Johann Hari

There are days I feel like I have been a cheerleader for mass murder. More than 150,000 Iraqis have died in the war I supported. (I am including the Iraqi soldiers; they were conscripted, terrified young men, and they should not be left out of the death counts). Malnutrition among Iraqi children is up. The country is littered with carcinogenic depleted uranium shells. Human Rights Watch says human rights abuses are happening right now in Iraq, and Fallujah is a bloody pile of rubble.

I keep thinking about the people I met in Iraq before the war, and wondering if they made it through. And the question keeps recurring: is Iraq - and the wider Middle East - sufficiently better to justify all that death?

And then a coincidence of timing happens, and the arguments become clear again. Yesterday, British politics was gripped by the release of the Attorney General's legal advice. But something else was happening too: Iraq's first democratic government was formed, and the President was trying to speak to us.

Jalal Talabani is a Kurdish human rights lawyer - something of an advance on Saddam Hussein. President Talabani said, "In the eyes of a majority of Iraqis, it was you who brought us our own equivalent of VE Day. Of course, the liberation of Iraq was controversial, as all wars should be. But Saddam's war against the Iraqi people was ongoing; we have evidence which demonstrates that the regime was executing its challengers until the last day of its rule. It was that war, lasting almost 40 years, which was the true war of Iraq. It was never controversial, never discussed, simply ordered and executed by him and his thugs. Our struggle for a better, emancipated Iraq now is only possible because of the coalition of the willing."

What should matter more to us when we judge the legality and morality of this war - the advice of the Attorney General and People Like Us, or the advice of the Iraqi people and their elected representatives? For me, this has always been the central question in the rows about Iraq. Back in 2003, when it became clear there might be a war in Iraq, I thought the principle that should determine my position was pretty simple: what do the Iraqi people want? I did everything I could to find out - from visiting Iraq to traipsing around London's centres for Iraqi refugees. But it was strange to discover that most people didn't want to hear about the opinion of Iraqis. The pro-war people justified their actions on the basis of WMD; the anti-war people just assumed they had the Iraqis onside.

At every step of the way, British people acted as though the argument about Iraq was a proxy for something else: a row about American power, or about pre-emptive war, or about Tony Blair's proximity to Bush. Too many of us chose our positions on that basis, not on the basis of solidarity with Iraqis.

There was a small, perfect moment a few months ago that symbolised this refusal to listen. Tony Blair was being interviewed by June Sarpong before a hostile studio audience, and the Prime Minister was talking flatly about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. The studio was filled - rightly - with jeering. They knew there were no WMD, and they demanded to know: wasn't this war about oil, or Israel, or a raw assertion of US power post-9/11?

The row continued for five fruitless minutes, with Blair begging the audience not to question his integrity, and the audience in turn begging to know the real reasons why he went to war.

And then a small, level voice came from the front row. "I am an Iraqi," a young woman said, "and I have just come back from my country. I know this war was not about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and I know the Americans did not do this because they care about us. But all of my family in Iraq supported this war, and so did I. We did it because we knew there was no other way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Why can't you all understand that? Why can't you side with us?"

There was a long pause. The audience looked nonplussed. Nobody spoke. And then the row about WMD burst out again, furious and fiery. Everybody carried on as if the Iraqi had not spoken. Blair tried to gesture at one point towards the Iraqi woman when his WMD argument was manifestly flagging, but nobody wanted to hear.

The debate about the legality of the war is a restaging of that studio debate on a national scale. The Iraqis are trying to speak, but because what they have to say fits into neither Blair's "Get the WMD!" script nor the Stop the War argument, nobody is listening.

Here is what Iraqis have persistently said about the war, in all the opinion polls and now through their elected representatives: They wanted the invasion to proceed. (Asked the simple question "Do you think America and Britain's war against Saddam's regime was right or wrong?", 50 per cent said to YouGov it was right and only 27 per cent said it was wrong.) But like all sane people, Iraqis did not think the American and British governments had altruistic motives for invading. They thought the WMD rationale was an absurd lie, with only 6 per cent of Iraqis describing it as the motive for invasion. Some 46 per cent thought (probably correctly) it was to get access to Iraq's oil and 41 per cent thought it was to help Israel - but they still supported it, because Saddam was the alternative.

Once Saddam was gone, they wanted elections as soon as possible and for the occupation to end. They have stuck to this position absolutely consistently.

But when it comes to legality, you have to answer a basic question: who is sovereign in Iraq? If you believe the Iraqi people are sovereign, then there was no crime, because Iraqis and now their elected government say they wanted the invasion to proceed. You can't invade the willing. The problem is that currently international law does not recognise peoples as sovereign. Incredible though it seems, right up until the moment he was forced from power, international law regarded Saddam Hussein's government as sovereign.

That cannot be right, and that cannot be a law worth defending. I support the idea of international law; but protecting the sovereignty of tyrants - against the will of their people - is a perversion of the benevolent instincts that lead people to seek lawfare not warfare.

Yet still the idea gnaws at me: is the will of the Iraqi people too thin a thread on which to hang the justification for a £200bn invasion and occupation? I remain certain of one thing though: the answers to these questions will only ever come from the Iraqi people and men like Jalal Talabani, and never from a remote British lawyer.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to show solidarity with Iraqis now - in their fight against Islamic fundamentalists, Ba'athists, IMF 'structural adjustment' and imposed neoliberalism - please go to www.iraqitradeunions.org and donate what you can.

Since Irshad Manji is coming to town, I thought I'd rerun my interview with her from July 2004:

The death threats began six months ago. One morning, Irshad Manji opened her e-mail and read the first of many pledges to kill her. "It contained some pretty concrete details that showed a lot of thought had been put into the death-threat," she explains now, unblinking. She can't say how many she's received - "The police tell me not to talk about this stuff" - but she admits that "they are becoming pretty up-close and personal."

