by Hopi Sen

I didn’t particularly want to write a piece about Johann Hari. As you may know, the Independent columnist is being investigated by his employer for various alleged ethical and professional lapses of various degrees of seriousness.

As a good social democrat, I think an employer has a duty of care to their employee, and while I have an opinion, I’m also aware I’m not in possession of all the facts. For example, if Johann Hari has been consistently honest with his employers about his working practices, the issue becomes as much a matter about their judgement as about his.

What has troubled me, however, is the sense among some on the left that those who raise questions about Johann Hari’s work have a right-wing, or catholic, or other somesuch agenda which devalues their concerns about his journalism.



This was most obvious in the initial reaction to allegations of plagiarism when the likes of Polly Toynbee leapt to his defence, but it is also a theme in the comments threads of posts like this one on Liberal Conspiracy last week.

Perhaps people do have such an agenda. I’ve no idea. But if they are right on the facts, that should be enough. But just in case it isn’t I want to focus on why, if Johann Hari’s journalism was shoddy and inaccurate, it should concern those you might call “progressives”. I will simply examine one of the articles Johann Hari submitted for the 2008 Orwell prize. It was an article in the Independent called “How Multi-Culturalism is betraying women”. It is, in large part lifted from an article which appeared in Spiegel a month earlier.

We know this because Johann Hari’s article only uses examples and cases from an article that appeared in Spiegel a month before his own. He uses the same quotes, the same cases, the same people. Every example that appears in Hari’s article also appears in the Spiegel piece. All but two of the quotes Johann uses are lifted, word for word, from the same Spiegel piece (of the remaining two, one is taken from a Nick Cohen book)

I want to be crystal clear. This is not, in my view, plagiarism. Instead, it shows that an article Johann Hari submitted for the Orwell prize was a third rate cuttings job, a piece lifted from a single article from Spiegel magazine, an article referenced in passing but which provides about eight tenth’s of the Hari article’s content..

Naturally, being a lazy journalist is not a crime. Where the real concern comes, though, is that in the process compressing and editing the work of others, Johann Hari allowed major errors to creep into his article, errors which leave the reader with a seriously inaccurate view of the events he reports .

Errors, in fact which mean that Hari must be deliberately misleading his readers about an important issue in order to make a polemical point.

The introduction of Johann Hari’s article is: “Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can’t back both. ” (emphasis mine).

It is the case of a woman who sought an expedited divorce from her abusive husband, and was initially denied by a judge in January 2007.

As Spiegel describes it:

the case brought before Frankfurt’s family court was that of a 26-year-old German woman of Moroccan origin who was terrified of her violent Moroccan husband, a man who had continued to threaten her despite having been ordered to stay away by the authorities. He had beaten his wife and he had allegedly threatened to kill her.

…

…Judge Christa Datz-Winter suddenly became inflexible. According to the judge, there was no evidence of “an unreasonable hardship” that would make it necessary to dissolve the marriage immediately. Instead, the judge argued, the woman should have “expected” that her husband, who had grown up in a country influenced by Islamic tradition, would exercise the “right to use corporal punishment” his religion grants him.

It was an outrageous and stupid decision and when it became public, it outraged almost everyone in Germany. For example, Spiegel quotes Lale Akgün, “a member of parliament of Turkish origin and the Social Democratic Party’s representative on Islamic issues”, saying that the ruling was “worse than some backyard decision by an Islamist imam.”

Hari does not mention any of this. Nor does he mention the fact that, as Spiegel says in the same article: “Judge Datz-Winter was removed from the case and the courts proved themselves capable of acting responsibly”.

Yet when you read the Speigel article, the cases Hari cites were spread over more than five years. This is misleading as it creates the sense of a sudden crisis. Worse, by ignoring the timescale, Hari also ignores the resolution of the cases, just as he does with the Datz-Winter case.

To take one of the examples, we learn from Spiegel :

In 2003 the Frankfurt District Court handed down a mild sentence against a Turkish-born man who had stabbed his German-born wife to death.

…

According to the court’s decision, the divorce would have violated “his family and male honor derived from his Anatolian moral concepts.” The Federal Constitutional Court reversed the decision in 2004.

In the hands of Johann Hari a month later this becomes :”A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his “male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts”. The bitch.”

As Johann Hari referenced Spiegel and used the exact same quote in describing the case as the Spiegel journalists, he must surely have noticed the date of the case. But he does not include it.

Nor does he include Spiegel’s very next sentence, which says that “The Federal Constitutional Court reversed the decision in 2004“. Again, nor does he include Spiegel’s more general disclaimer in the very next paragraph that “higher courts usually reverse these sorts of rulings”.

Instead, he leads the reader to believe that this case is one of a group that have just happened, and which show that a multi-cultural state is incapable of dealing with such cases at all.

Indeed the entire thrust of Hari’s article is that “a hot hard logic” means we must choose between the rights of women and multi-culturalism. Evidence that judges can (and do) make stupid, ignorant, foolish judgements which are then corrected on appeal does not fit with that Manichean argument. So they are left out. That’s not mere hackery, it’s fundamentally dishonest writing.

But what’s worse, when dealing with an important subject like gender, religion and culture, is that Hari’s inaccuracy leads, I believe, to a serious misleading of the reader about the rights of Muslim women in Germany.

The Spiegel article quoted Ayten Köse, 42, who manages a women’s shelter. Like Johann Hari, she was infuriated by the Frankfurt case.

She is constantly reminding women that the German state will not let them down. “But what should I tell them now, after this Frankfurt ruling?” Köse asks furiously. “That it can happen sometimes?” Trust in the constitution and the hope that it will be enforced, says Köse, is sometimes the only thing Muslim women can rely on for encouragement.

Yet Johann Hari says “In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections – because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into separate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin.”

Who should we believe? Ayten Kose, who was rightly furious with an idiotic judgement, and wanted the German constitution consistently upheld precisely because it represents a vital protection for Muslim women, or Johann, who distorted the facts to make a point and then claimed she has been reduced to a third class citizen, stripped of those same legal protections?

The woman at the heart of the case told Spiegel The worst thing is that the judge misinterpreted Islam. Our prophet said women are not to be beaten. The Prophet gave women rights and treats them as something special, not like a piece of shit. But the judge apparently sees something different.”

She seemed to want both German rights for women to be upheld, and to be a Muslim woman in Germany. Yet Johann Hari’s “hot, hard logic” claims she can’t have both.

I disagree with the premise of Johann’s 2007 article. I don’t think “multi-culturalism is betraying women”. Rather, I think that legal systems, often in cack-handed ways, are trying to come to terms with both the positive and negative consequences of multi-culturalism and seeking the balance between respecting differing cultures and of the fundamental rights of the individual.

This highlights major issues we must deal with – such as honour killings and forced marriages. These must be addressed with the same focus given to any crime of such seriousness, and we must not hide from them.

Personally, I feel that western countries have become better, healthier, more open societies as such subjects are exposed, debated and democratically resolved, as for example is happening with regard to Forced marriages.

What Johann Hari wrote was not fine journalism, but at best a third rate ctrl-C article. At worst, he seriously misled his readers about the details of an important, sensitive issue to make a polemical point. Frankly, that’s more Littlejohn than an Orwell.