Johann Hari

By now, you – o future reader – will know whether Jeremy Kyle woz robbed last night. At the National Television Awards, he was up for Most Popular Factual Programme. To those of you who actually have to work during the day, I suppose I should explain what ITV1’s agony-a-thon is all about – and why it deserved to win.

Jeremy Kyle is a SHOUTING and impatient daytime TV talk-show host who appears to have spent several millennia marinating in self-love and self-importance. Every weekday, a host of distressed people are wheeled before him and his studio audience to have their wounds ripped open for our enjoyment. The guests all have problems that can be expressed in a stark strap-line like: “I’m sleeping with my daughter’s boyfriend, how can I tell my wife?” He will take about two minutes to decide who is The Victim and who is The Abuser in any given situation, and he will then spend the rest of the time SHOUTING at the abuser: “Are you going to admit you’re a scumbag? YES OR NO?”

Kyle is never more than an inch away from his Dead Ringers impersonation: “Maureen, you’re 58.” “Jeremy, I’m 42.” “Let me finish! You’re 58, you’re scum, and what you’re doing is disgusting. Let’s bring out your husband.” It ends with a to-camera appeal: “Are you scum? Text ‘scum’ and your name to 57048.”

So, yes, I know all the reasons why I should hate this show. A judge recently called it “human bear-baiting”, after a man head-butted the lodger who was shagging his wife the moment he strutted onto the stage. Yes, it’s sleazy, sucking money from people’s misery. So why do I love the programme – and why does part of me think it actually does some good?

I have been watching talk shows like this since I was a child – Oprah Winfrey, Riki Lake, The Time, The Place – and very few people seem to have noticed that the morality they promote is unconsciously but wonderfully progressive. Who are the villains of these shows, the people the audience find abhorrent? Men who treat women badly. Homophobes. Misogynists. Neglectful parents. Exactly the people who deserve to have an audience booing them.

Let’s pluck a few random examples from recent shows. One was called “My mum hates me being gay!” Sarah, a delightful 19 year old lesbian, was brought out to explain how her mother had thrown her out of home. “I’m not ashamed of being a lesbian at all,” she said simply. Kyle said this was quite right, adding, “You shouldn’t have to apologise for what you are, ever,” and the audience whooped and cheered. Sarah’s mother was brought out – and she was clearly shocked by the hostility of the audience. It was the first time she had to consider that it was her bigotry, not her daughter’s homosexuality, that was the problem. This isn’t new: these were the first TV programmes to show gay people and transsexuals sympathetically speaking in their own words, breaking that taboo forever.

How about the show entitled ‘Daughter, Leave Your Beating Husband’? A fiftysomething mum is distraught that her daughter insists on staying with a thug who beats her. The defeated, timid daughter comes on stage and whispers, “I know what he’s done. I know he’s bad.” A massed audience telling her she deserves better – that she’s a lovely person – obviously has an effect on her. They strip away her delusions. She thinks he loves her. One woman asks, “Do you think he loves you when he punches you in the face?” Kyle tells her: “You can say – I’m going to walk away with my head in the air.” When Henrik Ibsen said that a century ago in ‘The Doll’s House’, it caused riots. Today, the repetition of liberal moral beliefs on shows like this has a slow, powerful effect on people watching at home. They have helped to engineer the new ‘common sense’ in our country – that women and gay people don’t have to put up with abuse. This is consciousness-raising money can’t buy, and we need it: still, in Britain today, two women are beaten to death by their partners every week.

Everything that is condemned on these shows deserves to be condemned. But that’s not the only reason why the criticisms so glibly thrown at these shows make me cringe. There are good reasons to be worried: why, for example, don’t they offer every guest on-going counselling, rather than just a few? Yet there are also ugly prejudices encoded in the sneers – not least a slathering of snobbery.

In Britain today, abuse of the white working class is so frequent we don’t even hear it. Recently, a famous media figure (and, as it happens, a beneficiary of nepotism) came up to me to congratulate me on an article I’d written defending immigrants. He said, “They’re so much better than these lazy council estate bastards. Can’t we swap them for everyone in Poland?” This shift in Britain’s prejudices was symbolised neatly recently when it was announced that Love Thy Neighbour is being remade. In the 1970s version, a white family were horrified when a “nig-nog” family moved in new door – and much supposed hilarity ensued. In the Noughties version, a professional black family are horrified when a white working class “chav” family become their neighbours after a lottery win.

