Ethnocentric Facial Hair Bias: Guardian Left's latest bizarre apologia for a loathsome terrorist

I’ve been reading the Guardian every day since July of 2010 and I still marvel at their seemingly limitless capacity to both sympathetically portray even the most ruthless, reactionary and malevolent figures, while simultaneously chastising the West for its ethnocentrism – our failure to feel terrorists’ pain.

The most recent example, On Feb. 10, Jonathan Jones’ CiF essay (Abu Qatada and the portraits of hate), suggests the over-the-top polemics of a right-wing troll, rather than an earnest argument. That is, the theme explored by Jones seems to veer into parody, something you’d more likely find in the satirical sites, The Onion or The People’s Cube.

Jones (a Guardian Arts contributor) frames Qatada, a major al-Qaeda figure, as a victim of our culture’s irrational fear of unorthodox physical appearances – what Jones describes as his “expansive waterfall of facial hair.” [emphasis added]

Jones’ piece includes this passage:

Tremendous beards have for thousands of years been symbols of intense male spirituality in many religions. Qatada’s beard is not so very different from the outburst of chin hair sported by Pope Julius II in a 16th century portrait by Raphael, or the beards of Jewish elders in a painting by Bellini.

Jones, whose essay employed the words “beard” or “hair” 15 times – which, I’ll go out on a limb to suggest represents a record number of follicle references in an essay about terrorism – argues:

The best way to understand how supporters of al-Qaida…who present themselves in this way imagine their own appearance, might be to look at Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. Like Qatada, Michelangelo’s Moses has a grandiloquent beard that dominates his face, which in the case of Moses is both gentle and furious. Moses glares wrathfully at us sinners as we enter the church that houses Michelangelo’s sculpture. His beard is that of a prophet, close to God, who looks contemptuously on the deficiencies and sins of humankind.

Qatada, like Moses, is a holy man full of wrath [emphasis added]

Jones, seemingly obsessed with how Qatada’s beard has been used to unfairly vilify him – what will no doubt hitherto be know as ‘Ethnocentric Facial Hair Bias” (EFHB) – added:

His clerical dress and beard identify him as part of a subculture of radical Islamists and within that subculture signify spiritual grace. But outside that world they mean he is a terrorist, a fanatic, a violent zealot.

He is visually ostracised, and visually condemned.

Barbaric use of images to demonise others and so justify the deprivation of their human rights.

Of course, the “visually ostracized” Abu Qatada was also Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man in the UK, who, in 1999, issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of Jews, including Jewish children, and told his mosque congregation that Americans should be attacked, wherever they were; that in his view they were no better than Jews; and that there was no difference between English, Jewish and American people.

Yet for Jonathan Jones, the “progressive” brave, new man, refreshingly free of the intellectually-crippling biases infecting a Western mind unfairly imputing guilt to this devout, complicated soul, we are in no moral position to pass judgement.

While many among the crude, unenlightened masses will remain bereft of Jones’ transforming understandings of Qatada’s “spiritual grace” and his sublime, ineffable aesthetic strength, such profound, majestic truths will certainly not be lost on the Guardian Left.