by Laurie Penny

Today's monotheistic patriarchal desert religions were not designed with the Internet in mind. In the sandy days of yore when Isaac and Ishmael were going their separate ways across Canaan, a RAM was something you sacrificed and Google was the noise that your enemies made as you slit their throats for worshipping the local animal deities. It’s safe to say that the ancient prophets probably didn’t envision their followers, three millennia on, hacking out their politics in the comments threads of liberal websites.

The Internet, however, has been curiously conducive to sectarian squabbles, and nowhere is this more evident than in the demonising of, respectively, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Islamist’ thinkers on websites such as Harry’s Place and MPACUK (the Muslim Public Affairs Committee). The sites place themselves on opposite sides of a notional split in the British liberal left between anti-war thinkers who advocate solidarity with Muslim groups, and the theorists and activists behind the Euston Manifesto.

Journalist Nick Cohen, a founding member of the Euston group, explained that sites like Harry’s Place are founded on the reasoning that “people once assumed that left-wingers were against antidemocratic sectarian movements that seek to justify oppression on the grounds of nationality, race or religion, but this is certainly not true of our times.

“As long as movements and regimes of the far-right are anti-western, then western liberals and leftists will fail to confront ideologues who want to subjugate women, murder homosexuals and Jews and institute an inquisitorial theocracy that seeks to tell Muslims what they can or cannot believe.”

This reasoning, however, has not translated into reasoned, inclusive debate in the blogosphere. Whilst most contributors to sites such as Harry’s Place or MPACUK attempt to maintain at least a façade of tolerance, a scan of the comments to the average article reveals reams of virulent and poorly understood dogma, much of it founded on ignorance, racism and religious intolerance.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has spent time moderating blog comments that as well as being a brilliant place to share ideas and force the pace of social change, the blogosphere has a tendency to lure idiots, bigots and bullies from their hiding places. Such is the case in comments threads of both camps in this debate. Not content with hosting frothing wingnuts, however, Harry’s Place has pursued what has been seen as a ‘witch-hunt’ against any Muslim or Muslim-ally who does not fit the site editors’ strict definitions of ‘moderation’; to whit, near non-involvement in politics.

In recent weeks the site has featured tasteless smear campaigns against, amongst others, recently deceased London politician Redmond O’Neill (“I am angry that a man whose life was spent in marginal and nasty political parties was able to attain such power…not everyone misses Redmond O’Neill”, said a guest blogger on the day of O’Neill’s funeral) and 17-year-old Young Muslims Advisory Group member Sabiha Iqbal, who has the temerity to be a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, an activity which in the eyes of Harry’s Place is clearly akin to spending one’s school holidays in terrorist training camps.

MPACUK and other anti-Islamophobic sites have a better track record of keeping their own house in order, calling out wingnuttery in the ranks and even denouncing prominent British Sharia activists such as Anjem Choudary as ‘extremist Muslim nuts’. This, perhaps, is as much a prudent response to contemporary suspicions of Muslims in politics as it is an objective ethical stance. Nonetheless, the sites are marred by reductionist attitudes to ‘Zionism’ that border on the anti-semitic, and by language that, at times, is just as threatening and hostile to site users from a Jewish background as Harry’s Place is to its Muslim readers.

A measure of sectarianism is in the nature of the Internet. When the theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term 'Global Village' to describe the coming communications revolution in the 1960s, he did not envision an international cyber-community characterised by bucolic tranquility. Anyone remotely charmed by the notion of a Global Village has probably not spent a great deal of time in villages, which, global or otherwise, involve a whole lot of gossip, backstabbing, isolationism and petty vendettas for every bastion of smalltown solidarity.

That sites like Harry’s Place and its anti-Zionist equivalents have sprung up, peddling rumour, slander and intolerance on both sides of the debate, is an inevitable side-effect of the low cost of entry to online politics, as irksome and expected as the nausea that accompanies a course of antibiotics.

But sectarianism is not inevitable in the blogosphere. A still, small voice of reason in the virtual mud-slinging match of the past decade has been Sunny Hundal*. Hundal established Liberal Conspiracy and Pickled Politics, the sites he now edits, as a direct antidote to the sectarian ideology of websites like Harry's Place and MPACUK. After less than two years, they now dominate every left- and centre-left UK blog ranking, belying the inevitability of intra-liberal conflict. As a member of Liberal Conspiracy's advisory board, it's a delight to observe how simple and effective have been the tactics employed to avoid sectarianism: a rigorous comments policy, avoiding censorship but weeding out infighting and abuse, and the foresight to engage commentators from a wide variety of viewpoints.

The Global Village may never be a place of total harmony, because the blogosphere is about diversification of ideas rather than consensus. Where consensus occurs, the Internet is a powerful tool for activism – but where it does not, our reaction as liberals should be to forge links and build bridges between different liberal interest groups, just as it should be in activist meatspace. Sectarian slanging-matches are older than the Internet, older than the Left, older even than the Abrahamic faiths whose more bigoted factions have driven the current split in liberal politics – but with a little integrity and imagination, a progressive consensus can be built in the blogosphere.

[*Who didn't know this piece was going to plug him, or ask for it btw! - Ed.]

This article was corrected on 14 November 2009. The Euston Manifesto does not explicity support the Iraq War, as previously stated, and this detail was introduced in sub-editing. This has now been removed.