We have thankfully stopped seeing ethnic minorities as the Not-Us, the Thank-God-We’re-Not-Them – and have neatly slotted the white working class into their place. Their presence on any TV show, wearing their clothes and talking in their voices, evinces a haughty hatred, disguised in the form of sympathy: oh, but aren’t we being beastly to the “chavs”? Again and gain, critics assume the (unpaid) guests are too stupid to make a decision for themselves about whether they should appear on a programme they’ve seen a hundred times. Why? Why are you better qualified to judge what’s good for them than they are themselves? Don’t you think girls like Sarah are empowered by the programme?

In the contempt for these shows, there is also a disguised longing for the age of emotional repression, when British people didn’t cry or shout or scream on television. But that world had horrible flaws that far outweigh ours. Watch the 1945 film ‘Brief Encounter’ now and it seems like the record of two deeply mentally ill people. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson meet on a train, fall in love and realise they are perfect for each other – but they are so deeply repressed they can’t even bring themselves to touch, and return to miserable, wasted lives wondering what might have been. This squalid Stoicism made women feel obliged to stay with men who beat them too: the stiff upper lip was intimately connected to the bruised upper lip.

Give me Jeremy Kyle and a sassy audience yelling at a woman to leave her abuser over that monochrome, bitter Britain any time.

This week, Gordon Brown and David Cameron will welcome the leader of one of the world's most vicious dictatorships to Britain. Both men will embrace Abdullah al-Saud, who heads a regime in which, according to Amnesty International, "Fear and secrecy permeate every aspect of life. Every day the most fundamental human rights of people in Saudi Arabia are being violated."

In his Labour Party conference speech last month, the Prime Minister declared that he would oppose dictatorship everywhere: "The message should go out to anyone facing persecution from Burma to Zimbabwe ... human rights are universal." He has refused to even attend the same summit as the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, on the grounds that "there is no freedom in Zimbabwe, and there is widespread torture and mass intimidation of the political opposition." David Cameron has also just promised to put "human rights" at the heart of his "foreign policy vision".

Yet both political leaders refuse to make a commitment to even mention human rights to the dictator. Instead, he will ride in a golden carriage with the Queen, and be guest of honour at a Buckingham Palace banquet. It is the start of a three-day state visit, funded by the British taxpayer. The decision to lavish large sums and the rare prestige of a state visit on Abdullah has attracted severe criticism in Westminster. The Liberal Democrats' acting leader, Vincent Cable, has refused to attend the banquet. The Labour MP John McDonnell said: "We are feting this man because Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world's oil, and because we sell him billions of pounds' worth of weapons. It is an insult to everything Britain stands for to put these geopolitical concerns ahead of the rights of women, trade unionists and all Saudi people."

While Abdullah is cheered by our political leaders, many of his victims will be protesting outside. Sandy Mitchell, 52, went to Saudi Arabia to work as an anaesthetic technician at a hospital in Riyadh more than a decade ago – and got a rare outsider's glimpse into how the tyrant maintains his power. He explains: "One day in 2000 I was getting out of my car at the hospital when I was pounced on. I was battered to the ground, a hood was put over my head, and they manacled my hands and feet. I thought – I'm being kidnapped."

He woke up in the Madhethe interrogation centre, where the Saudi police demanded he confess to being a British spy ordered to plant bombs in the country. He told then the bombs were obviously the work of Saudi Islamists – a view now accepted to be true – so they hung him upside down and began to beat his feet and buttocks with an axe handle for eight days. All the while, he could hear his friend Bill Sampson being gang-raped in the next room.

Mr Mitchell was eventually released after 32 months, when he was swapped for several Saudi citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay. But he warns: "The torture chambers in Saudi weren't created for me. These rooms were like a human abattoir. There was years' worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived, but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who don't survive those chambers."

