinn Fein. One night British soldiers were firing outside and they were lying on the floor, trying to be silent, when he whispered to her: "If we get out of this, I'm going to marry you." When they heard a rumour Adams had married, British troops turned up at Colette's family home. "You know who your daughter is married to?" they asked. "No," claimed her father. "Gerry Adams," the soldier said. Adams' father-in-law smiled and said: "Well, God help him!"

When they finally caught Adams, they were ruthless and ignored all human rights protections. "British Army officers came and trained RUC officers in sensory deprivation techniques. They took these people – they called them guinea pigs – and they cuffed them and put black hoods over their faces so they couldn't see anything for six or seven days. They were taken up in helicopters and pushed out backwards. They didn't know they were only a few feet off the ground; they thought they were going to die. And that continued. It happened to me – each occasion that I was arrested some of the methods were brutal. It's happening in Iraq. That's what armies do when they engage in pacification programs ...

"They took me back to another interrogation room and put me up against a wall, spread-eagled, and beat me soundly for hours around the kidneys and up between the legs. The beating was very systematic and quite clinical. There was no passion in it." (British doctors later confirmed that these practices were used in Northern Ireland.)

Did this leave you traumatised? Do you get flashbacks? "I know that there are some people who either succumbed to alcoholism, to drug dependency, and would then go to generally bad health. And there are others who arguably have never properly recovered." But suddenly he looks like he has revealed too much, and seems embarrassed. He sticks his chest out in an odd gesture of pride. "But me? I've been too busy. But no, I'm OK. I'm grand." And he laughs – a strange laugh I can't quite read – and smirks at his press officer, as if this emotional talk is a silly effete indulgence.

Adams was locked away in Cage 11 of the Maze Prison. It was made of corrugated sheets, and there were sometimes 30 to a cage. In the column he wrote anonymously at the time for a Republican newspaper, he said: "We read a wee bit, talk a great deal and engage in a little sedition." He also raged at "our impotent abnormality", but when I ask him what he meant, he changes the subject.

He tells me about Army officers who were involved in torture at that time in Northern Ireland – he gives their names, but I can't for legal reasons – and says they were retained by Tony Blair because he needed them in Iraq. "Here you have a Prime Minister who did a decent thing in Ireland, [and then] does an enormously wrong thing in Iraq. And the people who he had to take on [and challenge] in Ireland, he needs for the Iraq and Basra." He shakes his head. "You could just talk for hours on this. In Ireland, we don't have the old boys' network, the breeding grounds for the permanent government, the military establishment. We don't have that." He adds later: "Martin McGuinness and I begged Blair not to go into Iraq. We said – you're forgetting everything you learnt here."

He won't talk about what he did when he was released – through the period of the bombings of pubs in Birmingham and shops in London – except to deny any involvement in such events. "The IRA at different times failed, or, in fact, committed actions which were counterproductive, or which did not advance the struggle. So I'm not here as an IRA defender, or thinking that the IRA was doing everything right – not at all," he says.

Yet there is one incident in particular that seems to have troubled his conscience – and on which he made a revealing slip. In 1972, a 37-year-old Catholic widow called Jean McConville, with 10 children, was murdered by the IRA. She was living in a place called the Divis Flats, which was used as a base by the IRA at that time, and she agreed – in return for a small sum of money – to pass information about their movements to the British. When the IRA found out, she was shot, and her body dumped in a hidden grave. Her children were all dispersed to different foster homes. Ed Moloney, one of the most respected investigative journalists working in Northern Ireland, says: "It is inconceivable such an order would have been given without Adams' knowledge." When, a few years ago, Adams met two of her children, he told them: "Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared." But he wasn't. He was jailed more than six months later. Is she the body in his mental attic, the one he can't forget?

"Well, that shouldn't be taken out of context. I met the family and I got confused about the dates. And I quite quickly realised that I hadn't been imprisoned, and I told them that. So, we shouldn't ... " Yes, but it's an obvious confession that you were a senior figure in the IRA, isn't it? Otherwise, what difference would it make whether you were in prison or not?

His usually long sentences begin to fracture. "I meet victims of the IRA. On quite a regular basis. And I do think that I have a responsibility. And I try to the best of my ability to fulfil this. When people come to me, looking for the truth. For answers, looking for ... whatever they're looking for ... if I can do it, I feel that I have a responsibility. As part of closure. And giving them what they're entitled to. That's part of my job. Yes." And he looks like he has run out of words. There is a long silence.

"Those particular cases were particularly tragic, because she was a woman, because she had a large amount of children. I met many of her children as adults, and they ended up in foster homes, they ended up in just ... " He stops talking for a moment. "That's a particularly tragic case."

This thought hangs in the room. He looks down, then away. Then he continues, talking to the wall, faster and more fluently now.

"I think I have met all of the families who were victims. And I've met them collectively on a num

ber of occasions, and I've met them individually. And some of them are Republican families. Some of them are families which actually have strong Republicans in them. So, it obviously is, there's, it's hard to describe this." He looks perplexed. "It's you're dealing with neighbours. You're dealing with... people who might not necessarily forgive you, or forgive other Republicans, for what's happened. But you're not dealing with enemies."

III. "This is the only IRA campaign that has succeeded"

At some point in the 1980s – amidst the beating and the torture and the bombings – Adams made a dramatic decision. "I said: there are two choices here," he argues, pointing his finger. "There's the easy way. The easy way is that the war continues until it can continue no more. And then, we'll meet at commemorations, or we'll meet for a jar, and we'd discuss the good old days. Or we will take the high-risk route of actively trying to bring about a conflict resolution based upon politics," he says. He chose to drag Sinn Fein and the IRA – often against its will – towards the path of politics.

But the vision of failure he is presenting is his father's life, summarised in a few visual images. He fought; he went to prison; he nearly died; and for what? To meet for a jar and talk about the good old days in a Northern Ireland just as broken as ever. When I put this to Adams, he says without reflecting: "I think that's fair enough." But then he seems to physically shrug off this insight, adding quickly: "You have to live in your own time. What I suppose I'm influenced and shaped by is: it was always political. Always. Sometimes the politics were dormant, or subverted entirely. But when we had a chance to pursue politics, we did."

He chose not to be his father. He chose to get something for all his sweat and fear and beatings. "Whatever you think about the IRA, it is one of the few extra-parliamentary or guerrilla organisations which actually sued for peace," he says. "It could have fought on for another 20 years. Of course it could. But that's not what it was about. It was about trying to bring about a change in the lives of the people on this island."

He decided to shift his goal: to aim for full equality for Catholics within a partitioned Ireland, and argue for reunification solely at the ballot box. "This has been the only IRA campaign that has succeeded. Because every other one fought and then another generation had to pick up the fight, and continue fighting."

The gamble Adams was taking was drastic, in a way that still hasn't been widely understood. Ed Moloney's masterpiece, The Secret History of the IRA, is hardly soft on Adams – it accuses him of being complicit in murder – but it says that Adams played the main and essential role in leading the IRA rank and file, often against their will, to a peaceful compromise. "It was Gerry Adams who launched, shaped, nurtured, and eventually guided the peace process to an eventual conclusion," he writes. It could just as easily have ended with a bullet in his head: the ghost of the last Irish leader to sue for peace, Michael Collins, hung heavily over his story. He risked his life to make this change. At every stage, he had to drag a recalcitrant group of armed men who could have killed him for "betrayal".

Yet Moloney says this has left Adams in an ironic position. "While others have collected plaudits and the glittering prizes," he writes, "Adams has been forced to stay silent, biting his lip lest by accepting the praise of the establishment he undermine the peace process in the eyes of his supporters." If he admits what he did – skilfully manoeuvre the IRA into giving up its weapons and accepting peace, after so long fighting, with so little to show for it – he will lose his support.

Does he agree? "Well, I have learnt that the toughest negotiation is with your own side. It isn't with your opponents ... But the role that I had and continued to play in the peace process, is what falls upon me to play. I'm not interested awards, or any of the ... rest of it. I'm happy enough to be an outsider. I'm happy enough to be a subversive – in the most positive interpretation of that word." Then he adds, letting a little vanity slip through: "I still meet people who would complain to me – and that's gratifying for me – that I or Sinn Fein don't get the proper acknowledgement of the role that we played."

He even ended up sitting down with the man whose threats and rages made him join Sinn Fein as a teenager – Ian Paisley. "For all that he may have been involved in up until he became the First Minister, he was respectful, good-humoured, [and] I think, entirely genuine about the process. The only one who could have done it was Ian Paisley. He's the only one that could have brought in his ring of unionists. And he did it. I think he did a great service to everybody." Together, they steadily removed the barriers against equality for Catholics, after all this time. It seems surreally forgiving, on both sides.

Yet for a moment this year, it seemed as though the hardline Republican backlash Adams worked so hard to avoid had finally happened, in an unexpected burst of fire and blood. A group calling itself the Real IRA declared that Adams had "betrayed" everything he once fought for, and that the armed struggle was beginning once again. They shot two British soldiers, and they have started issuing death threats against Adams.

Does it feel strange to be getting death threats from your old comrades? "No," he says flatly. "The authorship of a death threat is totally academic to me."

The Real IRA is, he says, "very small. They have no popular base of support within Republicanism. You have a mixture of adventurers, old-style physical forcers, bar-stool revolutionaries, and – interestingly enough – some people who are definitely agents of the British crown." What does he mean? He proceeds to claim that several figures in the Real IRA – again, he names them, but for legal reasons I can't – are in the pay of the British. But why? What's in it for Britain? He says that in the British state machine – MI6, or the Army – there are people "who just have never bought into the fact that there's a new dispensation. In fairness to them, they fought in a war. And they lost. They lost. Who's the deputy first minister? [Martin McGuinness]. Who's in the executive? From their point of view, the people who they depicted as terrorists, the people who they tried to torture and gas, water cannon, shoot, all that, they won."

He is speaking more animatedly than at any other point in the interview. The intricacies of this conspiracy fire him up. Suddenly, I have the feel of being in a smoky bar in the paranoid world of 1970s paramilitarism, seeing connecting threads and secret agendas everywhere. "There are people in the intelligence services who would know that the sensible way forward is politically. But there's another tendency ... I remember one meeting we had during negotiations with the British Government – about policing, and Army bases – and what we were putting forward was a very, very simple and basic and common-sense proposition. But it was taking a dreadfully long time to get a positive answer to it. The senior British representative that we were dealing with kept going back into another room, so I – as if I'd made a mistake – walked into the other room. There was a sizeable group – five or six men – in plain clothes. I didn't know who they were. When I recounted that to a senior Irish Government official, he said, 'That's the nub of the problem, Gerry. Because they're the spooks, and they haven't given up.' They have been trying to defeat Republicanism for 30 or 40 years, and they have not been defeated."

Can this be true? Where's the evidence? Rather than answer, he returns to the Real IRA with disgust. "There was one IRA with the capacity and the popular support, the longevity of struggle and the courage to declare for peace. These [Real IRA] people are ... " he waves his hand through the air contemptuously. "No, there's no-one, really. We shouldn't elevate, no, we shouldn't elevate this so-called 'Real IRA' to something that it isn't ... It could continue – four or five people here could put together an ability to go and carry out some armed action. But you will never succeed, and you will never be able to perpetuate that, unless you have popular support. And you will not have popular support unless people agree with what you're doing. And they don't. That is over now."

IV. Falls Memories

With the interview over, Adams is returning to the Sinn Fein offices on the Falls Road. He agrees to give me a lift in his armoured car. "If we get into a fire fight, though, you're on your own," he says with a chuckle, as the door slams shut. We drive through the drab streets of Belfast. Where once there stood barricades on which Adams shouted, now there is a Gap, a KFC, a Starbucks.

What does Adams see when he looks out over this landscape? In his 1982 book Falls Memories he says this city is for him "a rubble-filled wasteland filled with ghosts". In that memoir, every corner of this cursed city makes him free associate. "Remember hearing about the girl volunteer, her face streaming with tears and her body racked with sobs as she tried to exact vengeance on a hovering helicopter with an aged .303 rifle which was too big for her to shoulder properly? I never found out who she was. Maybe she never existed. Just another story? You never know. I heard she stood there, on her own, firing away and all the time muttering 'You bastards, you bastards' to an implacable sky and a whitewashed wall, which had probably seen it all before."

Is this ghost still there in his mind? Can we trust him on this, or anything? How much of his account of his life should be subject to the clause he slips so ruefully into this tale: "Just another story? You never know."

He gets out and starts chatting to two old women who were wandering down the street. They tell him "how proud" they are of him, and he beams, and charms them. The mural of Bobby Sands stares out over them, and the street, and the drizzly Belfast sky. I watch him chatting and try to untangle all this moral ambiguity. Adams grew up in a Protestant supremacist state where there was discrimination against his people. When they tried to organise peacefully for equality, they were beaten and savaged. He almost certainly fought back with violence. Some of that violence was explicitly targeted against civilians who had nothing to do with the conflict.

Some of that violence was directed against other Catholics who disagreed with these tactics. And then – once he had fought back against real grievances with immoral tactics – he chose a path of peace and reconciliation. He risked his life. He is risking it still. And he got there – he got to peace. Should we remember the violence, or the reasons for it, and the risks he took to leave it behind?

While I am reeling with these thoughts, Gerry Adams shakes my hand briskly and disappears – into the Sinn Fein offices, into the history books, and into the moral mists where, I suspect, he will remain forever shrouded.

To read an archive of interviews by Johann - with everyone from Hugo Chavez to Dolly Parton to the Dalai Lama - click here.

“No estoy segura de cuántos días más seguiré en vida,” dice tranquilamente Malalai Joya. Los señores de la guerra que componen el nuevo gobierno “democrático” en Afganistán han estado enviando balas y bombas durante años para tratar de matar a esta pequeña mujer de 30 años proveniente de los campos de refugiados – y parecen aproximarse más con cada intento. Sus enemigos la llaman una “muerta andante.” “Pero no temo a la muerte, temo guardar silencio ante la injusticia,” dice simplemente. “Soy joven y quiero vivir. Pero digo a los que quieren eliminar mi voz: Estoy lista, dondequiera y cuandoquiera que ataquéis. Podéis cortar una flor, pero no podéis detener la primavera.”

La historia de Malalai Joya vuelve al revés todo lo que nos han dicho sobre Afganistán. En la retórica oficial, ella representa lo que ha sido el motivo de nuestra lucha. Es una joven afgana que estableció una escuela clandestina secreta para niñas bajo los talibanes y – cuando fueron derrocados – tiró la burka, se presentó de candidata al parlamento, y enfrentó a los fundamentalistas religiosos.

Pero ella dice: “Vuestros gobiernos os han echado polvo a los ojos. No os han dicho la verdad. La situación para las mujeres es ahora tan catastrófica como lo fue durante los talibanes. Vuestros gobiernos han reemplazado el régimen fundamentalista de los talibanes con otro régimen fundamentalista de señores de la guerra. (Es decir) que vuestros soldados están muriendo para eso.” En lugar de ser liberada, está a punto de ser asesinada.

La historia de Joya es la historia de otro Afganistán – el que está detrás de la burka y detrás de la propaganda.

“Somos las guardianas de nuestras hermanas”

Me reuní con Joya en un apartamento londinense donde vive con una partidaria durante una semana, para hablar de sus memorias – pero incluso aquí hay que mantener en secreto sus desplazamientos, mientras va de un piso franco a otro. Me dicen que no mencione su ubicación a nadie. Está de pie en el pasillo, pequeña y delgada, con sus cabellos fluyendo libremente, y me saluda con un fuerte apretón de manos. Pero, cuando nuestro fotógrafo toma su foto, comienza a reírse como una niña: la tristeza que refleja su pálida cara se desvanece, y se deshace en alegres risitas. “¡Me cuesta acostumbrarme a esto!” dice.

Luego, cuando me siento con ella para hablar de la historia de su vida, el dolor vuelve a inundar su cara. Su cuerpo se tensa y sus puños se cierran.

Joya tenía cuadro días cuando la Unión Soviética invadió Afganistán. Ese día, su padre abandonó sus estudios para combatir al ejército comunista invasor, y desapareció en las montañas. Ella dice: “Desde entonces, todo lo que hemos conocido ha sido la guerra.”

Su más temprano recuerdo es que estaba agarrada de las piernas de su madre mientras los policías registraban de arriba abajo su casa buscando evidencia del lugar en el que se ocultaba su padre. Su madre analfabeta trató de mantener vivos lo mejor posible a sus 10 hijos. Cuando la policía se hizo demasiado agresiva, llevó a sus niños a campos de refugiados al otro lado de la frontera en Irán. En esas inmundas ciudades de carpas ubicadas en la antigua Ruta de la Seda, los afganos se aglomeraban y eran tratados como ciudadanos de segunda clase por Irán. De noche, animales salvajes entraban a las carpas y atacaban a los niños. Allí, la familia recibió la noticia de que el padre de Joya había sido muerto por una mina terrestre – pero estaba vivo, después de perder una pierna.

No había escuelas en los campos iraníes, y la madre de Joya estaba determinada de que sus hijas recibieran la educación que ella nunca había tenido. De modo que huyeron de nuevo, a campos en Pakistán Occidental. Allí, Joya comenzó a leer – y fue transformada. “Dime lo que lees y te diré quién eres,” dice. Desde los primeros años de su adolescencia, inhaló toda la literatura que podía – desde la poesía persa hasta los dramas de Bertolt Brecht y los discursos de Martin Luther King. Comenzó a transmitir su recién descubierta alfabetización a las mujeres mayores en los campos, incluida su propia madre.

Pronto descubrió que le encantaba enseñar – y, al cumplir 16 años, una obra benéfica llamada Organización para la Promoción de las Capacidades de Mujeres Afganas (OPAWC) le hizo una atrevida sugerencia: ve a Afganistán y establece una escuela secreta para niñas, bajo las narices de la tiranía talibán.

De modo que tomó la poca ropa que tenía y fue llevada secretamente a través de la frontera – y comenzaron “los mejores días de mi vida.” Odiaba tener que ponerse una burka, ser acosada en las calles por la omnipresente policía “de vicio y virtud”, y estar bajo la amenaza constante de ser descubierta y ejecutada. Pero dice que valió la pena por las pequeñas. “Cada vez que una nueva niña entraba a la clase, era un triunfo,” dice, resplandeciente. “No hay nada mejor.”

Apenas logró evitar ser descubierta, una y otra vez. Una vez estaba enseñando a una clase de muchachas en el sótano de una familia cuando la madre gritó repentinamente: “¡talibanes! ¡talibanes!” Joya dice: “Dije a mis estudiantes que se acostaran en el suelo y permanecieran totalmente silenciosas. Oímos pasos arriba y esperamos mucho tiempo.” En muchas ocasiones, hombres y mujeres corrientes – extraños anónimos – le ayudaron enviando a la policía en la dirección equivocada. Agrega: “Cada día en Afganistán, incluso ahora, cientos si no miles de mujeres comunes realizan esos pequeños gestos de solidaridad mutua. Somos las guardianas de nuestras hermanas.”

La obra benéfica quedó tan impresionada con su persona que la nombró directora. Joya decidió establecer una clínica para mujeres pobres justo antes de los ataques del 11-S. Cando comenzó la invasión estadounidense, los talibanes huyeron de su provincia, pero las bombas siguieron cayendo. “Se perdieron innecesariamente muchas vidas, igual que en la tragedia del 11 de septiembre,” dice. “El ruido era aterrador, y los niños se tapaban los oídos y gritaban y lloraban. El humo y el polvo llenaban el aire con cada bomba que caía.”

En cuanto los talibanes se retiraron, fueron reemplazados por los señores de la guerra que habían gobernado Afganistán justo antes. Joya dice que, en ese momento: “me di cuenta de que los derechos de las mujeres habían sido traicionados por completo… La mayoría de la gente en Occidente ha sido llevada a creer que la intolerancia y la brutalidad hacia las mujeres en Afganistán comenzaron con el régimen talibán. Pero es una mentira. Muchas de las peores atrocidades fueron cometidas por los fundamentalistas muyahidines durante la guerra civil entre 1991 y 1996. Ellos introdujeron las leyes que oprimían a las mujeres, seguidas por los talibanes… y ahora volvían al poder, respaldados por EE.UU. Volvieron de inmediato a su antigua costumbre de utilizar la violación para castigar a sus enemigos y recompensar a sus combatientes.”

Los señores de la guerra “han gobernado Afganistán desde entonces,” agrega. Mientras “se ha creado un simulacro de parlamento en Kabul para uso en EE.UU.,” el verdadero poder “está en manos de esos fundamentalistas que gobiernan en todas partes fuera de Kabul.” Como ejemplo, nombra al ex gobernador de Herat Khan. Estableció sus propios escuadrones de “vicio y virtud” que aterrorizaron a las mujeres y destruyeron casetes de vídeo y música. Tenía sus propias “milicias privadas, cárceles privadas”. La constitución de Afganistán es irrelevante en esos feudos privados.

Joya descubrió exactamente lo que eso significaba cuando comenzó a establecer la clínica – un señor de la guerra local anunció que no sería permitida, ya que era mujer y crítica del fundamentalismo. Lo hizo igual, y decidió enfrentar a ese fundamentalista presentándose a la elección para la Loya jirga (“reunión de los ancianos”) para elaborar la nueva constitución afgana. Hubo un gran movimiento de apoyo para esa muchacha que quería construir una clínica – y fue elegida. “Resultó ser que mi misión,” dice, “sería denunciar la verdadera naturaleza de la jirga desde adentro.”

“Nunca volví a estar segura”

Al pasar ante las cámaras de televisión del mundo hacia la Loya jirga, lo primero que Joya vio fue “una larga fila con algunos de los peores abusadores de los derechos humanos que nuestro país haya jamás visto – señores de la guerra, criminales de guerra y fascistas.”

Pudo ver a los hombres que invitaron al país a Osama bin Laden, los hombres que introdujeron las leyes misóginas que después fueron seguidas por los talibanes, los hombres que habían masacrado civiles afganos. Algunos llegaron allí mediante la intimidación del electorado, otros mediante el fraude electoral, y aún más que fueron simplemente nombrados por Hamid Karzai, el ex petrolero instalado por el ejército de EE.UU. para que gobernara el país. Pensó en un antiguo dicho afgano: “Es el mismo asno, con montura nueva.”

Por un momento, mientras esos viejos asesinos comenzaban a pronunciar largos discursos congratulándose por la transición a la democracia, Joya se sintió nerviosa. Pero entonces, dice: “Recordé la opresión que enfrentamos como mujeres en mi país, y mi nerviosismo se evaporó, para ser reemplazado por la cólera.”

Cuando le tocó su turno, se levantó, miró alrededor a los ensangrentados señores de la guerra y comenzó a hablar. “¿Por qué permitimos que haya criminales presentes? Son responsables por la situación en la que estamos… Son ellos los que convirtieron nuestro país en el centro de guerras nacionales e internacionales. Son los elementos más contrarios a las mujeres en nuestra sociedad que han puesto a nuestro país en este estado y quieren volver a hacer lo mismo… En su lugar deberían ser procesados en los tribunales nacionales e internacionales.”

Esos señores de la guerra – que alardean de ser duros – no pudieron hacer frente a una esbelta joven que decía la verdad. Comenzaron a gritar y a aullar, llamándola “prostituta” e “infiel”, y a arrojarle botellas. Un hombre trató de golpearla en la cara. Le cortaron el micrófono y la jirga se convirtió en un disturbio.

“Desde ese momento,” dice Joya, “nunca volví a estar segura… Para los fundamentalistas, una mujer es medio ser humano, que sirve sólo para satisfacer todas las voluntades y deseos de un hombre, y para producir niños y trabajar en la casa. No podían creer que una joven mujer les estuviera arrancando las máscaras ante los ojos del pueblo afgano.”

Una turba fundamentalista apareció unas pocas horas después ante su alojamiento, y anunció que había ido a violarla y lincharla. Tuvo que ser puesta bajo inmediata guardia armada – pero se negó a ser protegida por soldados estadounidenses, e insistió en que fueran policías afganos.

Su discurso fue transmitido a todo el mundo – y vitoreado en Afganistán. Recibió un inmenso apoyo de la gente de su país, feliz de que finalmente alguien haya expresado su opinión. Una aldea pobrísima reunió dinero y envió un delegado a cientos de kilómetros de distancia para expresar su agradecimiento.

Una mujer extremadamente anciana llegó acarreada en una carretilla desvencijada, y explicó que había perdido dos hijos – uno ante los soviéticos, el otro ante los fundamentalistas. Dijo a Joya: “Tengo casi 100 años, y me muero. Cuando supe de usted y de lo que dijo, supe que tenía que verla. Dios la proteja, querida.”

Le entregó su argolla de oro, su única posesión de valor, y dijo: “¡Tiene que aceptarla! ¡He sufrido tanto en mi vida, y mi último deseo es que acepte éste mi regalo!

Pero los ocupantes de EE.UU. y la OTAN instruyeron a Joya que debía mostrar “cortesía y respeto” hacia los otros delegados. Cuando Zalmay Khalilzad, el embajador de EE.UU. le dijo eso, ella respondió: “Si estos criminales hubieran violado a su madre o a su hija o a su abuela, o matado a siete de sus hijos, para no hablar de todos los tesoros morales y materiales de su país, ¿qué palabras utilizaría contra semejantes criminales que estén dentro del marco de la cortesía y el respeto?”

Se inclina y cita a Brecht: “Brecht dice: ‘El que no conoce la verdad es sólo un idiota. El que conoce la verdad y dice que es una mentira es un criminal."

Los intentos de asesinarla comenzaron con un francotirador – y no se han detenido desde entonces. Pero ella dice sencillamente, con su puño cerrado: “Quería que los señores de la guerra supieran que no les tenía miedo.”

De modo que se presentó a la elección para el parlamento, y ganó por gran mayoría. “Volvería de nuevo para enfrentar a los que habían arruinado mi país,” explica, “y estaba determinada a mantenerme erguida y a que nunca volvería a doblegarme ante sus amenazas.”

“En cada rincón hay un asesino”

En su primer día Joya observó todo el nuevo parlamento afgano y pensó: “En cada rincón se esconde un asesino, un títere, un criminal, un lord de la droga, un fascista. Esto no es una democracia. Soy una de las pocas personas en este lugar que ha sido auténticamente elegida.” Comenzó su discurso de introducción diciendo: “Mis condolencias al pueblo de Afganistán…”

Antes de que pudiera continuar, los señores de la guerra comenzaron a gritar que la violarían y la matarían. Un señor de la guerra, Abdul Sayyaf, le gritó una amenaza. Joya le miró directo a los ojos y dijo: “Aquí no estamos en [el área que él gobierna por la fuerza] así que contrólese.”

Le pregunto si tuvo miedo, y sacude la cabeza. “Nunca tengo miedo cuando digo la verdad.” Ahora habla rápido: “Me siento verdaderamente honorada por haber sido vilipendiada y amenazada por los salvajes que condenaron a nuestro país a una miseria semejante. Me siento orgullosa de que, aunque no tengo un ejército privado, ni dinero, ni potencias mundiales que me apoyen, esos déspotas brutales me teman y comploten para eliminarme.”

Dice que para los afganos de a pie no hay diferencias entre los talibanes y los señores de la guerra igualmente fundamentalistas. “Qué grupos son etiquetados como ‘terroristas’ o ‘fundamentalistas’ depende de lo útiles que sean para los objetivos de EE.UU.,” dice. “Existen dos lados que aterrorizan a las mujeres, pero los del lado anti-estadounidense son ‘terroristas’ y los pro-estadounidenses son ‘héroes.’”

Karzai gobierna sólo por permiso de los señores de la guerra. Es un “títere desvergonzado” que ganará las elecciones presidenciales del próximo mes porque “no ha dejado de trabajar para sus amos, EE.UU. y los señores de la guerra… En este punto de nuestra historia, los únicos que llegan a servir como presidentes son los elegidos por el gobierno de EE.UU. y la mafia que detiene el poder en nuestro país.”

Cada vez que llegaba a desesperar en el parlamento, encontraba a más mujeres afganas corrientes – y volvía a la lucha. Me habla de una muchacha de 16 años, Rahella, que escapó a un orfanato que Joya había ayudado a establecer en su circunscripción. “Su tío había decidido casarla con su hijo, que era drogadicto. Ella se espantó. De modo que ciertamente la aceptaron, la educaron, le ayudaron.” Un día, apareció el tío y se disculpó, diciendo que había comprendido su error. Pidió si podría volver a casa por el fin de semana para visitar a su familia. Joya aceptó – y cuando volvió a su aldea Rahella fue obligada a casarse y fue llevada a otra parte de Afganistán. Meses después supieron que se había bañado en gasolina y se había quemado viva.

Ha habido una epidemia de suicidios de mujeres en todo el “nuevo” Afganistán en los últimos cinco años. “Los cientos de mujeres afganas que se han quemado no sólo se suicidan para escapar a su miseria,” dice Joya, “claman por justicia.”

Pero no se le permitió presentar esos temas en el supuestamente democrático parlamento. Los señores de la guerra fundamentalistas no pudieron derrotar a Joya en las urnas o matarla y buscaron otra manera de silenciarla. Mientras más hablaba, más se enfurecían. Pidió secularismo en Afganistán, diciendo: “La religión es un asunto privado, que no está relacionado con temas políticos y el gobierno… Los verdaderos musulmanes no necesitan dirigentes políticos que los guíen hacia el Islam.” Condenó la nueva ley que declaró una amnistía para todos los crímenes de guerra cometidos en Afganistán durante los últimos 30 años, diciendo: “Vosotros, los criminales, simplemente os estáis dando licencia para salir de la cárcel.” Por lo tanto los parlamentarios simplemente votaron para expulsarla del Parlamento.

Fue ilegal y antidemocrático – pero el presidente, Hamid Karzai, apoyó la exclusión. “Ahora los criminales señores de la guerra ya no son cuestionados en el parlamento,” dice Joya. “¿Eso es democracia?”

En Occidente nos han servido “un montón de mentiras” sobre lo que es Afganistán actual. “Los medios son ‘libres’ sólo si no tratan de criticar a los señores de la guerra y a los funcionarios,” dice en su libro:

“Raising My Voice” [Alzando mi voz]. Como ejemplo, nombra a un señor de la guerra específico: “Si escribes algo sobre su persona, al día siguiente serás torturado o muerto por los señores de la guerra de la Alianza del Norte.” Es “un mito” cuando se dice que ahora las muchachas ahora pueden ir a la escuela fuera de Kabul. “Sólo un cinco por ciento de las niñas, según la ONU, pueden continuar su educación hasta el 12º año.”

Y es “falso” decir que la cultura afgana sea inherentemente misógina. “En los años cincuenta, hubo un creciente movimiento femenino en Afganistán, que se manifestaba y luchaba por sus derechos,” dice. “Tengo una historia” – revisa sus notas – del New York Times en 1959. ¡Aquí está! El titular es ‘Mujeres en Afganistán levantan el velo’ Estábamos desarrollando una cultura abierta para las mujeres – y luego las guerras e invasiones extranjeras lo aplastaron todo. Si podemos recuperar nuestra independencia, podremos reiniciar esa lucha.”