"One story that I can tell you," she says, "a story that I have the permission from the police to tell you, is that I was in an airport in North America recently and somebody at the airport recognised me. I had a conversation with them. While I was engaged in conversation with a very portly, very sweet fifty-something man and his wife, an Arab guy came up to my travel companion and said, 'You are luckier than your friend.' As a nice polite Canadian she asked, 'What do you mean?' and he didn't say anything. He turned his hand in to the shape of a gun and he pulled the make-believe trigger towards my head. She didn't know what to make of this, so she asked him to clarify his intentions. He said 'Not now, you will find out later,' and then he was gone."

Sitting with Irshad in a London boardroom, it would be hard for anybody to guess that she is the star attraction on jihadist death-lists. She has the small, slender body of a ballet-dancer, and a Concorde-speed Canadian voice that makes her sound more like a character in a Woody Allen movie than an enemy of Osama Bin Laden's. So what has she done to earn a bullet in the head?

Irshad is a key figure in the civil war within twenty-first century Islam. She is the Saladin of progressive Muslims, an out-rider for the notion that you can be both a faithful Muslim and a mouthy, fiercely democratic Canadian lesbian. As one American journalist put it, "Irshad Manji does not drink alcohol and she does not eat pork. In every other respect, she is Osama Bin Laden's worst nightmare."

"What I want is an Islamic reformation," she says, leaning forward, her palms open. "Christianity did it in the sixteenth century. Now we are long overdue. If there was ever a moment for our reformation, it's now, when Muslim countries are in poverty and despair. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?"

We are all going to have to learn about this battle for an Islamic reformation, because it will be raging - and occasionally blasting its way onto our city streets - for the rest of our lives. Manji's best-selling book, 'The Trouble With Islam - a Wake-Up Call For Honesty and Change', is both a crash course in its terminology and a manifesto for the progressive side. The core concept in Maji's thought - and that of all progressive Muslims - is 'ijtihad'. It's a simple idea, and devastatingly powerful. Ijtihad is the application of reason and reinterpretation to the message of the Koran. It allows every Muslim to reconsider the message of the Koran for the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century. "What was true for ninth century Mecca and Medina may not be the best interpretation of Allah's message today", Irshad explains.

This seems obvious to post-religious European ears, but it is (literally) heresy to conservative and even most mainstream Muslims. "At this stage, reform isn't about telling ordinary Muslims what not to think. It's about giving them permission to think. We can't be afraid to ask: what if the Koran isn't perfect? What if it's not a completely God-authored book? What if it's riddled with human biases?"

"We Muslims have to understand our own history," she says. "Ijtihad isn't some wacky new idea. When Muslims were at their most prosperous, their most innovative, their most respected, it was when we practised ijtihad, in Islam's golden age from 750 to 1250 CE. The greatest Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd, championed the freedom to reason."

"It was the closing of the gates of ijtihad that led to disaster for Muslims, not the Crusdaers or the West or anything else. Sure, they were all bad, but the decline started with us," Irshad says. "It's the refusal to believe in independent reason that has contributed to a totalitarian culture in the Muslim world. Of course if Muslims can't reason for themselves, they become dependent on Mullahs and outside authorities. Of course if you think all truth is contained in one book and all you have to do is return to it - a belief I call 'foundationalism' - then you won't be dynamic and seek new solutions for new problems. Others have responsibilities as well, but we Muslims closed the gates of ijtihad on ourselves. We need to take responsibility for that, and turn it around."

It was in the twelfth century that Baghdad scholars "formed a consensus to freeze debate within Islam," she explains, and "we live with the consequences of this thousand-year old strategy. They did it to keep the Islamic empire from imploding - they thought all this dissent and disagreement would lead us to fall apart. But I've got news for you: The Islamic empire no longer exists, and our minds still remain closed."

In case this sounds cerebral - how could this arid intellectual debate have such a drastic effect on the world? - Irshad is quick to underline its practical effects. From the mass-murder of democrats in Algeria to the uprising of students against the Mullahs in Iran, from the mosques of Finsbury Park to the ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan, "this is the fight between progressive Islam and the Islamofascists."

Irshad does not just rant against Islamic fundamentalism. She offers a constructive long-term programme for undermining it, which she dubs 'Operation Ijtihad.' The solution lies with Muslim women. "At the moment, half the resources of Muslim societies - the women - are squandered. Yet investing in women makes amazing sense. Educate a Muslim boy and you've educated a boy. Educate a Muslim woman and you've educated a whole family. The multiplier effect of helping Muslim women is amazing."

So 'Operation Ijtihad' would require us to redeploy a large chunk of our aid and national security budgets to small business loans for Muslim women. "Micro-lending has an extraordinary 30 year-track-record. For example, in Bangladesh the Grameen ('Village') Bank loans tiny amounts of money to people whom standard lenders consider untouchable - especially landless women. They have helped 31 million people, and they have a staggering repayment rate of 98%. Helping women achieve financial independence en masse butresses their existing, often underground, attempts to become literate. They won't need the oracles of the big boys if they can reach their own conclusions about what the Koran says.

"Empowering women is the way to awaken the Muslim world," she continues. "If you are serious about undermining the culture that created al-Quaeda, this is the way to do it. When women have money they have earned themselves, they are far more likely to begin the crucial task of questioning their lot. It will transform a culture of hate and stagnation." This feminism shouldn't be alien to good Muslims, she adds. "Mohammed's beloved first wife Khadija was a self-made merchant for whom the Prophet worked for many years. I sometimes point out to Muslim men that if they are serious about emulating the Prophet, then they should go work for their wives." What do they say? "There is a dour, sour silence."