One man who narrowly escaped these chambers is Yahya al-Faifi, a 47 year old Saudi trade unionist, now hiding from the Saudi secret police in Britain. He worked for BAE Systems in Al Khobar evaluating the flying skills of pilots until 2001, when it was unilaterally announced that the company’s Saudi workers would be receiving a 40 percent pay cut. Al-Faifi decided to organise a trade union to protest. In Saudi Arabia, this is a capital crime. He was immediately fired and placed under constant secret police surveillance. He explains, “I passed information to Human Rights Watch, and this was the last straw. I was told I should ‘take care of my children’, and they would be in danger if I stayed.” He will be risking the further rage of the Saudi police against his family by joining the protests on Wednesday because “I cannot stand by while these crimes happen.”

But life in Saudi Arabia is worst of all for women. While Abdullah offers praise for Britain's female head of state, in his country all women are kept in effect under house arrest. They are banned from driving, from leaving the house without a male guardian, even in a medical emergency, or from holding a passport. Whenever women try to struggle free from these rules, the "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" – a posse of uniformed thugs who stalk the streets – beat them with batons.

There was a rare glimpse into how this system of gender apartheid works last year when a female Saudi writer called Badria al-Bisher authored a plea for change. She wrote: "Imagine being a woman, and being subject to harassment, beating, or murder, then when your picture is published in local newspapers, along with the criminals' in all their murderousness, there will still be those who ask if you, the victim, were veiled ... Imagine being a woman whose nose, arms, and legs are now broken by your husband, and when you submit a complaint to a judge saying: He beats me! He'd casually reply by saying: Yes? What else? ... Imagine being a woman, and this "guardian" of yours is your 15-year-old son."

The website on which this appeal appeared has since been shut down. The House of Saud's dysfunctions are not contained within the Arabian peninsula; they are burning their way out across the world – and backfiring on Britain.

In order to appease their own internal Wahabbi-Islamist extremists, the Saudi dictatorship is handing them tens of billions of oil-dollars to promote their vision across the globe. As the dissident ex-CIA agent Robert Baer says: "Never forget that it is the al-Saud who sign the cheques for these extreme mosque schools all over the world. It's hush money to divert Muslims' attention from the [activities of] the al-Saud [royal family]." The Saudi dictatorship is slowly poisoning global Islam, ensuring the most austere and fanatical desert vision liquidates the softer, more mystical strands – and we are already seeing this backfire on to the streets of London and New York.

Privately, government ministers claim Abdullah is slowly reforming the kingdom. They contrast him to the Interior Minister, Naif al-Saud, who blames the September 11 attacks on the Israeli security services and is even more hard line. But Human Rights Watch says that under Abdullah, "reform has been more cosmetic than real". For example, two of the country's leading liberal reformists, Abdullah and Isa al-Hamid, are currently awaiting trial. Their "crime" was to support a totally peaceful protest organised by mothers of men who have been seized without explanation by the Saudi state and held for years, without contact, lawyers or trial. Their names will not be uttered by Brown or Cameron this week.

The truth is that the British Government – and all Western societies – are so addicted to Saudi Arabia's oil that they feel they can't speak back. They are terrified of seeing the petrol that lubricates our economy (or the arms deals that butter it) being turned off, as it was in 1973 oil crisis. It is only by making a rapid transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels that this depraved relationship with a tyranny can be unpicked – but the Government shows no sign of doing this, preferring to stick to the old exchange of sycophancy, arms deals and crude oil.

As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it: "Addicts don't tell the truth to their dealers." That's why this week the torturer will be inside Buckingham Palace, and his victims left outside, alone.

If you want to join Sandy Mitchell, Yahya al-Faifi, Peter Tatchell, John McDonell and many others in protest against this visit, gather on Wednesday October 31, 6pm - 8pm, at the Saudi Embassy, 30-32 Charles Street, W1J 5DZ. It's next to Green Park tube - I'll see you there!

Back in 2001, I wondered out loud – and in print – if it would take “an environmental 9/11” to finally break the corporate brake that is holding up all action on global warming in America. Since then, New Orleans has drowned, the Southeast has dried up so severely the city of Atlanta is nearly out of water, and the skies over California have been turned red by the worst wildfires since records began. More than a thousand people have died, and more than $70bn of property has been destroyed. Seeing Americans huddled together in refugee camps is something that no longer shocks us on the nightly news. Yet still the political debate in the US remains stuck far short of the drastic cuts in carbon emissions we need now if we are to stop this Weather of Mass Destruction.