Muchos de sus amigos la instan a abandonar el país, antes de que uno de los aspirantes a asesinos tenga éxito. Pero, ella dice: “Nunca podré partir mientras toda la gente pobre que amo viva en el peligro y la pobreza. No voy a buscar un sitio mejor y más seguro, y dejarla en el infierno.” Mientras me pide perdón por su inglés – que, en realidad, es excelente – vuelve a citar a Brecht: “Los que luchan fracasan a menudo, pero los que no luchan han fracasado siempre.”

Actualmente, Joya lucha por la democracia desde afuera del parlamento. Pero, dice, todo demócrata afgano está actualmente “atrapado entre dos enemigos. Están las fuerzas de ocupación desde el cielo, lanzando bombas de racimo y uranio empobrecido, y en tierra están los señores de la guerra fundamentalistas y los talibanes, con sus propias armas.” Quiere ayudar al creciente movimiento de afganos de a pie que se encuentran entre medio, que se oponen a ambos: “Con la retirada de un enemigo, las fuerzas de ocupación, será más fácil luchar contra esos enemigos fundamentalistas interiores.”

Si fuera presidenta de Afganistán, comenzaría por enviar a todos los criminales de guerra del país ante la Corte Internacional de Justicia en La Haya. “Cualquiera que ha asesinado a mis hermanas y hermanos debería ser castigado,” dice: “desde los talibanes, a los señores de la guerra, a George W. Bush.” Luego pediría a todas las fuerzas extranjeras que se fueran inmediatamente. Dice que es un error cuando se dice que Afganistán simplemente caería en la guerra civil si eso sucediera. “¿Y qué me dicen de la guerra civil actual? Hoy en día la gente está siendo asesinada – muchos, muchos crímenes de guerra. Mientras más tiempo permanezcan en Afganistán las tropas extranjeras haciendo lo que hacen, peor será la eventual guerra civil para el pueblo afgano.”

El público afgano, agrega, está de su parte, refiriéndose a un reciente sondeo de opinión que muestra que un 60% de los afganos desea una retirada inmediata de la OTAN. Mucha gente en Afganistán, dice, tenía esperanzas en Barack Obama – “pero en realidad está intensificando la política de George Bush… Sé que su elección tiene mucho valor simbólico en términos de la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por igualdad de derecho, y esa lucha es algo que admiro y respeto. Pero lo que es importante para el mundo no es si el presidente es negro o blanco, sino sus acciones. No se puede comer simbolismo.”

La política de EE.UU. es impulsada por la geopolítica, dice, no por personalidades. “Afganistán está en el corazón de Asia, de modo que es un sitio muy importante para tener bases militares – para que puedan controlar con mucha facilidad el comercio con otras potencias asiáticas como ser China, Rusia, Irán, etc.”

“Pero puede ser cambiado por los estadounidenses,” agrega. Ahora se apasiona, su voz aumenta de tono. “Digo a Obama – en mi área, 150 personas fueron muertas por bombas de EE.UU. en un solo incidente en este año. Si su familia hubiera estado allí, ¿enviaría más soldados e incluso más bombas? Su gobierno está gastando 18 millones de dólares para construir otra cárcel de Guantánamo en Bagram. Si su hija pudiera ser detenida allí, ¿la estaría construyendo? Digo a Obama: cambie de ruta, o de otra manera la gente dirá mañana que es otro Bush.”

“Cuesta ser fuerte todo el tiempo”

“No es bueno mostrar alguna debilidad a mis enemigos, (pero) cuesta ser fuerte todo el tiempo,” dice Joya suspirando, mientras se pasa las manos por los cabellos. Ha estado hablando con tanta insistencia – con semejante coraje preternatural – que es fácil olvidar que era sólo una muchacha cuando fue lanzada a la lucha contra el fundamentalismo. Nunca se le permitió ser adolescente. La bravía concentración en su cara se desvanece, y parece un poco perdida. “Sí, mi madre se siente orgullosa de mi persona,” dice, “pero ya sabe cómo son las madres – se preocupan. Cada vez que hablo con ella por teléfono, su primera y última frase siempre es ‘¡Cuídate!’”

Hace dos años, se casó en secreto. No puede nombrar a su esposo, porque lo matarían. Hubo que revisar las flores para su boda a la busca de bombas. Sólo dice que se conocieron en una conferencia de prensa, “y que él apoya todo lo que hago.” No lo ha visto “durante dos meses,” dice. “Nos encontramos en casas seguras de nuestros partidarios. No puedo dormir en la misma casa dos noches seguidas. Es una casa diferente cada noche.”

¿De dónde sale tanto valor? Actúa como si la respuesta fuera obvia – cualquiera lo haría, afirma. Pero no lo hacen. Tal vez provenga de su creencia de que la lucha es larga y que nuestras vidas individuales son cortas, de modo que sólo podemos hacer progresar nuestra causa de a poco, sabiendo que otros tomarán el relevo. “Cuando yo muera, otros vendrán. De eso me siento segura,” dice.

Ciertamente tiene un fuerte sentimiento de pertenecer a una larga historia de afganos que lucharon por la libertad. “Mis padres eligieron mi nombre por Malalai de Maiwand. Fue una joven quien, en 1880, fue a la línea de fuego en la segunda guerra anglo-afgana a tratar a los heridos. Cuando los combatientes estaban cerca del colapso, levantó una bandera afgana y condujo a los hombres a la batalla. Fue herida – pero los británicos sufrieron una derrota importante y, finalmente, fueron expulsados.”

Cuando se presentó como candidata, tuvo que elegir un apellido, para proteger la identidad de su familia. “Me puse el nombre de Sarwar Joya, el poeta afgano y constitucionalista. Pasó 24 años en la cárcel y finalmente lo mataron porque no estuvo dispuesto a comprometer sus principios democráticos… En Afganistán tenemos un dicho: la verdad es como el sol. Cuando asciende, nadie puede taparla u ocultarla.”

Malalai Joya sabe que la pueden asesinar en cualquier momento, en nuestro recién liberado ‘istán’ de los señores de la guerra. Me abraza para despedirse y dice: “Tenemos que mantenernos en contacto.” Pero me quedo preguntándome tristemente si volveremos a vernos algún día. Tal vez lo nota, porque me insta a volver a leer el último párrafo de sus memorias “Raising My Voice.” “Es realmente como me siento,” explica. Dice: “Si muriera y queréis continuar mi trabajo, venid a visitar mi tumba. Echadle un poco de agua y gritad tres veces. Quiero oír vuestra voz.” Miro su cara y ella me da la sonrisa más valerosa que haya visto en mi vida.

`Raising My Voice' de Malalai Joya fue publicado por Rider. Todos los beneficios serán utilizados para apoyar la causa de los derechos de las mujeres en Afganistán.

Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Germán Leyens
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22232

"I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years – and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. Her enemies call her a "dead woman walking". "But I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice," she says plainly. "I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: 'I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.'"

The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and – when they were toppled – cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

But she says: "Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for." Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.

The story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan – the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda.

I "We are our sisters' keepers"

I meet Joya in a London apartment where she is staying with a supporter for a week, to talk about her memoir – but even here, her movements have to be kept secret, as she flits from one safe house to another. I am told not to mention her location to anyone. She is standing in the corridor, small and slim, with her hair flowing freely, and she greets me with a solid handshake. But, when our photographer snaps her, she begins to giggle girlishly: the grief etched on to her sallow face melts away, and she laughs in joyous little squeaks. "I can never get used to this!" she says.

Then, as I sit her down to talk through her life-story, the pain soaks into her face once more. Her body tightens into a tense coil, and her fists close.

Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains. She says: "Since then, all we have known is war."

Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother's legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding. Her illiterate mother tried to keep her family of 10 children alive as best she could. When the police became too aggressive, she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In these filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by the Iranian regime. At night, wild animals could wander into the tents and attack children. There, word reached the family that Joya's father had been blown up by a landmine – but he was alive, after losing a leg.

There were no schools in the Iranian camps, and Joya's mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read – and was transformed. "Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are," she says. Starting in her early teens, she inhaled all the literature she could – from Persian poetry to the plays of Bertolt Brecht to the speeches of Martin Luther King. She began to teach her new-found literacy to the older women in the camps, including her own mother.

She soon discovered that she loved to teach – and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.

So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border – and "the best days of my life" began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent "vice and virtue" police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. "Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph," she says, beaming. "There is no better feeling."

She only just avoided being caught, again and again. One time she was teaching a class of girls in a family's basement when the mother of the house yelled down suddenly: "Taliban! Taliban!" Joya says: "I told my students to lie down on the floor and stay totally silent. We heard footsteps above us and waited a long time." On many occasions, ordinary men and women – anonymous strangers – helped her out by sending the police charging off in the wrong direction. She adds: "Every day in Afghanistan, even now, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women act out these small gestures of solidarity with each other. We are our sisters' keepers."

The charity was so impressed with her they appointed her their director. Joya decided to set up a clinic for poor women just before the 9/11 attacks. When the American invasion began, the Taliban fled her province, but the bombs kept falling. "Many lives were needlessly lost, just like during the September 11 tragedy," she says. "The noise was terrifying, and children covered their ears and screamed and cried. Smoke and dust rose and lingered in the air with every bomb dropped."

As soon as the Taliban retreated, they were replaced – by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point, "I realised women's rights had been sold out completely... Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban – and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters."

The warlords "have ruled Afghanistan ever since," she adds. While a "showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the US in Kabul", the real power "is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul". As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own "vice and virtue" squads which terrorised women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own "private militias, private jails". The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.

Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic – and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga ("meeting of the elders") to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic – and she was elected. "It turned out my mission," she says, "would be to expose the true nature of the jirga from within."

II "I would never again be safe"

As she stepped past the world's television cameras into the Loya jirga, the first thing Joya saw was "a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known – warlords and war criminals and fascists".

She could see the men who invited Osama bin Laden into the country, the men who introduced the misogynist laws later followed by the Taliban, the men who had massacred Afghan civilians. Some had got there by intimidating the electorate, others by vote-rigging, and yet more were simply appointed by Hamid Karzai, the former oilman installed by the US army to run the country. She thought of an old Afghan saying: "It's the same donkey, with a new saddle."

For a moment, as these old killers started to give long speeches congratulating themselves on the transition to democracy, Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, "I remembered the oppression we face as women in my country, and my nervousness evaporated, replaced by anger."

When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. "Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now... It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again... They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts."

These warlords – who brag about being hard men – could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a "prostitute" and "infidel", and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.

"From that moment on," Joya says, "I would never again be safe... For fundamentalists, a women is half a human, meant only to fulfil a man's every wish and lust, and to produce children and toil in the home. They could not believe that a young woman was tearing off their masks in front of the eyes of the Afghan people."

A fundamentalist mob turned up a few hours later at her accommodation, announcing they had come to rape and lynch her. She had to be placed under immediate armed guard – but she refused to be protected by American troops, insisting on Afghan officers.

Her speech was broadcast all over the world – and cheered in Afghanistan. She was flooded with support from the people of her country, delighted that somebody had finally spoken out. One dirt-poor village pooled its cash to send a delegate hundreds of miles across the country to explain how pleased they were.

An extremely old woman was brought to her in a rickety wheelbarrow, and she explained she had lost two sons – one to the Soviets, one to the fundamentalists. She told Joya: "I am almost 100 years old, and I am dying. When I heard about you and what you said, I knew that I had to meet you. God must protect you, my dear."

She handed over her gold ring, her only valuable possession, and said: "You must take it! I have suffered so much in my life, and my last wish is that you accept this gift from me."

But the US and Nato occupiers instructed Joya that she must show "politeness and respect" for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, said this, she replied: "If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?"

She leans forward and quotes Brecht: "He says, 'He who does not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.'"

The attempts to murder her began then with a sniper – and have not stopped since. But she says plainly, with her fist clenched: "I wanted the warlords to know I was not afraid of them."

So she ran for parliament – and won in a landslide. "I would return again to face those who had ruined my country," she explains, "and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats."

III "In every corner is a killer"

Joya looked out across the new Afghan parliament on her first day and thought: "In every corner is a killer, a puppet, a criminal, a drug lord, a fascist. This is not democracy. I am one of the very few people here who has been genuinely elected." She started her maiden speech by saying: "My condolences to the people of Afghanistan..."

Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: "We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself."

I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. "I am never frightened when I tell the truth." She is speaking fast now: "I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me."

She says there is no difference for ordinary Afghans between the Taliban and the equally fundamentalist warlords. "Which groups are labelled 'terrorist' or 'fundamentalist' depends on how useful they are to the goals of the US," she says. "You have two sides who terrorise women, but the anti-American side are 'terrorists' and the pro-American side are 'heroes'."

Karzai rules only with the permission of the warlords. He is "a shameless puppet" who will win next month's presidential elections because "he hasn't yet stopped working for his masters, the US and the warlords... At this point in our history, the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the US government and the mafia that holds power in our country."

Whenever she would despair in parliament, she would meet yet more ordinary Afghan women – and get back in the fight. She tells me about a 16-year-old constituent of hers, Rahella, who ran away to an orphanage Joya had helped to set up in her constituency. "Her uncle had decided to marry her off to his son, who was a drug addict. She was terrified. So of course we took her in, educated her, helped her." One day, her uncle turned up and apologised, saying he had learnt the error of his ways. He asked if she could come home for a weekend to visit her family. Joya agreed – and when she got back to her village, Rahella was forced into marriage and spirited away to another part of Afghanistan. They heard six months later that she had doused herself in petrol and burned herself alive.

There has been an epidemic of self-immolation by women across the "new" Afghanistan in the past five years. "The hundreds of Afghan women who set themselves ablaze are not only committing suicide to escape their misery," she says, "they are crying out for justice."

But she was not allowed to raise these issues in the supposedly democratic parliament. The fundamentalist warlords who couldn't beat Joya at the ballot box or kill her chanced upon a new way to silence her. The more she spoke, the angrier they got. She called for secularism in Afghanistan, saying: "Religion is a private issue, unrelated to political issues and the government... Real Muslims do not require political leaders to guide them to Islam." She condemned the new law that declared an amnesty for all war crimes committed in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, saying "You criminals are simply giving yourselves a get-out-of-jail free card." So the MPs simply voted to kick her out of parliament.

It was illegal and undemocratic – but the President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban. "Now the warlord criminals are unchallenged in parliament," she says. "Is that democracy?"

We in the West have been fed "a pack of lies" about what Afghanistan looks like today. "The media are 'free' only if they do not try to criticise warlords and officials," she says in her book, Raising My Voice. As an example, she names a specific warlord: "If you write anything about him, the next day you will be tortured or killed by the Northern Alliance warlords." It is "a myth" to say girls can now go to school outside Kabul. "Only five per cent of girls, according to the UN, can follow their education to the 12th grade."

And it is "false" to say Afghan culture is inherently misogynistic. "By the 1950s, there was a growing women's movement in Afghanistan, demonstrating and fighting for their rights," she says. "I have a story here" – she rifles through her notes – "from The New York Times in 1959. Here! The headline is 'Afghanistan's women lift the veil'. We were developing an open culture for women – and then the foreign wars and invasions crushed it all. If we can regain our independence, we can start this struggle again."

Many of her friends urge her to leave the country, before one of her wannabe-assassins gets lucky. But, she says, "I can never leave when all the poor people that I love are living in danger and poverty. I am not going to search for a better and safer place, and leave them in a burning hell." Apologising for her English – which is, in fact, excellent – she quotes Brecht again: "Those who do struggle often fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed."

Today, she fights for democracy outside parliament. But, she says, any Afghan democrat today is "trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns." She wants to help the swelling movement of ordinary Afghans in between, who are opposed to both. "With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it [will be] easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies."

If she were president of Afghanistan, she would begin by referring all the country's war criminals to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. "Anybody who has murdered my sisters and brothers should be punished," she says, "from the Taliban, to the warlords, to George W Bush." Then she would ask all foreign troops to leave immediately. She says that it is wrong to say Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war if that happens. "What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed – many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people."

The Afghan public, she adds, are on her side, pointing to a recent opinion poll showing 60 per cent of Afghans want an immediate Nato withdrawal. Many people in Afghanistan were hopeful, she says, about Barack Obama – "but he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush... I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the President is black or white, but his actions. You can't eat symbolism."

US policy is driven by geopolitics, she says, not personalities. "Afghanistan is in the heart of Asia, so it's a very important place to have military bases – so they can control trade very easily with other Asian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and so on.

"But it can be changed by Americans," she adds. She is passionate now, her voice rising. "I say to Obama – in my area, 150 people were blown up by US troops in one incident this year. If your family had been there, would you send even more troops and even more bombs? Your government is spending $18m (£11m) to make another Guantanamo jail in Bagram. If your daughter might be detained there, would you be building it? I say to Obama – change course, or otherwise tomorrow people will call you another Bush."

IV "It's hard to be strong all the time"

"It's not good to show my enemies any weakness, [but] it's hard to be strong all the time," Joya says with a sigh, as she runs her hands through her hair. She has been speaking so insistently – with such preternatural courage– that it's easy to forget she was just a girl when she was thrust into fighting fundamentalism. She was never allowed an adolescence. The fierce concentration on her face melts away, and she looks a little lost. "Yes, my mother is proud of me," she says, "but you know how mothers are – they worry. Whenever I speak to her on the phone, the first sentence and the last sentence are always 'Take care'."

Two years ago, she got married in secret. She can't name her husband publicly, because he would be killed. Her wedding flowers had to be checked for bombs. She will only say that they met at a press conference, "and he supports everything I do". She has not seen him "for two months", she says. "We meet in the safe houses of supporters. I cannot sleep in the same house two nights running. It is a different home every evening."

Where does this courage come from? She acts as if the answer is obvious – anyone would do it, she claims. But they don't. Perhaps it comes from her belief that the struggle is long and our individual lives are short, so we can only advance our chosen cause by inches, knowing others will pick up our baton. "When I die, others will come. I am sure of that," she says.

She certainly has a strong sense of belonging to a long history of Afghans who fought for freedom. "My parents chose my first name after Malalai of Maiwand. She was a young woman who, in 1880, went to the front line of the second Anglo-Afghan war to tend the wounded. When the fighters were close to collapse, she picked up the Afghan flag and led the men into battle herself. She was struck down – but the British suffered a landmark defeat, and, in the end, they were driven out."

When she ran for office, she had to choose a surname for herself, to protect her family's identity. "I named myself after Sarwar Joya, the Afghan poet and constitutionalist. He spent 24 years in jails, and was finally killed because he wouldn't compromise his democratic principles... In Afghanistan we have a saying: the truth is like the sun. When it comes up, nobody can block it out or hide it."

Malalai Joya knows she could be killed any day now, in our newly liberated Warlord-istan. She hugs me goodbye and says, "We must keep in touch." But I find myself bleakly wondering if we will ever meet again. Perhaps she senses this, because she suddenly urges me to look again at the last paragraph of her memoir, Raising My Voice. "It really is how I feel," she says. It reads: "If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice." I look up into her face, and she is giving me the bravest smile I have ever seen.

'Raising My Voice' by Malalai Joya can be purchased here. All profits will go to supporting the cause of women's rights in Afghanistan.

You can donate directly to her campaigns here.

You can read an archive of Johann Hari's interviews - with everyone from Dolly Parton to Hugo Chavez - here.

Andrew Sullivan’s story is inherently implausible. How did an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative from the poky English town of East Grinstead end up as one of the most powerful writers in America?

Today his blog, the Daily Dish, is regularly named as one of the most influential in America, and in November it reached 23m hits in the month. Politicians from Condoleezza Rice to Barack Obama himself have courted Sullivan in the hope of friendly posts. After he moved his blog to the website of the venerable Atlantic Monthly magazine, the traffic there rose by 30%.

This is all the stranger since—unlike other big-name bloggers such as the liberal-Democratic Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos or the libertarian Republican Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit—he has no obvious political constituency. Sullivan is regarded by his critics as an attention-deficit bundle of contradictions. He is a conservative Christian who rages against the self-proclaimed forces of conservative Christianity. He is a pioneering crusader for gay marriage savaged by the gay left as “chief faggot”, herding homosexuals on behalf of The Patriarchy. He admits: “I’m very uncomfortable with audiences who agree with me… I’ve never really had a place where someone didn’t dispute my right to be there.” So what is the glue that holds together the blogger-king?

To read the full 5000-word article, click here,

Tony Blair’s decade in power is seared with disappointments, but there is one cool, consistent success-story that ran through his time in power: the rapid advance of gay rights. If we had known in 1997 we would achieve full legal equality for gay people in Britain – including de facto gay marriage, military service, and a ban on discrimination – so fast and with so little fuss, we would have been startled. When I interviewed the former Prime Minister about gay rights last month to mark the 15th anniversary of Attitude, Britain’s best-selling gay magazine, I glimpsed his very best side – and the strange, gaping blind spots that did so much harm to his record, and the world.

Leaning forward, Blair offers a passionate defence of the equality of gay people. He talks about how, from his schooldays, he had gay friends who were terrified to come out, and how the homophobia of the Conservative Party represented “everything I wanted to change” about Britain. He talks about how the endless charge of political correctness is used by “reactionary forces” as “a cover by people arguing against basic equality. Equality isn’t political correctness, it’s just justice.” He says with a smile that delivering on it was one of his “proudest achievements.”

And he transfers this success into an almost Messianic optimism about the future. He says he opposes Proposition 8 and is confident the US will follow Britain and accept gay marriage soon. Even when it comes to evangelical Christians, he says, “I think there is a generational shift that is happening there. If you talk to the older generation, yes, you will still get a lot of pushback, and parts of the Bible quoted, and so on. But actually, if you look at the younger generation of evangelicals, this is increasingly for them something that they wish to be out of – at least in terms of having their position confined to being anti-gay.”

As probably the most high-profile pro-gay religious person in the world, he says he is “optimistic” that all religions – including Islam – can go through “a process of Reformation” that will end with them accepting openly gay people and their partners. They will see they have to “treat religious thought and even religious texts as themselves capable of evolution over time. You have to understand the context and the society in which they were expressed. So, when people quote the passages in Leviticus condemning homosexuality, I say to them – if you read the whole of the Old Testament and took everything that was there in a literal way, as being what God and religion is about, you’d have some pretty tough policies across the whole of the piece.”

It is part of the “mission” of his Faith Foundation, he says, to move religion away from this anti-gay literalism and towards pro-gay “evolution.”

He doesn’t hide his disagreement with the anti-gay bile of the leader of his own faith, the Pope. He says “again, there is a huge generational difference here” and that “if you went and asked the [ordinary Catholic] congregation, I think you’d find that their faith is not to be found in those types of entrenched attitudes.” The fight for gay equality was a rare occasion when Blair took on the right. I ask him if he wishes he had done it more, and he looks thoughtful. “It depends on the issue. But yes.” What issues? He does his diplomatic smile. “I’d better not say.”

And yet, and yet… I soon crash into the blind-spot that sent his Premiership spinning to an early death. I ask him if he ever discussed his pro-gay views with George W. Bush. “No, I can’t say I did. I mean, here’s an interesting thing. I honestly haven’t the faintest idea of how he voted on any of these things, but I’d be quite surprised if he personally were prejudiced.”

It’s a bizarre answer. Of course he knows what George Bush did to oppose gay equality – he reads the newspapers. Why not just say he disagrees? Why lie – and add the word “honestly” as you do it? Why actually defend a man whose views on gay people are so obnoxious, and so opposite to his own? What does it matter what he “personally” believes, when he politically opposes gay rights?

Wrapped into this little interview was the paradox – and the tragedy – of Tony Blair. When he chose to fight on liberal issues, he was passionate, and brilliant. But he did it only a few times – and he willingly suspended these, his most impressive and admirable instincts, to embark on a bloody barn-dance with the worst President in living memory. Why?

Here's the full text:

J: If we’d known in 1997 that within a decade so much of the gay rights agenda would be achieved – civil partnerships, an equal age of consent, gay people in the army and the government – we’d have been impressed, wouldn’t we?

T: Yes, I think it’s one of these quiet revolutions in thinking. I think the most interesting thing and the best thing in a way is that public attitude has changed so fundamentally. Now, that doesn’t mean to say there’s not still a lot of homophobia and a lot of things to be done. But the fact that it is unacceptable for any mainstream political party to be anything other than on the side of equality and respect is, in a way, the biggest change. The items of individual legislation matter a lot, but I think it’s the general shift in climate that is perhaps the most important point.

J: Which of the piece of gay rights legislation were you most pleased to push through?

T: Probably civil partnerships, because that’s what really gave people a sense of liberation from prejudice. And also because I knew so many people whose lives had been affected by that. It was the culmination. And you know, it changed my own thinking a little bit. If I can be self-critical for a moment… I think back to the 1980s, when Ken Livingstone was doing a lot of campaigning for gay rights in the context of the GLC [Greater London Council]. There were people like me who were very much in the “we’ve-got-to-get-into-government” part of the Labour party who thought: “hmm, do we really need this along with all the other issues we’ve got?”

And I think one of the things that he did that was very important was to insist on this agenda when it really was not popular at all. In fact, to espouse it was to open yourself up to political ridicule. And he changed my thinking in the sense that it taught me – or re-taught me – a lesson that I think is really important in politics, which is that conventional wisdom is not necessarily wise: it can be wrong and it can be just a form of conservatism that hides behind a consensus.

If you look back in time, through the women’s Suffragette movement, the fight against slavery, it’s amazing how the same arguments in favour of prejudice crop up again and again and again. Politicians who are dealing with it at any one time face the issue as to whether they’ve got the courage to come up and challenge the political consensus. And I think in the 1980s, if you were espousing the gay and lesbian cause it was, you know, “does that mean that you are….?” Suddenly comes with a whole lot of other things with it that are going to be a nightmare for the party trying to get into Government. It taught me the need to distinguish very carefully between different attitudes and occasionally to be prepared to stand up and say, “okay, this may not be popular or part of the political consensus, but actually it’s right, and in fact, if we keep going long enough, strong enough, then we will change the conventional wisdom.

J: Some of the criticisms you faced seem bizarre now. You were constantly called “politically correct.”

T: You know, the attacks on political correctness always involved two things that were quite conveniently rolled into one by the more reactionary political forces. One was people just being silly about things: insisting somebody is called a “chairperson,” rather than a “chairman.” That makes most people say, “Okay, who really cares?” But they also tried to say any opposition to prejudice also is political correctness, when it’s a completely different thing. For a long time, the idea of political correctness was used to demonize the move towards equality, rather than just a criticism of some people who were a bit prissy in their terminology. Don’t let that phrase ‘political correctness’ be used as a cover by people arguing against basic equality. Equality isn’t political correctness, it’s just justice.

J: The gay rights issue is a rare instance where, as Prime Minister, you really took on the right. Are there are times when you wish you’d done a bit more as Prime Minister?

T: Well, it depends on the issue. [Long pause]. The answer is yes, for certain things.

J: What are you thinking of?

T: [Long pause again.] I’d better not go there! But there is a far greater eclecticism within politics today than there ever was before, so one of the things that I found really interesting and intriguing - as well as positive - was when I went to the Stonewall dinner and you’ve got the BP gay and lesbian group and the Ernst and Young gay/lesbian group, and I’m thought, “oh, that’s interesting!” But I think that’s quite good. I think the fact that you break out from a sort of left/right issue in traditional terms, on the issue of gay rights, and I think is quite important, actually. Because there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t be a Tory and be openly gay or be a successful businessperson or whatever. In fact, there are plenty of examples now of those.

Also, when young people are growing up now, they will have friends who are gay and it’s simply accepted – it’s not a big issue for them. And it’s like everything else. One of the things that happens is that, when these prejudices are challenged, people are forced to think through their own positions, and when they think it through, people say, “maybe that’s right.”

It is a generational difference. For me, there were obviously people at school I knew who were gay, there were people at University, and so on. And so it was very much part of my life from a very early stage. Do when I heard older Tory politicians saying that someone can be persuaded to be gay in the Section 28 debates, it just seemed ridiculous. And I was saying to them, “Look, I’m not gay, and there is nothing that would persuade me to be it – don’t you think it’s the same for gay people?.”

J: Did you get any people within the Government saying you going too fast on this?

T: Some of the older ones – the older MPs – but nobody in the Cabinet, I have to say, really. Chris Smith played a very important part in this, as well, because he was out as openly gay. I think most people basically agreed with it.

J: Were you taken aback when the Sun said the government was being run by a secret gay mafia?

T: Well! What actually happened, I think, I think what actually happened was a spate of so-called “scandals” that all happened around the same time about Cabinet ministers being gay. But I think what was quite interesting was that they tried running that for a bit, and people just didn’t connect with it. It didn’t go anywhere.

J: One of the very few homophobic jeers that did pick up some traction – and persists to this day – were the attacks on your friend Peter Mandelson, calling him “Mandy” and so on. Do you think that’s anti-gay prejudice?

T: I think in some quarters, yes. His career is interesting in both senses in that he’s attacked in certain quarters for being gay, and yet, at the same time, also, I don’t believe that has altered in any shape or form people’s opinion of him. What those comments indicate is that the prejudice is still there, but what they also indicate is that its force is very weak, really. Because people like him or don’t like him, but it’s not based on his sexuality. The attitude of the world at large to Peter has very much been based on his ability and his brilliance rather than his sexuality. And I think that in itself is quite interesting.

J: Do you think there are lessons here for the US? Gay rights are currently very controversial and contested there but here we introduced equality with relatively little fuss, towards the end at least.

T: Yes, I think so. It’s interesting, because in my Faith Foundation I have a lot of links with some of the evangelical groups in the US and elsewhere, and, actually, I think there is a generational shift that is happening there. If you talk to the older generation, yes, you will still get a lot of pushback, and parts of the Bible quoted, and so on. But actually, if you look at the younger generation of evangelicals, this is increasingly for them something that they wish to be out of – at least in terms of having their position confined to being anti-gay.

J: Your friend Bill Clinton was strongly opposed to Proposition Eight, which sought to deny marriage rights to gay people in California. I presume you agree with him?

T: Yes, and what’s interesting to me is that, I think, increasingly in America amongst the younger generation, even if they’re on the Republican Right, even if they’re evangelical, I just don’t think the attitude of being anti-gay is of the same force as it was the previous generation.

J: Did you ever talk to President Bush about this issue?

T: No, I can’t say I did. I mean, here’s an interesting thing. I honestly haven’t the faintest idea of how he voted on any of these things, but I’d be quite surprised if he personally were prejudiced.

J: I know you’ve got Rick Warren – the evangelical pastor – on the board of your Faith Foundation. He’s obviously not pro-gay, but do you feel you can change people’s minds by engaging with them?