"Then I remind them that it was Ibn Rushd who said - way ahead of any European feminists - that the reason civilisations are poor is that they do not know yet, the ability, the full ability, of their women," she continues. So how did Islam get so entwined with a misogynist culture? "I think you have to distinguish between Islam and the Arabic culture of the ninth and tenth centuries that very quickly became entwined with it. We have to disentangle Islam from the norms of the desert. Desert Islam was always opposed to the pluralistic, haggling life of the el-haraa - the urban alleyway bazaars. It is fanatic. Islam was meant to move the Arabs beyond tribe. Instead, tribe has moved the Arabs beyond Islam."

Irshad is needlingly, constantly aware that she could not even begin to enjoy the freedom she currently enjoys in any Muslim society. Her family were refugees from Idi Amin's West African tyranny, and the family washed up in Canada when Irshad was four years old. "I am also aware it wasn't Islam that fostered my belief in the dignity of every individual. It was the democratic environment to which I and my family migrated. In this part of the world, as a Muslim woman, I have the freedom to express myself without fear of being maimed or tortured or raped or murdered at the hands of the state. You know, as corny as this may sound, as a refugee to the West, I wake up every day, thanking God that I wound up here."

She grew up with "a miserable father who despised joy" and exhibited the worst of the Mullah mentality. Then in her local mosque - as an inquisitive, open-minded girl - she became aware of an attempt to "close my mind. It was a 'shut up and believe' mentality," she says. "Even in a free society where nobody was going to challenge us or hurt us for asking questions, even then our minds were still slammed shut. A crude, cruel strain within Islam continues to exist in even the most cosmopolitan of cities. That shows it isn't just external evil influences that have done this. We have - I repeat - done it to ourselves."

Irshad knows that she is dragging into the open an argument many Western Muslims have confined to their own minds for a very long time. She is critical of the "reflexive identification some Muslims in the West unthinkingly offer to groups like Hamas or the Taliban. I met one person [like that] at Oxford University last night. I asked, 'Do these women realise that the very groups and individuals whom they are defending are the very people who, if they were in power here, would frankly their daughters particularly of their right to be at Oxford at all?'"

She is frustrated that more moderate Muslims do not fight. "At all of the public events I've done to promote this book, not once have I seen a moderate Muslim stand up and look an extremist in the eye and say, 'I'm Muslim too. I disagree with your perspective. Now let's hash it out publicly.' Yes, after the event people tip-toe up to me and say, 'Thank you for what you are doing.' And there are times when I really want to say, 'Where was your support when it mattered? Not for my ego. But to show the extremists that they are not going to walk away with the show.'"

"It's insane that I get sometimes accused of 'Islamophobia', or offering comfort to people who hate Islam," she quickly adds, anticipating my next question. "I like to respond to that by talking about Matthew Shepherd [a young gay man who was recent crucified and burned to death in Wyoming]. I say to my good-hearted liberal friends, would you have let these yahoos get away with insisting that gay-bashing is part of their culture and as a result they deserve immunity from scrutiny on that front? Well, why is misogyny and homophobia in Saudi Arabia any different? No, it's up to us Muslims in the West to drop reactionary charges of racism against the whistleblowers of Islam - people like me and your heroic colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - and lead the charge for change."

She believes we are falling for a false kind of moral equivalence between democratic societies and tyrannies. "For example, the next time you hear an Islamo-fetishist, an imam of the ninth-century school, wax eloquent that Muslim societies today have their own forms of democracy thank you very much, we don't need to take any lessons, right there, ask him a few questions. What rights do women and religious minorities actually exercise in these democracies? Not in theory, but in actuality. Don't tell me what the Koran says, because the Koran, like every other holy book, is all over the map, ok. No, tell me what is happening on the ground."

She continues, her voice hard and rhythmic, "Tell me when your people vote in free elections. Tell me how many free uncensored newspapers there are in your 'democracy'. There is I believe, such a thing as the soft racism of low expectations. And I believe that there is more virtue in expecting Muslims like anybody else, to rise above low expectations, because you know what? We're capable of it."

It will not ultimately be Western bombs or Western markets that defeat Islamic fundamentalism. It will be women like Irshad, refusing to allow their religion to be dominated by fanatics. But there are a lot of people who want to stop her. "I actually don't live my life in fear, no not at all," she says, not entirely convincingly. "In fact I'll tell you right now, I deliberately did not bring my bodyguard to Britain with me against the better judgement of many people who want to see me alive."

"If I am going to convince young Muslims in particular that it is possible to dissent, and live, I can't be sending the mixed message of having the bodyguard shadowing me wherever I go," she says, her voice now uncharacteristically low and soft. "Even if something terrible happens, I stand by the decision, because I think at this stage it is far more important to give young people hope, to give them a sense of real optimism that there is room to be unorthodox."

The longest, strangest Gay Pride march ever has been traipsing past us over the past decade. Some of the most famous icons in history have been led by the hand out of the closet by kindly academic historians. This year alone, we’ve bagged a biggie: Abraham Lincoln has been revealed to be a man-loving bisexual whose male lovers praised his “perfect thighs”. And the Parade continues: here’s a Pope, there’s a Prime Minister. Look! There’s Jesus Christ, Chairman Mao, Yassir Arafat, Robin Hood, Winston Churchill... wait – is that? – yes, it’s Adolf Hitler. And – surely not? – he’s making out with William Shakespeare… and they’re both being fisted by Square Bob Sponge-Pants.

