Responding to this letter in the Guardian by Richard Riddle, David Aaronovitch recites the Blairite mantra that the threat of terrorism has nothing whatsoever to do with British foreign policy.
For a more serious approach see Mark Seddon at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 29 August 2006
The banning of Muslim prayer from planes and the demands that Muslims should carry special IDs is showing the rapid rate at which Islamophobia is spreading in the Western world.
Islamophobia, quickly increasing following the Sept. 11 attacks has now reached dangerous levels. According to the Gallup Research company, 39 percent of American citizens believe that Muslims should carry a special ID card in society. The occurrence of two events after the revelation of these frightening poll results, however, increased anxiety about the issue.
A U.S. citizen and Muslim, Ahmed Faruk, was kicked out of a plane for praying in his seat. In another event, two passengers were prevented from boarding a flight bound for England from Spain after pressure from the other passengers. The other passengers complained that the two people were terrorists, basing their accusations only on their Middle Eastern appearance.
American specialists speaking to Zaman said that it was politicians and the media which were contributing to the rise of Islamophobia in the West. Joseph Grieboski, Institute on Religion and Public Policy Chairman, said: “The media does nothing to help demonstrate the positive impact of Islam in the U.S.” National Council of Churches (NCC) Chief Bob Edgar said there were two groups that were doing adding pressure on the Islamic religion: the U.S. Government and the Christian religious right. Edgar added “Unfortunately, our government spends more time with the far evangelical Christian right.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Research Center Director Mohamed Nimer emphasized that the U.S. Government did not acknowledge that Islamophobia was an epidemic and serious problem. Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University said there is a “strong and growing” Islamophobic minority in the U.S.
Britain’s race relations chief defended last night the right of Muslims to open their own schools. In remarks that put him at odds with Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, Trevor Phillips said that Muslims had as much right as other religious groups to educate their children according to their beliefs. Last weekend Ms Kelly said the Government had to stamp out Muslim schools that were trying to change British society to fit Islamic views.
But, in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, Mr Phillips criticised the view, now rapidly gaining ground, that faith schools, and Muslim schools in particular, were incompatible with full social integration. He said: “What the proponents of this view really want to say is one of two things. One, a perfectly valid view, is that religion should be banned from the public sphere and practised only in private if at all. The other, not at all valid in my view, is that Muslims can’t be trusted to run schools, like Christians have done for centuries.”
“The argument of the government goes roughly as follows. Asians have lived parallel lives in this country for too many years, and because of this segregation, they care nothing at all for white people and are thus quite willing to blow them up on public transport.
“This is simply not true. For one, Al-Qaeda have regard for nobody’s lives, and white people should not take it personally. US, UK, and Australian targets have been hit in Muslim countries, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of their co-religionists. For Al-Qaeda, there are no rules to the game. They kill, and it doesn’t matter about your creed or colour in pursuit of their goals.
“The second count on which it’s not true is that it bears no resemblance to the bombers we know about to date. Richard Reid the shoebomber was a white convert. The July bombers all spoke English. One was a teaching assistant, one worked in his father’s fish-and-chip shop, one was married to a white Englishwoman, and one was known to have gone on wild drinking binges (thus passing Jon Snow’s integration test).”
Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 28 August 2006
The Government reacts tetchily to suggestions that British foreign policy has anything to do with the rise in radicalism among young Muslims.
When Muslim leaders wrote an open letter a fortnight ago suggesting just that, Foreign Office minister Kim Howells and Home Secretary John Reid fell over one another to condemn the comments as “irrational” and ” facile”. The Communities minister, Phil Woolas, has taken up the baton at Bolton Wanderers Football Club, dismissing a young Muslim woman’s views as “a load of crap”.
Woolas, launching the Government’s “tackling extremism” roadshow, got into a heated 10-minute discussion with Komal Adris, 27, there on behalf of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. “I told him that foreign policy was a real concern of mine,” explains Adris. “He suggested I had an extremist view and my concerns were illegitimate. I accused him of patronising me.”
Civil servants tried to usher Woolas away – to no avail. The minister snapped: “That’s a load of crap,” before walking off.