T: Yeah, of course. They, absolutely they can be engaged with, and through the process of engagement comes change. And it’s… look, it can be difficult. When some criticized me over the Catholic adoption agencies [who were allowed to continue, even though they wouldn’t give children to same-sex couples] my view was – how you conduct this argument is also important. When you’ve got people who are conducting the debate in a reasonable way, then you find that you do start to soften people’s attitudes and then you open them up to the possibility of change and you open them up to the possibility of reconsideration. Whereas, if just shout at them, then what you find is that people go back into their shell again. But that’s always been my view about politics, which is that if you actually think you’re right, you should have some confidence in your ability to persuade.

J: You are a very rare example of a person who is publicly very religious, and very pro-gay. Did you ever see a conflict between the two?

T: No. Not for me. Because I came to a religious faith through people who were themselves very much open and liberal on all these issues, and who would have regarded it as bizarre to have attitudes of hostility to gay people. I think it would have been, actually, the other way around. If in the end I’d felt that my religious faith was pulling me in an opposite direction, I’d have had real difficulties with it.

I think that for all religions, the challenge is - how do you extract the essential values of the faith from a vast accumulation of doctrine and practice? For many people, the reason for their religious faith is less to do with the doctrine and practice, and more to do with the values like love of God and love of your neighbour. And one of the things I do through my Foundation, through trying to bring different religious faiths together, to show how, actually, there is a huge common space around these values between the different religious faiths,

For many people in the world of religion, they have found they’re facing the same challenge as everybody else is in changing times, when it comes to the role of women, the issues to do with sexuality, and so on. But the problem within the institutions of organised religion as opposed, for example, to those in politics, is that those attitudes get mixed up with those of doctrine. For something that is religious in nature, it can be far harder for them to break with the past. They’re hard – they’re really difficult. Because people are debating - what is the word of God? If something is expressed in a particular way in the Bible or the Koran or elsewhere, can you possibly contemplate a process of modernisation where attitudes change over time? But my own view is that it’s better to have these views debated within religious circles than to pretend that they don’t exist.

J: But it almost seems like gay issues are like the Clause Four for religious people – the part they find hardest to change, the big symbolic crux. Are you basically saying religious people need to read their texts less literally, and more metaphorically?

T: Yes, and also to treat religious thought and even religious texts as themselves capable of evolution over time. You have to understand the context and the society in which they were expressed. So, when people quote the passages in Leviticus condemning homosexuality, I say to them – if you read the whole of the Old Testament and took everything that was there in a literal way, as being what God and religion is about, you’d have some pretty tough policies across the whole of the piece.

J: You’d have to support slavery, and killing disobedient daughters.

T: Yeah, and you’ve got the Old Testament Kings with hoards of concubines, and so on. There’s no way that you could take all of that and say, we in the 21st century should behave in that way. And actually, what people often forget about, for example, Jesus or, indeed, the Prophet Mohammed, is that their whole raison d’être was to change the way that people thought traditionally. Christianity was very much about saying, no, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ is not the right way to behave. And the Koran was, of course, an extraordinary, progressive – revolutionarily progressive – document for its time. That’s why many of the old pagan practices that the Prophet was keen to wean people away from were dispensed with.

This process of evolution and change carries on the whole time. Otherwise, you end up pitting religion against reason, and that is the single most dangerous thing you could ever do. Because in the end, if you force people to choose between religious faith and reason, they will choose reason. But that is not, in fact, what should happen. Religious faith and reason are actually in alignment, in my view – or, at least, that is the argument.

J: But why do you think so many of the world’s most senior religious figures disagree? The Pope said in a speech that “homosexuality is a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder,” and even compared the tolerance homosexuality to the destruction of the rainforests.

T: Again, there is a huge generational difference here. And there’s probably that same fear amongst religious leaders that if you concede ground on an issue like this, because attitudes and thinking evolve over time, where does that end? You’d start having to rethink many, many things. Now, my view is that rethinking is good, so let’s carry on rethinking. Actually, we need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you approach your religious faith. So some of these things can then result in a very broad area of issues being up for discussion.

That’s when I understand why religious leaders are very reluctant. But I sometimes say that organised religions face the same dilemma as political parties when faced with changed circumstances. You can either (a) hold to your core vote, basically, you know, say, “look, let’s not break out, because if we break out we might lose what we’ve got, and at least what we’ve got, we’ve got, so let’s keep it”. Or (b) you say, let’s accept that the world is changing, and let us work out how we can lead that change, and actually reach out.

J: Can you foresee a situation where in your lifetime or mine, we would have a pro-gay Pope, for example?

T: I don’t know, is the honest answer. I don’t know. Look, there are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for, but what I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic Church, particularly a well-attended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, I think you’d be quite surprised at how liberal-minded people were.

J: That’s quite a radical line for a Catholic: to say that the average Catholic congregation speaks for the Catholic Church more than the Pope does?

T: Well, I’m not going to say that! [Laughs] On many issues, I think the leaders of the Church and the Church will be in complete agreement. But I think on some of these issues, if you went and asked the congregation, I think you’d find that their faith is not to be found in those types of entrenched attitudes. If you asked people who are religious, “what makes you religious?” and “what does your faith mean to you?” they would immediately go into compassion, solidarity, relieving suffering. I would be really surprised if they went to: “Actually, it’s to do with believing homosexuality is wrong”, or “it’s to do with believing this part of the ritual or doctrine should be done in this particular way.”

J: Do you think that that transformation could also happen with Islam – that there could be a situation where elected Muslim leaders would be as open to the arguments for gay rights as you were?

T: [Nods.] I believe that, ultimately, people will find their way to a sensible reformation of attitudes.

Israel and Palestine

Drunken Politics: One of the things about your writing is that it’s hard to categorise. In the sense that you talk about war crimes that Israel committed and the suffering on the Palestinian side. So American pundits will kind of assume that you're Hamas, but then you've also done pieces on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie who has been targeted by Islamic extremists. So I wanted to know, number 1: We don't really hear about Palestinian suffering in the States, so I wanted to know what you thought of this kind of restricted journalism and maybe compare writing over here in the UK to what you see as dangerous trends in US media including restricted journalism and niche journalism.

Johann Hari: American newspapers are unbelievably bad. It’s when you go to America that you realise they're so dull, they’re so incredibly ideologically narrow. So you get this really incredibly right wing view, in the spectrum of global opinion, represented as centrist and that's all you hear. There are many reasons for the death of the American newspaper industry, but one of them is just that they produce an absolutely lousy product, that does not help [anyone] figure out what is going on in the world, the Palestinian issue is a good example.

Everyone knows in America, rightly, the Israel narrative, which is insofar as it goes, true. It is absolutely true that the experience of Diaspora life for Jewish people was horrific; they were subject to genocide, ethnic cleansing and the most appalling atrocities of the twentieth century. And it is true that as a result many of them went to what is now Israel. What you don't hear is that there was already a bunch of people living there. Nothing would make me happier than if the Israeli founding myth that it was ‘a land without people for people without land’ was true. You go to Tel Aviv which wasn't built on stolen land, which was built on genuine empty land and you see what a Jewish state could have been and it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world: amazing, thriving, democratic cosmopolitan, beautiful.

Unfortunately the rest of Israel isn't like that, there were people living there and the Palestinians had done nothing to justify or support the abuses against Jews. They were completely innocent, in the same way that the Kurds are denied a state now, and if they turned up and said, “Okay, New Jersey is ours tomorrow”, I don't think that the people in New Jersey would say, "Fair enough we're off to California, you have New Jersey". No, they love their houses, they love the places they’re from; they would stay and they would defend it.

And in the same way, that's what the Palestinians have done, and actually if you look at the Palestinian story, one of the things that is striking is how unviolent they were for so long. Their land is taken, 800,000 of them were ethnically cleansed, driven out of their land and not allowed to return and this is not seriously disputed by serious historians who are not propagandists any more. And the Palestinians were driven into these enclaves, Gaza and the West bank, some remained in what is now Israel with second class citizen status and then in 1967 there is another war and even Gaza and the West bank are taken and then Israel starts sending settlers to steal that land.and settle on it.

I can't remember the figures but between 1948 and 1967, something like 400 Israelis were killed, that’s appalling, I don't believe in killing, killing civilians is always wrong and it's always murder. But bearing in mind you've had ethnic cleansing, and 800,000 people, absolutely huge massacres and for almost twenty years you've had virtually no retaliation from the Palestinians at all. You then, when the settlements start being built and the tiny remnants of land that they've been left with are stolen, you then do begin to get some fight back.

People say, and this is one of the most incredible ignorant clichés you get in the American media is they say "Why don't they Palestinians try passive resistance, why don't they try a Gandhi?”. Well these people need to be told that there was something called the First Intifada. In the First Intifada, the Palestinians overwhelmingly peacefully, in 1987, simply refused to cooperate with the occupation. They ripped up their identity cards and they sat down. Yitzhak Rabin, now revered as a man of peace blah blah blah, gave the order and his words [to the Israeli Defense Force] were: "Break their bones". They went in and beat the shit out of them, so that's the reality. After the failure of the First Intifada, a fairly peaceful resistance, there then began to be more violence. Some of that violence took horrible and unjustifiable forms like suicide bombing of civilians. The violence has always been much more on the Israeli side, but that doesn't justify a single attack on an Israeli civilian but it's an element of the story that’s not told to Americans.

So look for example at what’s happening in Gaza now. It's 2006, the people of Gaza in a free and open election choose Hamas. I hate Hamas. Hamas are antithetical to everything I believe, but it was an open election, it was fair, it was not a rejection of a two state solution, as 70% of Palestinians want a two state solution. It was a rejection of the corruption of Fatah.

Drunken Politics: Can I just interject very quickly, we've heard other people state that Hamas actually stole the election because they were, this is one example, throwing members of Fatah off rooftops.

Johann Hari: No, the chronology of that isn't right. Right, what happened is, Hamas won fairly, no one disputes this, independent monitors, UN monitors, everything.

Drunken Politics: Didn’t Jimmy Carter say it was a fair election?

Johann Hari: That’s right, Hamas won, what then happened was that the American government then said that you can't allow Hamas to become the government. So they prevailed upon President Abbas, the idea [being] that you have two tiers of power here, you have the presidency, which is meant to be symbolic, and the legislative power of the Prime Minister, the real power broker. A bit like in Britain, the Queen and the Prime Minister. So they appealed to Abbas, equivalent to the Queen, to not allow Hamas to take power. They then started to flood Gaza with arms [calling for them to] forcibly stop them from taking power. In that context, where suddenly the democratically elected government is getting attacked, it's true they begun to fight back. There begun to be effectively, a civil war, a breakdown of power. When Hamas eventually does take power as the Palestinian people wanted, the European Union, the US and Israel together, imposed a blockade of Gaza.

I spent a lot of time in Gaza and the first thing you have to understand about a blockade, is that Gaza is absolutely tiny, a little bit bigger than the island of Manhattan, about 1.5 million people living on it and they can never leave. Most of the people there, if you speak to people our age who are, I guess, in our thirties, have never left this tiny patch of land. So you’ve got 1.5 million people, standing on top of a tall building and you can see the borders of their world. You can see the Mediterranean Sea to one side, and the Israeli barbed wire to the other. They were blockaded meaning that it was surrounded and very little was allowed in and out, so they massively restricted the food, Ariel Sharon’s advisor Dov Weisglass described it as putting the Palestinians on a diet, and medical supplies weren’t allowed in.

When I was last in Gaza, the hospitals were collapsing, the blood transfusion units were down to the very last, don’t know what it’s called, the centrifuge in the middle of it, so if that breaks, there’s no blood transfusions in Gaza, meaning huge numbers of people die. There have been things like the sewage system collapsing because they’re not letting pipes in, they're running out of medicine. They’re in the middle of that and bearing in minds, this is a response to a democratic election. Then in response to the blockade, rockets are fired. Then they [Israel] say, “what can we do we're being rocketed”. Well hang on; go back to the chronology of what happened. Then in response to the rockets, they began as what everyone now knows, to bomb Gaza. We know that about 1400, 40% of them children, people have died. And now it looks like in a couple of days, and I guess your listeners will know by the time they hear this, it looks like the Israelis are going to elect Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who's committed to toppling Hamas and reoccupying Gaza.

So all that narrative, most people as I say would know they Israeli narrative, and that’s important, and there’s truth in that narrative, but there’s just as much truth in the Palestinian narrative and that isn’t. That is shocking. You mention that I support Salman Rushdie, and I support Ayaan Hirsi Ali's right to speech. I absolutely hate Islamic fundamentalists, I detest them, they believe in killing all gay people, imprisoning women in their houses. I’ve taken a lot of risk to work undercover to expose these people. But it’s precisely, one of the reasons why I am so critical of what’s happened in Israel, is because it's causing Islamic fundamentalism to rise. Since the Bombing in Gaza, support for Hamas has sky rocketed, one of the biggest recruiting sergeants for Islamic fundamentalists for this part of East London and all over the world are pictures of what’s happening in Gaza and the West bank. Gaza has been turned into a Petri dish of Islamic fundamentalism. There’s no contradiction between being critical of human rights abuses by Israel and being critical of Islamic fundamentalism – the connecting thread being you're in favour of human rights for everyone.

Drunken Politics: Right, that's a very logical point so why do you think that at least in the American media's narrative [it is perceived that by] criticising Israel you support terrorism, yet [ignoring] everything you just said…

Johann Hari: The problem with terrorism is that it's a propaganda term. Terrorism is violence we don't want. It’s apparently not terrorism to blow up a family in Gaza, or a school in Gaza that you know, having been given the GPS coordinates, is a school with the UN approved coordinates. It is [however] terrorism to blow up a family in Tel Aviv, either they both are or neither are. I prefer to talk about murder, and when it's murder and when it's not. Both those instances are clearly murder, and I refuse to use the term, so why is there a situation? One, there is a group that describe themselves falsely as a pro-Israel lobby, in fact they are doing unimaginable harm to Israel. There is no contradiction between the pro-Palestinain and pro-Israel, I have friends on both sides who I want to be safe and the same thing will make them both safer.

The idea that bombing the hell out of Gaza and stealing more of the West bank is going to make Israelis safe is insane. And when you have a friend who's self-harming, and you going to their house and they’re slashing their arms up with razors, you don't say “Oh you've run out of razors, I'll go and buy you some more”. You say, “Wait you've got to stop doing this, we've got to find a way for you to stop doing this”. The same thing is happening in Israel, Israel is harming itself. Even if you don’t care about the Palestinians in the slightest, even if all you cared about is Israeli security, the course their on is a catastrophic for them. There is a group that describes as pro-Israeli, people like the Anti-Defamation League, Camera and Honest Reporting who just viciously smear people who try to tell the truth about this. You look about Jimmy Carter, you know Carter brokered the first and only peace deal Israel ever had with one of its Arab neighbors; he couldn't do much more for Israel’s security than Jimmy Carter has done. Yet even he could be smeared as, you know, anti-Semitic and the terrible thing about this is that it makes it actually really hard to deal with genuine anti-Semitis,, which is real and most people then think it's just a propaganda smear.

Drunken Politics: People then said, with Carter it was just really over his book where he just told the history of what happened from both sides.

Drunken Poltics 2: And he's not a part of that?

Drunken Politics: And that’s actually one of the reasons why people actually said that Obama didn't have him speak at the democratic national convention. I have just another quick follow-up question with the media and I’m curious about your take on it.

Blogs, Newspapers and Pundits

Drunken Politics:So moving away from newspapers, and just [focussing on] American punditry, a lot of people see the rise of popularity of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow. Maddow I like a lot more and I think she’s intelligent [and works[ as a good counter to the Bill O’Reilleys and the Sean Hannitys. I don’t think it’s like this over here, do you see that as dangerous, that instead of countering the extreme right propaganda noise machine, we’re creating just a left wing equivalent instead of countering them with more objective journalism?

Johann Hari: That’s not my problem with Olberman and Maddow. Like you, I like both of them and they’re nice people and they do some really good work. I think that the problem is more that something Noam Chomsky talks about [how the] left is [being] represented. This idea that Maddow represents the far left, if you listen to what she said about Gaza it’s shocking. I was really disappointed with her, she took a really shocking and ahistorical view. Her views were unhelpful to understand what was happening, and Rachel Maddow is on domestic issues pretty liberal but on foreign issues, she’s pretty hawkish.

Drunken Politics:We could figure out whether it was her or the network was hawkish.

Johann Hari: What I think the danger is though… if you’re going to have a shrill imbecilic right wing people, it’d be great if we all spoke in this lovely elevated way. Look, if you’re going to have shrill imbecilic right-wingers, you’re may as well have shrill imbecilic left-wingers, which I’m not saying Maddow or Olbermann are shrill imbeciles or indeed left-wingers. I don’t’ think that’s the problem, the problem is what gets delineated as ‘the left’. Did you see in Forbes magazine, did the most incredible thing recently: the top 25 most powerful liberals?

Drunken Politics: Maureen Dowd?!

Johann Hari Christopher Hitchens? Who’s a friend of mine, but no one’s idea of a left-winger and Fareed Zakaria? He’s the most market fundamentalist loon. It really is ridiculous. It’s very interesting because, where you delimit dissent, I think Noam Chomsky is right about this, is that you don’t just ban people form saying things, but what happens is, people think that even if this really liberal person thinks that, then it must be true. If you never hear anyone giving the Palestinian story, and you’re a nice well-intentioned liberal person and you think “Well if even Rachel Maddow, who everyone thinks is this crazy left winger, says that Israel is in the right and they had to do this” then surely that’s just the truth.

Drunken Politics 2: I feel that the part of the problem is the real liberals have been marginalised to the Internet where there are fantastic blogs like Glenn Greenwald. The mainstream media actually has a vested interested in dismissing them as marginalised, radical and unserious. I wonder if you could focus on this, I know you’ve blogged for Huffington Post, what you see as a counterculture to the mainstream media on the Internet where the liberals are hiding.

Drunken Politics: They’ve been banished

Johann Hari: There are some really bad blogs, and there are some good blogs. Just like there are some really bad newspaper journalist there are some really good newspaper journalists. The idea of people, for example, I write for the New York Times sometimes, the idea of news journalists at the New York Times sneering at bloggers, who were the ones who told us definitively that there were weapons of mass destruction. There’s no humility there, so I think there is a problem, I think there are some really good blogs, I mean I’m slightly worried about the death of newspapers with all the provisos I’ve given. Newspapers do an important newsgathering role, even with all the distortions we’ve talked about. The bloggers, generally can’t do [that], generally bloggers are commenting on news often in brilliant ways, but generally their breaking stories by reading what the mainstream media says and realising their wrong. It costs a lot of money to send a correspondent to Iraq or wherever, and to employ people. I’m slightly worried about newspapers, [obviously] the best way for newspapers to sell themselves is to make themselves much better products, which is clear they’re not going to do. Even newspapers in their current feeble state in the US, if they die, are going to leave a hole in the newsgathering stage, which is worrying. But I do think you’re right about people sneering at blogs, who are the real people who live in glasshouses throwing stones around.

Iraq

Drunken Politics: I've been reading this one quote from a citizen who said and this is a sad statement, but it said "at least under Saddam, we knew what could get us killed, we knew if he had political ambitions, but now going to the grocery store I have a bigger chance of....”

Johann Hari: I'm slightly wary of that argument because there was massive murder of civilians under Saddam, we know that it wasn't on the scale that we've seen in the last two years but there were periods which were just as intense. For example Halabja, a Kurdish town. In fact there were survivors who live near here, who were just gassed – whole civilian populations. So there's a tiny amount of truth in that, in that there were certain predictable things that got you killed. But equally lots of people were randomly murdered under Saddam.

Drunken Politics: And even things like the gassing could be traced back to western ambitions in the region and [it was America] who actually supplied Saddam with the weapons. The famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.

Johann Hari: Oh sure, that was the good old American tactics.

Drunken Politics: It's rare we've talked to something who's had split views on the war. What would you have seen as a good strategy to go in and take out and stop Saddam but without the post invasion problems?

Johann Hari: The problem is not the strategy, it’s the motivation. If the Nelson Mandela peace army could have invaded Iraq, there were all sorts of things you could have done which would have meant that transition to democracy in Iraq that meant life was saved. The Nelson Mandela Peace Army ain't available, so the reality is that the Bush administration did it. In a way to say what would have been the right strategy would be to ask the wrong question. Strategy is about motives. If your strategy is about transition to real democracy in Iraq, and Iraqis living good lives that’s very different to a strategy based on how do we control the oil supply and maximize our control over the country.

Pirates

Drunken Politics: Could you talk briefly about what the article is about. In general, the two types of stories that are underrepresented in our media tend to be about indigenous people and particularly black indigenous people, and why they do those crazy things in Somalia.

Johann Hari: We must try to do this without any ‘arrs me hearties’, or pirate jokes or gags. [Laughter] There are basically two stories about Somalia and pirates. There's the lie and there's the truth. There’s the story which your told which is that the pirates in Somalia have been hijacking ships for the last couple years are evil greedy people motivated just by a desire for money and are thugs and murders. They're like bankrobbers. Then there’s the truth. What happened in Somalia is that in 1991, the Somalian government collapsed and the country imploded. Two processes began in different parts of Somalia; bearing in mind it has a 3000 km coastline. A European shipping fleet, mostly Spanish, Italian and some British came along and basically started industrially fishing Somalian fish, which is one of the main sources of food in a starving country. Suddenly these tiny little fishermen with nets were being out fished by these industrial trawlers and the fish started just disappearing, so there was a massive increase in hunger in Somalia.

In another part of Somalia, industrial waste from Europe begun to being dumped just off the cost, because it's expensive to get rid of waste in Europe [whilst] it costs nothing to take it in a boat and dump it outside Somalia. The most incredible thing that was dumped was literally nuclear waste. So after the tsunami, barrels of all sorts of random shit started to wash up on the coast of Somalia, including nuclear waste that we now know [as a result] radiation sickness killed around 300 people but no ones bothering to count or check. That’s [what] the UN special envoys estimate to me was, 300 died, could be far more, no one’s looking, cleaning or doing anything.

Imagine if this happened in Florida, imagine if the government of Florida didn't have any resources and suddenly Italians came, stole all the fish and everyone was going bust in Florida, and they started dumping nuclear waste. People of Florida would be calling for the nuking of Italy. The Somalians with very limited resources sent what they called the ‘National Volunteer Coast Guard’ to try and stop these people, and the people we call pirates call themselves the coast guard. This is not that implausible when you bear in mind the context. It’s absolutely true that the some pirates have committed unacceptable acts, I don't believe it's ever right to take a hostage, [but] they haven't killed anyone, harmed anyone, but they have taken hostages. That’s not right, they do it to get money but they then in some cases give it back to [their] communities, which have been desecrated in several instances. So it's a good example of how something is presented as mindless insanity when actually it's actually completely different.

[There’s an interesting anecdote about] the original pirates in the golden age of pirates. Alexander the Great had a pirate brought to him and he said "What do you mean trying to seize things and plunder?" and the pirate said "What you mean sir, except I do it with ships and you do it with countries". You can well imagine one of these Somalian pirates saying that to Bush if they’d been summoned to him.

If you look at the pirates of the golden age in the 17th century, actually what happened there [was that] these people who were called pirates were people who were [initially] employed as sailors to work in the transatlantic trade, they were unimaginably abused, they were whipped, they were thrown overboard if [they got] sick and often not paid, simply refused payment at the end of the journey. They were people who were sick of all this and actually said, “screw this we're going to take over this ship and we're going to run it”. And incredibly, pirates were among the first people in the whole western world who begun democratic elections, they would elect their captain weekly and hold deliberative meetings, it seems surreal! They took in slaves, they allowed slaves a vote and not treated any differently. One thing I found out subsequently is that there’s good evidence that a significantly amount of them were gay, and if you were worked on the merchant ships and found shagging a man, you were thrown overboard or whipped. The pirates liked it[?] I think of them as the ‘pillage people’. Pirates were actually, within their context, a very different story.

Anti-Defamation League

Drunken Politics: With the US press blindly taking Israel’s side, there’s motives there, it's our weapons it has and there’s groups like Anti-Defamation League…

Johann Hari: Do you have something like the UK's Trade Descriptions act, where you're not allowed to falsely advertise yourself? I think someone should take the Anti-Defamation League to the court [for] the idea that they are against defamation. They exist to defame people; someone should really sue them for false advertising.

Drunken Politics: They were actually one of the only people who came out against George Mitchell, I’m paraphrasing, the head [of ADL] said that he thinks he would be too even handed.

Johann Hari: They also deny the Armenian genocide because Turkey is the strategic ally of Israel and when congress passed resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, which there undoubtedly was. Adolf Hitler when he was launching the holocaust said, " Ahh who remembers the Armenians?" as proof of why he can do this. The Anti-Defamation league said that you shouldn’t support this motion and deny it. For those people to ever claim to speak for [anyone], they're monsters. Sorry but can't resist that rant.

Media and Motives

Drunken Politics: So we have motives there, but the pirate story, do you think it is another foreign policy move [that] I don't know about, or does it just strictly come down to [the fact that] it’s more entertaining for the media to make Captain Hook puns than to report on class warfare.

Johann Hari: I don't think it's that simple. It's that newspapers are own by very rich men and very rich men have interests, and people who disrupt those interests are seen as outside that. You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, who explains it far better than I can. It's not like a conscious demand, but it's just that the interest of advertisers and billionaire owners will inevitable shape the journalism you write. It would seem very odd in the culture of a place owned by billionaires and paid for by rich advertisers to defend people who are disrupting global trade, for example – it would seem highly odd. Corporate media create a 'common sense' logic where taking the side of the people who are not in favour of those things seems just very odd.

So I think that [although there’s] a lot of individual journalists [who] are very nice people, it seems though almost impossible to see [these subconscious interests]. I think it's like those magic eye pictures where you have to let your eyes go slightly out of focus before you see it. They can't do that; it's so counter intuitive to them. I think Israel story is slightly different due to a highly successful smear and defamation campaign, [and also] partly because it's [in the] interests of the American state, well, to what they think is the United States’ interest to have a strategic ally in the font of the world’s oil. Israel itself doesn’t have oil, but is in the middle of the richest oil base area in the world. [It is due to] a combination of those factors.

Bottled Water and Coke

Drunken Politics: Something that I think liberals are pretty guilty of is that they sort of sit around and bitch about the government and bitch about corporations while smoking their Phillip Moore cigarettes and have our Budweiser beer. And you wrote a great piece around new years, on bottles water and coke. I wanted you talk about that because of a lot of email from overwhelmed listeners who don't know where to start.

Johann Hari: I think the best place for people to start [is to bear in mind that] you are always more powerful when you stand with other people; [however] on your own you have very little power. So join Friends of the Earth, join Amnesty International, join groups that are campaigning. I’m not generally in favour of consumer boycotts, because we're all guilty of something or other, it's better to lobby for the law to be changed so the companies can't do something, rather than that for us individually to try. But there are some companies which are so heinous, who’ve committed vile acts that it's reasonable to say “I won't be a part of that”. I was, until the 31st December last year, a Coke addict. I drank diet Coke the whole time, and I was vaguely aware of terrible things that the Coke cooperation was doing but I deliberately put off researching it. But then a comedian and journalist I know called Mark Thomas wrote a fantastic book called Belching Out The Devil where he just basically followed a lot of the things Coke was doing; I didn't know for example the very last speech Martin Luther King every gave was for people to boycott Coke.

But there were loads of things he looked at, and there are so many examples of monstrous things Coke have done, that we could fill an encyclopedia, but the two that really stuck me was in Columbia, where I think it's called [Carepa] in Columbia where there [were] local trade unionists. The local Coke bottling plant is a Coke subsidiary, we have to stress for legal reasons, and it’s the bottling plant where Coke is bottled. They had a fairly strong trade union, good rights for the local workers and then they fired everyone and tried to employ non-unionized workers, and people organized and basically paramilitaries in Columbia started systematically murdering the trade unionists. The trade unionists say, they saw the paramilitary sitting with the Coke managers, the Coke subsidiary managers. It's shocking that the coke subsidiary people are now in hiding, Coke is paying much lower wages and no rights. So in India, there’s even more shocking stuff where they went into poor areas, took all the water, tapped into the local aquifer so local villages had no water and offered them in return Coke!? To wash in. It's incredible! Mark Thomas is brilliant on this, and absolutely you campaign that corporations have to be held legally accountable, but at the same time you can say enough, “I don't want to drink the blood of Columbian trade unionists” is the high falutin’ way of putting it.

The other thing is bottled water, bottled water is a different issue but firstly the environmental cost of bottled water when you have water running from your taps is just crazy. We are literally flying and shipping water form Fiji to London, when we have perfectly good water in London taps. And what’s incredible is that in Fiji, a third of the people have no access to clean drinking water, but we're taking their water. Companies say but we invest 0.1 percent back into Fiji, but when the Fiji government actually tried to tax them, the bottling companies threatened to leave and the elected government had to give in. So we're going to these poor parts of the world, taking from underneath the rain forest, their water, giving virtually nothing back and has a horrific effect on global warming, can't recall the figures but I’m sure it's if every bottle of bottled water we drink, a quarter of it is filled with oil. So you can just say, I admit I’ve cracked a few times on that one, but you can say “I'm out”. I keep forgetting to carry of water with me like a camel...

Drunken Politics: After a big thing we tried to do, reusing one bottle for weeks but then we saw a study which said it was bad for you.

Johann Hari: What you got to do is use a glass bottle. Actually plastic bottles are really bad for you and can get you ill.

Fareed Zakaria

Drunken Politics: What is the name of your article on Fared Zakaria?

Johann Hari: I really detest Fareed Zakaria, if you click on archive and book reviews it's in there [on www.johannhari.com]. I’ll give you one example of Fareed Zakaria.

Drunken Politics: Didn't you call him tiny fascist?

Johann Hari: Soft voiced authoritarian, there’s just one bit in there where he's profoundly anti-democratic, fawning about how it's better to do business in China than in India, yeah because the Chinese government doesn't have to listen to its people whilst he Indian government does. An example [was] of a businessman he spoke to who went to China, and was shown a huge area and [was told] “you can built factories here”, and there were loads of little towns in it, with people living there. And the guy goes, “what about the people who live there?” [and the authorities said] “Don't worry they’ll be gone”. The guy comes back two months later, they're gone and Fareed Zakaria, says ‘unfortunately Indian government is not so efficient’. It’s true. The Indian government being a democracy doesn’t just force people [out of their homes] on the whim of western corporations. The way he uses that as an example of Indian inefficiency is so revealing – and this is a guy known as a liberal?

To be fair to him he resists some of the more obviously psychotic far right, [for example] he rebuts the people who says Europe is being taken over by Muslims, but he rebuts the far far far right in order to defend the far far right. Well done Fareed, he's repugnant.

Super HIV and Campaigning

Drunken Politics: Were talking to a friend of mine in Manchester who’s gay, and he was saying that the use of crystal meth has exploded in the last 10 years and subsequently there’s a lot more unprotected sex and you wrote a very interesting, very worrying article abut the rise of Super AIDS. Could you briefly talk about that?