Yes, when it comes to gay history, it’s raining famous, famous men. C.A. Tripp was an American sex researcher and noted historian, and last year he left in his will a bombshell of a book: ‘The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln’. It’s a history of America’s greatest President – the man who led America through a civil war and the abolition of slavery – that finally crowbars open an aspect of Honest Abe’s life that was avoided by previous biographers. Sure, people who studied Lincoln’s life always knew something was not quite straight: even in 1926, the biographer Carl Sandburg said the President and his close friend Joshua Speed “possessed a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets” – pretty unsubtle code for its time.

But Tripp is the first historian to document not just one but five plausible gay lovers for Lincoln. When Abraham was in his twenties, a broke lawyer born in a log cabin, he met Speed, an 18-year old shopkeeper. Speed offered to share a room – and a bed – with Abe. This wasn’t uncommon in the 1830s, when only the rich could afford a bed of their own. But sharing would be a transitory, uncomfortable alliance for a few months – except with Abe and Joshua. They shared for four years, a fact that even a 1950s biographer noted “bordered on impropriety.”

When Joshua eventually moved out to get married, Lincoln spoke like a spurned wife. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote, “Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell… To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.” He harried Speed about his fiancée: “You say you have reasoned yourself into [getting married]. What do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it? Did you think… of courting her the first time you saw her?… I shall be so anxious about you I want you to write to me every mail.” He often spoke in this heightened, romantic way to Speed: “I opened the latter [letter] with intense anxiety and trepidation; so much that, although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm.” It turned out that Speed couldn’t get it up on his wedding night, or any night since. Lincoln would write to him for the rest of his life, always signing off “Yours forever, Abraham.” He never used this phrase with his eventual wife, preferring “Yours sincerely.”

Lincoln went on to share his bed with at least three other men – including the one who famously appreciated his thighs. One of his guards, David Derickson, was noticeably “devoted” to Lincoln, and shared the President’s bed when the First Lady was out of town. He was seen wearing the President’s nightshirt on several occasions after they had woken up together. Lincoln suffered from depressions throughout his life, possibly caused by repressing his sexuality. After he died, his stepmother said “he was not very fond of girls”, and noted he had no girlfriends until he eventually married. Tripp even discovered a poem Lincoln wrote as a teenager, in which he fantasises about marrying another boy: “The girls he had tried on every side… but he is married to Natty.” For all these reasons, Tripp concluded Lincoln was “predominantly homosexual.” The historical ripples of these suppressed errections could be huge. Could it explain Lincoln’s lack of enthusiasm for Christianity, a fact that has puzzled historians for generations? Could it even help to explain why he was attracted to the cause of emancipating the slaves?

But Anthony Rotundo, author of ‘Tranformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era’, says we should be careful about this. He has questioned the idea that this evidence means Lincoln was ‘gay’ in the twenty-first century sense. “Men would often enjoy romantic friendships in that era, and it wasn’t something they felt they had to hide,” he explains. “It wasn’t seen as ‘gay’ in the contemporary meaning of the term, because the idea of being uniquely oriented towards men and accepting it just didn’t exist. There was a spectrum of relationships. You didn’t have to say ‘I’m on this side or that,’ as you do today.” Gregory Woods, Britain’s first professor of gay and lesbian studies, agrees. “Right now, we have a crude idea of what sexuality is. We have this strict binary opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but most people throughout history have not thought in those terms. Sexuality was much more fluid, if you’ll excuse the pun. If you think about it, the structures of male privilege made it far more likely men would fall in love with each other, because in pre-feminist times men were so much more highly valued than women. Men and women didn’t communicate on equal terms, and women were not educated. So if you were a man – particularly a powerful man – only other men were going to understand you or be able to offer stimulating conversation. That’s why intimacy came primarily from other men. Who’s surprised that spilled over into sex sometimes? I think feminism may reduce some of that gay experimentation, which is sad to think of.”

The outing of historical figures is now so mainstream that this year the British government introduced a Gay History Month to our schools, to promote awareness that same-sex love was buried in every crevice of history. The first example of this kind of outing can be found in Sigmund Freud’s 1910 biography of Michelangelo, where he speculated – in terms that are now generally accepted as true – that the great artist loved men in a romantic and sexual way. But even a decade earlier, Oscar Wilde had responded to the vicious homophobia of Victorian Britain by pleading – at the trial that broke him – for people to remember that sex between men has existed at every stage of human civilisation, including among the greatest intellectuals and artists. He said that, although today it is “the love that dare not speak its name,” he simply felt a love for Bosie “such as was felt by [King] David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo.”

But was Wilde’s belief that Shakespeare felt romantic love for men true? We know that in the Elizabethan theatre, many of Shakespeare’s leading female roles would have been played by pretty young male prostitutes, because theatre was not a ‘reputable’ profession for a woman. A majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets – over 126 of them - are addressed towards men. Professor Woods – who has studied this era – says, “I don’t think it really matters what he did with his dick. I think what matters is that these are poems that can be read by a man to his boyfriend, knowing they were written by one man for another.”

So we can claim Britain’s most potent icon – the Bard – as a semi-homosexual. And it gets better. One of the most potent myths in English history – that of Robin Hood – may in fact be batting for our side. At the Second International Robin Hood Conference in 1999, in a paper called “the Forest Queen”, the University of Wales professor Stephen Knight explained that Sherwood Forrest may have been rather more like Heaven than we had previously understood. The first Robin Hood poems in the 14th century (describing a man who lived two centuries before) were filled with homoerotic imagery about swords and quivers – and, most importantly, they did not contain Maid Marian. Not at all. She was invented in the sixteenth century in order to de-homosexualize the story and to make Robin palatable to readers who hated the homosexual subcultures suppressed by the Church since the myth first circulated. Merry men indeed.

