Jane Clare Jones blog on Tommy Robinson

[CassieMaddox]

Just a really great read
https://janeclarejones.com/2024/07/28/tommy-robinson-far-right-populism-and-gender-criticism/

These are my favourite bits:

The greatest danger to women and girls has always been, and remains, the men inside their own houses. This is the nature, and the devastation, of endemic male sexual violence. It usually happens in the place, and with the people, who are supposed to be most safe. It would perhaps be comforting to imagine that we could easily identify the men who are dangerous – the Muslims, the brown ones, the ones in dresses – and then we could keep ourselves safe by keeping them out. But the argument materialist feminists made throughout the early years of the gender wars applies equally here: men are a statistical danger to women as a class and there is prima facie no way of working out which ones are dangerous and which ones are not.

The argument is no longer ‘guilt by association’ or ‘purity politics,’ it is now a) What even is the far right anyway?, b) The far right doesn’t mean anything because I was called far right for knowing men aren’t women, c) You people think anyone who disagrees with you is far right, and d) He is not far right anyway. That is, it has moved from claiming that association with the far right is either not happening or if it is happening has no impact on the substance of GC discourse, to people openly associating with the far right and recycling far right talking points while denying that the far right is the far right.

But what feminist women have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to get across, is that these kinds of men are not on ‘your side,’ if ‘your side’ is genuinely defending women’s rights. These men are on their side, and their side wants a largely white patriarchal nation, in which ‘their’ women know their place and are ‘protected’ only insofar as ‘protection’ means keeping them guarded from ‘other’ men.

The pictures at the end of the article are very illuminating too.

Brava JCJ 👏

Fast moving thread!
Just coming back to this (thanks for responding Cassie)
I think I see things so differently to you!
I've a very switched on teen (just going off to study politics and IR at Uni) who I'm forever grateful for pointing me to the Ground News site/app.
I think said teen (who voted Labour for their first vote) is innately like me- and likes to be aware of any biases at play in media consumption- from any side.
I'm at risk of your newly added 'engage with the argument not the source' criteria I suspect?- but I do struggle to see what's wrong with that?
Total trust and reliance on accepted sources has made me see several friends struggle with cognitive dissonance- on the gender debate specifically. (I went through that myself!)
It's so clear to me now (and to my wise teen!) that we are constantly bombarded by biases and can't escape them whatever we read. So I'd prefer to read wide with full knowledge of the biases at play and draw my own conclusions from the various facts and viewpoints- much like some of the best discussions on here. (Does any outlet manage to be completely unbiased?). I just can't see any gain from writing off sources out of hand. I find when I look at Unherd or The Times, or the Guardian, or any other paper/source- there will always be articles I agree with or don't, or I'll roll my eyes at the obvious bias (on any side). But it is all informative and I have found the more widely I have read, the more able I have been to find my own thoughts that don't neatly sit in any particular camp. I think that's healthy!
I've found gems through Unherd- like the Stock and Bindel articles- as well as the best Nick Cave interview ever- as well as some that I don't align with. But reading or watching any content I don't agree with has honed my own critical thinking- and awareness of the larger issue of how we are most likely to be unable to trust our own views if we DO only expose ourselves to 'acceptable' sources.
My teen gives me hope for a youth that will grow away from polarization towards nuance and consciousness of the societal forces acting on them.
Out-of interest this made me look up Unherd on Ground News and they place Unherd as 'center'- they also break down by topic.
Great stuff.
https://ground.news/interest/unherd
Edited to add Ground News link in case anyone is interested

Yeah I'm probably a bit too sceptical. I do read stuff there but I'd fact check it. I often read stories on several different news sites and check the source- its amazing how much the sites recycle the same dodgy content - especially the Mail, GB news, express and telegraph. They basically seem to just publish the same stuff.

I think the rise of "opinion" pieces isn't always helpful either. I wish there was more quality investigative journalism.

This is a thread about the far right in the UK, not whether Sharia law in Iran is a problem.
All the things you mention are either a derail, or a conscious attempt to suggest far right talking points are reasonable. Neither of which I particularly want to engage in.

I think the rise of "opinion" pieces isn't always helpful either. I wish there was more quality investigative journalism.
Definitely agree on this.

And yep. These last few years has defintely made me fact check bloody everything!