Johann Hari: HIV infection rates among gay men are rising for the first time, since the initial aids epidemic, really quite high in the US and in Britain and you have to ask why. There are a number of reasons firstly; some people call protease inhibitors, protease disinhibitors, because they give people the impression that getting HIV is like getting diabetes, instead of getting cancer. Well it's not actually. Protease inhibitors don't work for a lot of people, and life on protease inhibitors is horrible, and incredible expensive, costing [around] a million pounds per person to keep them alive [over a lifetime]. There’s a range of other reasons [which is that] a generation of young gay men like me haven't seen their friends die, they don't know what that’s like. [There are also] a whole range of other reasons. This issue of super AIDS is difficult to talk about, particular difficult because people in the gay community say “don't talk about this publicly”, don't [as it were] ‘air your dirty linen in public’. Well we've got to talk about this, and frankly we're going to be forced to talk about this if you don't change your behavior soon.

In I think 2002, a guy showed up in a clinic in NY showing something that didn't seem to be possible. He’d been tested a few months before and shown to be HIV negative, but he'd turned up and he wasn't just HIV positive, he had AIDS, full signs of AIDS. That is impossible, well thought to be not possible. At the same time, there was an outbreak of 4 or 5 of similar cases, HIV negative initially and now developing AID, and protease inhibitors weren't working with them. A lot of the scientists said, we've waiting for this to happen because if you have a large numbers of HIV positive men having unprotected sex with each other, the virus is making different mutations of it's getting stronger and stronger. So the danger is that if you have a culture of bare backing, you can end up creating effectively a Petri dish for a stronger form of the virus. Now fortunately, this form of super AIDS appears to not have been transmissible, it's still quite mysterious, we don't know why it only went to 5 people, we don't if even know if those 5 people had sexual contact with each other but it does seems likely. We do know the more bare backing there is; the more likely it is that you will have an outbreak of a drug resistant form of AIDS that operates more quickly. This is absolutely terrifying and important for people to understand; even if you’re HIV positive, having sex with another HIV positive person, you're taking a terrible risk not only with your own health but with other people's health.

It’s tricky to start an education campaign about this because the gay community was so stigmatised because of AIDS and they feel like they’ve just branded themselves anew by shedding that old past, but that’s so dangerous because it’s not as though it’s suddenly isn’t a problem anymore. In trying to rebrand the lifestyle of being HIV positive, [for example] they’ll show a guy rock-climbing and [caption it] he’s HIV positive and it’s good that they’re trying to destigmatise people who are sick, but at the same time, HIV is such a terrible illness that the gay community almost needs to own it again in order to protect themselves.

We’ve got two problems, the first is that AIDS is. The stigmatisation of gay people in the 80s was horrific, obviously I think that was monstrous. At the same time, actually part of the problem is that we’ve de-gayed it to much, the fact is if you’re not an IV drug user, a recent African immigrant, gay or have unprotected sex with prostitutes, you’re very unlikely to become HIV positive in Britain or the USA, it’s not impossible but it’s a much bigger risk for gay men than anyone else. It doesn’t help gay people to pretend that’s not the case and to spend all the prevention money on [advertising about] young straight couples going to Ibiza. It seems to be helping people, it seems like a nice thing to do, but actually you’re not warning [the right] people who need to be warned.

I absolutely defend HIV positive people in their right not be discriminated in employment or housing or anything like that. But I was really surprised when I started writing articles about bare backing that I got people who describe themselves as HIV rights campaigners saying “how dare you say we’re sick, that we’re causing problems if we have unprotected sex with each other”. Well I’m sorry, you are sick. You have got a disease. I desperately wish that wasn’t the case, I desperately wish we could find a cure tomorrow, but you are carrying a terrible diseases, I’m not attacking you in the same way I’m not attacking cancer victims when I say they’re ill. They called me HIV phobic, well yeah, I am HIV phobic, I’m frightened of the HIV virus, it would be insane not to be frighten of it.

You’ve had campaigns in San Francisco and in Britain where government information campaigns [are being attacked]. For example in San Francisco they had a poster which said “stay healthy stay negative”, they had to scrap it all because these HIV rights activists said “How dare you say we’re not healthy”. Well you’re not! Partly, we don’t want to be nasty to anyone, but you have just got to say to everyone that this is a terrible problem and is getting worse and HIV infections among gay men are mesmerising. You mention Crystal Meth, which is a key factor; it makes you incredible disinhibited and horny, which is the worst possible combination for unprotected sex. Apart from the problems crystal meth has without HIV, it causes HIV problems, and risks becoming incredibly popular in Britain. The gay community finds this difficult because formative experiences for most gay people is of “we want to get people off out backs, we’re very libertarian as a community, we don’t want anyone interfering with us”, very rightly. But that means we’re also in a difficult position to deal with this threat, because we’ve got to start judging people and warning them, which is something we find quite hard, a formative experience for us is shaking off that sense of judgement and actually we’ve got to say “it’s really stupid and dangerous to engage in this”. A lot of young gay men get into this because they’ve got very low self-esteem, because of homophobia and they’ve got to be helped. Approaching them with a finger wagging tone is unhelpful but it does no one favours to treat this as not a serious problem with potential for a horrific problem. Martin Luther King had a great line which said “We begin to die the moment we’re silent about the things that matter’, and that’s not a metaphor for gay people in his instance, we can’t be silence or we may begin to die again.

Homophobia and Hip Hop

Drunken Politics: On homophobia, you wrote another piece talking about the hip-hop community and a lot of the homophobia in the lyrics and in the culture, and how a lot of people in that community are actually in the closet. I remember after Prop 8 passed republicans were so happy when that 7/10 statistic came out [which stated] that African Americans voted for it, they seems so excited to pit the gay community against the black? Anytime they can pit communities against each other, they seem very happy. Could you talk a bit about the article and the hip hop culture and how you think we can actually stop these minorities fighting?

Johann Hari: I’ll deal with the last question first. You appeal to people’s empathy, the way the gay rights movement won in the UK, and we’ve more or less won, we’ve got gay marriage, and it’s illegal to discriminate in almost every sphere. It’s [won] by appealing to people’s empathy, not just aggressively condemning them. Most African Americans, like everyone else, are basically empathetic people who don’t want to be nasty to anyone, and particular because they’ve got a historical experience of being horrifically abused. I think it’s not helpful to go in with a kind of “damn you, you’re a bunch of bigots” [mentality]. I think what we have to do is approach black American’s decency. Obama is very good with this, he’s not perfect, but he’s very good at it. He supports unions not marriage. We will prevail. If you look at the Prop 8 polling, among every [cultural/racial] minority and look at the under 30s and the majority are in favour of gay marriage. That doesn’t mean we should be too relaxed, but they’re on the wrong side of history, It’s worth bearing in mind the year Obama was born, interracial marriage was illegal in 13 states.

In terms of homophobia there’s a very interesting question with hip-hop in particular, and hip-hop has a disgusting culture of calling for the death of gay people in the lyrics. I actually think there’s a kind of soft racism that stops people criticising that, but it is actually racist to not criticise some because they’re black when they say something terrible. If you believe in treating people equally, you should react to a black person who says something in favour of killing gay people in the way you’d react to Jerry Fallwell saying it.

Hip hop is one the worst offenders who have encouraged this really vile culture. There is a really interesting new book by a man called Terrence Dean who’s a very senior figure in the record industry saying that a really significant number of these very homophobic hip hop artists are in fact gay secretly on the down low. In a way that shouldn’t surprise us, I always think this when I became aware of homophobia “ why would you be bothered”. I don’t sit there feeling angry at straight people have sex. I’m happy for my heterosexual friends when they have sex. One of the reasons why was found by the University of Nebraska, where [in an experiment], they wired some people’s penises to monitor the blood flow. So they get a sample of I think a hundred men who identified as anti-gay and showed them lots of porn including straight porn and gay porn, and basically an extraordinarily high number of them got turned on by the gay porn. It makes it kind of sense in that in that what they’re doing is repressing their own instincts I’m not saying everyone who’s homophobic is secretly gay, although hip hop artists have a lot in common with republican politicians.

It’s not that they’re all secretly gay, but pretty much everyone in their teenage years had some sort of fleeting attraction to the same sex and if you were just not anti-gay that wouldn’t be a problem. I certainly had heterosexual impulse as a teenager, although I’d have sex with a tree if I could. That’s natural, and you forget about it and it’s all a part of adolescent development. But if you think it’s terrible and shameful and remained with you and became externalised hatred, like [as though] the people who’ve tempted you must be punished. I think it helps you to understand how these homophobic climates develop, a climate [that, on the other hand] is relaxed about gay people just accepts the obvious reality that in every human society, 2-4% are going to be attracted to the same sex. That’s life, animals do it, birds do it, bees do it. That’s life; don’t get worked up about it, don’t get hateful. It’s certainly the people who repress it who feel terrible about it that then built up this great well of hatred. I just feel sorry for them, obviously if they beat up a gay person I’d feel more sorry for the gay person, but I pity them.

Drunken Politics: Do you think that would ever happen that would mean these guys would start coming out?

Actually Kanye West totally to his credit, his cousin came out and he said “ I’d like to apologise for all the homophobic things I’ve said in the past, and I realise they were stupid and I love my cousins who’s come out and he’s a great guy”. If you went back 50 years, it would just seem unimaginable gay people were[n’t] put in prison in Britain, that you’d have gay people in the government, gay marriage, it would seem unimaginable. The world changes. I’m sure that this will seem just as bizarre to us as the ban on interracial marriage when Obama was born, it would seem weird.

Influences and Happiness

Drunken Politics: What are a couple examples of books and albums that really inspired you artistically or politically or that you jusr think for someone interested in politics and journalism are must reads.

Johann Hari: I have the worst taste in music in the world; I have friends who weep when they look at my iPod. I will not say music, because you’ll be disgusted.

Actually one book that had a huge effect on me is by someone we’ve mentioned, in his earlier incarnation, Christopher Hitchens. When I was 14 I read an amazing book he wrote, called the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice. It was an expose about this woman who everyone thought was wonderful, who was a disgusting liar, fraudulent and a crook, she’s a real monster who deliberately left people in terrible pain, lied, [was a] hypocrite, a woman who campaigned for divorce to be criminalised and when one of her friends princess Diana got divorced, said it was a good thing. When people were dying her hostels in Calcutta, she gave them only aspirin, said “suffering is beautiful, Christ suffered on the cross’. When she got ill, she checked in to the best clinic in Switzerland she could get. She was repugnant, took money from thieves and crooks. She was a disgusting person I remember reading and thinking, wow, he’s taken something I just took as certain and completely turned it on his head and he’s right. I looked it up and it was all true.

Drunken Politics: Did you think that influenced you and your articles you write? Taking ‘monsters’ like pirates, and looking at them through an empathetic eye.

Johann Hari: I think it was a definite instinct, but Christopher Hitchens showed me that doing that could be your job. I thought – How amazing is that! That had a big effect on me. Noam Chomsky, when I was reconsidering my position Iraq, reading his work really help me reorient myself and figure out what was going on. Richard Dawkins’ writings on religion or superstition as we would call it had a big effect of me. There’s an amazing book that’s just been published in the states by a Australian writer called Clive James who lives in Britain called Cultural Amnesia. It’s a history of all the writers he thinks we should remember in the 21st century; he speaks a million languages, the most polymathic and incredibly funny, beautiful writer. I absolutely love him.

Drunken Politics: Last question: what makes you happy?

Johann Hari: My nephews and my niece make me happy. They make me laugh. My nephew has got the thing we were talking about, [the contrarian’s spirit]. I went to a school debate he did and for some reason they were debating whale hunting, I don’t know why these 9 year olds were debating whale hunting but hey. He came up to me beforehand [and said], “I don’t think whale hunting is right, but everyone else was against it. That pissed me off”. There was a little girl was against it and was whining “ the whales, the whales”. And Josh my nephew stood up and said: “What is the point of whales? all they do is swim up and down in sea that we could have for us so I say lets kill all the whales now, once and for all”. I thought, “ aww, a little columnist is born”.

My grandmother makes me happy; she is a joyous person. She’s nearly ninety and for some reason, although she’s the most gentle person, she loves watching horrifically violent horror films. She loves the Saw movies, whilst I was watching [it] through my fingers [she said] “look son! he’s about to rip her rib cage out!”. I took her a couple months ago ‘Gladiator’ on DVD, and at the end she said: “Didn’t they make such good films in ancient Rome?”

The unlikely story of the state of Israel – 60, sullied, surviving – is intertwined with the unlikely story of Amos Oz. He is, all at once, its most distinguished novelist, its most passionate defender, and its most notorious "traitor" – a word he uses about himself. His friend David Grossman says "Amos is the offspring of all the contradictory urges and pains within the Israeli psyche." To spend a day in his company – to follow his story from the birth of the state to the suicide of his mother, from Zionist idealism to a broken heart – is to tour the dizzying dissonances of the Jewish state as it staggers into the 21st century.

Oz is sitting in the coffee shop of Joseph's bookstore in Golder's Green, north London, looking older and more fragile than his vigorous black-and-white author's picture. He is 70 now, his hair wispier and whiter. He greets me with a gravelly voice, and we order black coffees. It seems far away and long ago, but Oz once dreamed of bombing this city. He was once a child of what he calls "the Jewish intifada" – the stone-throwing, death-defying Jewish rebellion against British occupation. He believed the state that would emerge from the rubble would be a model of justice and idealism for all mankind. If you were a child in Gaza now, Mr Oz, would you be dreaming the same dreams against Israel? "I don't even have to imagine the answer to this question – I know it," he says. "Because I was a kid in Jerusalem in '48 when the city was besieged, shelled, starved, [and] the water supply [was] cut off. And I know the horror, and I know the despair, and I know the hopelessness, and I know the anger, and I know the frustration." He says he was "not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a brainwashed little fanatic, a stone-throwing chauvinist. The first words I ever learnt to say in English were 'British, go home!'"

In his novel Panther in the Basement, he writes: "This is how I remember Jerusalem in that last summer of British rule. A stone city sprawling over hilly slopes. Not so much a city as isolated neighbourhoods separated by fields of thistles and rocks. British armoured cars stood at street corners with their slits almost closed, their machine guns sticking out in front like pointing fingers: You there!"
At the age of eight, he built "an awesome rocket" in the backyard of his house. His plan was "to aim it at Buckingham Palace. I typed out on my father's typewriter a letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England... Torrents of blood, soil, fire and iron intoxicated me." His favourite song – a Stern Gang anthem – proclaimed: "We must fight until we breathe our last breath!"

So how did this boy, from this place, end up co-founding Peace Now, and fighting for a free Palestinian state alongside Israel? What contortions did he travel along the way, and since? And how did Israel's story come to this?

I. Jerusalem Dreams

Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem because his parents had nowhere else to go. They were running for their lives. "It was the only life raft they could find," he says. "My parents, they tried to become American, they tried to become British, they tried to become Scandinavian – nobody wanted them, anywhere. So, it's a very common error to assume that in the 1930s, my parents went to a travel agency and inquired about a holiday resort, and they made a mistake – they should have said, 'the French Riviera,' and by mistake they said, 'Jerusalem.'"

It was a city of "dusty tin roofs, urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, [and] parched hillsides". For his parents, it was a barren shock. They were "troubled refugees from Europe, who loved Europe and were kicked out by Europe, who were devoted Europeans at a time when no-one else was a European. Everyone [else] was a pan-Germanic, or pan-Slavonic, or just a Bulgarian or a British patriot. The Jews were the only European Europeans at that time – and Europe kicked them out. They were labelled cosmopolitans, they were labelled ruthless intellectuals, they were labelled parasites. And they came to Jerusalem hoping to create a tiny little Europe in the heart of the Middle East – a European enclave. Which they couldn't, of course. Because there was no Europe. Because their idea of Europe was no more than an idea, not a reality. The Europe of their love, the Europe they loved, did not exist, except in their own imagination."

Oz's mother, Fania, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Rovno, a city in western Ukraine. She dreamed of being an artist, and soaked herself in the works of Anton Chekhov. But by the time she went to university in Prague, the tide of anti-Semitism was rising fast. She got out just in time: the Nazis killed her brother, her sister-in-law and her nephew. They killed almost all her school friends. They killed the world she grew up in – and then Stalin swept away anything that remained.

So Fania was left beached in Jerusalem, a dry, dusty city that seemed wholly alien to her. Oz says her life consisted of "the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key... If you ever spoke about the past, something bitter and desperate would creep into her voice."

His father, Arieh, was forced to leave Lithuania. He was "a cultivated, well-mannered librarian, severe but also rather shy," Oz says, who believed his true destiny – to be a great scholar of Hebrew literature – was inexplicably thwarted. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he aligned with the Israeli right, who believed the Arabs in Palestine had to be ruthlessly fought and forced out. Fleeing the Nazi persecution of the Jews, he believed Jews had to show strength to the point of brutality, or die. He wrote propaganda for the Stern Gang, which bombed British targets and Arab civilians, and were labelled as terrorists.

Still, his parents felt a sense of inferiority, and exclusion, even within Israel. "We were out-of-the-way Israelis," he says. "The drama took place in Galilee, in the valleys, not in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was out of the way. And my parents were cut off [from] the mainstream of the enthusiasm of the Zionist revolution. They were cut off because they were right-wingers at a time when everyone was a socialist, they were city dwellers when everybody was a toiler of the land, they were academics at a time when academics were regarded with a certain suspicion."

On the night the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel on part of British Mandate Palestine, Arieh crawled into bed with his eight-year-old son. He whispered: "From now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew. Not that. Never again. From tonight that's finished. For ever." It was the only time Oz ever saw his father cry.

That is how he ended up – like a child in Gaza today – under siege. He remembers "the war, the shelling, the siege and starvation" in fragments. He lived in what felt like a "dank submarine", crammed into his house with his parents and a host of other families. He slept on a mattress in the corner with his parents while the food was rationed, the windows were sandbagged, the medical supplies ran down to nothing, and the toilets overflowed with faeces because there was no water to flush them. "Every few minutes, when a shell landed, the whole hill shook, and the stone-built houses shuddered," he says. There was "a massive bombardment whose aim was to cause losses among the civilian population, break their spirit and bring them to submission".

His parents were great linguists: his father spoke 11 languages, and read 17. Yet even when they were locked up together like this with nothing to do, he says: "The only language they taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me, too, to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent."

He was raised under bombardment to be a militant, scorning the British, the Arabs, and the entire Jew-hating world. His grandfather taught him: "We have to beat them up so they'll come and beg us for peace." Does he feel angry when he thinks about the child he was? "No – I feel amused. Bitterly amused. I was a product of a militant upbringing in a militant time, in a state of war, and I grew up in a world where everything was black and white. We were white and our enemies were black. And our enemies were not just the Arabs but the rest of the world. The entire world. The Germans, Europe, Russia – everybody was our enemy. We were alone in the world – we were the few and the just. There was something very sweet about such a simple world, which divides into goodies and baddies, something very attractive for a child in particular, of course, and everything fell neatly into place."

There seems to have been an extraordinary pressure on this only child – to be everything his parents had failed to be. When his father finally had a slim work of scholarship published, he inscribed it to his 11-year-old son: "To my son Amos, in the hope he might carve out a place in our literature."

Both his parents were "immensely inhibited", and could express little emotion beyond this burning ambition. As the news of her family and friends' deaths began to filter through to Israel, Oz's mother became ill and withdrawn. She began to experience "headaches" that lasted for months, and required her to inhale mysterious medicines all the time.

And then, one night, once the state was born and Amos was 12-and-a-half, she walked through a Jerusalem rainstorm to her sister's flat, went to bed, and took a massive overdose. Having run for her life, she now ran to her death. Was there an element of survivor's guilt in her suicide? He looks away. "Possibly. I don't know. I don't know the reasons why she killed herself and I no longer make an attempt to know. I doubt it that... in most cases, when a person kills himself or herself, I doubt it that there is such a thing as one reason. There is an excuse, there is an immediate motive, but there is more than just one reason." He knows his father had an affair; he knows his mother felt lost in Jerusalem.

"I was very angry with her," he says. "I was very angry with my father, I was very angry with myself. I blamed every one of us for the calamity," he says. He wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. The rage lasted for decades. "There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death. I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain." It was only, he explains, "when I reached the age when I could be my parents' parents [that] I could look at them with a combination of compassion, humour and curiosity." He made them the subject of his masterpiece, his memoir A Tale of Love And Darkness.

He never once discussed his mother's death with his father: "We continued as if she had never lived." But now, through writing, he could express everything he wanted to say. "It was about inviting the dead to my home, offering them a cup of coffee, and saying – let's sit and talk about that which we never discussed when you were still alive. This is a highly recommended practice: invite the dead to your home from time to time, offer them a coffee and a cake, engage yourself in a good conversation with the dead, and then tell them to go away – don't let them stay in my house. Drop by from time to time. That's the proper relationship between the living and the dead." Was it having children himself that made him finally able to forgive his mother? "Yes, definitely," he says with a firm nod. In what way? He is silent for a long time. "This is too personal. I will not discuss that, if you'll forgive me." Then he adds, to change the subject: "I just became old enough to imagine them as immature people. I lost interest in the question of whose fault it is."

Two years after his mother committed suicide, Amos Oz left his father and his father's world – and began his metamorphosis into a very different person.

II. courage

At the age of 14, Oz has written: "I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins."

He ran away from Jerusalem to a kibbutz – and abandoned his father's surname, Klausner, for one of his own invention.

"'Oz' means strength – and it also means courage," he says now. "When I left home at 14 and a half, I decided to become everything [my father] was not, and not to be anything that he was. He was a right-wing intellectual; I decided to be a left-wing socialist. He was a city dweller; I decided to become a tractor driver. He was short; I decided to become very tall. It didn't work out, but I tried – I tried. So, I assumed the name 'Oz', because this courage and strength are what I needed most."

Back in Jerusalem, nobody had asked what happened to the Arabs who had lived in Palestine. They vanished during the war; that was all. In the kibbutz, Oz began to hear whispers – initially to his shock and indignation. This had been their land, and they had been driven from it, by force, by us. Could it be true?

Slowly, he began to imagine the Palestinians driven from their homes, scattered in rotting refugee camps somewhere beyond Israel's borders – and to see their similarity to his own parents. He reached the conclusion "that the clash between Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab is a tragedy, not a wild west movie, with good guys and bad guys. It's a tragedy, because it is a clash between right and right. The Israelis are in Israel because they have nowhere else to go. The Palestinians are in Palestine because they have nowhere else to go. This is a conflict between victims, and between people who both have a just claim to the land."

In 1967, this became a crucial insight, changing the course of Oz's life. He was conscripted and fought on the Egyptian front in the Sinai desert. "I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield," he says. "The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words – very difficult indeed. There is a stench on the battlefield which doesn't come across in war movies, and in television documentaries, and it doesn't even come across in the reportage of death and devastation and destruction on the battlefields. And this particular stench, which I remember very vividly, very physically, I remember the stench – this I simply cannot describe in words, and without the stench the description will be false."

How did he sustain himself? "When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul, otherwise you would die of terror – you would die of fear. You switch off your soul and you act like an animal or a machine. People under fire change greatly. You know what my first response was? When I found myself under fire, and I could literally see the Egyptian soldiers – it was in '67 – these Egyptian soldiers on the next hill, firing mortar shells at us, and the mortar shells exploding in armies. My immediate instinct was, 'call the police. These people are insane. They can see that there are people here and they are shooting at us.' Maybe that was the last sane response on the battlefield: 'call the police'."

He says, however, he did not do anything he regretted. "I don't think so, no. I have done many things that I am sorry I had to do, but nothing that I am ashamed of. For me, fighting, both in 1967 and in 1973, was a last resort, because I knew very boldly that if I don't fight, and if the others don't fight... my family will be killed – we will be thrown into the ocean. It was not about territories, it was not about holy places. It was about life and death. And such a war... even though that I am an old man now, I would still fight such a war. If they put me with my back against the wall, and they would say, 'Either you fight or your family gets killed,' I'll fight." The wars to defend the settlers – or the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s – are different, he says: "I would rather have gone to prison than fight for them. I would have refused to fight for occupied territories. For an extra bedroom to the nation. For holy places. For resources. I would refuse to fight for anything except for life and freedom."

Amid the triumphalism and the first flood of settlers, Oz was one of the first Israelis to say the land other soldiers had conquered – Gaza and the West Bank – should be returned to the Palestinians for a state of their own. "I asked myself, 'How would I feel if I were a Palestinian in the West Bank and in Gaza?' And, unlike most Israelis – who assumed naively that the Palestinians will be happy about the Israeli occupation, because Israel will bring with it a higher standard of living, and perhaps a better legal system – I immediately could imagine the anger, the frustration, the hatred, the despair of the Palestinians. So I started advocating a two-state solution. And at that time, there were very few of us. In fact, we could conduct our national assembly inside a telephone box."

He was immediately dubbed a "traitor". He says with a smile: "I take this as a compliment. A traitor is he who changes in the eyes of those who cannot change and do not change and does not even conceive a change." All the great Jewish heroes were traitors in their time, he notes: "Jonathan and Michal betrayed their father Saul; Joab and the other sons of Zeruiah, the fair Absalom, Ammon, Adonijah, son of Hagith – they were all traitors, and the worst traitor of all was King David himself, David about whom we still sing the song, 'David King of Israel lives, lives, lives on still.'"

And Oz was indeed betraying his father's vision. He told his son he was "crazy. Simple as that," Oz says. "We had some fierce arguments about peace and about the Palestinians. My father never recognised the Palestinians as a separate national entity. He thought there is a pan-Arabic nation, and this pan-Arabic nation has a territory which is 150 times bigger than the territory of Israel. 'They have enough space. What do they want of us?' He was a great simplifier on this issue." He retorted to his father: "The drowning man clinging to his plank is allowed, by all the rules of natural, objective, universal justice, to make room for himself on the plank, even if in doing so he must push the others aside a little. Even if the others, sitting on that plank, leave him no alternative to force. But he has no natural right to push the others on that plank into the sea."

What would your father think if he could hear you now? "He would be very angry with me – no doubt." Is this, in part, an Oedipal revolt? Oz frowns a little. "There is an element of Oedipal revolt in every father-son relationship, including the relationship between me and my father."

But there was one conviction he inherited from his father and has always retained. They both saw religion as an "archaic dust", a bizarre leftover from a more primitive, less rational age. So when the settlers began to seize the West Bank as part of a Messianic plan to reclaim the entire biblical land of Israel, Oz saw it with horror as an attempt "to push Judaism back through history, back to the Book of Joshua, to the days of the Judges, to the extreme of fanatical tribalism, brutal and closed."

The tragedy is – he believes – that these people believe they are motivated by the best in human nature. He wrote in his novel Black Box: "It is neither the selfishness nor the baseness not the cruelty in our nature that turns us into a species that destroys itself. We annihilate ourselves (and shall soon wipe out our entire species) precisely because of our 'higher' longings, because of the theological disease." The settlers believe they are saving us, even as they drag their tribe towards hell.

"The Jewish people has a great talent for self-destruction," he sighs. "We may be the world champions in self-destruction... [caused by] our characteristic demand for perfection, for totality, for squeezing our ideal to its last dregs or to die trying. [Look at] the history of the ancient Hebrews – they were suicidal by being extremely extremist and fanatical, by not compromising with reality, by not being ready to tolerate a Roman yoke for a while in order to survive and stay in the country. We lost our country in 70AD because we were impatient and we couldn't tolerate a lasting Roman yoke. That was a gross mistake." Likewise, the settlers now seek to seize all of the historical land of Israel – and in so doing, they prevent a two-state solution and could condemn Israel to a slow death.

Then, suddenly, he leans forward. "But let me share with you some good news, because you normally get only the bad news from the Middle East on the press and the media. The good news is that the vast majority of the Israeli Jews and the vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs know, in their heart of hearts, that at the end of the day there will be a two-state solution. They know it. Are they happy with it? They are not happy with it. Will they be dancing in the streets when the two-state solution is implemented? They will not be dancing in the streets. But they know... There is lack of bold leadership on both sides. But the two-state solution remains the only way out."

He has been offering this beautiful, rational vision for 40 years now, and I have happily repeated his lines. But aren't there days when he despairs? Aren't there days when he agrees with Boaz, one of the characters in Black Box, who says: "In the end the Jews will finish [the Palestinians] off or they'll finish each other off and there'll be nothing left in this country again except the Bible and the Koran and the foxes and burned ruins"?

He smiles. "I like Boaz a great deal – I think he's quite a character. But I don't share his pessimism. I think a two-state solution is inevitable. The Israeli Jews are not going anywhere. There are five and a half million of us, and we're not going anywhere – we don't have anywhere to go. The Palestinian Arabs are not going anywhere, either – they don't have anywhere to go. We cannot become one happy family, because we are not one with the Palestinians and we are not family and we are not happy, either. We are two unhappy families. So, it's about turning the house into a semi-detached house. A two-family unit. There is simply no alternative to this. Now, this make take long or may take short. But it will happen."

And then our discussion of his passionate attempt to rescue his country returns, obliquely, to the question of the mother he could not rescue. He believes the answer to the conflict – the temperamental solution – lies in the author she loved, even as her headaches raged and her will to live waned. "At the end of a Shakespeare tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies, and maybe there's some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearian one, for the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy."

III. operation cast lead

Today, Oz lives on the edge of the Negev desert, and it strikes me he has come to resemble it – his manner is dry and slow and vast, and he seems to look down on history from the perspective of thousands of years.

Why is Oz capable of understanding the dark ambiguities – and the need for compromise – when so many of his Netanyahu- and Lieberman-voting countrymen aren't? "See, I get up every morning very early, I drink a cup of coffee, I sit myself by my desk, and I start imagining, 'what if I was him? What if I was her?' That's how I make a living: by imagining the other. I imagine the other. That's my professional life. And my hobby, as well: I sit myself in street cafés, and when I have nothing else to do, when I'm waiting for someone..." He looks out over the café we are sitting in now, and smiles. "I look at the other guests in the cafés and try to imagine their life, who they really are, what are they talking about at that faraway table?

"So that's what I do. It's easy for me. It's much harder for ordinary people who are not writers, who are not novelists, to imagine the other in times of war, or even in times of a family feud. In this I belong in a minority. Most people don't bother." He repeats himself, with a shake of disdain: "Most people don't bother."

This, he adds quickly, isn't unique to Israel. "It is caused by anger, my friend. Anger. War begets anger and hatred and resentment. Very few people in Britain could pay any attention at all to the ordeal of Dresden and Leipzig. Very few people at the end of World War Two in London would pay any attention to the suffering of the innocent civilians in those cities."

And yet, and yet... it seems that Oz has failed, at last, to hold himself to the high standards he has set. He initially supported Operation Cast Lead – the bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 1,400 people, 40 per cent of whom were children – even though he says he knows, from his own experience, that it will make the children of Gaza dream lunatic dreams of revenge. I ask him why. "Hamas fired some 10,000 rockets on southern Israel, where I live. And I don't think any country in the world would simply turn the other cheek to that. I don't think England would restrain if anybody showered Yorkshire with 10,000 rockets. So, an Israeli response was understandable and acceptable, in my view. The dimensions of the response, the disproportion of the response, is something which I severely criticise."