Male-to-male semen seems to spurt onto every page of history. Look at the English monarchy. At least three Kings - from James I to William of Orange – had same-sex lovers, but (thanks to the playwright Christopher Marlowe) the most famous homosexual monarch is still Edward II. As a Prince, he was so truly, madly, deeply devoted to a famously muscular young knight called Piers Gaveston that his father sent Gaveston into permanent exile. As soon as his father died, Edward sent for Piers. At the Coronation, Edward’s real partner wasn’t the Queen next to him but the queen walking a few paces behind him, carrying the glittering royal crown and sword. Edward gave Piers the pick of the wedding presents, and then he gave him the earldom of Cornwall. (We’ve all wanted to do that for our boyfriends at one time or another).

The royal historian Robert Lacey explains, “The reckless passion of Edward II for Piers Gaveston ranks as the first of the momentous love affairs that have shaken England’s monarchy over the centuries. Homosexuality was deeply disapproved of in medieval England. It was considered by many a form of heresy – a ticket to hell – though there is enough evidence to make it clear that many a monk and priest might have been seen at the ticket barrier. ‘The sin against nature’ was usually referred to indirectly, with comparisons to the Old Testament love of King David for Jonathan – ‘a love beyond the love of women’.” But the couple ignored this, pioneering His ‘n’ His clothing by dressing identically. They were so devoted that when the Barons want to limit Edward’s power, he accepted on one condition – that it would not affect Piers. Edward was eventually persuaded to send Piers to be his representative in Ireland, but he waved him off from the Isle of Wight and became unhinged at the loss of his love. Impatient and disgusted, the Barons rebelled and beheaded Gaveston. Edward lived for a few more years – before he too was killed by having a burning hot poker rammed up his arse.

Few powerful men have embraced homosexuality as completely as Edward, but many have dabbled. Winston Churchill, for example, had sex with the song-writer Ivor Novello “to see what it was like”. He later described the experience as “musical”. Chairman Mao – the Chinese dictator responsible for the death of over 30 million people – enjoyed being wanked off by Red Guards. Mao’s personal doctor Zhisui Li writes, “The young males who served as Mao’s attendants were invariably handsome and strong, and one of their responsibilities was to administer a nightly massage. Mao insisted that his groin be massaged too, a practice I became aware of only when one of the guards refused to oblige him. “This is a job for a woman, not for me,” he told me just before he left. Later, in 1964, I witnessed a similar incident on Mao’s train. As his guard was preparing him for sleep, Mao grabbed the young man and began fondling him, trying to pull the man into bed with him.” Gore Vidal has claimed that his cousin-in-law, Jack Kennedy, was bisexual, and allowed a gay friend to suck him off from time to time.

Professor Woods believes there is a relationship between ravenous hunger for power – seen in Churchill, Mao, Kennedy and countless other leaders – and a huge and indiscriminate sex-drive. “Many of these men seem to have such an appetite for sex they will do it with anyone willing,” he says. “Perhaps that’s why so many historical leaders have been susceptible to this kind of retrospective outing. Is there a correlation between the need for power and the need for sex? Will people with that need seek any outlet? I think so.”

But does it help gay people today to know this? Should we be pleased that some of the people who shaped human history – from Plato to Lincoln – had sex with men, or should we see it as a distraction from the real political battles of today? Woods is ambivalent: “I’m not sure it means much in terms of the struggles we’re in now – it’s not necessary in any political way – but it’s certainly adding an interesting new dimension to history. I’m not sure it will change the minds of homophobes, but it can help gay men with a bad self-image to realise that people like us have pulled off some of the most amazing achievements of our entire species.” Only this cuts both ways. We don’t just get Lincoln; we also get the Fuhrer. “Yes, there is plausible evidence that Hitler had sex with men when he was a young man living in hostels,” Woods says, “and nobody would want to claim him as a founding father of the gay movement.” The only lesson from the posthumous attempted outing of Hitler and Mao is that gay people have been everywhere in history. Homosexuality is not a sign of being progressive or morally decent; lusting after the same sex is morally blank, and can be found in people of every moral stripe and none.

But each historical ‘outing’ occurs in a particular historical context of its own; each outing is political. It’s no coincidence that Lincoln has been outed at a time when gay marriage is one of the hot-button issues in American politics. "It's not all that surprising that this is happening now," says historian John D'Emilio, author of ‘Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the Unites States, 1940—1970’, "It's so American to feel this need to look to the past for models to legitimise a group's history. It began with women and blacks and now it's taken up by gays and lesbians. The difference with homosexuality is that it is never so clear-cut, so even when the evidence is clear, it's not clear enough.”

Recent attempts to claim Jesus was gay are also clearly part of a wider political movement to drain the millennia-old poison of homophobia from the Christian Church. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire, caused outbreaks of angina across the Anglican Church this year when– as part of a lecture entitled ‘Homosexuality and the Body of Christ – Is There a Third Way?’ – he hinted that Jesus may have had a homoerotic relationship with his disciples. Conservatives in the Church immediately howled. “It is appalling deconstructionism from the liberal lobby which will spin even the remotest thing to turn it into a hint that Biblical figures are gay,” David Virtue – head of the conservative Anglican website, VirtueOnline – said, before hoping that “thunder and lightning-bolts” strike him down.

But gay equality campaigner Peter Tatchell believes Robinson was onto something. He explains, “One version of St. Mark's gospel - which is still the subject of academic dispute - alludes to Jesus having a homosexual relationship with a youth he raised from the dead.” He’s right: according to the US Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, of Columbia University, a fragment of manuscript he found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958, showed that the full text of St. Mark chapter 10 includes the passage: "And the youth, looking upon him (Jesus), loved him and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God". Tatchell adds, “The veracity of this manuscript is hotly contested by other Biblical scholars. This comes as no surprise. The revelation of a gay Jesus would undermine some of the most fundamental tenets of orthodox Christianity, including its rampant homophobia.”