The science is clear: these apocalyptic weather-events are unlikely to be freak one-offs. While it’s hard to link any single hurricane or vast fire to global warming, Katrina and California’s wildfires fit into the wider warming pattern of increasingly freaky weather predicted by climatologists as the world warms. As Professor Tim Flannery, Australia’s most distinguished scientist, puts it: “Americans might feel they’re suffering from a whole lot of severe weather at the moment, but look globally and you see exactly the same thing around the world. Anywhere with a Mediterranean climate, such as Greece or Australia or California, is suffering extreme wildfires. Now, why is that happening? The climate is slowly shifting, so that the desert regions adjacent to those Mediterranean areas are starting to expand.”

He’s not alone. The prestigious journal Science recently published the results of a long study into wildfires – and they found that man-made global warming is driving their new ferocity. Professor Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona concluded, “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it's not 50 to 100 years away – it's happening now in forest ecosystems through fire.” The fires will speed up as global warming speeds up. If we hit three degrees centigrade of warming, most models predict the Amazon rainforest itself will dry out and burn up. The most important carbon skink on earth will turn to ash – ensuring the world warms even more.
So it’s a red herring to suggest that an individual arsonist was The Cause of the California fires, the latest right-wing talking point. Even if a malicious person did strike – it’s possible – the fire only spread so far and so fast because the climate is unusually dry. The hefty act of arson is our carbon-spewing behaviour every day, altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere in a way that guarantees more warming and more wildfires.

In a Washington DC that talks obsessively about national security, why is this issue – threatening the lives of US citizens, and people across the world – still lingering at the bottom of the to-do list? Look at the list of donations to the campaign of Rudi Giuliani, the man most likely to be the next President. All the major oil and gas companies have transferred their political donations from the Bush administration to ‘America’s mayor,’ lavishing half a billion dollars on him this year alone.

Giuliani in return promises another four years of the burning Bush approach, dismissing energy conservation as “not very effective” and cheerleading for drilling out the oil beneath the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Serving the fossil fuel industry isn’t new for Giuliani. In 2005, he took a fat $10m job at Bracewell & Patterson, a lobbying firm that is described by the National Resources Defence Council as “the most well-known face of aggressive energy-industry lobbying in America.”

But under the current US system, almost every politician is forced to go grovelling to massive oil and gas corporations for campaign donations – so it’s not surprising that they all end up tangoing to their tune, even at the expense of New Orleans and California. Giuliani is merely the extreme end of a narrow spectrum. Even Al Gore had to beg for cash from Exxon-Mobil and Chevron in order to run for President, and he neutered his environmentalism accordingly. It’s only now Gore doesn’t have to scrape for cash that he has been able to speak the truth.

This pattern is repeated across US politics: take away the need for oil cash, and politicians start dealing with global warming seriously. Five years ago, both Maine and Arizona introduced clean state funding for political parties. Almost overnight, the states switched from near-denial on global warming to agreeing to abide by the Kyoto protocol. As the State Assembly Member Loni Hancock says, “Clean money [is] the reform that makes all other reforms possible.”

Dirty money in US politics is leading to dirty smoke-streaked skies across California. It is only when the American people start to pay for their own political campaigns – instead of outsourcing the job to Exxon and friends – that we can begin to deal with global warming. They don’t have time to dawdle: the list of super-charged ‘natural’ disasters is growing every week – and the next one to hit could be Hurricane Giuliani.

A royal guest to be proud of?

His regime is condemned as one of the most brutal in the world, but today Britain will roll out the red carpet for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

By Johann Hari
Monday, 29 October 2007

This week, Gordon Brown and David Cameron will welcome the leader of one of the world's most vicious dictatorships to Britain. Both men will embrace King Abdullah al-Saud, who heads a regime in which, according to Amnesty International, "Fear and secrecy permeate every aspect of life. Every day the most fundamental human rights of people in Saudi Arabia are being violated."

In his Labour Party conference speech last month, the Prime Minister declared that he would oppose dictatorship everywhere: "The message should go out to anyone facing persecution from Burma to Zimbabwe ... human rights are universal." He has refused to even attend the same summit as the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, on the grounds that "there is no freedom in Zimbabwe, and there is widespread torture and mass intimidation of the political opposition." David Cameron has also just promised to put "human rights" at the heart of his "foreign policy vision".