But use your own test – of seeing the other side; of empathising. Using the same logic, you can ask from the Palestinian perspective – what country could tolerate being violently occupied for 40 years, then having part of its territory blockaded and semi-starved, just to punish it for how it voted in a democratic election?

He uncharacteristically changes the subject, and tries to blame somebody else. "Well, I'll tell you something about this blockade. Gaza borders with Egypt. There was no reason why the Egyptians would not provide Gaza with whatever it needs. And there is very little reason for Israel to provide Gaza with what it needs. After all, Gaza is firing on Israel... If Egypt and the rest of the Arab world wanted to invest in Gaza and to rebuild Gaza and to raise the standard of living in Gaza, they could have done it." Yet Oz knows it is Israel that puts vast pressure on Egypt – especially through the US – not to do that. Israel's own security services said Hamas would extend the ceasefire if Israel agreed to ease the blockade. Wouldn't that have been better? Wouldn't fewer children now be dreaming of shooting rockets at Tel Aviv?

Oz – for the first time in our interview – seems unsure. "I don't know. I think we tried. If we tried hard enough, I don't know. I really don't know." He looks down, then away.

Then he says more confidently: "I think in the last days before the Israeli attack on Gaza, the firing of rockets increased to about 80 rockets a day. And our casualties, and our homes destroyed, and there was the suffering of close to one million Israelis who have to live in underground shelters. No government could tolerate this. No government could simply turn the other cheek."

But the Palestinian side was suffering even more horribly – using your logic, they, too, have a right to fight back and bomb. "I could understand and justify, and justified, a limited, proportionate, measured, cautiously targeted Israeli military response – not a full-scale war. You see... I said many times, and I'll say it again – I'm a peacenik, not a pacifist. Yes, the pacifists believe that the ultimate evil in the world is war. I believe that the ultimate evil is not war but aggression, and aggression sometimes has to be blocked by force. Hence the difference between a peacenik and a pacifist."

It is another wriggle. I'm not advocating pacifism – I'm saying this specific war was a bad idea. As if to soothe me, he says: "I think there should be a thorough judicial interrogation of the occurrences in the Gaza war. The Israeli judiciary is independent and bold and I think there should be a thorough, comprehensive interrogation." He then says that "in principle", Israel should negotiate with Hamas. "If Hamas is ready to talk to Israel, Israel should talk to Hamas right away. Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, we need to. It's difficult to compromise with Hamas because Hamas maintains that there should be no Israel at all. Not even I can propose as a compromise that Israel exists Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. But the moment Hamas shows the slightest inclination to recognise Israel, I would talk to it – of course I would."

The he surprises me with a bold prediction. I ask: can you imagine Bibi Netanyahu shaking hands with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on the White House lawn, with Obama smiling in-between? He beams. "Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes." He adds: "Don't swear an oath about Netanyahu not delivering the two-state solution. So far, we have seen almost every right-wing Prime Minister making surprising concessions for peace. Begin over Sinai and the peace with Egypt; Sharon in evacuating the Gaza strip; Netanyahu himself over the Hebron concessions. So, I don't know. I cannot read his mind; I am sure he does not know yet what he is going to do. But it may well be that reality will be stronger than him, that he will sense the mood of the majority of the Israeli people and surprise us." He has met Netanyahu "a few times", and says: "Deep down below, he strikes me as an opportunist, and that's not necessarily a bad quality under the circumstances."

Oz and Netanyahu come from similar backgrounds: right-wing revisionists in a socialist country, demanding tougher, harder, crueller policies. Can you imagine a world where you ended up like him? "Yes, yes," he says. "Well, the question is – would he end up like me?"

What does this support for the attack on Gaza – and the initial bombing of Lebanon in 2007 – suggest about Oz? Is there a desire to be an easy, unconflicted part of the tribe – to belong – at last? Is his empathy running out as rockets rain close to his home? In his latest, tender book, Rhyming Life and Death, a middle-aged novelist wanders the streets of Tel Aviv, feeling disconnected from his country. The character admits to "a profound sadness that he is always an outsider".

Do you feel this, Amos? There is a long pause. "I would say yes," he says. But every follow-on question I ask to tease this out only prompts a subject-changing anecdote about something else. The loneliness of the exhausted, wavering peace campaigner is something he doesn't want to discuss. And so the boy who ran away from his suicide-scarred home at 14 to become a left-wing icon might be allowing flickers of his father's voice to break through – at last, after all this time.

What happened to the Israeli left?

I think the hundreds of thousands of left-wing voters decided more or less, at the very last moment, that they are going to vote for Livni’s centrist party in order to block Netanyahu. They are still leftists.

Three years ago, Israel evacuated Gaza and handed it over to the Palestinians, removing by force some 26 Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip. The general expectation was that now, some peace and quiet will follow. Instead, Israel was showered by a rain of rockets from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, which lasted for years. No doubt there is disappointment, anger and an urge to respond. I’m not justifying it – I’m just explaining the phenomenon.

Has Israel ceased to be a European country?

Well, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a ‘European country’. Do we mean the Balkans? Do we mean Russia? Do we mean England? What exactly is a European country? It is a common assumption, and a wrong assumption, that the founding of Israel came from enlightened Europe. They did not. Most of them never had any experience with liberal democracy or with the rule of law. The founding fathers and mothers of Israel came primarily from Tsarist Russia, partly from Poland, Hungary – such places. They did not come from very liberal, open-minded countries – they came from dark dictatorships. Very few among the founding fathers and mothers of Israel ever experienced democracy. If I compare Israel to the countries from which the Israelis came, by and large – Tsarist Russia, or Fascist Poland, or Fascist Hungary and Romania, or, for that matter, Morocco and Iraq, Israel is by far better than the countries where the founders came from.

My parents never lived for a single day in their lives in a democratic country before they came to Jerusalem.

How do you explain the rise of Avigdor Liberman?

Lieberman is a complex phenomenon. He stands for tightening the screw on the Israeli Arabs, but he also stands for liberal marriage and for more or less separating the church from state. He stands for a two-state solution. I’m not advocating him, for God’s sake, I’m not defending him, but he stands for a two-state solution and he also stands for two capitals in Jerusalem. So he’s not simply far-right. He’s far-right on the Israeli Arabs, but not on other issues.

This see this as a growing trend everywhere. I remind myself that in peaceful Norway, a far-right, semi-racist party carried more than 20% of the votes. In peaceful Switzerland…So, in peaceful Switzerland some 18% voted for a far-right, semi-racist party – not to mention France and Italy. So, there seems to be a universal phenomenon, and Israel is not immune.

You have said your views on David Ben-Gurion, israel’s founding Prime Minister, have changed. In what way?

Yes, I wonder if I was right, because the more I read about Ben Gurion, the more I realise that, behind his harsh rhetoric, he was a great compromiser. He was willing to accept the two-state solution at any phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – right from the 1930s on, he was willing to accept the idea of partition of the disputed Left. So, his rhetoric was very patriotic and very harsh and full of exclamation marks. But in fact he was a pragmatist.

So you’re not expressing sympathy for there is the driving-out of people or the refusal to let them return?

Look, in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were forcibly driven out by the Israelis. That is something we will have to account for. We cannot let them go back into Israel proper, into pre-1967 Israel, because if they do there will be two Palestinian states and no home for the Jews. But we have to assume moral responsibility, at least partial moral responsibility – perhaps not full moral responsibility.

Why not full moral responsibility?

Because let’s not forget that this happened in the context of an all-out attack of the Arab world on young Israel. An attempt, a vicious attempt, to throw the Jews into the ocean. And let us also not forget that there was a 100% ethnic cleansing of the other side at the same time. Not one Jew was allowed to leave, to remain in the West Bank and in Gaza occupied by Egypt and by Jordan in 1948. There was a Jewish community in the old city of Jerusalem who lived there for more than 1,000 years. In fact, they lived there longer for the Arabs. They were wiped out in 1948. So, the ethnic cleansing took part on both sides. That’s why I say “partial responsibility.”

How do you explain the stance of the European left towards Israel?

In the 20th century, most of the conflicts were Manichean. Colonialism and anti-colonialism was black-and-white. Apartheid was a black-and-white issue – literally. And Vietnam was black-and-white. So many do-gooders in the world are in the habit of waking up in the morning, signing a petition in favour of the good guys, launching a demonstration against the bad guys, and going to sleep feeling very well about themselves. They find it difficult to conceive a phenomenon such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is essentially not black-and-white. I think the syndrome of the 21st century – not just in the Middle East, everywhere – is not about Huntington’s War of Civilisations (not at all, not in the least), it’s about the fanatics against the rest of us. And fanatics exist in Islam, in Judaism, in Christianity, in the left wing, in the right wing – everywhere.

You have said that during your childhood, Holocaust survivors were viewed with discomfort, even disgust, within Israel.

There was a latent version of anti-Jewish feelings. The young Israeli Jews did not want to identify themselves with the eternal victims. They don’t want to be one with the eternal victims. They were throwing at the survivors the horrible accusation, “why didn’t you defend yourselves? Why didn’t you fight back? After all, we are fighting back – why couldn’t you fight back?” That is, of course, forgetting the totally different circumstances – Nazi Europe and in the Middle East. There was a certain deep inclination among the new Israelis to turn over a new leaf – to be born anew. To renounce themselves from those qualities which were allegedly ascribed to the Jews by their worst enemies, by the anti-Semites. So, in a sense, many Israelis accepted certain anti-Semitic clichés, and resented what they found in the Jews as the reason for those anti-Semitic clichés.

Do you believe the European criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, as many Israelis charge?

I’m very reluctant to be inflationary with the usage of the term “anti-Semitism.” I think much of the vehement criticism of Israel is well-deserved. I think, however, that some of the criticism of Israel originates from a certain double standard. And from great expectations. Not from anti-Semitism, but from great expectations. You see, many times I heard it from European friends. They say to me, “well, the Jews, they have been through the death camps and concentration camps. How can they be cruel after such an experience? The Palestinians, on the other hand – they have been humiliated and oppressed. No wonder they are violent – what else do you expect?” This is giving double standards a bad name.

It is actually very condescending to all the Palestinians. And, by and large, very condescending to all the entire Third World. There is a certain attitude, a certain mood, prevailing in this country and elsewhere, that, “right or wrong the Third World, we should stand by it.” I find this very insulting to the Third World. The Third World deserves help, compensation, support – but not a moral concession. No-one in this world deserves a moral concession. Not the Palestinians, not Israelis, not anyone.

The experience of World War Two is fading here. And because, on the British Left, there is a kind of irrational Third World sentiment: “right or wrong, if it’s the Third World then we have to stand by it.” And in every confrontation between what strikes the British as the First World on one hand and the Third World on the other, they automatically stand by the Third World, whether it deserves to be defended or not. That’s why they have very, very little interest – relatively little interest, or perhaps no interest at all – in conflicts within the Third World. And this inclination to Manicheanism is alien to me. And this entire attitude of dividing the world into good guys and bad guys – signing petitions in favour of the good guys, launching demonstrations against the bad guys, and going to sleep feeling very good about themselves – is very alien to me.

My attitude is really more Chekovian. When I see a car accident site, with people bleeding on the roads, asking who is to blame and launching an angry demonstration against the driver would be last on my mind. I will tend the injured people, I will think about healing the wounds, I will think about getting medical aids, I will think about… to stop the bleeding, and I will put off the question of who takes how much of the blame. It’s not urgent. You know, that’s… when I talk to Palestinians. In a sense, it’s easier for me to talk to Palestinians than to talk to some of the friends of Palestine here in Britain and in other European countries. Because when I talk to Palestinians it’s always about the question of what can be done and what should be done. Whereas here, it’s more often than not about the blame, and who takes the blame. So, I am Chekovian in the sense of regarding my role in the peace efforts as the role of a country doctor. “See what I can do; see what I can do.”

Do you think Israel should bomb Iran to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons?

Regrettably, within 15 years or so, every country that wants it will have means of mass destruction, whether nuclear or whatever. So there is no point for Israel in striking Iran, when Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapon, may turn tomorrow into a fundamentalist Islamic country. So, we will have to rely on good old deterrence, rather than launch a pre-emptive strike.

What does you say to those on the right, who say deterrence doesn’t work against people who don’t mind dying in a holy cause?

I don’t think heads of governments are ever the equivalents of suicide bombers. Not even Hitler. If he would have known that Germany is going to be annihilated, he would probably have been more careful. Assuming that both Israel and Iran are going to be nuclear, this may provide for peace and quiet, because it would provide a mutually assured destruction.

How does it feel to come to Britain, a country you dreamed of bombing as a child?

It felt fascinating. I was immensely and endlessly curious about everything British. Because I remember them from the days of the British mandate in Jerusalem in my childhood with a certain ambivalence. I didn’t really hate them; I wanted to hate them, I needed to hate them, I was supposed to hate them. But I couldn’t hate them, because in the end they were not the demons we pictured them to be. They have done their share of incitement between Jews and Arabs – separate and rule, you know. And they have committed their serious misdeeds in the Middle East. But they were not diabolical. And deep down in my heart of hearts, there was a warm niche for the British in my heart. When I first came here, I was glad to come here.

Do you think European repentance about anti-Semitism has been sincere? What do you think of ‘The Reader’?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m not sure there has been a deep soul-searching in Europe about minorities altogether. And, to judge by the way other minorities are being treated by Europe now, I am not sure the soul-searching was really sufficient.

Well, German literature taught me a lesson. First, they wanted me to sympathise with simple German folks during World War Two, which I could do. Then, they wanted me to sympathise with German soldiers during World War Two, which I could do with some difficulties. Now, they want even, want me to sympathise not only with SS, but with war criminals, with SS war criminals. That’s a bit hard.

Do you have high hopes of Barack Obama?

We all have messianic hopes in Obama, and I’m worried about my own hopes, and I’m worried about other people’s hopes. I think we are hoping too much. He declared a week or so that he will deal aggressively with the peace in the Middle East. I never thought I would enjoy hearing an American president using the word “aggressively,” and I would think that this is a positive thing, but here we go! Yes.

Do you believe in sanctions against Israel?

That would be counter-productive, because this will harden the Israelis and corner them, and strengthen the widespread feeling, any widespread feeling, that “the whole world is against us anyway, so why try?”

What do you say to advocates of a one-state solution, accommodating both Israelis and Palestinians?

One-state solution would be a terrible solution, because trying to push into bed together, into a honeymoon bed together, two deadly enemies, after 100 years of bloodshed and suspicion and animosity, would provide for a tragedy. We have seen what happens in former Yugoslavia, we have seen what happens in Cyprus, we have seen what happens in the former Soviet Union. Even Belgium is dissolving now. So a bi-national state is a miserable solution.

What do you say to people who say Israel is a colonial implant in the Middle East?

I would say that colonialists went to overseas countries to get rich. The Jews didn’t come to Israel to get rich. In fact, they pumped a million times more resources into the country than they could have possibly hoped to take out of it. So, this in itself rules out the comparison to colonial enterprises. Moreover, the Jews had nowhere to go.

Is Israel now the country you imagined it would be?

Certainly not. Israel was born out of dreams – out of magnanimous dreams. It is destined, by definition, to be a disappointment. This is not about the nature of Israel; it’s about the nature of dreams. The only way to keep a dream whole and rosy and intact and perfect is never to try to live it out. The moment a dream is fulfilled, it’s flawed and disappointing by definition. This is true of planting a garden; this is true of writing a novel. This is true of living out a sexual fantasy. This is true of everything.

What are the main disappointments?

Many. Many, many. Too many to describe. The initial… one of the initial dreams was that Israel would become a castle of spirituality. In fact, it’s a very creative country – it’s exploding with creativeness. Maybe going through a cultural golden age. The theatre, the cinema, the literature, the music, the sciences are vivacious. But the kind of moral example unto the nations which the founding fathers and mothers hoped for Israel to be is not fulfilled and possibly couldn’t be fulfilled. That’s the unavoidable gap between the magnitude of initial dreams and the realities.

What should British people who are concerned for peace be doing?

They should be more curious. They should be more curious. Be aware of the position of a walking exclamation mark, which is the position of the fanatic. After all, the fanatic is a walking exclamation mark. Be more curious. God in the details, and the devil is also in the details. Study the details. Imagine the other. These are my simple imperatives.

In what way would that inform practical action?

Practical action right now is to help find homes and jobs for hundreds of thousands of homeless Palestinian refugees. This is urgent. Reconstruct Gaza. This is urgent. Help Gaza evacuate the settlers from the West Bank. This is urgent. These are urgent tasks. And everybody could do something in this direction. Everybody could do something – at least something.

You have defended the idea of compromise from its critics.

I’m a great believer in compromises. I know the word “compromise” has a very bad, very negative reputation, especially in radical circles in this country and among the young. Compromise is conceived as inconsistent, as opportunistic, as dishonest. For me, the word “compromise” is synonymous with the word “life”. And where there is life, there should be compromises. And the opposite of “compromise” is not “consistency”, and the opposite of “compromise” is not “idealism” – the opposite of “compromise” is “fanaticism” and “death”. And when I say “compromise”, I don’t mean “capitulation”, and I certainly don’t mean “turn the other cheek”. I mean, “try to meet the other somewhere halfway – somewhere halfway.” And that’s true in a marriage as much as it is true in international relations. It’s about compromises.

What do you say to those on the right who say - okay, what happens if we do what you want; we withdraw to the ’67 borders, we have a peace deal, and the next day, rockets are fired at Israel?

We will fight back. We will definitely fight back. But then, we will fight a just war of self-defence. Yes. This might happen, by the way. There is no guarantee that this will not happen; if Israel withdraws to the ’67 boundaries, there is no guarantee. But we will be fighting a just war of self-defence, and there is all the difference in the world.

I think the Palestinians will have less reasons to want to fight against Israel if they have a state of their own – if they have a homeland of their own. I hope so.

Hanif Kureishi is embarked on an experiment. “I am determined,” he says with an expressionless stare, “to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding. No more bullshit.”

Ever since I read his first novel, ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, I have imagined Kureishi to be a living version of the novel’s protagonist, Karim. He is a beautiful mixed-race boy from the suburbs, determined to dream and shag and saunter his way to the big city. But what, I always wondered, happens when the Buddha of Suburbia sags into late middle age? Where did Karim go? Over the years I had heard depressing rumours about Kureishi – that his story dissolved into the success-cliché of hard partying and hard drugs, and he ended up half-mad and suicidal and scribbling nasty novellas about his ex-wife.

When he walks into Café Rouge in Shepherd’s Bush, those stories deflate with a small hiss. He is a slim, short 54-year old with a lingering raddled handsomeness. At first glance, he looks like a vaguely trendy North London G.P. He greets me with an emotionless voice – as if asking about my symptoms – and we sit in the corner and coolly order coffee.

And then the therapy session begins. He almost immediately announces his new mission to discard the illusions that clutter our minds – and his method is psychoanalysis. It is the subject of his new novel, ‘Something To Tell You’, and of his life. Three times a week, Kureishi lies on a couch and tries to dispassionately understand the workings of his subconscious. “It has stopped me doing things that are mad and stupid and self-destructive,” he says. “You don’t just lie there. It’s not a narcissistic bath. It’s quite violent. It’s about how your sexuality and your aggression are destructive. Your dreams show you that. The rest is just surface.”

At first, this commitment to a bonfire of illusions sounded, to me, like a conceit – a fancy self-dramatising illusion itself. But as we spoke for hours, he emptied his discarded delusions onto the table one by one, and dismantled them. Yes, I was suicidal and paranoid. Yes, my “semi-broken” father hated me, even as he loved me and tried to make me into a replica of him. Yes, I hated my grandparents’ Islam, with its Holy Book bearing “a threat on every page.” Yes, I reacted to the Paki-bashing of my youth by internalizing racism, and wishing my brown skin away. Yes, male sexuality is cold and dark and has nothing to do with love.

He says it all in an affectless voice, as if he is discussing how to fix a car engine. And yes, it is a voice without illusions.

I “We all carry a body in our cargo”

You cannot interview Hanif Kureishi alone. He is always accompanied by the spectre of his father, Rafiushan Kureishi. “If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse,” one of his characters says. His father pushes his way into Kureishi’s conversation punctually, at least once every five minutes. “Yeah, I think about my dad every day. The whole time,” he says. “I still want to be like him, and I still hope one day to coincide with him… Sometimes, I think I go to my desk only to obey my father.”

Rafiushan washed up in the white English suburbs of the 1950s determined to be a writer. It was his only way of overcoming “his sense of defeat” – yet he failed at it. He had been born in colonial Bombay into a wealthy family, and went to school with Zulfiqar Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s Prime Minister and patriarch. But the family lost everything during partition and fled to the newly-created Pakistan – so Rafiushan was scattered in his early twenties to the imperial mother-country. He never went home again. Instead, he toiled in “suburban semi-sleep” in South London, as Hanif puts it, working as a clerk at the Pakistani embassy, and writing novels every night that were never published.

“He seemed to be living his life in the negative, as though there was someone bad inside him,” Hanif says. He transmitted his failed ambition to his son – but when his son succeeded, part of him was enraged and affronted. When Hanif first had a play performed at the Royal Court in his early twenties, his father sat on the back row, flicking V-signs. How did you feel? He won’t say; he instead empathises with his father. “It was really difficult for him,” Hanif says. “He came to Britain from India in his twenties and I think it traumatised him. He never saw his mother again. He found it very difficult to be in England, because if you were an Indian then, people on the whole thought you were inferior… My father was much patronised. He came from a very distinguished family, but he was seen as a Paki the whole time.”

Their relationship was “riddled with Oedipus complexes,” Hanif says now. His father was sick throughout Hanif’s childhood, and he became terrified his rage would kill his father. “During most of my teenage years he was ill and weak and vulnerable. You couldn’t really argue with him without thinking – my God, I’m going to kill him. What you want in a father who you can argue with. My sons and I” – he has three – “have huge fights, and it’s good for us all. It’s rather invigorating. We can have these huge fights and I’m there the next day. With my father, I was worried I would kill him with my strength or with my talent or intelligence or whatever. You wonder who is the parent and who is the child.”

On his own twenty-first birthday, Hanif believed – for a time – that he came close to killing his father. He took out a girl he liked and finally had sex with her – while at that exact moment, his father was having a heart attack. He became convinced the two were not a coincidence, and concluded: “I knew that wherever I went and whatever I did, he was, like God, always watching and condemning.”

His death in 1991 didn’t stop the condemnations. Kureishi likes the Ibsen line: “We carry a body in our cargo.” I ask him what his father would make of him now, and his voice becomes varied in tone and louder for the first time in the interview. He smiles broadly. “He could still be alive. He’d be in his late eighties.” But all he can name that his father would like is his grandchildren. “He would be very proud of my boys,” he says. Returning to his expressionless stare, he says we are all “recovering children.”

Hanif has often tried to write a short story about a man who, on his fiftieth birthday, goes into a pub and meets his father, who is also fifty. They sit together as equals for the first time. But when Hanif tries to write it, the dialogue never comes. A dialogue between equals with his dad remains impossible, even in his imagination. His father is still standing over and above him, always superior, always angry.

II Souls lost in translation

They started to burn Hanif Kureishi – and attack him with chisels – when he was thirteen years old. He was one of a tiny number of mixed-race kids in the distant suburbs of South London, so at his school gangs of white kids would lock him in the metalwork shop and sear into his flesh, or shut him in the woodwork shop and stab at him. They called him a “Paki.” “Had I stayed on,” he says, “I might have been destroyed by racism.”

He wasn’t just marked on his skin; he was splintered within. “You walk down the street and people say to you all the time – where are you from? Yeah, but where are you really from? You sound like us, but you’re not one of us, are you? Being attacked, being beaten up, being spat on – it happened the whole time. [I had a] girlfriend who said – you can’t come round tonight, if my dad sees a fucking Paki sitting at the dining room table hell do his fucking nut.”

Kureishi was sunk in a dilemma faced by so many children of immigrants: second generation blues, where you don’t belong in your father’s country, but you aren’t accepted in the country where you were born either. When he went to Pakistan, people laughed out loud when he said he was English – but they also said he would never belong with them either. “One man said to me ‘We are Pakistanis, but you will always be a Paki.’”

Today, European Islamists are reacting to the same alienation. They are, Kureishi says, “souls lost in translation” – at home nowhere. So they seek to build a pure identity for themselves in a Puritan religious fanaticism based on Medina in the seventh century.

Kureishi reacted very differently. At first, he fantasized about eradicating the Asian part of himself. “From the start I wanted to deny my Pakistani self,” he says. “I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it… [It was] a desire to be like other people. I thought – everywhere I go, people think – there’s a Paki. They don’t think there’s John Smith. There’s a Paki.”

His mother was white, so he lived on a racial fault-line where this was possible, for a while. He was sometimes accepted by other white gangs as one of them. “My friends at school used to say to me – ‘we’re going out Paki-bashing tonight, do you want to come with us?’ And I knew my dad would be walking home from work, and they might beat him up.” They didn’t see the contradiction? “No. They’d say, ‘You’re one of us.’” How did you feel? “I thought – what the hell’s going on here?”

But as he dropped out of school and skidded around on the dole, Hanif began to deal with this dissonance by discarding his self-hate and turning to art. “I used my creativity to put together all these things I couldn’t put together in the world. I wrote a screenplay [‘My Beautiful Launderette’] about a skinhead and a Pakistani boy running a launderette together, and they were in love. So you create a unity.” At the same time, he began to be wooed by the best values of his mother’s country. He became a “hippie socialist kid”, he says, “obsessed with sexual freedom and novels and making social change. We thought all of us – black people and gay people and feminists – were part of the same fight.”

Islamists react in the opposite way – with a fierce suppression of creativity and freedom. Kureishi discovered this for himself in the early 1990s, when most of us were living in the fiction of a friction-free future. His father had died, and for the first time in his life he began to go to mosque. “I felt that… I would lose touch with what was Muslim in me.” His father had never been a believer: he was repelled by memories of being beaten for failing to rote-learn the Koran. “In place of a discarded Islam, he made a religion at home out of library books,” Kureishi says. His prophets were Chekhov and Dostoyevsky – but he had a vague cultural attachment to the symbols and rituals of Islam nonetheless. “It wasn’t belief I was looking for. I already believed in culture and love as the only possible salvation. I think I was looking for solidarity.”

Instead, he found “a cult of hate.” He says: “The mosques in those days were extraordinary – you’d have these flamboyant preachers walking up and down making incredibly inflammatory speeches. I would hear the most rancid rants about women, gays, the West, liberalism.” He was bemused to see the rich rhetoric of liberation end “on its knees, in prayer. Having started to look for itself, it finds itself… in the eighth century.”

He would leave the mosque in revulsion, and head to the nearest pub to down pints and “remind myself I was actually in England.” He wrote the first real imaginative exploration of English jihadis, ‘The Black Album’ – a remarkable novel about 7/7, published eight years before the bombs exploded. It follows a group of young Muslim men who prefigure Mohammed Sidiqh Khan.

They were reacting to the same doubt and divisions Kureishi felt – but with violent illusions. “Fundamentalism provides security,” he says. “Everything has been decided. Truth has been agreed and nothing must change... They put a lot of effort into fashioning a retributive God to which to submit.” They love the fierce rules and restrictions on their behaviour, because “constraint is a bulwark against a self that was always in danger of dissolving.” They are gluing their warring selves together with hate.

If he was a young man today, would he be tempted by this philosophy of jihadi-hate? “Oh God no. No way. The jihadis would create a society nobody wants to live in, where women are enslaved and gay people are killed. I saw what happened to my uncles in Pakistan. They were journalists and they were thrown in prison for criticising this stuff. No. I was a hippy kid. I was never tempted by that.”

He believes the only answer to this hatred is a “tough liberalism” that defends it values more fiercely – against both racists and Islamists. “You respect people who are different, but how do you live with those who are so different they lock up their wives?” The morning we met, he saw a woman in a burqua in his son’s playground. “I wouldn’t allow that. If I was a teacher, I would say – fucking take it off. I want to see somebody’s face when I’m talking to her… Behind closed doors, you can wear anything you want. You can be a transvestite or wear a Nazi uniform or anything you want. But you can’t go into a school playground wearing a Nazi uniform, and you shouldn’t go in something that symbolizes oppression of other people.”

But he is equally repulsed by his former friend Martin Amis’ notorious comments mooting the mass punishment of Muslims. It was “a psychotic paranoid vision… It’s a madness. You have to look at this full-on, but not in a paranoid way.”

In the same sparse classroom in 1930s Bombay – under the threat of the cane – Kureishi’s father learned to be a secular humanist, and Zulfiqar Bhutto learned to build an Islamic nationalism that, in the end, led his daughter to nurture the Taliban. They sat together, and worlds apart. The country Bhutto helped to build terrifies Kureishi today. “All bad things in the world originate in Pakistan, in my view,” he says. “It’s in such a vulnerable place, between China, India and Iran, drawn on the map by some Britisher who was running for the boat… The only hope is for Pakistan to rejoin India. It was a mistake, a terrible idea – but that’s impossible now.”

The only way to build an identity – for any of us – is, he says, “to keep talking. You don’t ever reach a conclusion – but it’s the conversation that matters. Only when you stop talking honestly about what goes on inside human beings, [does] evil happen in the silence.”

III “So innocent”

“We were so innocent,” he says, remembering how he came to be nominated for an Oscar for writing ‘My Beautiful Launderette.’ He was twenty-nine, living in a council flat in West London, and he’d been on the dole for years, writing plays for the Royal Court. “After I heard the news, I went down to Oxfam and got a D.J. [dinner jacket] on, and I got the bus down to Gatwick and went off to the Oscars. I sat next to Bette Davis and Dustin Hoffman, and all the studios send flowers to your hotel room” – he is speaking almost breathlessly now – “and it’s just amazing. And then at the end you go back and you end up at Gatwick and you get on a bus back to West Ken and you think, ‘Oh. This is miserable.’”

Suddenly glistening with success, he found that “a lot of people hate you and envy you. And it really affects a lot of your friendships - particularly with people that you’ve known for a long time. And I wasn’t prepared for that at all. You know, not everybody thinks, ‘What a lucky man! You’re talented – you’ve done well.’ A lot of people think: ‘You cunt. Who the fuck do you think you are? Why has that happened to you?’ Bitterness and hatred is absolutely – it’s really disturbing, actually. It happened to all of us: it happened to Daniel Day Lewis [star of the film], particularly.”

“So I spent years drifting around the city – just taking drugs, fucking about, you know,” he says, “doing whatever I wanted, with no real, substantial connections to other people… And so you can really begin to think that you don’t believe in anything, that you’re nobody, you have no connection. What’s the point of your life – your world? And I had that feeling a lot.”