Perhaps one of the most important outings recently, however, is of a historical figure who dwarfs even Jesus, Lincoln and Churchill: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. The dirty sponge shift-lifter was revealed to be gay in a lecture to Republican members of the US Congress this January by Christian moralist James Dobson. He explained that SpongeBob holds hands with his starfish friend Patrick, and has called for tolerance of different groups including gay people. SpongeBob is, he declared, a piece of “homosexual propaganda”. He certainly has a powerful ally in the kids’ TV world: just a few years before, the far-right evangelist Jerry Falwell declared that Tinky-Winky, the purse-carrying Tellytubby, was a heathen homosexual. “He is purple – the gay pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle – the symbol of gay pride,” Falwell raved.

This sudden outing of childrens’ TV characters (who next? Bert and Ernie?) has its own historical context. The Christian far-right in the US is trying to roll back the gay rights agenda, and its claims that “subtle homosexual propaganda is being inserted into our children’s television” performs an important function in this fight. It allows them to explain to themselves why the gay rights agenda is gaining in support despite their relentless opposition: clearly a whole generation of Americans has been brainwashed to accept this evil, and that is why we are failing. But the row about Tinky-Winky and SpongeBob is also the American Section 28, an opportunity to claim that the far right’s opposition to homosexuality is simply a sincere attempt to protect children. “We’re not homophobes – we just want to protect children from you!” howl the SpongeBob-beaters.

In ‘1984’, George Orwell wrote that “who controls the past controls the future.” If gay equality is going to keep on rolling out across our society and across the world, then it has to seep backwards into the past too. For centuries, homosexuality was written out of history; it is a sign of progress that, although Lincoln suppressed his homosexual feelings in his life, we no longer feel the need to join in. Let the History Parade roll on.

When I spent a week in Hebron two summers ago, I would have backed a thousand boycotts: of Israeli academia, of Israeli goods, of Israeli sportsmen. I discovered a West Bank town beyond belief and beyond sanity. The 130,000 Palestinians in Hebron live under lockdown so that 450 settlers - that's 450 - can roam free.

For most of the year, these Palestinians are imprisoned in their homes. They are not allowed to leave for any reason; if they do venture out they can be - and often are - shot. Once every few days, they will be allowed to scramble around the city in a desperate, rushed search for enough supplies to last the next random period of imprisonment. The average Palestinian home in Hebron is tiny; families of eight people share a few rooms. Many families have outside toilets they can never reach; they use buckets. This is their life.

On the first day I visited, I assumed the curfew was on. Cracked steel shutters stood before every shop, and silence ruled the streets. But I found out this was a good day. No curfew was in place: it was just that Palestinians were either being turned away from the checkpoints that scar the city, or were too afraid to leave their homes. They cannot visit the old Palestinian market-place because it has been appropriated as a "safe zone" for the settlers, so they have shifted their shops to a barren patch.

As I was shown around, I noticed an odd wire mesh that hangs over the market. Naively, I asked what it was for. Greg Rollins, a worker for the Christian Peacekeeping Team based in Hebron, said softly: "The settlers throw things down at the Palestinians. Rocks and bricks. I've seen their children hurl their shit down here. So they put up the mesh. It doesn't always work."

Most of the people in Britain who have been campaigning for a boycott of Israeli universities - like professors Steven and Hillary Rose - are decent people trying to show solidarity with the Palestinians trapped in this half-life. They are enraged that the Israeli government, after 38 years of this occupation, is barely inching towards the two-state solution the world knows is necessary, and they want to try something - anything - that will nudge Israel forward. To accuse them of being anti-Semites, self-hating Jews, or quasi-Nazis - all insults hurled in their direction - is false and disgusting.

Today, the position of British academics on this question is unclear. Some seem to be enforcing personal boycotts; few attend academic conferences in Israel. The Association of University Teachers agreed to a boycott earlier this year but reversed their position yesterday.

The only sensible question now is: would the proposals help or harm the Palestinians? In 2002, we had a taste in Britain of what a blunt boycott of all Israeli universities would look like. Dr Oren Yiftachel is one of the millions of brave Israelis who has been arguing relentlessly for justice for the Palestinians. He has tirelessly documented the Sharon government's theft of Palestinian land, and even set up a radical Arab-Israeli journal that made the Israeli right combust with rage. That summer, he submitted an academic paper to a left-wing periodical called Political Geography in which he argued against the abuse of Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere. The article was returned to him unread; the journal explained that it was boycotting Israelis.

The clearest, bravest, most extensively documented opposition to Israel's crimes against the Palestinians has come not from Damascus or Riyadh but from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. If you want to know the full details of the crimes unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank, look to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. If you want to understand the real history of Israel/Palestine, read Tom Segev, Benny Morris (before his strange about-face in 2002), Ilan Pape, and Israel's other "new historians". A total boycott of Israel's universities will simply lock them out of international academic debate. If we act as if all Israelis are synonymous with Ariel Sharon, we will only drive the country further and further to the right.

Indeed, Israeli universities are universally regarded as one of the most progressive parts of the country. That's precisely why Ariel Sharon's government is eroding their autonomy and funding. Professor Neve Gordon of Haifa University is a fierce defender of the Palestinians (she has even been called "a fanatic anti-Semite" by US professors), but she pleads: "Unwittingly, American and European supporters of the academic boycott against Israeli universities are aiding this [right-wing Likud] attack. It will only weaken the elements in Israeli society that are struggling to preserve these havens of free speech from a right-wing assault."

Some of the proponents of the AUT boycott recognised this, proposing instead to boycott only two universities: Haifa, because it had apparently censored a graduate student's thesis about Israeli war crimes, and Bar-Ilan, because it has links with a campus for Jewish settlers on the West Bank. But even this seems too blunt: 20 per cent of Haifa's students are Arabs, and some of Israel's most prominent left-wingers are on the faculty. Do we really want to boycott them?