An elected MP of a party that I keep getting told is on the rise because "lefties" won't listen to concerns.

"Islamist" as a term has been coopted by those trying to make their anti-muslim prejudice sound reasonable and Anderson knew exactly what he was doing when he used that phraseology.

If posters don't like readers like me assuming they are using the word in an Anderson like context, they need to be more specific. That's the consequence of the far right coopting language to legitimise their prejudice.

In many nominally Christian and secular countries, women have equal rights in law. This doesn't pan out as complete equality, but you can at least take an employer to court for sacking you for refusing to wear the sort of clothing that the company wouldn't impose on a man, for example.

Now let's take Malaysia as an example. It's generally seen as reasonably moderate, certainly not as crazy as Iran. Men can take multiple wives. If a woman moves out of the marital home without her husband's agreement, he is not liable to pay her maintenance. In at least one state in Malaysia, Muslim women, must, by law, wear the hijab. In one state, women may only perform in front of other women. There was a case fairly recently were police refused to deal with a Chinese woman who wished to report a crime because she was, in their eyes, immodestly dressed. She was wearing shorts and t-shirt, iirc, and she wasn't Muslim, and this was in a part of the country generally seen as being more liberal. On the plus side, the country, and even quite conservative Muslim families there, is pretty hot on educating women.

So yeah, the position of women in the secular west is a lot better than it is in many Muslim countries. And I'm not Muslim-bashing here: I have Muslim friends. I am Islamist-bashing.

Also, Catholics are Christians. They way you word it makes it look as if you think they're not.

How about giving posters here the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that they're not known as right-wingers, or seeking clarification first?

But it's a bit like the word 'woman' being coopted by some, er, men. I refuse to put 'cis' in front of it to describe myself. I stick to the original meaning.

Edited to correct typo.

I’ve tried following but am getting really confused about the arguments

I thought the gist of JCJ was men, all men, are the problem and the far right criticism was about not being seen fraternising with racists even if they believe men can’t be women too bc they are males who are as much of a risk as the balaclavaed antifa tras.

But the thread seems to have moved towards GC believe in keeping males out of female spaces and TR believes in keeping ‘foreign’ males out of Britain so GC = racists?

Or male abuses of females are worse in X culture/country so those females here abused by men here can’t complain

The men who raped me were home-grown straight white able-bodied homophobic racist nationalists but if I am GC that puts in the same category as them?

That I think women from other countries and cultures face even more misogyny and abuse than I have/do and we should give them refuge but not sex offenders makes me racist?

I’m sorry I don’t really understand what is being argued about, to me all males=potential risk and while I think some things might indicate an elevated risk like previous rape/abuse, that fundamentally we can’t tell who just hasn’t been caught before so we need to ban all males - is that not JCJ’s and GC’s point?

I want to understand why the thread is so heated - aren’t we all on the ‘keep all males out of all female spaces’ side?

What is immigration to do with GC position?

Could somebody help me with a quick “the argument on the thread is Side Cassie is saying ‘this’ and Side Others are saying that’ because I think I am missing some essential point of divergence but I can’t work out what 😬

I remember all this.
JB first wrote about it in 2004 or 5 and also called out TRA at the sametime.
She has been getting death threats and cancellations ever since.

Out of interest would you then call them fundamentalist Muslims instead?
ie those Muslims who use their religion to exploit and suppress women as a way to distinguish between the Muslims who dont?
See also Christian fundamentalists.
Sometimes people use words to define a separate category
.It is a term thats been around since I was a kid and always denoted the more political extreme.
I have used the term to distinguish from Muslims who dont seek to oppress women or convert others or force them to stay or bomb people.
It of course has been coopted along with so many other neutral words.

Yes, but we were discussing this paragraph:

However, because much of the gender critical case concerned preserving single-sex space – that is, keeping men out – it always bore a certain structural resemblance to the type of sovereignty-thinking that, as we saw above, animates far-right populism. Indeed, as I explored in ‘Why Feminists are Not Nazis,’ a paper I gave at the University of Reading in 2019, that structural resemblance is precisely the basis on which TRAs always claimed that the gender critical position was fascist adjacent.

The paragraph you've now quoted does say what you said in your earlier post, but I had assumed that you were discussing the same paragraph as the rest of us, not a completely different paragraph making a completely different point.

It's a long piece, and if we're going to discuss it, it's probably better that we are all clear about which points we're discussing.

