With very few exceptions, every issue of Zero Tolerance over the past 6 – 7 years has featured Alan ‘Nemtheanga’ Averill’s column (yes, that loud mouth from Primordial, Dread Sovereign and other degenerate bands); from recounting the weird and sometimes hilarious experiences of his globe-trotting as he tours the world with his bands – to social commentary, the man at the front has something to say about, well, just about everything. Some of it you might like, some you might hate – some might go right over your head or give you an involuntary facepalm, we don’t really think he cares – but we’re sharing it here anyway.
“There were two holes dug in the ground, and I see two women in black veils are dragging two other women also in black veil towards the holes, and people are gathering around, all village people, and then a mullah (someone like a priest), standing right in front of the holes, opens the holy Quran and reads the parts of it about stoning, and how they deserve it. Then the two women in black veils drag the other women into the holes. The holes are so tall they come up to their arms. They put them in the holes and two other people come and seal the holes so they fit into them and can’t move. The two are so quiet; the mother is whispering a prayer, and the daughter almost screams that ‘God himself knows that I haven’t done anything’, then her father shouts at her saying ‘shut up you whore of a daughter‘. And mullah again prays in Arabic and tells the father ‘may your wife and daughter be forgiven’, and the father knows he has to begin, like he has been waiting so long for this very moment, and grabs a big rock and throws it at his wife, then his daughter. Then his brother does the same… Then his four-year old son…”
I have a group of Primordial fans I talk to from the Middle East. Some are men and some are women. Some have – in their own words – escaped; some are still living there, often hiding their love for the music as best they can. The women talk to me about living under an Islamic regime. Not being able to leave the house without a male chaperone, not being allowed to travel, drive, and in some cases go to college. About hiding the music they love from the religious police, secret meet-ups with friends to listen to it. Some escape and cross borders in search of something better, some have been to prison and some far worse.
The story changes from country to country, city to city, but there is a line running through all the things they explain: The oppression of women; the view of women as second class citizens.
I have sent my chatroom friends a video of German feminists chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the end of Berlin’s Women’s March. The story at the beginning of this column is one girl’s vivid response; a moment later a secretly filmed video of the event she described shows up on my screen. A male friend filmed it. It’s beyond brutal. It’s almost unwatchable, and what gets you the most while doing so is the glee with which the men in the poorly filmed video set about their task. As I watch the video of a mother and daughter being stoned to death, my Iranian friends are no doubt watching the group of white western German feminists shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ at a Women’s March demo in the video I shared with them.
The chat we have is full of questions for me. How can western women fail to see the truth, how can they be so stupid, how can we tell or show them, how can these so-called feminists fail to grasp what the truth is? My friends are at pains to say that stoning is not common – that it happens more in various countries and rural areas where Mullahs have more power – but now that people have mobile phones the stories are getting out there. They quote me sections of the Quran advocating wife beating.
After watching these stoning videos there’s a part of me that feels almost sorry for the Women’s March protestors, yet this is where we are now. When I was a teenager I read Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’, my mother and sisters were political and as a kid in the early ‘80s I went on women’s marches against the Irish state over contraception. I marched for divorce. I was brought up hearing, respecting and reading the original women’s rights movement. Finding Camille Paglia recently again on YouTube destroying modern intersectional and third wave feminists was a joy to behold, like being reunited with an old flame, one who still has all the fire you loved about her in the first place.
Yet now? I don’t want to be (and am not) one of those alt-right anti-feminists, but it seems the gears have shifted. These women are not seeking equality, they’re using feminism as a front for anti-globalism, for anarchist class war. They see Islam as a vehicle that they can strap themselves to in a bid to destroy the West and its system of patriarchal oppression. Whatever possible weapon they can use to spear the ‘privileged white male’, and the rights of women who disagree or have an opposing view to this minority extremism are thrown under the bus. Yet to think these women would be able to live as they do now in a Sharia society is a complete nonsense. Do you need to see the Isis sex slave pamphlet? It’s easy enough to download. The truth might be that if they want to confront the system of patriarchy they might be better off marching on the Saudi embassy.
…the freedoms enjoyed by us in the West allow us to plot to tear it down and advocate its destruction from within. These freedoms allow us to take to the street and protest while the police stand and watch. They allow us to disagree and debate.
The irony is, of course, that the freedoms enjoyed by us in the West allow us to plot to tear it down and advocate its destruction from within. These freedoms allow us to take to the street and protest while the police stand and watch. They allow us to disagree and debate. Are these freedoms allowed throughout the rest of the world? We can agree that the system may be far from perfect, but it’s about the best system there is right now.
What future are they aiming for? What sort of future do they envisage. From my discussions, no one has thought that bit through – some kind of anarchist community with no gender, no borders, no nations – all happily trading without money and living off the land? Or are we inviting war on ourselves, inviting lawlessness through our own idealistic naivety because the real world is so far from the social sciences department, and the law of the claw will simply prevail. I think you know what I think. See here’s the thing: people like this think they are the peasants in the French Revolution, but the truth is that they are the aristocrats, they just don’t know it yet. Removed from the concerns of the working class they sit and judge, but trust me, right now someone, somewhere in the working class is building a guillotine.
Alan Averill
Photograph by Gareth Averill
The views and opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily shared by the magazine Zero Tolerance Magazine or Obdurate Ltd. This column appears in the current issue of Zero Tolerance Magazine, #077 . Back issues are available at this location.