“At the beginning of his tenure, Blair embarked on a privatisation spree that saw much of our public service sector shift from state ownership and control to those of a cluster of private businesses. Going further than Thatcher herself, he set about privatising schools, hospitals, transport and the mail, scrapping the university grant and breaking the backs of countless students with ever rising tuition fees. Seizing, like his Hobbesian allies across the Atlantic, 9/11’s immense opportunities, he then turned to Britain’s legal corpus with a vengeance, waging endless battles against judges and civil liberties associations.
“Today Blair seeks to destroy another age-old British tradition, multiculturalism, as though it were a passing affliction that could be dispensed with at his royal whim. As they use all the tricks in new Labour’s book of spin to force us into line, he and his ‘communities minister’ ought to bear the following historical fact in mind. Britain’s multiculturalism was not born today or yesterday with the coming of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent: it is intrinsic to the fabric of British society, which is made up of a multitude of races, creeds and sects: Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, along with myriad other groups.
“Blair, who would be more comfortable reading the Daily Telegraph than the Guardian, has adopted an extreme discourse that plays on our basic instincts of fear, insecurity and national pride. In so doing, he has shifted a nauseating rhetoric that had long been confined to the British National party and its ilk into the government, and thence to the mainstream of public opinion. That 53% of Britons now see Muslims as a threat is thus hardly surprising. This has been a victory for no one in Britain except the far right….
“Those who cite France as a role model for Britain do not know what they’re talking about. What is shielding France from our 7/7 is not its abysmal record with its minorities, but its more reasoned foreign policy and the distance it has maintained from Bush’s insane wars of aggression.”
Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 29 August 2006
The millions who marched against the war were not only “disgruntled, unintegrated Muslims”, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues.
Racial profiling a recipe for alienation
By Ken Livingstone
Morning Star, 26 August 2006
The recent anti-terror raids and the subsequent charging of individuals for alleged terror offences has led to demands that Britain introduce profiling of passengers at airports.This would mean that some passengers would be targeted for much tighter checks at the airports.
But what this “profiling” really means is racial profiling.
It is important that anti-terrorism policing in London is intelligence-led and targets those engaged in terrorist activity. As Sir Ian Blair has repeatedly stressed, community support is essential to isolate terrorists and bring them to justice.
Racial profiling as increasingly advocated in some sections of the media is a totally opposite strategy. It alienates entire communities by making them potential suspects.hat would destroy the community confidence on which our defences against terrorism depend and fuel a sense of injustice amongst young people affected by it.It will also legitimise outbursts of racism which destroy good community relations.
If the media and some politicians are allowed to put whole communities under suspicion, then incidents like the passengers who demanded that two entirely innocent Asian men be removed their plane, or the family who were apparently turned away from the London Eye because they spoke Arabic, will become common.
If those kind of incidents are tolerated they will provoke precisely the breakdown in community relations which the terrorists and the extreme right want to see.
“Please let’s get the islamophobe Jon Gaunt exposed for what he is. He is not only misrepresenting Islam but also advocating a witch hunt for all Muslims who have links with Pakistan, ‘He should (Mr John Reed) … investigate every young Muslim who has been to Pakistan and immediately stop the farce of airline restrictions for all and replace it with ethnic and religious profiling’. Yes, it is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda that so effectively and repulsively spread the hatred of the racist state against the Jewish people. Let us stop this hate mongering!”
The Muslim Public Affairs Committee urges protests to be sent to the Sun in response to Jon Gaunt’s recent piece in that paper.
“After each crisis there is a focus on the Muslim community not doing enough to root out militants, although the families of the terrorists have had no inkling of their doings. Statements are made about multiculturalism preventing the integration of Muslims in the west, although the terrorists are completely integrated in ways such as speaking English and participating in wider British society. Attention is concentrated on mosques and madrassas, although militancy is developed in secular spaces not religious ones. Immigration is seen as a problem, although the terrorists were born in Britain, their immigrant parents being the most law-abiding of citizens.”
Faisal Devji in the Financial Times, 27 August 2006