He began to take drugs full-time “as though I were trying to kill something, or bring something in myself to life.” Coke, LSD, ecstasy. “You use drugs and sexuality as a cure for depression – you crash, then you use again, and it’s a cycle of stupidity.” He began to have intermittent insane thoughts, “thinking people have been sent in cars to kill me.”

It seems strange to be discussing this so casually in Café Rouge. He doesn’t stop his disclosures as the waitress puts coffee down in front of us; she looks at us oddly. I feel like I am standing over an operating table, slicing a man open, and taking out various internal organs, while the patient lies there awake, calmly commenting on his kidneys and intestines.

He believes it is psychoanalysis that saved him. In the world of PET scans and ever-more-detailed understanding of the brain, it’s fashionable to see the talking cure as a crude, unscientific left-over from early twentieth-century Vienna. Kureishi scoffs. “As though only something scientific could improve your state of mind! That would be like saying to somebody who had read a novel by Dostoevsky and says, ‘This has changed my life and had a profound effect on me’ that their view is unscientific. It misses the point. Psychoanalysis is more like poetry. It’s more like literature in its deepest sense: this is where we think about who we are. It’s not a mathematical thing.”

Yes. But in his sessions of the couch, does he ever feel like the Woody Allen character in ‘Sleeper’ who wakes up after being cryogenically frozen and says: “Oh god! I’ve missed two hundred years of therapy appointments. I would have been nearly cured by now”? He laughs, but then looks slightly cross. “Psychoanalysis has never said that it would make anybody happy – that would be the most fatuous claim… Most analysts now would say, “You’re entitled to your symptoms. You don’t want to get out of bed and go to work? I don’t blame you.””

The narrator of ‘Something To Tell You’ is a psychoanalyst diving into his own murderous past. I try to talk about it, but Kureishi’s evangelism keeps breaking through. “Freud’s is the only ideology of the twentieth century that isn’t coercive. It has no ambition to turn you into anything, whereas all the other ideologies have an ideal for what a man should be. It’s like philosophy, in the sense that it would enable you to think about the ends of your life, not about the means.”

This stock-taking of his subconscious can make him seem blunt to the point of cruelty. He hasn’t spoken to his little sister, Yasmin, in over ten years. She began to tell the newspapers that she hated his descriptions of their family, and they were “wrong.” She says she has always been his “emotional dustbin” and “he's using the media to play out his game of bullying and intimidation. He only does ‘hate’ with me, always has, always will; even when we were speaking, it was always there festering, like some psychotic cocktail.”

As I read this out to him, he says without showing any emotion at all: “No, I don’t speak to my sister.” Do you miss her? “No.” Do you think you will never speak to her again? “I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me.” Really? “No. I have lots of good friendships.” Were you close when you were a child? “The older ones don’t really notice the younger ones. There’s just these kids running around and you get on with your life, and later on the younger one says – God, I’ve hated you all my life, you bullied me – and the older ones say: I didn’t notice you at all.”

I sense there is more here so I keep up a scatter-gun of questions about her, and eventually he sighs: “There are big losses and little losses in a life, and she is a little loss. It obviously bothers you more than it bothers me.” This sounds aggressive in print, but in the flesh it was said observationally. “Psychoanalysis,” he says, “might teach you that you have the right to ignore people who are close to you.”

IV “Aggression is what sex is about.”

One of the most strangest aspects of Kureishi’s work is how readily – how bluntly – his characters are prepared to sever intimate relationships and toss away the corpse. In 1998, he wrote a novel called ‘Intimacy’ about a man who is leaving his wife and children. Kureishi had just left his wife and children. His “fictional” narrator had a failed writer for a father, and was nominated for an Oscar in his twenties. The ex-wife is described as a nagging, boring bitch, and the Kureishi-proxy says dismissively: “There are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a frozen sea.”

He says he didn’t intend the book as an attack on his ex-wife “at all”, and for the first time in the interview, I don’t believe him. Has she read the book? “I don’t know. I’ll ask her.” Yet despite this evasion, the book is frighteningly honest. I think of it as Prick-Lit, a chilly new genre in which male sexuality is as barren and amoral as in the works of Andrea Dworkin – only this time it’s told from the inside.

In Kureishi’s work, male lust is almost always an ugly, destructive force. It is split off entirely from love, or even affection. In ‘Something To Tell You’, one character says: “Loving someone, or even liking them, has never brought the slightest improvement to sexual pleasure”. Does he agree? He pauses. “It’s a provocation, but it’s a provocation in which there’s much truth. It may be that aggression is what sex is about, and it adds to the experience if you’re not concerned about the other person.”

Perhaps this is why prostitutes recur so often in his writing. His father lost his virginity to a “whore”, and believed they were “a great marital aid.” So does his son have sex with prostitutes? He laughs at the question – not awkwardly, but freely. “I don’t like to pay for it. I always feel that somehow they should pay me! My vanity is so great – or at least it used to be. I grew up in the sixties. So it was just a free-for-all. And it was pleasure. What you want in the end is that the other person to want you. You want their desire.”

One of his driving beliefs as a young man was in the great collective libidinal release of the sexual revolution. He thought if sex was set free from convention and constriction, we would all be happier. “When I was a kid at school you couldn’t see women’s bodies. You never saw a pair of breasts, and in porn magazines, pubic hair was removed. I remember seeing porn and it was all depictions of nature – people frolicking under a tree. Now my sons look on the net and they said – look at that dad, what the fuck are they doing? Look at this one!”

Yet today he thinks he was wrong to preach the tantra-mantra. “I’m disillusioned about sex. If you look at ‘The Buddha of Suburbia,’ an unrepressed world seems like a very cheerful prospect.” But now it has happened, and “it’s dehumanized people. It’s like the repetitiveness of strippers: clothes on, clothes off, clothes on, clothes off.” We have inaugurated a “Thatcherism of the soul” where, as he put it in ‘Intimacy’, “Love is a free market; browse and buy, pick and choose, rent and reject, as you like. There’s no sexual and social security; everybody has to take care of themselves, or not.”

He says sex is now “usually a way of just using other people. It can be deeply pleasurable to fuck somebody and not care who they are and what they are. If you grew up in the fifties, as I did, then getting laid in that way seemed like a rebellion. It seemed very liberating. But then sexuality just became very instrumental in the eighties and nineties. You’re just using other people to have a wank. And there’s no relationship at all. And that seems just narcissistic and empty and worthless to me…. In the 1950s we repressed sex, and now we repress love. Today, if you look around you, it’s human connection that’s elusive.”

V Disillusioned?

When your illusions are gone – dismantled and dead on a psychoanalyst’s chair – what do you have left? Kureishi leans forward. “Other people. The people you love. Your family. Your group. Your work.”

This is our parting sentiment. For hours, he has told me you can be unillusioned without being disillusioned. He has said you can let your ugliest feelings speak freely without being conquered by them. He has said it in a persuasive monotone. But standing outside Café Rouge in the West London chill, I peer back through the window, at Kureishi with his spectral father hanging over him, and I wonder if it is true.

For Johann Hari, 2008 was a good year. He became the youngest ever winner of the Orwell Prize for political journalism, aged just 28. But for many of his fans his finest moment came four years earlier, when he appeared on Richard Littlejohn’s Sky News show to speak about the BNP. Hari didn’t take any prisoners.

He pounced on the Daily Mail columnist, strafing him with well-chosen statistics. “In your novel To Hell in a Handcart”, he began, “which was accurately described as a 400 page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP, you described a single asylum seeker receiving £117 pounds a week. In reality they receive £33.” Raising his voice to the right-winger – who by now was sweating profusely – he accused him of propagating “anti-asylum seeker lies.”

I asked him whether it had been a planned ambush. He shook his head, saying that although the BNP are “obviously disgusting”, it’s journalists like Littlejohn that “pump out the sewage the these rats feed on.” But is Littlejohn really that evil? Hari answered adamantly: “I feel very sorry for Richard Littlejohn. He is mentally ill. He’s absolutely obsessed with homosexuality… I mean, he thinks about gay sex more than I do. He actually thinks gay people are going to come and try to convert him. He writes most of his Mail columns from a gated mansion in Florida. He hates this country and knows nothing about it.”

Johann Hari has made a name for himself as a firebrand left-wing columnist. He writes polemically for The Independent, the Huffington Post and Attitude, Britain’s best-selling gay magazine. He was born in Glasgow but was raised in North London by his father – a Swiss-German bus driver – and his mother, a Glaswegian social worker who specialises in working with victims of domestic violence (“battered wives”).

We meet up in the East End, near Brick Lane. Johann appears slightly dishevelled. He apologises, but tells me that he’s been looking after his nephew. “My family seem to think”, he laughs, “that I’m available to babysit because I work from home.”

We go into a hotel bar, and Johann asks me what I would like to drink. “A Coke please,” I say, still eager to impress – I’m sure he wrote a column about how much he likes Coke. Johann orders apple juice. Fuck. I suddenly remember that his column was about giving up Coke because of the evil practices of the Coca-cola company in Colombia. It’s too late, we sit down and begin.

One of Hari’s earliest political influences was George Orwell. Aged just 13, he had been dispatched by his father to Switzerland to live with his grandparents and learn German. A Londoner through and through, he was not looking forward to it, and took a stack of books. One of them was Down and Out in Paris and London, which, he said, “I must have read about 15 times while I was there”.

How much does he identify with Orwell, I ask him, who wrote that a writer must be “vain, selfish and lazy”? He laughs, “I love Orwell but I am always nervous about people who claim Orwell as a mentor. I think it’s hubristic.” He continues: “There’s been a generational shift with Orwell. People in their fifties and sixties tend to revere the Orwell of Animal Farm and ‘1984’ – that tends to be what brought them to his work. But they touch me least because when I was born the Soviet Union was almost gone. Those novels were written to make important points which have since become obvious.”

Clarifying this, he adds that “being a left-winger after communism is a bit like being born into a family where you had a granddad who everyone says they loved. But when you learn about him it turns out that he beat the shit out of granny, murdered the other grandchildren and buried them under the patio. You think, what the hell was it that everyone saw in this nutter?”

He might not claim Orwell as a mentor, but Hari’s prose is fluent and – in argument – he’s convincing. Unlike it was in Orwell’s time, the world of newspaper journalism is less assured now. Given the choice between buying a newspaper or reading its content online for free, the reading public doesn’t shun gut instinct. Now the credit crunch is losing newspapers advertising revenue fast – as someone who is primarily a newspaper columnist, does Hari ever feel like he is on a sinking ship?

“You’re right”, he starts quickly, “being a print journalist in 2009 can sometimes feel like being a coal miner in 1976. But I believe people want to understand what is happening in the world and I think there will be some sort of mechanism for delivering that which will be financially viable.”

I ask him to elaborate, so he adds: “There are structural forces at work that an individual journalist will find very hard to deal with. But if you want more people to read a newspaper you’ve got to produce the best damn product you can. You’ve got to make sure your writing is accessible. I’m amazed at how much journalism is just unclear. Or is written in a cliquish way that is only interesting to a tiny number of people.” He begins to get more animated: “the whole way that we cover politics in this gossipy Westminster way is totally uninteresting to the vast majority of people. What you write has got to be comprehensible to the average reader – it’s got to matter to them.”

Johann begins to explain some of the issues that are affecting modern journalism and complains, “There’s very little that I can do to change those tectonic shifts. It’s a bit like becoming one of those monks who were paid to write out the bible, then the Guttenberg press comes out. Well, you can’t really do much. Improving your handwriting isn’t going to help.”

Sitting up, he moves on to the international press: “One of the reasons American newspapers are going bust is partly because of all these structural changes, but also because they are so fucking boring. If you compare them to British newspapers or French newspapers, they are just a lousy product – they are badly written, bland, horribly presented… and they have shit columnists.”

This comes as a surprise. Hari writes for The Independent, which is criticised by many journalists for similar reasons. It’s doing so badly – with huge losses and a flagging readership – that it recently was forced to mo­­ve into the same building as the Daily Mail, politically speaking its arch-enemy. Does the Indie really come close to his version of the ideal newspaper?

He replies confidently: “I think it’s one of the best. I’m really proud and privileged to work for it. There are people like Patrick Cockburn who I think is one of the most extraordinary journalists in the world. The paper is really is good to me – very few editors would let a writer go off for a month to Congo or Bangladesh to cover what seems to be an obscure, off-the-agenda story. I’m very lucky like that.”

Hari has covered a lot of obscure stories in his time: he won the Orwell Prize for pieces about a ‘pleasure’ cruise with American Republicans, multiculturalism and women, and another on France’s “secret war” in the Central African Republic. But as a part-time foreign correspondent, he also covers stories which are very much on the agenda. A week before the interview, when I rang him to confirm the meeting place, he told me there might be a problem. “It looks like I might be sent to Gaza,” he said, “you better ring back on Sunday to check I’m still in the country.” The Israeli army, however, wasn’t letting journalists into the war zone, so he was ordered to stay put.

His column recently declared that Israel was “self-harming”. Sensing an oncoming tirade, I ask him to explain. “What’s going on there is a tragedy for both sides,” he starts. “Primarily, it’s a tragedy for people in Gaza, because they are the ones who are being killed in huge numbers. But it’s condemning more Israeli civilians to die horribly as well.” He pauses, before adding: “Basically at the end of this there’s going to have to be a two state solution along the 1967 borders. Someday, somehow that has to happen.” Johann’s tone has become quietly emotional. But he remains focused, moving onto why this solution hasn’t taken place. One reason is the return of Palestinian refugees. He declares: “There’s polling that shows that the vast majority of refugees don’t want to turn to Israel proper. They want to return to a free, independent Palestine.”

Hari has visited Gaza before, and attempts to explain the difficulties of living there: “It’s hard for people to imagine. It’s this tiny little place with one and a half million people living in it who’ve never left. You stand on a tower block and you can see the borders of their world. You can see the Mediterranean Sea and the Israeli barbed wire. If you live in that situation, cut off from the world and blockaded, with 60% unemployment, real hunger kicking in and suddenly you start getting bombed…”

Moving back to the political, Hari says: “At the moment there is a majority on both sides for a two state solution. I don’t see how this bombing gets us closer to that. This is a lot of dead and injured people, a lot of people made angrier, more hateful, and it’s not going to stop the­ rockets. It may cause a brief cessation to the bombing of Ashkelon and Sderot, but the long-term solution has to be two states.”

When I bring up Hamas, Hari is quick to define his position: “Look. I hate Hamas. They are an Islamist fundamentalist organisation…But this conflict has crippled all the Palestinian moderates, emboldened the most extreme end of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And if even we break Hamas completely, this idea that you’ll get a return to Fatah is ludicrous. You’ll actually end up with a complete implosion of Gaza and the rise of other, really crazy, Islamist groups. I’ve met representatives from those groups and they are not the people we want in control of Gaza.”

Shortly before the interview, Barack Obama – then president-elect – gave his first statement on the crisis in Gaza. Although stating his concern for the political situation, Obama claimed that until he was president he would not be able to speak out. I ask whether Johann thought the statement had been weak.

He replies: “I think Obama was right. There’s not a lot he can do until he is president. There is this convention that you only have one president at a time.” Hari has been a supporter of Obama from early one, and he is not one for criticising the first African-American president. But I’m interested to know how he thinks, as president, Obama will approach the problems in the middle east.

“We have to be depressingly realistic about Obama,” he says slowly. “It’s still ambiguous as to what he’ll to do about the Israel Palestine situation.” He continues, talking about “hawkish” Jewish lobbies in America who claim to speak for American Jews but actually don’t. “After African-Americans American Jews are the group who are most in favour of the two state solution.” He adds: “It’s actually these nutcase Christian evangelicals who are most pro this fanatical view of Israel.”

Hari is an outspoken critic of religion. One of his favourite writers was Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great and the critique of Mother Teresa’s practices, The Missionary Position. Hari’s publicly listed Facebook profile states: “Sometimes I chide Richard Dawkins for being too soft on religion”, so I ask him if he thinks some religions are less offensive than others.

He agrees: “Of course. Not everyone is Osama bin Laden. I don’t think all religious believers are evil – if you believe in an imaginary sphere, sometimes that imaginary sphere will tell you to do good things as well as bad things. And I don’t agree with some of the militant atheists who say that moderate religion is like a gateway drug and that actually it provides cover for extremism.” He adds, laughing: “I have lots of friends who are moderate religious believers and we can have civilised, intelligent arguments- they are not going to try to kill me.”

Like Hitchens, Hari despises Mother Teresa. They both accuse the ‘saint of Calcutta’ of being a religious fundamentalist who converted the dying to Catholicism. I ask him who he would rather send to hell – Mother Teresa or the King of Saudi Arabia? “The King of Saudi Arabia just here because if there is a hell Mother Teresa is already there…oh no, that’s too nasty. Er…the King of Saudi Arabia because although Mother Teresa was a disgusting fraud and a hypocrite she didn’t kill or torture people. The King of Saudi Arabia is in a whole other league.”

Johann clearly isn’t fond of monarchies. He has written a book, God Save the Queen?, about how the British should abandon the Royal Family. He claims that Prince Charles has been victim of child abuse and is a fierce critic of his badly informed science, calling him a “strikingly stupid man” who, every time he has been judged academically, “has been a disaster.”

Surely he sees eye to eye with Prince Charles on global warming? “He is personally one of the worst polluters in Britain”, Hari shoots. “His reasons for being opposed to global warming are gibberish. Global warming it not a spiritual crisis. It’s a problem because we’ve got too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…The things Prince Charles says about global warming are used to discredit the rest of us who are genuinely worried about it.”

There’s time for one more question. Is global warming the biggest crisis facing the world in 2009? “Yes. People think this is a long-term problem. It’s not. I’m worried about myself and people who are alive now. This is imminent: if the planet warms by two degrees we’ve lost Bangladesh. We are quickly heading towards the point of no return.”

Johann Hari has proved two things: his intelligence, and his ability to form polemical positions on any subject. We stand, and he asks me if I am stressed about exams. We walk outside. “God it’s like the arctic”, he says, shivering. “I’ll walk you to the tube.”

“Hitler appointed me his biographer,” David Irving says. He is not laughing. He is announcing that the Fuhrer – the man he has revered since he was a child – saw him coming. Yes: Hitler prophesied Irving as the man who would clear away the smears and bring The Truth at last to an unwilling world. Irving discovered this prophecy when he was writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, but he is only prepared to disclose it baldly now. “I made a great point of tracking down all Hitler’s surviving doctors,” he says, “and I identified Erwin Giesing as the doctor who treated Hitler after the bomb attempt on his life in 1944.” He tracked him down in the 1970s to Aachen in West Germany, and when Irving called, he claims Giesing said: “Yes, I’ve been expecting you.”

Irving arrived at Giesing’s surgery and, he says, was immediately handed a 400-page file. “Giesing said it was his diary [of his time with Hitler]. ‘That’s what you have come for,’ [he said]. I asked why, why me? Why haven’t you given it to Jacobson or Hilburg or any of the other great historians?” Giesing said the answer lay on page 385. Irving flicked to this page, and, he says, “it is August 1944 and he is treating Hitler – cauterizing his eardrum – and he says, ‘Mein Furher you realize that you have the same illness now in your inner ear that the Kaiser had?’ Hitler said ‘Yes that is true, how did you know that?’ And Geesing said he had read it in the biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman, J D Chamier.” And he says Hitler replied: “One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an English man of the present generation. They won’t to be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives.”

Irving sits back with an expression of beatific calm. “So [when] I phoned the doctor and he said ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the Messiah had come. The one he had been waiting for all these years. And of course all the other historians hate that because they don’t fit.” I stare silently for a moment. To clarify: you actually think Hitler wanted you to be his biographer? “Yes. Yes and I am not ashamed of that. Hitler knew that. Hitler himself said that for fifty years they won’t be able to write the truth about me.”

And I realize this interview isn’t about history; it’s about pathology.

How did this happen? How did a clever boy abandoned by his father in wartime Essex – as Nazi bombs fell all around – end up as the last man entranced by Adolf Hitler? How did a historian feted, for a while, by the English right end up in jail in Austria under laws banning the reconstitution of the Nazi Party? How did the father of a disabled daughter end up believing the great killer of the disabled was spiritually guiding him? And how did it end here, with this?

I Swinging the lantern

David Irving has limped to the door of his large Berkshire country house, and is standing by a Christmas tree, waiting. I trudge up the drive, wondering how a recent bankrupt can afford all this, when he beckons me in with a rather severe look. As we walk into his kitchen, he explains his awkward movements: “If you spend four hundred days in prison, your muscles turn to Marmalade jelly. We were allowed to walk around once a day in a yard smaller than this room –” he waves his hand around the kitchen – “seventy men, walking clockwise. At my age,” seventy, “the muscles don’t come back. I have to crawl like a cockroach up stairs.”

He begins to make coffee and bleak chit-chat. He says that two days after he was released from prison, he fell over in Swiss Cottage tube station. “A woman came up to me and said ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been in prison for 400 days…’ and she scuttled away.” While the water boils, he takes me on a tour of the grounds. There are acres of rolling greenery, lapping over private tennis courts and spurting fountains. He lives here alone. His former partner – or “concubine”, as he calls her – Bente Hogh ended their relationship when he was imprisoned, and he is single now. Their teenage daughter Jessica visits sometimes. As he shows me the foliage proudly, he explains that he used to live half the year in Florida, but now immigration is “a nightmare.” He adds with a wag of the finger: “If you go to Florida, don’t go with a woman. Florida is very humid, and she will blame the humidity on you. It will be your fault.”

We settle in the living room looking out over the grounds, and our photographer begins to snap him. He mentions that the white coffee-cup Irving is holding works well against the green, and Irving says: “Well, it is an Aryan cup.”

A picture of his father, John, stares out from the mantelpiece. “I saw him very little,” Irving says. “The rumour in the family was that when he found out that my mother was expecting twins – me and my brother – he turned and fled. [That was] 1938. There were various attempts, sporadically, at reconciliation. In those days families didn't divorce. He came back once from Wales where he was living, and I've got a vague memory of him being there for three or four days and then kicking over the traces and going again. I remember in those two or three days, I went to Brentford school happy, nonchalantly mentioning that I was going to be having a chat with my father that evening. But then he was gone again. Then some time in the 1950s he came back for about another week. He tried and also failed.”

He only got to know his father in the last year of his life: 1964. John said he fought in the Battle of Jutland, so Irving got a contract for him with his publisher to write a book about it for the anniversary. But his mother warned him he would only be let down again: the book would never arrive. So Irving drove to Wales and took his father back to London to live in his flat. “I sat him at that table and I put out an old tape recorder in front of him and I said you dictate and I'll spend all afternoon typing [it] up. Between us we finished the book.”

He suspects now his father was a fantasist. He said he fought in the war and was invalided out after being on HMS Edinburgh, but “after a time, when you get to know your father, in retrospect you think – I wonder if that was true? My sister has done a lot of research and says, ‘You know David, a lot of what daddy told us wasn't exactly true.’… Oh, he was full of stories. He affected a mock Welsh accent when he told them.” Then he adds: “In the navy they call this make-believe and exaggeration ‘swinging the lantern.’”

Are you like your father, David? “Oh, everyone spots similarities between me and my father… In fact my first wife, Pilar, got on very well with my mother, and at one point [she told her] I was being just the same as my father. I know how he behaved.” How was that? “Oh, probably some chauvinism. I've got pronounced views on women. They're very useful but they have their place.” And he thought that? “Oh, I'm sure he did. When he died, his brother sent me a twelve page letter telling me what a rotter my father had been.”

David was left alone with his mother and his siblings in the village of Ongar, in Essex. She rose them alone, making money by drawing sketches for the Radio Times. I ask how she explained that their father didn’t return. “Oh, I take always with a pinch of salt what women say about how their husbands behave. I've heard equally bad stories about her having complained to the Admiralty about him, which didn't do his career any good.” Nonetheless he says she raised her four children “absolutely impeccably. She managed to get us all into public school in Brentwood.” But it was a tough wartime childhood. He says: “You're very indignant you've got no toys. Our toys were made of broomsticks and wood. My older brother John had a Hornby train, the only reason I've ever wanted to have a little boy was so I would have an excuse to have a Hornby train.”

And this is where Adolf Hitler first enters David Irving’s story.

II That Man

“I was told you don't have toys because of that man Hitler,” he says, sipping from his Aryan cup. “He was called That Man. [In the newspaper cartoons] there were Nazis parading around – Mr Hitler with his crinkly boots and little toothbrush moustache, and there was Dr Goebbels with his club foot, and fat old Goering with his medals. And I thought – because of them I've got no toys?” He snorts. “You split away from your parents at a very early age. They tell you things and you nod and say ‘yes mummy,’ but at the back of your brain you think, well, I'm probably being sold a bill of goods. You make a little mental check…. I said to myself, if they’re such ludicrous people, then why are the Germans doing it for them?”

His twin brother, Nicky, remembers David at six years old running towards bombed-out houses after a Nazi air-raid, shouting “Heil Hitler!” Irving shakes his head. “Untrue, untrue,” he mutters. His infatuation began, he says, a few years later, when he was sent away to school. He got hold of a copy of Hitler’s Table Talk, and he would read it at night, allowing himself only a few pages at a time so it would last longer. “I don't know if you've read Hitler's Table Talk, but it's [in bites of] two or three page describing in the first person what Hitler said at lunch or dinner, from 1941 to 1944,” he says. “It’s fascinating to read what Hitler was thinking. A lot of it made sense.” Like what? “Oh, about women… Women have very special minds. They are superficially similar to us and they speak a very similar language to us but they are also rather like ants. They can communicate with each other, without actually [using] a language that you can hear… More than that I'm not going to say, I've got enemies enough already.”

What could be more taboo in the Britain of the 1950s than to embrace Adolf Hitler, the man the country had united to defeat, as an alternative father-figure? It was the most absolute and shocking way to reject everything around him. “I was beaten solidly throughout [school]. It was a very sadistic process… Our house master was the gym teacher, which meant he was very muscular… There was an umbrella stand with ten different bamboo canes of different calibre with a cushion next to it, which he would try them out on first” – he makes a repeated thrashing noise – “and he would say right come with me, follow me.” It was ritualised, I say. “Oh, absolutely, it was sadistic. And I wouldn't have missed it.”

When he was in his mid-teens, he won a school prize. He could choose a book to be presented to him on Speech Day by the Deputy Prime Minister, Rab Butler. Irving asked for Mein Kampf. “I arranged for all the local press to photograph the deputy prime minister giving a copy of Mein Kampf to Brentwood schoolboy David Irving,” he says with glee. “I stood there holding the book up long enough for all the people to get their focus and flash and I sat down. I looked at the book and it wasn't Mein Kampf, it was a German-Russian technical dictionary. They got their own back.”

After Brentwood he went to Imperial College, London to study science, but he believes he was thwarted by a “Communist” professor and had to drop out. He headed for Germany. “I was the only foreign labourer in the whole of the Ruhr,” he says. Working in the steelworks, he began to hear whispers of another taboo. “Dresden was a word which just didn't exist in the English vocabulary then,” he says. But the Germans told him their city – filled with civilians, with little military role – had been firebombed by the Allies. “The whole of the city centre was cordoned off while they were cremating the bodies, ten thousand at a time on the city square,” Irving says, shaking his head.

So he wrote his first history book, a densely researched account of the firebombing of Dresden. Suddenly he was an up-and-coming historian, acclaimed across continents. But he remained within the historical consensus: the book condemns Nazi atrocities. When I remind Irving of this now, he says these passages were inserted into the book without his knowledge. “My publisher William Kimber… felt very deeply about the Dresden air raid and he put in certain lines into my Dresden book without telling me. Okay?” He only realised this, he insists, “years later.” I must look incredulous. You didn’t see the proofs? “No.” Why would he do that? “Political correctness. Don't raise your eyebrows in great shock, this happens. You'd be surprised if you knew how many people have a hand in a book before it's finally published, lawyers, publishers, editors' sisters and wives.” Ah yes, women.

By telling the story of Dresden from the perspective of the Germans, he suddenly found another door opening – to Hitler’s ghost.

III The Magic Circle

Scattered across Germany, silent and shamed, were Hitler’s secretary, his personal guard, his doctor. They were, he says, “a small circle of very frightened people who had had a very tough time. When one of them [died], they would meet at the graveside.” They had never spoken to anyone. Irving was the first outsider to penetrate this “Magic Circle”. Otto Gunsche had been Hitler’s personal adjutant, the man who burned his body at the end – and he liked the Dresden book. After a series of meetings, he led Irving to the rest.

“They were all very nice people,” he says. “This was something that impressed me from day one – these are people who've been to staff college, they've been to university, they're educated, upper-middle class people, chosen for their qualities and their abilities… and they all spoke to me in private in terms of glowing admiration of the Chief. And I thought to myself – there must be two Hitlers, there's the Hitler we're told about by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and there's the Hitler that these people worked for.”

They told him about a Hitler who was kind to children and animals. He recounts a very long story about how Hitler once noticed that two stenographers were cold, and insisted they be brought heaters.

When I suggest that all dictators have a loyal clique who like them – it means nothing – he keeps dodging the question. Eventually, he responds by arguing dictators are often misjudged: Idi Amin gets a unfair press, for one. Irving says he owns a medallion that belonged to the Ugandan dictator, and he likes to wear it secretly below his clothes when he is delivering a lecture. But, I respond, he ethnically cleansed the Ugandan Asians. He shrugs: “Expelling people is something that's been going on for a long time.”

From within Hitler’s circle, Irving began to develop an elaborate theory that “the Chief” was innocent after all. After the barrage of unanswerable evidence presented at his trial, Irving now concedes that the Holocaust happened – and there were “some” gassings at Auschwitz – but he insists Hitler had no idea it was going on. It was orchestrated by the evil Joseph Goebbels and his staff. They deliberately hid it from Hitler, because he was “the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich.”

Eva Braun “suckered him”, and Goring made him look anti-Jewish when, in fact, by 1938, Hitler “wasn’t anti-semitic at all.” Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic? "If you look at his career, both in detail and in general, Hitler was the person who protected the Jews,” he continues. “But he was repeatedly outsmarted by the Heinrich Himmlers, the Martin Bormanns.” When I start listing Hitler’s many genocidal rages against Jews, he says he was just “playing to the gallery.” Of course, to maintain his view that Hitler knew nothing, he has to tamper with historical documents – changing words, and deliberately ignoring all the contrary evidence, as was shown ad nausem at the trial. I am more interested in teasing out why Irving should contort himself to believe this.

If a raddled, aged Adolf Hitler appeared at your door now, what would you say to him? “I would switch on my tape recorder.” And after you had heard everything he had to say, would turn him in? “Then I would base my decision on what he told me he had done and I would adopt a very harsh measure on that. In the case of Herman Goerring, for example… a lovely, enjoyable buffoon but he was undoubtedly a hanging case. He committed murders, and in my mind if you commit one murder you're for the rope.” So you think it’s conceivable that Adolf Hitler could not have committed even one murder? “With his own hands?” No, not with his own hands. He goes off on a long side-track about how Winston Churchill did kill people with his bare hands. I have to drag him back to Hitler. “Oh, he's technically responsible, he's constitutionally responsible, but what interests me… [is] you find out again and again he's been duped, he's been duped by Eva Braun, he's been duped...”

