Geldof: ‘I did it not because I didn’t care — but because I cared too much...’
Last night Bob Geldof received a lifetime achievement award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council in the US — and gave this speech to reflect on why he returned his Freedom of Dublin to protest the inhumanity in Myanmar
IT is not because the Rohingya people are Muslims that I made my feeble protest. It is not because they are either Muslims or Rohingya. I don’t care what they believe or how they identify. I care only that they are human beings who are being killed, raped, tortured and removed because of difference.
Nor will I accept that the Muslim people of America only care because some fellow religionists in Burma are suffering. I can understand why that may happen but if it is indeed the case then it is not human empathy that is at work but rather a false identification of shared victimhood.
I say it is understandable perhaps in the same way that Christian believers were rightly outraged by the targeting of the Yazidi people of Iraq or the Copts of Egypt for extermination by the Islamic death cultists of Daesh and using the same methods currently being murderously employed by the nominally Buddhist killers of Myanmar.
It is the same as the nominally Christian German genocidalists targeting the Jewish people and so on and so on in God’s name and into the infinity of its tiresome, ugly bullshit. I feel the same way — but not because I am Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew or whatever. I feel the same way because I identify as human.
The outrage felt for all those so picked upon and selected for murder must be only because they are people. Not because of a shared faith. Not because they wave the same spiritual flag as oneself. Not because of nationhood or common community but rather common humanity. Put away the flags of cultural bias. Hoist the colours of the human.
How God must loathe his creation. That is if you want to believe that. Me, I don’t care.
Believe what you want, but when those belief systems are so perverted by men and women of ill-will and obsessive political ambition, then how easy is it for those same beliefs to be manipulated to foul barbarism, anti-human, anti-thought, anti-reason — anti-life. And none of it, the mad belief systems, the hatred so engendered and the putrid, stinking, filthy inevitable end result makes no sense to me. And I will fight it.
In the 1960s a great American satirist called Tom Lehrer wrote this song: “All the Protestants hate the Catholics And the Catholics hate the Protestants All the Hindus hate the Muslims And everybody hated the Jews.”
As with all satire it is only funny because it is sickeningly true.
We are neither enabled nor confirmed by the identities we allow ourselves to be. Rather we are confined and condemned by their imposition. Why do we do this when we know it limits us? When it culturally and intellectually imprisons us. Is it just because we have that old pathological fear of not belonging?
We simply cannot be alone. We must group. We are obliged to be tribal. Tribes of like-minded groups who must always be obviously right, whose every other opposite thought or idea is a rivalry and must be stamped out. We are tonight in LA, but everywhere and everyone worldwide is either, one way or another, in LA terms, a Crip or a Blood! And they are both ridiculous and wrong.
I registered disgust against the murderess, the ethnic cleanser Aung San Suu Kyi. She had been a great moral force in the world and therefore a hero to me and millions. I had been asked by the city I was born in, and which had honoured me greatly, to welcome this woman to Dublin. To sing and speak welcome to her on behalf of so many in Ireland. I did so.
When power and its pursuit or misguided hubris perverted her into a monster I felt sickened to the core.
We find it hard to give up our heroes when they are revealed to be not just flawed, not simply to have feet of clay but rather to be sick and walk with those same feet of clay through fields of filth and blood.
I felt a chump. I had been taken for a ride. Suckered in. Made a fool of. And so I did the only small thing I could possibly do and give back the honour my fellow citizens had bestowed upon me. Not because I didn’t care — but because I cared too much. It meant a great deal to me and it was a great loss.
Will it make a difference? Of course not. But it is astonishing to me and a great source of gratitude from me that you, the Muslim Public Council of America, noticed this tiny gesture of faraway, and that tonight I follow in the footsteps of proper heroes. Ones who are noticed. Ones who are heard.
I also understand, I think, a little of what it must be to be a Muslim in the United States at this time of the world’s turmoil.
I am Irish and lived in the UK throughout the vicious, murderous IRA bombing campaigns in that country. Of course, unlike perhaps being Muslim there is no external flag that allowed the British people to register whether one is Irish or not until one opens one mouth and then there is the irrefutable geographical logic of accent!
For the vast majority of the five million Irish people in Britain there was only a terrible shame that innocents were being slaughtered in their name. Often with bullets paid for by a misguided IrishAmerican community, indulging in some mythic Hibernian past that owed more to Hollywood than to history.
I was a pop singer then as now and did what I could to put an alternative Irish perspective and tried to articulate a revulsion and disassociation from the killers and child-murders and torturers on both sides.
The same must be true for Muslim-Americans today. Confusion, shame, revulsion at those medievalists that would bring blasphemy to your belief and heap shame upon your culture.
So speak out you must. Shout not just the call to prayer from the minarets. No excuses for the killers from some ancient inappropriate interpretation. No apologies found in the scriptures. No prayer that allows for cruelty, barbarism or intolerance. No fellow-travelling Imam and a mealymouthed apologia. Robust, declamatory rejection of intolerance, hatred and anti-intellectualism should be a daily requirement everywhere and all the time. No hiding.
No hiding — because, ladies and gentlemen, there just isn’t any. There never is.
Everywhere and always the thugs, the brutes, the murderous scum are at their devil’s work. We must never accept that. Indeed we can never accept that. If we can do little now then one day perhaps they will be brought to some justice. But often not. And that too we must bitterly accept but never acquiesce to.
But, tonight, for those 650,000 people huddled in squalor, counting their dead and mutilated, raped and ravaged, hungry, exhausted and torn we can only offer our ineffectual thoughts, empathy and renewed political effort for whatever good it might do.
Not because they are Burmese. Not because they are Rohingya. Not because they are Muslims.
But because and only because they are hurt, they are brutalised, they are defenceless, they are different. But different only in some facile irrelevant way.
We speak to and for them tonight and tomorrow and on. We speak of them because, most significantly of all...
They are people. They are human. So are we... most of us.
‘I felt a chump. Taken for a ride. Suckered in. Made a fool of’