By Scapegoating Muslims, Cameron Fuels
Radicalisation
Ministers foster terror with their wars. Now they attack liberties
at home in the name of British values
By Seumas Milne
June 27,
2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Guardian"
-
The
anti-Muslim drumbeat has become deafening across the western world.
As images of atrocities by the jihadi terror group Isis multiply
online, and a steady trickle of young Europeans and North Americans
head to Syria and Iraq to join them, Muslim communities are under
siege. Last week
David Cameron accused British Muslims of “quietly condoning” the
ideology that drives Isis sectarian brutality, normalising hatred of
“British values”, and blaming the authorities for the
“radicalisation” of those who go to fight for it.
It was
too much for Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative party chair,
who condemned the prime minister’s “misguided emphasis” on “Muslim
community complicity”. He risked “further alienating” the large
majority of Muslims fighting the influence of such groups, she
warned. Even
Charles Farr, the hawkish counter-terrorism mandarin at the Home
Office, balked. Perhaps fewer than 100 Britons were currently
fighting with Isis, he said, and “we risk labelling Muslim
communities as somehow intrinsically extremist”.
But Cameron and his neoconservative allies are
preparing the ground for the government’s next onslaught. The target
will not be terrorism, but “non-violent extremism”. Next month, from
nursery schools to optometrists, health services to universities,
all will be legally obliged to monitor students and patients for any
sign of “extremism” or “radicalisation”.
The new powers represent a level of embedded
security surveillance in public life unprecedented in peacetime. We
already know from the government’s Prevent programme the chilling
impact of such mass spying on schools, where Muslim pupils have been
reported for speaking out in favour of Palestinian rights or against
the role of British troops in Afghanistan.
But the “counter-extremism” bill announced in the
Queen’s Speech is about to take the anti-Muslim clampdown a whole
stage further. The plans include banning orders for non-violent
individuals and organisations whose politics are considered
unacceptable; physical restriction orders for non-violent
individuals deemed “harmful”; powers to close mosques; and vetting
controls on broadcasters accused of airing extremist material. It’s
censorship under any other name.
That was the view of Sajid Javid, then culture
secretary, in a leaked letter to the prime minister earlier this
year. But Cameron shows every sign of pressing ahead with what
amounts to a full-blown assault on basic liberties. Most
ludicrously, the new powers are defended in the name of “British
values”, including “individual liberty” and “mutual respect and
tolerance”.
But as became clear in the aftermath of the
murderous Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, we are
not all Charlie when it comes to freedom of speech. Anti-extremism
powers will be used overwhelmingly against Muslims, rather than,
say, non-Muslim homophobes and racists who have little interest in
mutual respect and tolerance.
And they will fail, as their earlier incarnations
have done, to discourage the small minority drawn to terrorism at
home or jihadi campaigns abroad. Government ministers claim such
violence is driven by “ideology” rather than injustice, grievance or
its own policies. But, given that they
refuse to speak to any significant Muslim organisation they don’t
agree with or fund, perhaps it’s not surprising to find them in
thrall to an ideology, neoconservatism, of their own.
Any other explanation for the terror threat would
in any case implicate the government and its predecessors. In
reality, it shouldn’t be so hard to understand why a small section
of young alienated Muslims are attracted to fight in Syria and Iraq
with Isis and other such groups. Jihadi “ideology” has been around
for a long time. But there were no terror attacks in Britain before
US and British forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and those behind
every violent attack or terror plot have cited western intervention
in the Muslim world as their motivation
Isis has a different appeal to al-Qaida. It has
taken huge stretches of territory using naked terror, destroyed
borders and set up a self-proclaimed caliphate. In the Middle East
it presents itself as the defender of Sunnis in a convulsive
sectarian war. For a few young marginalised western Muslims, such
groups can offer the illusion of a fight against tyranny and a
powerful sense of identity.
But add in relentless media hostility, rampant
Islamophobia, state surveillance and harassment of Muslim
communities, and such alienation can only spread. In the past year,
we’ve had the
“Trojan Horse” Birmingham schools plot that never was, the
ousting of an elected Muslim mayor of Tower Hamlets by a judge –
including on grounds that he had exercised “undue spiritual
influence” on Muslims – and evidence of an increasing level of
anti-Muslim attacks.
Islamophobia now far outstrips hostility to any other religion or
ethnic group.
Ministers and their media allies downplay the role
of “foreign policy” in Muslim radicalisation, against all the
evidence. By foreign policy, they mean multiple western invasions
and occupations of Muslim states, torture and state kidnapping on a
global scale, and support for dictatorships across the Arab and
Muslim world. That includes Saudi Arabia, of course, which shares
much of Isis’s “ideology” and practices; and Egypt, whose
ex-military leader, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, overthrew the elected
president in 2013 and is soon to be welcomed to Downing Street.
Isis is itself the direct product of the US and
British occupation and destruction of Iraq, and both countries back
armed rebel groups fighting in Syria – as they did in Libya. So no
wonder would-be jihadis
get confused about who is on whose side. Western Isis volunteers
are a disaster for Syria and Iraq, but so far they haven’t carried
out return attacks at home.
That could of course change, not least as the
government criminalises dissent, brands conservative religiosity
“extremist” and, in the formulation of ministers, “quietly condones”
Islamophobia. The British government has long fed terrorism with its
warmaking abroad. Now it’s also fuelling it with its scapegoating of
Muslims at home.
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