Yet both political leaders refuse to make a commitment to even mention human rights to the king. Instead, he will ride in a golden carriage with the Queen, and be guest of honour at a Buckingham Palace banquet. It is the start of a three-day state visit, funded by the British taxpayer. The decision to lavish large sums and the rare prestige of a state visit on King Abdullah has attracted severe criticism in Westminster. The Liberal Democrats' acting leader, Vincent Cable, has refused to attend the banquet. The Labour MP John McDonnell said: "We are feting this man because Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world's oil, and because we sell him billions of pounds' worth of weapons. It is an insult to everything Britain stands for to put these geopolitical concerns ahead of the rights of women, trade unionists and all Saudi people."

While King Abdullah is cheered by our political leaders, many of his victims will be protesting outside. Sandy Mitchell, 52, went to Saudi Arabia to work as an anaesthetic technician at a hospital in Riyadh more than a decade ago – and got a rare outsider's glimpse into how the king maintains his power. He explains: "One day in 2000 I was getting out of my car at the hospital when I was pounced on. I was battered to the ground, a hood was put over my head, and they manacled my hands and feet. I thought – I'm being kidnapped."

He woke up in the Madhethe interrogation centre, where the Saudi police demanded he confess to being a British spy ordered to plant bombs in the country. He told then the bombs were obviously the work of Saudi Islamists – a view now accepted to be true – so they hung him upside down and began to beat his feet and buttocks with an axe handle for eight days. All the while, he could hear his friend Bill Sampson being gang-raped in the next room.

Mr Mitchell was eventually released after 32 months, when he was swapped for several Saudi citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay. But he warns: "The torture chambers in Saudi weren't created for me. These rooms were like a human abattoir. There was years' worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived, but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who don't survive those chambers." Mr Mitchell will be joined at the protests by many refugees who have narrowly escaped this fate, including the trade unionist Yahya al-Faifi.

But life in Saudi Arabia is worst of all for women. While King Abdullah offers praise for Britain's female head of state, in his country all women are kept in effect under house arrest. They are banned from driving, from leaving the house without a male guardian, even in a medical emergency, or from holding a passport. Whenever women try to struggle free from these rules, the "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" – a posse of uniformed thugs who stalk the streets – beat them with batons.

There was a rare glimpse into how this system of gender apartheid works last year when a female Saudi writer called Badria al-Bisher authored a plea for change. She wrote: "Imagine being a woman, and being subject to harassment, beating, or murder, then when your picture is published in local newspapers, along with the criminals' in all their murderousness, there will still be those who ask if you, the victim, were veiled ... Imagine being a woman whose nose, arms, and legs are now broken by your husband, and when you submit a complaint to a judge saying: He beats me! He'd casually reply by saying: Yes? What else? ... Imagine being a woman, and this "guardian" of yours is your 15-year-old son."

The website on which this appeal appeared has since been shut down. The House of Saud's dysfunctions are not contained within the Arabian peninsula; they are burning their way out across the world – and backfiring on Britain.

In order to appease their own internal Wahabbi-Islamist extremists, the Saudi dictatorship is handing them tens of billions of oil-dollars to promote their vision across the globe. As the dissident ex-CIA agent Robert Baer says: "Never forget that it is the al-Saud who sign the cheques for these extreme mosque schools all over the world. It's hush money to divert Muslims' attention from the [activities of] the al-Saud [royal family]." The Saudi dictatorship is slowly poisoning global Islam, ensuring the most austere and fanatical desert vision liquidates the softer, more mystical strands – and we are already seeing this backfire on to the streets of London and New York.

Privately, government ministers claim King Abdullah is slowly reforming the kingdom. They contrast him to the Interior Minister, Naif al-Saud, who blames the September 11 attacks on the Israeli security services and is even more hard line. But Human Rights Watch says that under King Abdullah, "reform has been more cosmetic than real". For example, two of the country's leading liberal reformists, Abdullah and Isa al-Hamid, are currently awaiting trial. Their "crime" was to support a totally peaceful protest organised by mothers of men who have been seized without explanation by the Saudi state and held for years, without contact, lawyers or trial. Their names will not be uttered by Brown or Cameron this week.