There is a better way. What is needed is not an embargo - à la apartheid South Africa - but the civil society equivalent to smart sanctions. If we want to show solidarity with the Palestinians - and we must - then there is a group operating here in Britain and across the developed world that is making possible some of the worst atrocities against Palestinians. The corporation Caterpillar is the provider of 64-ton D9 bulldozers to the Israeli Defence Force that have been used to systematically level entire Palestinian towns. A blade on the back on the bulldozer - known as "the ripper" - has ripped through more than 40 miles of water and sewage pipes.

At least three Palestinians have been killed because they could not flee their homes in time, and more than 16,000 have been made homeless in the town of Rafah alone. The peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by a Caterpillar bulldozer when she tried to protect the home of a local doctor from destruction. One of the reasons for the deadly collapse in Palestinian civilian infrastructure over the past four years is that demolitions are now so persistent that nobody is bothering to rebuild.

So here is a boycott that cuts right to the heart of the occupation, and claims no collateral damage on the Israeli left. The message is simple: Every person wearing trendy Caterpillar boots walks over the bloody rubble of the Palestinians. Every construction company that pays for Caterpillar equipment is helping those who profit from war crimes. You can join the campaign to stop the bulldozers at www.catdestroyshomes.org. In the fight for a safe, free Palestinian state alongside Israel, there are landmines on every side, and we have to be careful. We must choose boycotts that target the worst of Israel, not the best.

It used to be easy to spot attacks on science. A Southern pastor would wave the Bible and hiccup that he wasn't descended from no monkey. An African village would refuse vaccines, preferring the hallucinatory treatments of the local sage. New Age fortune-tellers would sell their potions in fairgrounds. All would be quickly dismissed by people who could see the fruits of science every time they flicked a light-switch or headed to their GP.

But over the past few decades, the enemies of science have evolved (oh, the irony). Rather than attacking the Enlightenment from the front, pedlars of irrationalist and superstitious theories have begun to claim that their beliefs are simply alternative and equally valid scientific theories. They have adopted the style (but not the techniques) of scientific discourse. Now, they construct fake evidence to meet their preordained religious conclusions - and demand scientific respect for it.

So today, the Southern pastor doesn't wave the Bible; he waves a collection of apparently scientific papers about "Intelligent Design Theory" that claim to prove the world must have been created by a conscious intelligence. The African sages claim they are resisting the ‘imperialism’ of ‘Western science’ by sticking to ‘traditional medicines’. The New Age fortune-tellers have a whole section in every pharmacy headed "alternative medicine". And many defenders of the Enlightenment - afraid of falsely being dubbed intolerant - have shut up and accepted it. The result is that global understanding of science is being slowly contaminated.

If you want an example of this new pseudo-science, check out the dismal, brain-rotting new movie What the Bleep Do We Know? which arrives fresh from sleeper-success in the States. Marlee Matlin plays a woman who is having a strange day; she meets a boy who is capable of bizarre physical tricks, and he asks her, "How far down the rabbit-hole do you want to go?"

The film claims to be a serious study of the philosophical implications of quantum physics, and Matlin's story is intercut with interviews from people who seem to be scientists. At first, they simply point out some of the extraordinary things that have emerged from the study of matter at a quantum (sub-molecular) level. The discoveries are indeed mind-blowing: it turns out that at the level of the very tiny, the laws of Newtonian physics do not apply. A particle can be in two places at the same time. It can move from one place to another without travelling the distance inbetween. It can dematerialise and rematerialise, seemingly randomly.

All this is true. But gradually the film begins to stir in unscientific (and absurd) extrapolations from quantum physics. The movie's "scientists" begin to claim that discoveries in quantum physics provide proof for a whole range of fantastical New Age claims. They say you can walk on water if only "you believe it with every fibre of your being". Scientists have yet to come up with a real 'theory of everything' that unites the different rules of quantum physics and Newtonian physics. So the New Agers have simply made one up without the bother of experimentation: they claim the quantum rules - with their mystery and unpredictability - are the 'real' rules, and Newtonian physics is simply a product of our over-programmed brains. We simply need to deprogramme our barins through meditation and a world consistent with quantum rules - where seemingly anything is possible - will be unleashed.

The real scientist Richard Dawkins summarises the film's assumptions: "Quantum physics is deeply mysterious and incomprehensible. Eastern spirituality is deeply mysterious and incomprehensible. Therefore they must be saying the same thing." Sadly, Dawkins' reaction is an exception; many newspapers have lauded the film as a "brilliant scientific study".

Okay, so it's a dumb movie, you might think, but what harm does it do? On its own, very little. But What the Bleep ... bears all the hallmarks of the new pseudo-sciences. One typical tactic is to take a gap in scientific evidence and fill it with faith-based claims. For example, geologists have discovered a gap in the fossil record which makes it hard to explain how evolution worked at certain periods. The neo-creationists seize on this and claim it as "proof" that evolution didn't happen at all. (Incredibly, over 40 per cent of Americans believe them). The New Agers do the same with the gaps in quantum physics.

In the case of New Age spirituality, little physical harm is done. A few dupes are sold worthless "alternative medicines"; a few gullible people might end up embarrassingly splashing about at the bottom of a river after trying to walk on it. Even in the case of creationism, it's hard to show substantial harm. Some children are cheated of a real scientific education and taught an outright lie, but nobody is dying as a result. (If the Creationists were consistent, they would refuse flu vaccines, since they are predicated on the notion that the flu virus is constantly evolving. Mysteriously, they seem to be able to live with this inconsistency in their actions).