The last time he saw his mother, she disowned him because of this Hitler-love. She had come to visit his new baby, Josephine, and she was sitting with the child when Irving tried to read her a passage from one of his books. In revulsion, she asked: “What is this viper I've nurtured to my bosom?” Irving says: “She wasn't interested and I said, ‘You just want to play with Josephine, you don't want to listen to what I'm [saying], you've just never been interested in anything I've done, have you!’ Afterwards you kick yourself that those are the terms you have parted company for ever.” But still he cannot stop. He says: “One hundred years from now Hitler will get a very decent hearing. Not so much his underlings.”

IV The Enemy

There were no Jews in the village where David Irving grew up, and he used to think there were none at his school. “But let me tell you a horrible little anecdote…” he says, leaning forward. “Immediately after the Lipstadt trial I flew to Florida so they couldn't touch me… On the plane a man came down the aisle towards me, and said ‘You're David Irving aren't you?’ I said no you're mistaken, and he said ‘I know you're David Irving, and I know why you're denying it.’ I said no you don't. Whoops!” But when he got to Florida, the man told him angrily: “I know who you are! I went to school with you and you made life unbearable for me and another Jew. I was a boy at Brentwood school, you called us filthy little yids, you screamed at us!”

Irving looks bemused as he recounts this story. He assured the man there were no Jews at his school, and he must be mistaken. But he was so shaken he got the man’s name from the checkout desk. (He claims the airline staff reassured him: “Them Jews, them Jews, they all want to have suffered.”) He checked with his old school and “I got all the details. He was a year behind me, two years behind me. Well, I don't know if you know anything about public school, but you never, ever, ever speak to boys in the year, or two years behind you. They don't exist, they are lower than low. No way would I have spoken to him.”

This story is, to Irving, yet more evidence of Jewish wickedness. He offers the old racist rote: the Jews organised “most” of the wars of the twentieth century, and sneer at “the goyim.” Who were the first Jews you knew? “At university. Mike Gorb. He was my flatmate in Kensington, very, very nice guy.” He is now uncontactibly dead, after a mountaineering accident. “John Blok, he was a kind of mentor for me at the university… Jaqueline Gross we employed and she was very nice, very jolly girl and she thoroughly enjoyed working for us. That was in 1982 or 1983 or something.” He insists these Jews were nice people – but when at a lecture a few years ago a Jewish man asked him if he was saying the Jews brought Auschwitz on themselves, he responded: “The short answer is yes.”

How were Mike and John and Jacqueline bringing on their own gassing? He shifts in his chair. “I know that I'm not liked and I know why I'm disliked and I know what I could do to become instantly liked. The Jews have never asked themselves, so far as I can see, over the last three thousand years why they are not liked.” But there is a vast literature by Jews trying to figure out why anti-Semitism happens. He backs off for a second. “I'm not familiar with Jewish literature, because I don't read it. But do they ever reach an objective and useful conclusion?” he asks ingenuously. Plainly is a mass hysteria, like the witchcraft craze – a long, mad search for a scapegoat. “Maybe you're right, I hope you're right, but then why would holocausts happen, why would the German people have turned a blind eye?” he says. When I don’t respond immediately, he exclaims: “Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha!”

Do you think every persecuted group in history brought it on themselves then? Did the “witches” cause their own murder? “Indirectly, yes, by not creating a society in which this wouldn't, couldn't happen.” I run through a long list of persecuted groups in history, and finally come across a few he thinks were just the victims of “mass hysteria.” So couldn’t anti-Semitism be a mass hysteria? “No.”

He believes Jews are responsible for their own persecution because they do not “police their own community,” and begins talking about the fraudster Bernie Madoff as an example. He believes Jews let him get away with it – even though a preposterously small proportion of Jews could possibly have been aware of his crimes. So if your Jewish researcher or your Jewish flatmate was to be killed by anti-Semites, they would be responsible because they didn't stop Madoff? “Or the Madoff of their days, yes.”

He seems incapable of seeing Jews as individuals for long. The faces of Mike and John and Jacqueline soon disappear into the amorphous monstrous mass existing only in his mind known as The Jew, which – intriguingly – suffers from many of the characteristics Irving’s critics ascribe to him: it is attention-seeking and greedy and brings about its own destruction.

Yet he insists that, like his Hitler, he is only saying this for the Jews’ own good. “I'm a great friend of them… I'm saying this in their own interest. I'm trying to stop it happening again, whether it's in America or wherever else the Jews flee to. They don't recognise the fact that it's just possible that they are the architects of their own misfortune, to use that wonderful phrase. They are so arrogant, they won't accept this. Every time some rich Jew dies, [they say in his obituaries he was] the noted philanthropist. He won't go down in history as being a noted philanthropist, he'll go down in history as being a Jew, and the non-Jews see the Jews and say ‘well how have they made all their money? From us.’ And that's one reason to dislike them. It's human nature.”

There will, he reckons, probably be another Holocaust in thirty years, when we realise we have been conned. Oh, and if the Jews are lucky, there will be a David Irving or an Adolf Hitler there to protect them.

V Josephine

In a box in the corner of this room, there sits the ashes of a girl Hitler would have murdered. It is Irving’s eldest daughter, Josephine. Like in a moralistic Victorian parable, this Hitler-devotee ended up with a severely disabled daughter – and I want to know how he dealt with the dissonance.

“In 1981 she became schizophrenic and it was a terrible shock for us,” he says, his voice dropping from its confident strut. She had been getting into trouble at school for a while, but Irving assumed it was normal teenage turbulence until one day she left an exam and walked home. She told her father: “Oh, the devil was sitting in the road just in front of me.” Irving looks into the middle distance. “You hear your own daughter saying things like that and it begins to become very frightening. You don't realise what's going on.” A Harley Street doctor diagnosed her with latent paranoid schizophrenia. “It is not curable. It can be treated, but for the benefit of the rest of society,” he says. “My wife vanished for three months. She couldn't take it, left me with the children to look after. I can't begrudge her that, it was a terrible shock and it took a long time to sink in.”

He remembers walking with Josephine on the anniversary of her diagnosis, and he said she had been ill for a year “She turned those blue eyes to me and she said, ‘Oh no daddy, I've been ill for many more years than that.’ Imagine your oldest daughter saying that… For the next 18 years she struggled with this appalling affliction which got worse and worse. She heard these voices which speak with enormous compulsion. The voice that tells you to stand back from the edge of a platform as an express train rattles through, with equally the same cohesion tells schizophrenics to do the exact opposite.”

In 1996, he tried to commit suicide by hurling herself from a building, and ended up “a complete cripple”, as Irving puts it, with a broken back and both her legs amputated. She secretly married another seriously disabled man who “had a bad, bad brain,” but after three years, she attempted suicide again – this time successfully. The hospital staff, he says, told him “she must have been a very determined suicide indeed to pull herself out of a window, a fifth floor window, in that condition.” Their son is now grown up, and fighting in Afghanistan.

He says the experience has changed him. “I find myself becoming a lot more human towards people who have a disability…. Now if I find a Down Syndrome child or someone a paraplegic or somebody with some other obvious disability wheeled past me I will go out of my way to go over to them, to smile, to say hello because you realize that they are humans too.”

You do realize, I say as gently as I can, that Hitler would have killed Josephine? “Yes, Hitler had one of his own cousins killed, this is one of the appalling things.” He then quickly goes off on another tangent, talking about a radio programme he was once on, and I have – for once – to draw him back to the Hitler. I can almost see the conflict within him, as he veers back and forth from admitting Hitler did something wrong. “Hitler had the very best of reasons, if I can put it very oddly like that.”

He claims the first case of euthanasia authorized by Hitler was of “a child who had been born hideously disfigured in some way, and the doctors and the parents wanted to put the child down for its own sake… That was the kind of reasoning behind it, and then [Karl] Brandt [Hitler’s physician] came to Hitler and said of course this isn’t the only case, there are many many more cases like this, but this was the foot in the door. [It] provided a lawful basis for termination of people who were medical misfits and it became ever wider. When war broke out people said well, we need the hospital beds now for people who really need them, and gradually the field became broader and broader.”

And so he concedes with a sigh: “Had we been in Nazi Germany then Josephine would have been swept up in that procedure.” But then he adds quickly, in a sentence that uncharacteristically dissolves into meaninglessness: “Except of course that we now have drugs” to treat schizophrenia, “so I am not sure that [Hitler] would have [killed her] because, as I say, just at the end, by that time the drugs would have been there which would have made it possible to...” He stops and collects his thoughts.

“The way the Nazis did it was always in the nicest possible way,” he says at last. “The parents were told ‘oh she has succumb to pneumonia’, something like that. [It was] evil with good intentions.” Where were the good intentions? “The parents would not have been told.” But the child would know that they were being killed, and the parents would still have a dead child. “I don’t know, it is very difficult when you get into these fields, a what-if, a hypothesis.” It’s hardly a wild what-if: it happened to tens of thousands of real people just like you. He is silent.

So you really think the murder of people exactly like your daughter was an act committed “in the kindest possible way”? “Oh, I am quoting that television gentleman… what is he called… he crossed his legs all the time and wore a beard.” Kenny Everett? “Kenny Everett. I’m, uh, just quoting his catchphrase. The Nazis did these things, but they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it, they did it in a concealed way so that parents only later on found out to their horror what had actually happened.” Does that make it any less horrific? He clams up. “I think this argument is so stilted I don't want to get entwined in it.”

He looks over at the ashes, and then looks down, speechless for the first time in our interview.

VI Silenced

In 1989, Austria’s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said publicly: “Should Irving ever turn up here again, he’ll be locked up immediately.” His lectures had breached the country’s laws banning denial of the Nazis’ crimes and rebuilding a Nazi movement – and the punishment ran to twenty years in jail. Yet in 2006, Irving chose to return to the country, knowing there was a warrant out for his arrest. Was he seeking a confrontation? He shakes his head. “No, but I was prepared for it… I can't allow people to silence me forever. One day I shall have to go back to Germany. I have to continue research there, but I'm banned from Germany. I can't allow people to silence me or to stop my research.”

He was put on trial, and blames his conviction on the fact the fact that eight members of the jury were “stolid, slab-featured, middle-aged Viennese Hausfrau type women, with a bus-stopping range of perhaps a hundred yards or more.” But prison, he insists, was wonderful. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he says, pushing out his chest. He says it’s great for a writer to have all the distractions shut out. He quotes Evelyn Waugh approvingly: “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”

But is this true? This was the first time he was forced into close contact with black people, a group he believes are inferior. He says America used to have a “nicely stratified system, with the white on top followed by the coloureds followed by the blacks and the slave labour on the bottom,” until the Jews decided to shake it up with the wicked civil rights movement. Yet he says he made friends with a “young Black” called Momo, and with “lots of them. There were Africans in the prison from Nigeria of course. I suppose it's even racist to say of course, but I mean the Nigerians, blacks are going to be largely criminal. I spoke most of their languages, French or Spanish or whatever and so they came to me.”

In his new book about his time in jail, ‘Banged Up’, he describes an odd incident in which he “accidentally” drank detergent, saying he mistook it for lemon juice. Did you try to kill yourself? “Lord good Lord no!” he says with a great forced guffaw. “No, I would never commit suicide. Suicide is partly congenital like alcoholism. If you want to be an SS officer, which probably you don’t...” – he laughs – “one of the forms that you had to fill in looks at if there is a history of suicide in your family or a history of alcoholism then that is a black mark.” He then describes an elaborate scenario in which detergent and lemon juice became interchangeable.

As I get up to leave, his daughter Paloma, who is visiting from Madrid, wanders in. She asks our photographer nervously: “Did he behave himself?” Irving takes me around the house for one last time, proudly pulling himself up the stairs. He was declared bankrupt in 2003 – so how does he afford this gorgeous house? “I'm not going to talk about money very much, but I have an income.” I heard you were supported by a Saudi prince. “I tried it, oh I tried it,” he says. He claims that in 2003 Prince Salman Fahd – son of the Saudi king, and then Interior Minister – promised him £800,000, just before he died of a sudden heart attack. “I would say eighty percent of my income comes from the United States… It's very enjoyable showing that despite every effort the enemies make to smash me, provided my heart holds out, then I'm okay. I can survive.”

VII The scamp

As we stand by the Christmas tree, with the door open and the cold wind blowing in, I wonder –does David Irving believe what he says? Does he actually think Adolf Hitler ordained him as his defender when he was just a toddler in Essex? His twin brother, Nicky, has said: “I’ve never been entirely convinced that, deep down, David really holds these ridiculous views. It’s possible that he was simply doing what we did when we were children – anything to get attention. It’s almost a sickness with him.” His former partner Bente agrees: “I never really felt he believed a lot of it. I still don’t really. He enjoys being provocative. He’s an extraordinary attention seeker, always has been.” Is he just swinging the lantern, like his father?

He laughs at this suggestion. “I am a scamp, yes a scamp,” he says. “Ever since school. I like to have one piece of mischief on every page I write so you go to turn the page and are thinking, well, what was that page about?” And he closes his eyes tightly in the freezing air. For one moment, it seems as though he is back at Brentwood School, asking for a copy on Mein Kampf for speech day, and thinking all this – all this hate, and all this hard work to rehabilitate the worst genodical killer of the twentieth century – is only a jolly, jolly jape.

For a forensic rebuttal of the holocaust denial myths, go to http://remember.org/History.root.rev.html

An Orwell Prize Winner in his twenties, Johann Hari is a model of what aspiring young writers can become. He startedb writing for the New Statesman soon after leaving university and by the age of 23 had a twice-weekly column in The Independent.

Despite his rise, he is cautious in his understanding of what someone in his position can achieve. He speaks, in our quiet Aldgate café, of two types of political columnists: those "who think they're talking to politicians and ones who think they're talking to the readers."

He recounts a story of former Times columnist Antony Jay: "A reader wrote to him and said, ‘I didn't understand what you were saying,' and Jay wrote back to him - ‘Since you're not the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Governor of the Bank of England it doesn't matter whether you understood what I was saying. It wasn't written for you.'"

So Hari understands that to effect change, he must persuade readers and put them in touch with pressure gorups. "Some of the things that I say aren't things you'd normally read in a newspaper. A lot of times people write to me and say ‘Oh I'm so glad, I thought I was mad for thinking like that but actually now I realise it's quite a rational thing to say'."

But in the era of podcasts and blogs, is his role as a traditional newspaper columnist under threat? Not only are newspapers seeing their circulation and profits drop, but their authority as the nation's news-breakers is being cut away by every internet exclusive.

He claims not to be worried by the financial future of the press: "I cannot make newspapers more economically viable than they are. So, I don't spend a huge amount of time sweating about it".

Hari is combative regarding the relative quality of new and print media: "When blogs first began I thought they would be like columns: with a fairly rational argument. I thought the medium they would most resemble would be column writing. Actually I think the medium they have ended up most resembling is talk radio. It's consumed in small bursts and there's a premium on aggression, shouting and being more extreme than the last person. There are some excellent intelligent bloggers but they are a minority."

He bemoans the declining standard of Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips' writing: "People who actually write blogs are quite atypical of your readership, but someone like Nick Cohen gets congratulated for his most right wing views by bloggers, so he will air them more and more and get more and more positive comments, and slip further and further away from reality. You imagine they are your readers, when in fact they are a tiny, tiny proportion of your readers, and the maddest wing of them. But it's like a sort of electronic circle jerk, where you get trapped in it."

True newspapers boast not only quality control but also the willingness to pay to send writers across the world to report, something Johann recently did in Bangladesh. His experience of the impact of climate change left a deep impression. He talks of seeing trees emerging from the sea where just two years ago there were houses. "The biggest island in Bangladesh has lost half its mass in the last decade".

A creative analogy demonstrates the nature of the threat and the imperative to deal with it: "Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that Osama bin Laden had a machine that could flood some of the most important global cities, make the oceans more acidic, cause the ice caps to collapse and drown Bangladesh.

"Then we'd do everything we possibly could to stop Osama bin Laden from using this machine. We are that machine. We are doing that. But somehow it's not personified in the form of an enemy. If it's all of us doing incrementally it's much harder to deal with."

He mentions Bill McKibbin, an American environmentalist author who explains human inability to deal with climate change as a function of evolution: we are not evolved to think that "we do the weather to ourselves".

Our conversation moves on to another man-made disaster, according to Hari, the ‘War on Drugs'. Opposition to drug prohibition crosses traditional ideological lines, including libertarians and conservatives. Hari, a self-proclaimed social democrat, is another joining the calls for legalisation.

"There was a great line of Milton Friedman, not someone I'd normally quote approvingly: ‘Drug addiction is always a tragedy for the individual addict but drug prohibition makes it a tragedy for the whole society'. Drug prohibition causes more problems than drug addiction. It doesn't actually stop very much drug addiction.

"We know that in the US when, in the 1970s, they decriminalised cannabis in three states, cannabis use did not go up, it stayed the same. We also know that countries that are the most prohibitionist, like the US and Britain, have more drug addicts than liberal countries like the Netherlands."

But this is an issue in which the actual words used by those advocating reform are working against them. "If you look at the opinion polls, in the Daily Mirror for example, the word ‘legalisation' gets very little support. If you ask people if they support legalisation about 10-20% of them do.

"If you ask them ‘Do you think drugs should be taken away from criminal gangs and handed to off-licenses and pharmacists?' about 80% of people say yes. So I think the word ‘legalisation' has a certain contamination around it. Which is unfortunate."

Consistent in his other views, Hari has radically changed his mind on the Iraq War. In the months leading up to the invasion, he was one of a number of left-leaning writers who supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. But almost six years later, he regrets his initial position.

"What I got horrifically wrong and should have known in advance, as some people did, was that because the American invasion was motivated primarily by a desire to monopolise the oil resources it would be an occupation that was run in the interests of the oil resources, not in the interests of the Iraqi people.

"If you look at what happened in Venezuela, another country I've reported on, a year before the invasion they [the US] supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected President, because he was trying to control the oil supply himself, and use the profits not for American multinationals but to enrich people in the barrios [slums]. So I should have looked at evidence like that."

In abandoning and apologising for his pro-war position, Hari has parted company with Christopher Hitchens, the man whom he credits with inspiring him to become a journalist after his denunciatory ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice' was published in 1995. "I remember being absolutely exhilarated by it and thinking ‘well I want to do this.'"

Hari's secularism is as strident and assertive as that of Hitchens. "70% of the British people never attend religious ceremonies. But the people who are religious are very concentrated. 70% of British people think faith schools should be abolished, but the 30% who support them really really fucking support them and if the faith school is shut down will go crazy and lobby and hold protests.

"Whereas the 70% who are against them are just mildly against them because they've got better things to do with their lives because they're not superstitious lunatics."

With his witty writing and combative agenda, Johann Hari shows us that real, traditional column writing is alive and well.

The first time Billy Bragg – the deep-red singer of socialist anthems – held up the English flag on stage, the crowd hissed. But the rock star who spent the 1980s championing the miners and a socialist Nicaragua wanted them to cheer. He said to his fans, “I know what you’re thinking. But we have got to take back the symbols of our country.” And so he sang a song: a patriotic English anthem he had written that ended with the words, “Oh my country, oh my country, what a beautiful country you are.”
o
“When I came off stage, my mates said to me – you’re taking the piss, right?” he says in that famously flat voice that nonetheless vibrates with sincerity. “But I’m not. I do love this country. I want to get to the point where people see the flag on the back of a white van and don’t think the worst.” Today, Billy Bragg is trying to write the soundtrack for another England.

“For years, we’ve allowed racists to hijack our national symbols,” he says, swigging black coffee in a West End hotel on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. We may, he warns, be about to feel the consequences with a dull thud. “There is a strong chance the British National Party are going to win a seat in the London Assembly on May 1st,” Bragg says. “They are led by a man who questions the veracity of the Holocaust. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m against anybody's who's willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Adolf Hitler. It's a total insult to that generation who fought so hard against the Nazis.”

“It’s time to repossess our national symbols,” he says. You can’t do that from your armchair. You’ve got to go out and do it.” That’s why he has organised an alternative St George’s Day celebration at the Barbican Centre.

“Where was St. George born?” Bragg asks, leaning forward. “The Middle East. Our patron saint is a migrant worker. He’s come here looking for work because he can do the patron saint job cheaper and better than the rest of us. Before the Medieval period, it was done by Edward the Confessor. But Old Edward was undercut by St George, a man was born in Lebanon. He was picked up in the Middle East and brought back here by the Crusaders and we’ve had him ever since.”

Bragg was born at the far end of the District Line, in Barking, into the white working class, in 1957. His father worked in a warehouse. He grew up with “no telly, no phone, no car, no inside bathroom.” He was sent to the local secondary modern, where everyone was being packaged to work at the Ford plant in Dagenham, and skulked away when he was 16. Today his only brother is a bricklayer, and his mother still lives in the house they grew up in. But this is also is a history layered – as every British family’s is, when you delve into it – with immigration. His great-grandfather came here across the water from Italy, and lived here forty years without learning a word of the language. “Yet his children and grandchildren loved and fought for this country.”

He smiles. “But partly because we – the left – have backed away from anything to do with nationalism, people don’t know our real history.” They don’t know about the great egalitarian traditions of England, stretching from the Peasant’s Revolt to the Levellers to the Battle of Cable Street. This, he says, is the England we should wave the flag for. “I love the strong tradition we have of holding those in authority to account, which stretches right back to Magna Carta and the Reformation, and came to a head – no pun intended – in 1649. Until we did it, there was no document like Magna Carta. There was no moment in European history prior to us chopping off the King's head where the people showed they were the real sovereigns. We have to prove that these episodes mean as much to us as the Battle of Trafalgar does to the traditionalists.”

But instead, we have been served up a national story that fetishises “monarchy and authority and hierarchy, all the stuff designed to keep people like me and immigrants in our place.”

He wants to stir a renewed English identity built on “space, not race.” He is trying to make the places of this island echo with as many musical resonances as the dancing-in-the-streets American landscape. He once rewrote the song ‘Route 66’ to be about the A13, the duel carriageway that runs from London to Southend-on-Sea. He rewrote his hero Woody Guthrie’s most famous song, singing: “This land is your land/ This land is my land/ From the coast of Cornwall/ To the Scottish Highlands.” It's a nationalism that avoids all the ugly old competitiveness: you love your slice of land, and you expect other people to love theirs.

As he talks, I realize one of the disconcerting things about Bragg. In an industry made entirely from artificial sweetener, he is organic – unprocessed, and entirely uncynical. Billy Bragging is the opposite of bragging: his sincerity slices through our sneering culture. He expects us to give a damn. It is as if Bruce Springsteen and Tony Benn had a love-child, and it is singing about us.

As an earnest man, Bragg has a twitching nose for phoniness. That morning, he appeared on Andrew Marr’s morning programme, and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told him he loved his music. “Him and Cameron claim they loved the Jam and the Clash,” he says. “It’s all lies. I can spot a Tears For Fears fan a mile off. I bet they spent the eighties singing along to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’”

There is an important story to tell, he says, about the working class England that was his womb, and why it is angry. It is a story about the failure to build council houses; the failure to provide good public services; and the spiralling inequality “which has got even worse under ten years of a Labour government, incredibly.” The story should end with solutions true to the best English traditions, not least “a higher minimum wage for everyone” and “more council housing.”

But that is not being offered. In the absence of stirring ideologies, some of his old schoolmates are falling back on the worst tribal instincts. “I'm loathe to refer to BNP voters per se as racists,” Bragg says. “There are racists among them, but in my experience they are people who might be better described as cynics, who have given up on mainstream politics. Labour has always delivered for the people of Barking, but in the last ten years they haven't. So [some people are] looking to lash out, and the BNP are the bluntest object they can find.”

He says the short-term solution is simple. “Vote. Vote. The BNP rely on a low turn-out. They can only get in if most of us stay at home.” And when you do, he adds, you should bear in mind that Boris Johnson has been endorsed by the BNP. “That word he used about black kids, ‘piccanninies’ – it’s from Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. The one where he said the black man would have the whip hand. Boris knew that association. It’s shameful.”

The long term solution, he says, is to take back Englishness. And it is England he is talking about: Britain, he says, is “just an economic union that’s past his sell-by date”. He recently sang: “Take down the Union Jack,/ It clashes with the sunset./ And put it in the attic/ with the Emperor’s old clothes.”

Where did this stirring to reimagine England come from? As a child, his father, Dennis, read him history books, giving him a sense that their suburban frontier-land between Essex and London was filled with the ghosts of English history. But by the time he entered his twenties, Billy had sloughed off nationalism, finding it distasteful and reactionary.

Today, Bragg is nearly as old as his father ever got to be. Billy is 51; Dennis died of lung cancer at 53. Are you rediscovering your father’s passions as you overtake his dying-age? For the first time, his long tumbling sentences stop. “He knew he was dying for eighteen months,” he says slowly. “When he went to hospital and had the operation, they told me and mum that the best way to deal with it was to not talk about it. So we never talked about it.”

Never? “Even when he was being injected with morphine. Even when he was seeing hallucinations in the room. Even when I was having to shave him because he was too weak to do it. We just never talked about it.” Not once? “Never. I can’t believe I’m saying it either. We just acted like it wasn’t happening. I was only seventeen, I didn’t know any better.” Is returning to English history a way of returning to him?

For the only time in our interview, he changes the subject. He says he knows that distilling Englishness will always be impossible. “Top of my list of things I love about England would be Marmite,” he says, “Well, that’s lost me half the neighbourhood straight away.” He laughs. And in his anarchic, uproarious laugh at our utter inability to define England, I feel a little ripple of love for my country.

I recently interviewed Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate for mayor of London, about the current street-by-street struggle for the job. I also spoke to his main opponents: Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. It was for the gay magazine Attitude, so we focused on gay issues - but I think the approach and philosophy of the three candidates that emerged from the conversations is revealing for all Londoners.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire. We now make up fifteen percent of this swirling, whirling world city’s electorate – so we can currently watch the candidates for Mayor of London ply us with electoral poppers in a bid for our support.

It’s a decision with hefty consequences. The Mayor controls the Metropolitan Police – the people who keep us safe. He controls the city’s transport system, and he sets policy for global warming – essential in a city as vulnerable to flooding as London.

The cast of leading candidates in this race is like a surreal reality TV roster: we have a left-wing veteran of the old gay rights battles, a tousle-haired Tory, and the most senior gay policeman in British history, all competing for our votes.

Brian Paddick has been breaking pink ceilings for his entire career. He rose to be the most senior openly gay police officer in British history, and today he is the Liberal Democrat candidate for the mayoralty. He has taken some poisonous homophobic smears: he was dubbed ‘the Camp Commander’ by one anti-gay pundit (even though he isn’t camp in the slightest) and had to put up with an eight page kiss-and-tell in the Mail on Sunday. But he’s still standing, and today he pledges it will be “payback time” for gay people with the police if he wins.

JH: Why should gay Londoners vote Paddick?

BP: Because I'm a born and bred Londoner, I'm passionate about London. I'm not a politician. I listen to people. I've proved that I can be trusted. And I'm gay!

JH: What are the issues specific to gay people you’d be dealing with as mayor?

BP: Crime is an issue for everybody but it is particularly an issue for the LGBT community - not just in terms of homophobic crime, but because we like to party, and I've lost count of the number of friends who've come out of the Shadow Lounge a little bit the worse for wear at two o'clock in the morning and have been mugged and marched round to the cash point at knife point. You know, we went through decades of being targeted by the police. It's pay back time. It's time that they started paying attention to the real issues that we face as LGBT people and started delivering the sort of service we should quite rightly expect from them.

JH: You were the most senior gay police officer in British history. How would you go about making sure the police deliver for gay people?

BP: There's been a charge in the law so that the mayor can now chair the Metropolitan Police Authority, which holds Metropolitan Police to account, decides the budget, sets the priorities and is involved in the selection process for commissioner - so there is a real hand-on role there.

JH: Is there still a homophobic culture in the police force?

BP: The Gay Police Association since last year had a twenty 25 percent increase in the number of calls from police officers who have been subjected to homophobia. This is still a live issue. At the moment if you as a victim of a homophobic attack or same sex domestic violence and you dial 999 you don't know whether you're going to get a good deal or not - it depends which police officer turns up. What the police have got to realise it's not like going to the supermarket: if you don't like Tesco, you can go to Sainsbury's. The police are the police and that means whoever it is who turns up on your doorstep, you should be able to trust them to deal with you appropriately. That ain't the case at the moment.

JH: Should gay people be worried about Boris, particularly his views on Section 28, and so on?

BP: He has not proved his credentials as far as the LGBT community is concerned and when he has endorsements from people like Peter Stringfellow who describes him as a red blooded male. You look at his history, the sort of things he's said about not just about gay people but about other minorities, then I think people should be concerned about what his real attitude is towards the LGBT community.

JH: Like describing black people as “pica ninnies” with “watermelon smiles”?

BP: Piccaninnies, yes. What Boris' PR people are doing is spinning like mad and trying to keep him out of trouble, trying to stop him saying the sort of things you've described. What Londoners have got to realise is they may be able to do that for four months in an election campaign, but there's no way they'll be able to keep him out of trouble for four years if he becomes mayor.

JH: Obviously Ken had until a few years ago an unequivocally glowing record among gay people, but there have been some concerns since he started palling up with Yusuf Qaradawi. What’s your take on that?

BP: He doesn't seem to be consistent in what he does and what he says. So, yes, he supported gay pride, like he supports lots of other minorities in their celebrations in Trafalgar Square – but in terms of his commitment to make a real difference to the day to day lives of minorities, then I think there is a big question mark. Surely he must realise that inviting somebody like that as a guest of his… I mean, you've got Peter Tatchell saying that for thirty years he's been an ardent supporter of Ken Livingstone but he isn't any more following what he did, then I think all LGBT people need to sit up and take notice.

JH: Would you invite someone like Qaradawi?

BP: No I wouldn't. There are plenty of other Muslim scholars who do not hold that view, who do not have such a radical view as that homosexuals should be put to death. Who can be invited to encourage more integration in London. What we don't need is people who hold such extreme views that they are likely to cause division.

JH: Have there been any homophobic attacks on you in this campaign? I haven’t seen any.

BP: I did an interview with the Islam Channel and I was asked specifically – don't you think there's going to be quite a lot of people who won't vote for you because you are gay? I said it’s funny because the previous Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Stevens, was concerned about putting me in as the Police Commander into Lambeth because of perceived homophobia amongst the Caribbean community. Fifteen months later when he tried to get me out, and the Caribbean community and the gay community and every other community in Lambeth were up in arms against the Commissioner for trying to remove me, I think he was wishing there had been some homophobia from the black community!

What I said to them was, when people realise that you're a decent guy, that you do a good job, then your sexuality quite rightly becomes a secondary issue.

JH: Bullying in schools is a big issue for gay people. What would you do about it as mayor?