The truth is that the British Government – and all Western societies – are so addicted to Saudi Arabia's oil that they feel they can't speak back. They are terrified of seeing the petrol that lubricates our economy (or the arms deals that butter it) being turned off, as it was in 1973 oil crisis. It is only by making a rapid transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels that this depraved relationship with a tyranny can be unpicked – but the Government shows no sign of doing this, preferring to stick to the old exchange of sycophancy, arms deals and crude oil.

As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it: "Addicts don't tell the truth to their dealers." That's why this week the torturer will be inside Buckingham Palace, and his victims left outside, alone.

Imagine a woman – let’s call her Beth – who has been an unthinking atheist all her life, just because her family and her friends are too. One day, she decides to convert to Islam. As soon as she dons the hijab, her neighbours start to swear and spit at her in the street. A brick is thrown through her window; while she is sleeping, her car is torched. When she speaks out publicly, the death threats come. She is a “whore” who will be “raped to death”. All the other converts to Islam are receiving the same threats. Some have been beaten. Some are on the run. When they approach the police, they are wary-to-hostile. The officers ask suspiciously: what have you been doing to anger these Muslim-bashers?

If this was happening this way, it would – rightly – be a national scandal. There would be Panorama specials, front page fury and government inquiries into Islamophobia. But it is happening – only in the reverse direction. All over Europe, there are Muslims who are exercising their right in a free society to change their religion, or to become atheists. And they are regularly being threatened, beaten, and burned-out, while the police largely stand by, inert.

Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22 year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the “right” to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and the end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: “We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

Ehsan was immediately threatened with death. He was kicked to the ground outside the supermarket. He was grabbed in a street with a knife put to his throat. He can’t afford to be glib about the risk: he remembers the daylight decapitation of Theo Van Gough on the streets of Amsterdam. Yet instead of rallying to Ehsan, his party condemned him. The Dutch Vice-Prime Minister Wouter Bos said they disapproved of an organisation that “offends Muslims and their faith”.

In Britain, my friend Maryam Namazie recently set up the British Council of Ex-Muslims. She was immediately flooded with calls from frightened people who wanted to join but were too intimidated. Endless phone threats inform her she will soon be beheaded – but she has learned that the police just aren’t interested. “They have never been very helpful,” she says. “They act as if it’s your fault for ‘provoking’ these people, when in fact the Islamist movement uses threats and intimidation as a tool to silence their critics.”

People raised on the honeyed multicultural platitudes that religions like Christianity and Islam are all about love and hugging puppies will wonder why these people would take such risks to leave their faith. This week I interviewed Mina Ahadi, the founder of the German branch of the Council of Ex-Muslims, after she was named Secularist of the Year.

Mina is a warm fiftysomething woman with a big laugh, and when we meet – in a house in London I can’t disclose for safety reasons – she is wearing a big jumper and small, wire-rimmed glasses that make her look like any other German Hausfrau. But she has a very different story, taking me back to her childhood in rural Iran. She tells me: “As a Muslim girl, I was not allowed to do so many things. From the age of 12 onwards I was basically not allowed to leave the house. I couldn’t play on the street, I couldn’t mix with boys, I couldn’t even do the shopping. I hated it. There was terrible violence towards the women in my community, everywhere. One of my cousins, Nahid, went into a man’s house unaccompanied, and the men in my family tied her to a tree and whipped her. When I read the Koran for myself I was shocked, because many of these things are actually recommended by the Prophet Mohammed.”

She soon realised she was an atheist, a view reinforced by her reading of Charles Darwin. When she went to university, the Islamists began to force a theocracy on the Iranian people. She refused to accept the mass sackings of women and the enforced veiling. She was beaten for speaking out, and had to go into hiding. One day, her husband and four of their friends were taken away. Nine months later, in another hiding place, she read that they had been executed.

She decided to seek refuge in Austria, because she read in a book that women’s life expectancy there was higher than men’s, “and I thought - that’s my kind of country!” But she was amazed to find that even in Europe, Islamist groups were being treated as the respected spokesmen for all Muslims by politicians and journalists. Even here, the extreme wing threatened her with death for forming the International Committee Against Stoning to save women, and the police did little. On her visit to Britain, they offered her no protection at all.

If Christian fundamentalists were doing this – as they used to, and would like to again – none of us would hesitate in erupting in rage. But because Islamic fundamentalists are doing it, we feel awkward, and fall silent. The only difference is the colour of their skin. There is a word for this: racism.