This is a thread about the far right in the UK, not whether Sharia law in Iran is a problem.

The thread is about what people want it to be about. That is not for you to dictate.

My first thought reading this was that it's because they abstractly blame disparities between the sexes, and sexist behaviours toward women, or sexual violence, on "the patriarchy" which is a kind of amorphous abstraction that has taken on a life of its own. It is some powerful thing with no concrete causal action. Sort of a miasma (maybe this accounts for the fears of contamination.)

Since its all caused by the patriarchy, there is no possibility of a difference in kind between say, Iran and the UK, and they also don't want to say there is any substantive progress, since the patriarchy hasn't been defeated.

It then struck me that this is exactly parallel to the American ID politics attitude to race. The cause is non-concrtee "systemic racism" -that is behind every disparity, and the people who take that view will argue that the situation of American blacks today is no better than it was in 1700 or 1930. There is, notably, no concrete causal chain and what's more, asking for such a thing is itself racist.

It's exactly like this particular staring of feminism, and also exactly like gender ideology. They are all part and parcel of the worldview as was described on the first page. JCJ, Cassie, and the rest are all part of a kind of ideological movement. They are like the Southern Baptists of leftism and feminism, and this small rift over gender is like the kind of rift that occurs when half the congregation thinks the Bible is ok with musical instruments, and half things they are not allowed. They are all still Southern Baptists in the end.

'Islamism' is a political ideology.

"A political ideology which seeks to enforce Islamic precepts and norms as generally applicable rules for people's conduct; and whose adherents seek a state based on Islamic values and laws (sharia) and rejecting Western guiding principles, such as freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, artistic freedom and freedom ..."

I may be wrong but I think the poster was referring to JD Vance.

I use the word Islamist and Islamism. This is the commonly accepted term for a very real and frightening development. I could also use Islamic fundamentalism. Don't you dare have the arrogance to assume I am a rascist or fascist.

You need to take a hard look at yourself

I cannot like this post enough.

Lib Fems love 'the patriarchy' - so much easier to blame than actual real life men.

Out of interest, where do you personally get your "fact checking" information from? What do you personally consider 'quality'?

Personally, think it is always better to get your news information from mainstream media sources ( a variety of them), including print media. If you rely on twitter - you just get funnelled down an echo chamber which reinforces your own prejudices.Print media may not be perfect, but at least it is honest and its biases well established. Mainstream media each have a breadth of columnists and creditable journalists.

Russia considers itself a secular state, not a Christian one. Surely you know that Communism/Marxism sought to eradicate the role of religion in society?

Introduction. According to its constitution, the Russian Federation is a secular state; the church is separate from the state. No ideology can be recognised as a state ideology or imposed as compulsory on all citizens.

Yes - like I said, mainstream media, left and right source. Often look at BBC verify, full fact and other fact checking websites too.

Whereas Pakistan, for example is an Islamic Republic:

"The 'Dominion of Pakistan', was secular from 1947 to 1955 and after that, Pakistan adopted a constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic with Islam as its state religion"

I was discussing the article I linked in my OP 😂 I know it's long but it does all build to quite a nuanced position so it's not altogether helpful to pull out one paragraph and assume JCJs position from that.

Immigration should be nothing to do with the GC position.
The article I linked us by a left wing feminist pointing out that people like Tommy Robinson have aligned themselves with the GC cause and as a result now you often see far right points being made alongside GC points. I would argue that's what has happened to this thread.

The "other side" think the left wing socialist feminists have a blind spot and wilfully ignore real concerns, leading to the rise of far right ideologies. They would probably argue that by refusing to acknowledge what they see as the intrinsic misogyny of "islamists" feminists like me are the problem.

The divergence fundamentally is about whether or not one is willing to tolerate far right view points as a legitimate part of GC discourse.

I was the poster who bought up JD Vance and Lee Anderson as the reason why I am sceptical about the term Islamist (and read it as dog whistle anti muslim).

So I can try to take a long hard look at myself but not sure what you want me to learn? I still think some who are further to the right have coopted the term "Islamism" to legitimise what is basically anti Muslim prejudice.

I'm not a fucking lib fem and the fact you think I am shows you know nothing about feminism Jon Snow

I wasn't talking about you Cassie. What a bizarre extrapolation.