BP: I was bullied for being gay at school. So I know from personal experience what that can do to you, and how isolated it can make you feel. We had an open air swimming pool in the playground at my secondary school which was only heated during the summer, and in the middle of winter, I got picked up, when I was in the sixth form, I got picked up by about half a dozen other sixth formers and carried through the playground to where the swimming pool was. They had every intention of throwing me into the water in the pool. Thankfully I was rescued by a member of staff who was patrolling the playground, stopped them from throwing me in. Then a few weeks later they tried to strip me - which was very interesting thing for alleged straight boys to do to a gay man - and on that occasion I was rescued by my twin brother. On the first occasion I managed to hold it together, but on the second occasion I went home in tears basically, even though I was seventeen at the time.

There was one other event I’ll never forget. As a police inspector you have to visit all the scenes of unexplained death, and at one there was a guy, a really gorgeous looking guy, naked, hanging from the back of a door in a flat on a council estate. And this was quite clearly a gay guy who couldn't come to terms with society's attitude towards him and presumably had nobody to turn to. It had such an effect on me to see that, it’s why I get really angry with people like [Times columnist] Matthew Paris, who on a programme to celebrate the anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality said that gay people have never had it so good. He doesn't realise that this bullying still goes on, and we were still having people being murdered on Clapham Common even a couple of years ago because of their sexuality.

It all starts at school, not just in terms of the damage that's done to LGBT people by that bullying but this insidious growth of homophobic feeling starts at school and ends up in murder.

JH: What can we practically do about this?

BP: I don't think the Mayor is vocal enough on these sorts of issues. You know, okay, he and I formed were on the lead float at Pride – Ken Livingstone, I and Shirley Bassey, or at leasta wax image of Shirley Bassey, were on the lead float of Pride, and it's all very well for him showing his support like that, but he needs to be vocal in supporting groups like Schools Out, Sue Sanders. He's very pro-Caribbean community in his rhetoric and yet he's not said a word about disproportionality in stop and search by the police. He is a superficial supporter of minority groups. When you come down to making a real difference to the day to day lives of LGBT people, then I don't think Ken's done very much.

JH: What’s your position on cruising areas?

BP: It's very important for the police to listen to what the concerns of local people are. We have had incidents of robbery and serious violence against men who have sex with men in public sex areas. Even if the police get complaints from local residents where the boys don't behave themselves as they should do, then it ought to be a case of the police working together with the local LGBT community and working with the gay media to raise those concerns with the people using those areas. We should be working in collaboration to find a solution to the problem, rather than going straight down the enforcement route.

JH: HIV rates among gay men are rising for the first time since the mid '80s. Is there something the mayor can do about that?

BP: The mayor is responsible for a fairly narrow range of things but he has tremendous influence. There is an obligation under the mayor to have a positive impact on London health generally. In my autobiography I talk about my experiences with unsafe sex and with HIV.

At a fairly low point in my life I ended up having unprotected sex with somebody. But it wasn't until after about three months that I found about by complete accident that he'd nearly died of AIDS. It was not a good time, really. It was the first Christmas Eve that I'd ever been on my own, and I couldn't get tested for a week because all the clinics were shut. Luckily they rushed it through as an urgent case, so I only had to wait two days.

There’s a younger generation who haven't lost lots of friends to HIV-AIDS and don’t understand what risks they are placing themselves at by having unprotected sex. A lot of it is to do with lack of self esteem. There are deeper issues here than simply getting a kick out of unprotected sex.

JH: That’s horrible. What can the mayor do about situations like this?

BP: I don't need to tell gay men in London how difficult it is to get an appointment at an STD clinic, or how long you have to wait if you go St Thomas' and go for the No Appointments service. And I have to say, certain high profile celebrities saying they're too scared to have an HIV test is not the message that we need to be delivering to the to the LGBT community. I have a test once a year anyway, and I'm lucky enough to be able to go private now, otherwise I'd never get it done. I remember saying to the doctor, “How long do I have to wait until I get the result?” and he said, “Oh, I'll be able to tell you as soon as I put the plaster on.” That's how quick and relatively painless it is nowadays.

JH: When did you realise you were gay?

BP: When I was eleven. That was a long time ago now, society's attitudes are different, my parents’ attitudes were very different to what my mother's is now. The only gay people you saw were very camp. I can do camp, but I'm not camp by nature. You would see Larry Grayson on the television, and you’d think – if that's what being gay is about, I think I'd rather not be. It took until I was thirty to get over it, and realise you just have to live with it – no, more than that, you can have a fantastic, fantastic time, being openly gay.

JH: Why did you marry a woman?

BP: It was an absolutely genuine attempt to play it straight. And I thought that I was determined to try at least and be happy living as a straight man. And five years wasn't a bad try. At least then I could round to my mother and say I tried that and didn't like it, so now I'm going to do this.

JH: How did you come out to your colleagues in the police?

BP: Well I had one experiment when I was a Detective Chief Inspector – you know, like Morse - I took the risk of telling my boss and the other members of the senior management team that I was gay. It was the wrong decision, big time. I was bullied by my boss, he constantly undermined my authority in the presence of subordinates, he publicly outed me in front of other staff, it was bad news, and so when I moved on to the next job, I kept quiet. The genie was out of the bottle then, and you couldn't get it back, but I certainly wasn't going to talk about my sexuality, because I had such a negative experience from being open about it. It wasn't then until I reached the level in the police that I had aspired to when I joined, Commander, that I decided to go all out - so I came out in a Saturday edition of the Financial Times.

JH: Are there lots of gay senior officers who won’t come out?

BP: Yes. After what happened to me would you come out? There have been tremendous positives from coming out as I did but I've had to put up with a lot, including a kiss and tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a Sunday tabloid, followed by weeks and weeks of regurgitation and repetition of the allegations that were made then. With Elton I belong to a small exclusive club of people who have successfully sued the Mail On Sunday.

JH: Some of the press coverage was really despicable. Richard Littlejohn was particularly vile.

BP: I took him out to dinner.

JH: Really? How could you bear to eat while look at him?

BP: I sat him down, and I said, you may think what you do is funny but there are human beings on the other end of your distorted and barbed comments. Do you realise what you are doing? He basically said, ‘I don't intend anybody to take anything I say seriously.’ Having said that, he has never written a negative word about me since. It's a bit like the racist attitude towards the black guy who lives next door- George is alright, it's all the rest of them. And it's exactly the same with Littlejohn. Except I think he's got issues with his sexuality, myself.

I once got invited to speak at a university in Minneapolis in America on the disproportionate incarceration of young African-Americans. I shared the platform with a black female judge, which is as rare as an openly gay senior police officer. What I said to the audience was there was – there’s no point being a black judge or an openly gay police officer if you behave like a straight white man. And even if every time I go to Barcode in Vauxhall, which is my local, a diary item appears in one newspaper or another saying that I have been dancing without a shirt on, that isn't going to stop me. Whether I'm mayor or not, I’m going to go on living a life as a gay man, because that's what I am andI'm very proud of that.

I recently interviewed Boris Johnson, the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, about the current street-by-street struggle for the job. I also spoke to his main opponents: Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick. It was for the gay magazine Attitude, so we focused on gay issues - but I think the approach and philosophy of the three candidates that emerged from the conversations is revealing for all Londoners.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire. We now make up fifteen percent of this swirling, whirling world city’s electorate – so we can currently watch the candidates for Mayor of London ply us with electoral poppers in a bid for our support.

It’s a decision with hefty consequences. The Mayor controls the Metropolitan Police – the people who keep us safe. He controls the city’s transport system, and he sets policy for global warming – essential in a city as vulnerable to flooding as London.

The cast of leading candidates in this race is like a surreal reality TV roster: we have a left-wing veteran of the old gay rights battles, a tousle-haired Tory, and the most senior gay policeman in British history, all competing for our votes.

Boris Johnson became famous as a columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a mop-headed panellist on Have I Got News For You. His persona – of an amiable, bumbling Old Etonian twit – disguises some canny instincts: he has risen to be the most popular Tory in Britain and is within inches of snatching the mayoralty for Ken.

But several gay groups have fretted about Boris: just a few years ago he was a strong supporter of the homophobic Section 28, ranted against “Pulpit Poofs” in his columns, and compared civil partnerships to marrying a dog.

JH: Why should gay voters choose Boris?

BJ: Just for the same reason that I hope that, all members of all communities should vote for me – because I want to bring a new eye to the government of London, which I think is out of control at the moment. I want to make a real effort to give people safety on the streets, buses, station platforms. I think it's time for a twenty first century transport system. In this capital we're not getting it.

I think the current Mayor is ideologically prevented from doing things that need to be done, and I think above all, people want housing in this city that they're not able to afford. They want beautiful new, affordable dwellings of the kind I want to encourage by being practical and less ideological about it.

JH: Are there any issues under the mayor’s remit that you think will particularly affect gay people?

BJ: I do want to have a London in which everybody feels happy and at home. I was very pleased the other day when a couple who had just had a civil partnership - or something, I always get the phrase wrong - they were going down Shaftsbury Avenue in a kind of rickshaw thing and they hailed me warmly and wished me well in the elections, and set off. I felt very pleased by that.

We are a very advanced city and we should lead the world in this kind of thing and I want to promote that and do all I can. But I don't particularly want to get into the business of devising loads of tailored policies for every particular group, because I think that starts becoming insidious. I'm not in favour of, treating people as though they belong exclusively to one set or group. People have multiple identities and everybody in this town is a Londoner and I want to treat them that way.

JH: Who were the first gay people you knew?

BJ: (Long pause). I really don't know… (Long pause.) I suppose, I suppose there were, I suppose there were loads of, I'm just trying to think… I suppose some teachers I knew must have been gay, but didn't really let on about it and didn't want to much.

JH: Many gay people would feel anxious that you supported Section 28, and just a few years ago accused the government of having “an appalling agenda of encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools”. Did you really think it was possible to teach children to be gay?

BJ: No, no, no, no, no - what's that? - the only point I was making there was that I thought that this was being introduced in a sort of… my point was about political Balkanising. It was being done to provoke people, rather than any real desire to...

Surely it wasn’t about provocation, it was about teaching children about homosexuality from a young age.

As I recall the issue was to do with compulsion. Wasn't the question [about] whether or not schools should be compelled to have [these lessons]? I thought the issue was are you compelling teachers in schools to take a particular line, and I'm not in favour of that.

JH: No, that’s not what Section 28 was. It wasn’t about compelling people to teach about anything – it was the opposite. Section 28 in practice was a ban on ever teaching about homosexuality.

BJ: I don't think that's true. I'm not against… Well, let me tell you my version. If schools want to teach homosexuality, I think they should, I think that's fine. What I'm against is any kind of compulsions on teachers to do this that or the other, and that is what, from memory, I didn't like about the repeal. There's far too much proscription already of what teachers have to say and do.

Obviously you've got to teach homosexuality, you've got to teach about gay sex in, in sex education, it's obviously vital, but, where I come in on this I'm against bossiness and telling teachers what they gotta do.

I don't understand homophobia myself, I think it's very often projection, in my view. You've got some issue going on there. Let's be honest, why else would heterosexual people be like that? Mathematically, in the great race of life, homosexual people have ruled themselves out of the competition for women, so what's to dislike?

JH: Some people also worry about what you said about gay marriage. Five years ago, you said, ’If gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.”

BJ: No, no, no, no, no, no. Nu, nu, noo. What I said, well this is what I think I said on Newsnight, or something like that, or Question Time…

JH: It’s in your book.

BJ: Oh, well I can't remember, oh, that's right. The point I'm making is I'm a libertarian on this, I think, as society evolved, taboos will go and shift. I'm not saying I'm going to do it by all means, but you know I was just making the point that things that seem unacceptable to one generation can be acceptable to the next generation. All I was doing was making a powerful point in favour of tolerance.

JH: Why were you against gay marriage at that time?

BJ: Because marriage has always been, technically defined as marriage between a man and a woman but if we are going to redefine it then that's fine by me. At the time that this question came up I was speculating about the use of the language. Is this, if we're going to call this a marriage, it means an evolution in the use of the word… and it’s fine with me.

JH: A few years ago, you referred to religious gay people as “pulpit poofs.”

BJ: No, I, well, I… I mean, pulpit poofs. Pulpit poof was admittedly a phrase that I borrowed from the Sun, I'm ashamed to say, and I did bung in [to an article], and if it did cause offence I am sorry. I think it's obviously intended in a pretty kind of jocular way and you know I hope I can be forgiven that one.

JH: Gay teenagers in London are six times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. What as mayor would you want to do to tackle that?

JH: I'm very worried about the incidence of suicide among young men anyway. Among the Turkish community there are depressingly high suicide rates at the moment. I think young men feel particularly vulnerable to changes that have happened in society, this applies to gay men, straight men, whatever, and they feel that the world has moved on in ways that they don't often understand. You know big tools, very important tools are at the disposal of the mayor, like encouraging them to get help and support for the arts. There's huge possibilities for doing better than getting kids away from gangs, make them feel happier, more confident. What really gets my goat at the moment, and infuriates me is that so much London Development Agency money is being wasted, with no proper accountability. It could be used to help kids, give them another way of thinking about themselves, give them opportunities.

JH: You’ve been very critical in the past of the idea of gay and lesbian outreach workers, using them as an example of a waste of money. But part of their remit is to deal with suicidal teenagers. Is this something you would want to peel back as mayor?

BJ: I'm not certain that you need to Balkanise society in this way. I just think we need to focus more on the needs of Londoners.

JH: Obviously one concern for gay Londoners is homophobic hate crime. What would you want to do about this as mayor?

BJ: I, I loathe and despise this kind of prejudice, I don't want to see it in London and we will make sure that we crack down with the full force of the law.

JH: Organisations like the Gay Police Association say we need to have a campaign like the one that followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence. But you were very critical of the reforms that happened at that time, comparing them to Ceausescu’s Romania.

BJ: I wasn't very critical actually. If you read the interview I did Sir William MacPherson what you'll find is the thing I really didn't like, and actually which Sir William then retracted, was was the suggestion that you could be done for thought crime in your own house. If someone reported you, sneakily, and said, ‘oy, oy, I was having dinner you know, the other day, with Johann, and, God, you should have heard him mouthing off, something rotten it was.’ And then there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night. And I thought that was a load of nonsense, and it was just no way to run a society. And I compared it to Ceaucescu's Romania, because that's exactly what used to happen in Ceaucescu's Romania, with kids being encourage to inform upon their parents.

JH: What's your attitude towards cruising areas? The Mayor seems to have had an attitude that was should effectively have quite a hands off attitude to it.

BJ: Erm… In my JCR [Junior Common Room] at university, which was a very progressive JCR, it had a rule that there could be no sexual contact of any kind, except homosexual contact. But I think what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If you're going to have measures to prevent people having sex in public they should be applicable to everyone.

I don't want to give the forces of law and order any pretext for being bullying or persecuting, but when there are going to be children about and members of the public, then I think there should be a sense of decorum. Decorum, civility, that's what I want for the streets of London, and that means people behaving themselves in public. But provided there's no public nuisance or public risk or it's not encouraging any kind of culture of criminality, then I'm in favour of tolerance, I want tolerance. If there is no risk to the public and there is no real law and issue involved and we're talking about consenting adults then it certainly would not be high on my list of priorities, no.

JH: Ken Livingstone has been criticised for meeting with the Islamic fundamentalist Yusuf al-Qaradawi. What are your thoughts on that?

BJ: I do think it's very odd that someone who preaches, someone who espouses a doctrine of promoting great gay rights should embrace a man who wants gays to be killed. I think that's incredible, and I think a stand should be taken not just from the Mayor, but from the many fantastic, thoughtful members of the Muslim community who secretly loathe all this stuff and just feel a bit nervous about speaking out about it. It would be great if they could speak out too.

JH: In the eighties, Ken said he thinks we’re all bisexual. Do you agree?

BJ: I'm a polymorphous pervert. That's what Freud would say, I don't know about Mayor Livingstone.

JH: A lot of people have an image of Eton as a hotbed of sodomy. Is that what it’s like?

BJ: To a degree I find personally insulting, it really wasn't like that for me. It didn't really work out that way.

JH: That’s a good New Tory way to end – with a regret that you weren’t sodomised at school…

(Boris laughs).

I recently interviewed Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, about the current street-by-street struggle for the job. I also spoke to his main opponents: Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick. It was for the gay magazine Attitude, so we focused on gay issues - but I think the approach and philosophy of the three candidates that emerged from the conversations is revealing for all Londoners.

Along with San Francisco, London has the largest throng of openly gay and lesbian people on earth. It is one of the few safe cities for us, sucking in gay people fleeing from a slew of homophobic holes, from Africa to China to Yorkshire. We now make up fifteen percent of this swirling, whirling world city’s electorate – so we can currently watch the candidates for Mayor of London ply us with electoral poppers in a bid for our support.

It’s a decision with hefty consequences. The Mayor controls the Metropolitan Police – the people who keep us safe. He controls the city’s transport system, and he sets policy for global warming – essential in a city as vulnerable to flooding as London.

The cast of leading candidates in this race is like a surreal reality TV roster: we have a left-wing veteran of the old gay rights battles, a tousle-haired Tory, and the most senior gay policeman in British history, all competing for our votes.

Ken Livingstone has run London twice. In the 1980s, he was the head of the Greater London Council (GLC) – and was swiftly dubbed ‘Red Ken’, in part because he spoke out so fiercely for gay rights. Long before it became a fashionable cause, Ken was arguing our corner – until Margaret Thatcher found him so politically painful she abolished the entire GLC.

Ken rose from the political grave in 2000 when he became London’s first directly-elected mayor. His first words were: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted seventeen years ago…” He stayed true to the gay rights cause, setting up the first British register of civil partnerships. So many of his gay supporters were bemused – and disturbed – when he started publicly praising and embracing an Islamic fundamentalist cleric called Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has argued that homosexuality is “a disease”. Ken even dubbed Peter Tatchell “Islamophobic” for arguing against this odd alliance. In our interview, we ask him what’s going on. This is an edited transcript.

JH: Why should gay voters go for Ken?

KL: I think we've actually one of the leading cities in the world for gay people – not quite up there with San Francisco but alongside Copenhagen, Amsterdam and so on. It's strange, because this is most probably an election where none of the main candidates is actually homophobic. I remember saying in 2000 Lesbian and Gay hustings - there isn't a candidate on this platform we've got to stop. You couldn’t be credible in London elections if you were homophobic.

In actual fact, one of the reasons why the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard never really went for me in the first two mayoral elections was because at that hustings [the then-Tory candidate] Steve Norris described [the Daily Mail editor] Paul Dacre as a fuckwit. They really hated Norris for that.

Lesbian and gay people in London should vote for me because of climate change, because of transport policy, because of what we plan to do with affordable housing, and what we've done with policing. But I would be surprised if any of the main party candidates is not broadly signed up to London's lesbian and gay agenda, They may not be very well informed about it, as with Boris, but when I think back to twenty years ago, you had Labour MPs forced to resign if they were caught cottaging. Now, I think in the Blair government it was actually a wise career-move to come out – you were more likely to get a junior ministerial post, because Blair was desperate to break with all that.

JH: What do you think are going to be the big issues for gay and lesbian Londoners face over the next mayoral term?

KL: I think the biggest single problem facing lesbians and gays in the city is bullying in schools. Schools are a place where homophobia is still completely open and acceptable. A part of that is the legacy of Section 28 - no teacher feels they can dare say anything that might be interpreted as sympathetic. We funded with Stonewall a DVD and fact-pack to go to every school to show they how they have to tackle homophobic bullying. What I'd really like to do in the third term is put a lot more money into supporting the various organisations that tackle bullying in schools.

Then there’s the issue with STD clinics. That's not specifically lesbian and gay – we think now one Londoner in ten has got chlamydia and they don't know about it – but it’s something I’m working a lot on. I was very angry with [former Health Secretary] Patricia Hewitt when she switched money from the well performing health trusts to the ones that were screwing it up, because the first thing they all did was cut the provision of health care in the community. Now people are told you can have an appointment in an STD clinic in two weeks, and a lot of young people just aren’t going to say, ‘I'm not going to have sex for two weeks.’ That’s when you see a lot of STD transmission.

I think there's a real problem also because gay people your age haven't seen this tide of death now, and people have got used to their pill regimes and all that. I think an awful lot of people are going out assuming it's not going to kill you, and they’re unaware of just how depressing it's going to be on that pill regime for the rest of their lives. It’s time we had anotehr big public health drive on this. The government's also given me a duty to try to encourage people to live healthy lives – it’s very New Labour. (Laughs).

There’s still a lot to achieve I suspect in terms of faith. For those lesbian and gay men who are actively practising a faith, I think it's a real problem. One of my disagreements with the government is that religious groups should not be given an opt-out from the gay rights legislation. It really depresses me how the Archbishop of Canterbury has moved to try and accommodate the bigots. I say – let the Church of England split and the bigots go off on their homophobic binge. We shouldn't compromise our principles on this at all. There isn't a single sentence in the New Testament, not even a single word attributed to Christ, that can be interpreted as homophobic - not one. All this stuff comes from all the Old Testament, that was written by the Mesopotamians five thousand years ago, who were not at the cutting edge of the modern world.

JH: You were one of the first champions of gay rights in British public life, long before it was fashionable. In your first incarnation running London in the 1980s you broke a lot of anti-gay taboos, and in the 1990s you set up the first civil partnership register. But you took a lot of homophobic abuse for it – people saying you were gay.

KL: It's nasty. I don't think it's any nastier than what's happening now, I'm just immune to it. It hurts your family more than it hurts you.

But you know, in 1981 when I first ran London and we lauched this pro-gay agenda, there wasn't a black reporter or an openly gay person in Fleet Street. The medium through which all of this filtered out to the public was just riddled with all the isms we were trying to challenge. I had just separated from my wife at the time, so they became obsessed about my sexuality. But I had this policy of never saying I wasn’t gay. I was always depressed when somebody would give a great speech at Labour Party conference defending gay rights and then they’d feel obliged to say, Of course, I am heterosexual.” I’d think oh god. So I wouldn’t say it.

It was hilarious because for about a year of the press desperately trying to find my supposed gay lovers, they discovered I was living with a woman. I had been doing it quite openly, but because they were looking for a man they hadn't noticed the woman at all. It was bizarre.

I first got involved in the gay rights battle in 1974 in Norwood, when there was this brilliantly over-the-top group called the Gay Liberation Front. They would ride around the constituency on a horse and they would be carried to the town hall in a coffin. A lot of people on the left said this was demeaning to the class struggle, all that stuff, but I was quite supportive as a councillor. I got a reputation for stepping in and helping on gay cases, like when a school inspector who was gay was being pressured to stand down and I helped him out. I got even more involved when this horribly reactionary judge sent a man to prison for writing a poem suggesting Christ was gay. That must have been 1976.

Obviously Section 28 was a big deal for us too. I remember knocking on doors in the 1987 election and people saying ‘I've always voted Labour, but I can't vote Labour this time because of all the lesbianism in the schools.’ This had really bitten in to popular consciousness, and it was vile. Then the election was over and the government introduced the legislation – and yet through all through the debates in Parliament, we kept saying - which schools are we talking about? Where is this supposed promotion happening? And the Tory ministers would keep saying, ‘I've left my file at home’, or ‘I read it in the Daily Mail.’ They actually passed legislation for which not a single shred of evidence could be produced to suggest that any school was promoting homosexuality.

JH: It’s a very strange idea – to believe you could make children gay.

KL: You must have seen the TV debate with Harvey Milk [the first gay mayor of San Francisco] where there's a similar thing happening in California, and he says - if kids were that impressed by role models there would be a lot more nuns around than there are today. Still nothing changes. No, that’s not true - it does change, it's not as bad as it was.

JH: What made you so different to so many men from your generation on this issue?

KL: I'm trying to think. My mother had been on the stage, so she was in a climate where lesbians and gay men were very overt and out, and she was very positive about itt. I was really lucky growing up in the 1950s because my mum was great on gay rights and my dad was great on race, and I picked up the right messages from each of them. I was doing my paper round as the Wolfenden Report was published so there was this big background debate which we weren't supposed to hear - about prostitution, homosexuality and all those reforms.

It was really opening up. In 1960 there was a film about Oscar Wilde that was so censored you couldn’t even figure out what he was supposed to have done. But by the 1960s films were coming out that were pretty open like ‘The Victim’ with Dirk Bogarde.

I reckon each generation acquires its politics as a reaction to the awfulness of the government of its day, and in my generation it was Harold Macmillan and the grassmoores. It produced this great ferment which took off in the sixties. We were always seeing films about the problems of people getting pregnant. I remember from about the age of fourteen I walked about always with a condom because I'd seen all these traumatic films that said if you have sex, the woman gets pregnant, there's an abortion, he dies, she gets forced into a loveless marriage. I had no prospect of getting laid whatsoever but I went around in the absolute terror about it. I always think when people complain about the sixties you've got to allow for the fact that it was an over reaction to the fifties.

JH: Given your record and reputation on gay rights, many gay people were shocked to see you defending Yusuf al Qaradawi, a Muslim scholar who says gay people should be killed.

KL: The question is - am I to believe what I read in the papers, or what I hear a man say for himself? I’ve been on the receiving end of the papers myself, so I tend to trust what I hear someone say. It may very well be that he different things in different countries, but when he came to City Hall, he was absolutely clear - he said nobody should physically attack homosexuals, no man should beat their wife, Jews and Christians are people of the book.

Now, any Muslim cleric has a real problem at the moment because unlike with Christianity you are not allowed to interpret the religious text, it is the absolute word of God. That’s actually where we were seven hundred years ago, which is the age difference between the two religions. When you look across a range of Muslim opinion, there's a great strand of Wahhabism which is vile and which Western governments turn a blind eye to, because we want the oil and we suck up to Saudi royal family, then there's more open people, and we need to engage with them.

Sometimes people say to me why don’t you talk to this wonderful openly gay Muslim group, and I’m sure they are great. but they don't represent hundreds of millions of Muslims and Qaradawi does. Of all the main Muslim preachers, he actually has the largest following for somebody who is arguing for engagement with the rest of the world, and opening up the religion.

No, he won’t be at the next Pride march, but my job is to engage with what represents which is the most progressive mainstream strand of Islam. To be honest until this row erupted we didn't know anything about it him. But on 9/11 even the Sun praised him, he called on Muslims to give blood, he condemned the attacks.

JH: But do you really think Peter Tatchell is homophobic for opposing him?

KL: I think there's a strand of people on the left, it's not just Tatchell, it’s Nick Cohen and Martin Bright, who have a genuine fear that we are under threat from Islam and I think they've gone over a line. I mean Tatchell's not as bad as Cohen.

This isn't unusual: if you look at the post war Labour government, under Attlee's government there were some pretty awful things going on in Northern Ireland, real abuses of the human rights of the Catholic minority, and there was a stand on the left that argued - yes, Unionists are pretty grim, but the Catholic church is worse. Actually the Catholic church as it was in the 1940s was pretty bad. It didn't justify what was being done by the RUC or the B-Specials as it then was.

Or there’s another example. With the Cohen people, all this has happened before. You got people who signed up during the Cold War as well – people who were on the left and they got totally signed up behind the Cold War agenda of Washington. The people they tried to destroy weren't Stalin so much, they focus on all these people trying to find a middle way between Washington and Moscow. They really believe you have to be on one side or the other, and I refuse to be on the side of George Bush or of fundamentalism. I want us to pursue our own middle path in London.

JH: I agree with you that Nick Cohen’s wandered off the reservation, but Peter Tatchell is a consistent critic of all religions and all human rights abuses.

KL: But don't you think he spends more time opposing the homophobia in Islam? It just seems that way. But then I’m relying on what appears in the newspapers, you know, and maybe I shouldn’t. I think there’s a parallel to the Catholic Church. The Catholic church was horrendously reactionary up until 1958. With the election of John XXIII, the whole world had a great sigh of relief. He stopped Anti Semitism, started to engage with Jews, and in his last year of his life he was starting to re-examine the position of women in the church. The world didn't say - oh, we can't engage with John XXIII because he's unsound on lesbian and gay rights, we were just over the moon that someone was forcing the Catholic church to look outward. You engage with what is the best bet, even when it’s far from perfect.

JH: Do you want to see a process where Islam becomes open to gay people, as some strains of Christianity and Judasim have?

KL: Yes, but I don't know how long it's going to take. It might take hundreds of years, it will certainly take decades, and therefore you work with those elements that pushing it in the right direction. The real difference that will make it difficult in Islam is that whereas in some other religions there is a defined leader and occasionally you get a good one who takes you in the right direction. But in Islam there is no leadership structure, there are Grand Ayatollahs, but there's no pivotal figure who lays down the law and so it might take a lign time. The one thing I am convinced of is changes are only going to come from within. Us all outside denouncing, will do no good at all and may actually be counter-productive, and so you engage with the better ones. Qaradawi is eighty now, and when he dies it's not clear who will be the main Muslim figure taking that forwards. Have you seen the stuff he’s put out about oral sex? He was the first imam to issue a fatwa about oral sex – recommending it. An imam can’t be all bad if he’s recommending oral sex.

JH: But what about these quotes from Islam Online...

KL: What eighty year old cleric is doing their own website? Give me a break, I don't think he can read it, I suspect.

JH: Okay – what about his quote, which I’ve seen him deliver on camera: “Personally I consider a homosexual to be as a drug abuser, one who requires treatment. Does anyone in their right mind consider drug abuse to be what one is born with? This is not a genetic anomaly, it is something that one acquires, and it's a disease that needs a cure.”

KL: And yet, when he was here, he said you must respect the laws, you mustn't attack homosexuals.

JH: That's not necessarily incompatible. You can say don’t kill them, but it’s a disease to be cured.

KL: As I say, you'll never get him on a gay rights march. He undoubtedly doesn't believe that it's anything other than a sin, but then on that basis I wouldn't engage with the Chief Rabbi, here, I would never meet any religious leader, and giving his current position, you couldn't meet Rowan Williams for God's sake. I assume you're an atheist? I am too. Isn't life easier?

When the Mayor of Moscow comes here, I talk to him too, and he bans gay pride marches. Given that Berlin and Paris have openly gay mayors and they were there true, it's just horrible and embarrassing. It didn't stop me lobbying him for his three votes on the Olympics, internationally. If it had gone the other way, well, then Paris would be holding the Olympics. In politics you engage with people which you have profound disagreements with, and if you can't you shouldn't be an MP or a mayor. You can't be in politics and just meet nice people you agree with. That's why I hardly ever meet anyone I completely agree with. Even amongst my own staff, who disagree with me on so many things.

JH: Should gay people be worried about Boris? He used homophobic language in the past.

KL: What's you've got to understand about Boris is that he's a hard line Thatcherite. What does Boris actually believe? When he was calling black people piccaninnies, and saying civil partnerships were like a man marrying a dog, it it never occurred to him he was going to have to run for election in London. Now he's actually repositioned himself as Ken Lite. Virtually everything I'm doing he's now broadly signed up to, whether it's cl