Women like Mina expose a hole in the stale logic of multiculturalism. She shows that secularism is not a ‘Western’ value: she thought of it all by herself, in a rural village in Iran. Yet the attitudes that lead to the persecution of apostates are widespread even within British Islam, because we patronisingly assume it is ‘their culture’ and do not challenge it. Some 36 percent of British Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24 think apostates should be murdered. The younger British Muslims are, the more they believe it – a bad sign for the future, unless we start arguing back. This isn’t just kids sounding off. Some act on it: a Despatches documentary earlier this year, ‘Unholy War’, found dozens of cases of apostates having their cars blown up, their kids threatened and even being beaten and left for dead, on British streets.

Of course, the ex-Muslims have flaws too. Sometimes they can imply there is only one true reading of the Koran – the vicious Bin Ladenist one. In fact, it is a basic atheist truth that superstition is elastic: the ‘holy’ text can mean anything the believers want it to mean, precisely because there is no divine essence to it, only the contradictory ramblings of human beings. If moderate Muslims find a way to relativize away the most abhorrent parts of their holy text, as many Christians have been forced to in a secular environment, then we should cautiously welcome them, while still encouraging them to make the full journey into atheism.

But one way to keep up the pressure for this reform within Islam is to have a thriving movement of ex-Muslims. They demonstrate to ordinary Muslims that if they are appalled by the unreformed bigotry of their faith as it currently stands, there is a rich and rewarding alternative – secular humanism.

If we in Europe do not defend people like Ehsan and Maryam and Mina who are fighting fundamentalist thugs for the basic human right to believe and say what they want, do we even deserve these rights for ourselves?

You can read my article about the shocking treatment of Muslim women by the German state here. And please, before right-wing loons start e-mailing me about how this is a sign of 'Eurabia' and that Europe is being taken over by Muslims, check out my debunking of this here and here.

There is a response to this article on the homophobic website 'Islamophobia Watch'. This is a site which notoriously said that gay people should stop whining about sharia law, because it says there has to be four witnesses to us having sex for us to be executed. (See here.) You can read their smears against Ehsan and Maryam and Mina here.

They claim these principled left-wingers are in fact on the "far right" because, er, they defend the rights of women, gay people, novellists and cartoonists, and oppose all religions - those well known far right principles. They shamefully call Maryam "a nutter" for opposing Islamic fundamentalist homophobia, when she has witnessed it first hand in Iran. They then smear Eshan as aligned with Geert Wilders, without pointing out he has in fact condemned Wilders' disgraceful calls for the Koran to be banned, saying instead that "everyone should read it."

They should be deeply ashamed of their attack on these brave ex-Muslims. You can ask them why they defend the religious murder of gay people, and scorn anybody who condemns it "Islamophobic", by e-mailing editorial@islamophobia-watch.com

You can e-mail comments to me at j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

There has been a string of sweaty headlines from almost every continent on earth over the past month that might seem, at first, to be unconnected.

In Syria, a mysterious series of explosions in the desert turn out to have been an Israeli military strike which they claim was designed to take out the early stages of a nuclear weapons programme. In Iran, the chief nuclear negotiator with the West has quit because he doesn’t agree with the hardline stance of President Ahmadinejadh. In Washington DC, the Bush administration continues to funnel cash into developing “more useable” battlefield “mini-nukes.” In Russia, Vladmir Putin has ordered Russia’s fleet of strategic nuclear bombers to resume round-the-clock patrols for the first time since the fall of Soviet tyranny. In India, the government has fissured and almost collapsed over the question of whether the country should enter into a nuclear deal with the US. In North Korea, dictator Kim Jong Il appears to be – perhaps – taking baby-steps towards giving up his nukes after a lot of bribes. And somewhere in the distance, Diana Ross should be singing, “I’m in the middle of a chain reaction.”

These scattered stories are all fever-symptoms of living in the Second Nuclear Age. In the First Nuclear Age, the Cold War, there were two concrete power blocks facing each other eyeball-to-eyeball, and there was a doctrine, however hellish, regulating their use: Mutually Assured Destruction. You fire, we’ll fire, and then we’ll all die. Today, that world – with its mad MAD doctrines – is gone, and the odds of a nuclear weapon actually being used are swelling.