But the failure of defenders of the Enlightenment to stand up against this erosion of science is leading to deaths in some of the poorest countries in the world. Since the 1970s and the rise of postmodernism, it has become popular to view science as a Western, imperialist system, no better or worse than other "indigenous forms of knowledge". Some leaders in developing countries have taken this seriously - and the victims have been their own people. The South African President Thabo Mbeki has enthusiastically picked up this rhetoric, attacking the "hegemony" of Western science and claiming it is "colonialist" to argue HIV causes Aids. He has latched on to a scientist called Peter Duesberg, who says that Aids is caused by poverty and cannot be transmitted by heterosexual sex. The result? Over 70,000 children are now born every year with HIV in South Africa - a great victory over imperialism.

Similarly, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party that governed India from 1998 to 2004 aggressively promoted something called "Vedic science". This claims that all scientific knowledge can be found in the Hindu sacred texts that were revealed "in a flash" over a millennium ago. The best scientific techniques are not experimentation and verification but yoga and meditation. It is, in other words, not science but religion. But - in line with its prescriptions - the science budget of India was diverted towards studying astrology and creating magical weapons like those in the holy books. India's earthquake prediction systems were steered away from scientific method towards "Vedic" practices. The Department of Health invested millions in the research, development and sale of cow urine as a treatment for TB and Aids.

This injection of multiculturalism and relativism into science has not done any harm to privileged Westerners, who revert to real medicine the moment they get seriously ill. But it has been a disaster for poor countries.

Dawkins has debunked this relativism best, saying simply, "Science works. An African tribe might believe that the moon is an old cooking pot throw up into the sky, but that doesn't get you to the moon. Science does. Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite."

Yet fewer and fewer people seem able to spot the difference between science and pseudo-science. The people who stuff their faces with "alternative medicines" (now available on the NHS in some parts of Britain) are no more scientific than Thabo Mbeki or the BJP. Science-sapping postmodernists have popularised a false equality between sense and nonsense. This has replaced the real equality of all people before the rigours of the scientific method, which is not "Western" - just ask the Arabs who pioneered it, or the tens of millions of people in Africa whose lives have been saved by the scientific eradication of smallpox.

But if we in the developed world cannot resist the rise of New Age drivel and neo-creationism, if even we say it's all relative, what hope do people in more desperate circumstances have against their own anti-scientific charlatans?

In Britain, we rarely notice that people in the public eye might be good at – wait for it – more than one thing. Melvin Bragg had to pump out a dozen elegiac, elegant novels before he emerged from the bouffant on the South Bank Show. Mark Lawson – the Philosopher-King of Newsnight Review – has been similarly exiled from Literature-Land to Telly, but his first novel – ‘Idlewild, or Everything is Subject to Change’ – was a beautiful political phantasmagoria about JFK and Marilyn, alive and unwell in the conspiracy-infested America of the 1990s. Since then, he has produced the best fictional riff on the Thatcher years so far (‘Bloody Margaret’) and a tight, elliptical thriller about the pre-Hutton BBC (‘Going Out Live’).

With ‘Enough is Enough’, Lawson has melded the best of these works into a mosaic-novel about the last days of Harold Wilson. His mind failing, his political authority haemorrhaging, his paranoia triumphant, the Prime Minister looks out over a London that seems to be spiralling beyond democratic control. Rogue MI5 agents are convinced that ‘Henry Worthington’ (Wilson’s code-name) is a Kremlin mole. The PM’s pregnant secretary is blackmailing him – “one phone-call to the Daily Mail and it’s all over” – while Wilson’s doctor offers to “dispose of her” with a discrete injection. Some of Britain’s most senior dignitaries – from press tycoon Cecil King to that old Windsor-licker Lord Mountbatten – consider mounting a coup. Wilson confides to his friend Barbra Castle, “Every year, when I watch them out on Horse Guards Parade, practising the Trooping of the Colour, I imagine them turning and marching on Downing Street.”

It sounds preposterous, until you remember all this is true. Although Lawson stresses that his interpretation of events is fictional, the fat bibliography and scattered cultural memories of Spycatcher and the memoirs of Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary, are a reminder that these events happened only a generation ago. The Prime Minister raved incoherently: “I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should listen.” Lawson takes Wilson at his own estimation, and his novel sweeps round Wilson’s web in sepia-prose, following dozens of characters in the literary equivalent of the long panning-shots of Robert Altman – with cameos from Richard Nixon, Auberon Waugh, Elizabeth Windsor and Bobby Kennedy. One of the oddest pleasures when reading the work of a critic who dares fiction is spotting the literary influences: Lawson’s reverence for Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Georges Simenon are smeared on every page. If ‘Enough is Enough’ sounds too unfocused, too ambitious, the unifying theme is the long journalistic quest for a British Watergate: Wilson, Jeremy Thorpe, the coup-that-never-was, and – as the novel screeches to a halt - the deaths of Diana and Dr David Kelly.

Fiction set in the past usually says more about the period in which it was written than the period in which it is set. Can anybody watch the Julie Christie rendition of Doctor Zhivago – the movie that tosses a glitterball into the gulags – without noticing how screamingly sixties it is? Similarly, this novel about the dusk of a thrice-elected Labour leader is also about… the dusk of a thrice-elected Labour leader. When Hugh Cudlipp, the legendary Mirror editor, says of Wilson, “The key to his success in politics is that he isn’t actually very political. He believes what he needs to believe at any given time and has – or had – the gift of getting people to think he genuinely thinks it,” it is hard not to think of Tony Blair. Lawson wisely leaves this as a subtext, but ‘Enough is Enough’ should become the set-text for the dying days of the Blair administration, a jagged reminder of where Labour Prime Ministers go to politically die.