In the Second Nuclear Age, we have mini-cold wars spreading across the world’s hot-spots. India vs Pakistan. Israel vs (soon) Iran. North Korea vs (soon) Japan. And – back from the dead – the US vs Russia. Yet this time there are no hot-lines, no agreements not to fire first, and barely any plans to defuse the stand-offs. Just 27,000 nuclear weapons, each one 70 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some scientists suggest it would take the use of less than 5 percent to trigger a global nuclear winter.

Shortly before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy foresaw the world we are now living in. He said, “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security.... There would be only the increased chance of [nuclear] war.”

So how do we get out of this radioactive cul-de-sac? Kennedy had an idea. He ran in 1960 as a nuclear hawk, baiting Republic President Dwight Eisenhower from the right by falsely claiming he had allowed a “missile gap” to develop between the Soviet Union and the US. But then – in the Cuban Missile Crisis – he came within inches of overseeing a nuclear holocaust. After that, he declared, “The weapons of [nuclear] war must be abolished, before they abolish us.” He proposed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) based on a simple bargain. The countries that already had nuclear weapons would agree to slowly disarm in lockstep, and in return the countries without weapons would agree not to tool up. The Treaty was eventually signed after his death, in 1968.

It is still the best route out of our current nuclear crises – yet the NPT is being used as toilet-paper by the world’s leaders. The Bush administration, for example, has ignored both parts of the bargain: it has buffed up its own arsenal instead of reducing it, and it has recognised and rewarded other countries for proliferation. That’s what the current row in India is about. The US is proposing to reward India for becoming a nuclear power, offering it nuclear materials and other goodies. The Communist members in the Indian coalition are refusing, and they are prepared to bring down the government if necessary.

The UN High Level Panel on Threats recently warned about where we’re headed: “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.” Most of us have been inert in response. The old mass movements for upholding the NPT have largely melted away.

Yet – for the first time in a long time – there has been an almost-unnoticed flash of hope on this issue from the US. Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama was recently attacked for making a “gaffe” after he said he wouldn’t, as President, use nuclear weapons against civilians. (Ah, such “political immaturity”). But instead of backing down, he raised the stakes, announcing: “Here’s what I’ll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.” He pledged to “strengthen the NPT”, take US missiles off hair-trigger alert, and multilaterally make mighty cuts in the US nuclear arsenal “to stop giving countries like Iran and North Korea an excuse.”

In other words: Obama wants the bargain Kennedy proposed to be brought back to life. The developments in North Korea suggest Obama’s preferred strategy – diplomacy – might work. A fortnight ago, Kim Jong Il agreed to disable his main nuclear complex at Yongbyon and declare all his nuclear activities by the end of the year. He has been dragged to this point by a combination of sanctions and bribes by all the world’s major powers, who are unusually united. It’s hard to be totally optimistic: Kim made deals in the past, only to see them break down. But it suggests that sustained anathemising of proliferation may bear results in the end.

And for Iran? Many of the people who oppose (as I do) the Cheney-Giuliani plans to bomb Iran think this is simply a matter of waiting for the internal Iranian opposition to depose the Holocaust-denying thug Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh. But this ignores a simple fact: a majority of Iranians want nuclear weapons, according to every opinion poll. It’s desirable for the Iranian people to ditch Ahmadinejadh for lots of reasons – but it isn’t a non-proliferation strategy, unless he is replaced by somebody even more dictatorial.

No; the only long-term way to drag Iran away from the nuclear path is to change the minds of the Iranian people themselves. In a Bushian world where all the major powers, including Britain, wave their own nuclear weapons as virility symbols, that is impossible. In an Obaman world where the existing nuclear powers were dismantling much of their arsenals, it could – just – be done.

And if the sanctions and threats and carrots all still failed? If Kim and Ahmadinejadh’s successors insisted after all on tooling up? A denuclearizing world could – as an absolutely last resort – justify taking military action to prevent other countries going nuclear. But today, to go to war supposedly to uphold the NPT would be a sick joke, when the world’s leaders are all blatantly burning it themselves – and ramping up the risks of the Second Nuclear Age.

You can read my other articles about nuclear weapons here and e-mail comments to j.hari -at- independent.co.uk