Ayesha Abbasi writes about setting up her new organisation Help The World Oxford.            

Asalamu alaikum and hello! 

I run an organization called Helptheworldoxford, an organization based in the heart of Oxfordshire

Our Aim

Our aim is to raise awareness of world issues and disasters, fight any form of injustice anywhere against anyone and help the local community in any way that we can.

As well as help, we wish to educate our community, for education is the key to battling ignorance. Another big aim of ours is to change the negative stereotypes against Muslims, alternatively, I hope to spread a positive image of Muslims,  especially in light of Islamaphobia and right-wing views on a rise across the world.

It is our responsibility to fight these negative stereotypes, not just against Muslims but people of colour and immigrants.  Which is why our organization is made up of students of from all sorts of different backgrounds, and that we will make a difference in this world and make it a better and more peaceful place, one step at a time.

Female empowerment also drives our organization forward, to show people that hijabis are not oppressed, that we are not “letterboxes” and we do not need to be liberated.  We have a voice and our organization has helped and will continue to help girls of all backgrounds to find their voice in a world of patriarchy.

Why did I set this organization up?

I was lying down in my bed at 2 am, I just could not sleep after hearing about the Lebanon blast and how hurt the Lebanese community was hurting in Oxford

I always felt and realised again in that moment, that certain disasters and injustices do not get the same amount of representation and love as when these things happen in the western world.

I never saw any physical representation of support, no memorials, paying respects, protests against islamophobia, protest for Palestine ( etc ). Oxford had become silent regarding these issues. Painfully silent.

I had always known that the western world did not have the best view of Muslims, and it always disheartened me for it was pure ignorance, a negative stereotype perpetrated by the media and right-wing parties.  I wondered if that was the reason people did not give as much care to injustices and disasters in other parts of the world.

I was tired of the silence, of the negative portrayal of Muslims and people of colour and of even my community which at times, is not letting girls have a voice.

I was tired of feeling like the world was against me and didn’t understand me and frustrated by the ignorance people portrayed.

And then I realised,  Nothing can be done if there are no examples of positive Muslims/ People of colour.   We needed to show people who we truly are, instead of sitting at home and getting frustrated on how we were portrayed and how people didn’t seem to care about us.

So I got up at 2 am, looked at my wall which had a poster up saying “ Be the change you want to see “

So I set up a youth organization called Helptheworldoxford. And got to work.

What have we done so far?

Our first event was a Beruit Vigil. I wanted to show the oxford community a physical representation of support for Lebanon  In 3 days, I organized for a singer to come, volunteers to help and speakers to be present.

It was beautiful

Dozens of people came at such short notice, people of all colours, of all backgrounds and religions.

In the tears and sniffles, as our singer sang the most moving songs, we all lit candles, placed flowers and paid our respects.

We then had a Christian and Muslim prayer as well as speeches. It concluded with people writing notes to the Lebanese community and a temporary memorial set up in which people continued to pay their respects after we had left.

The second event we planned was much bigger than the first. With our name out there, my organiztion started growing and got people from all backgrounds to join.  We held a Palestine sit in and culture day.

We gave out hundreds of Palestinian dishes to the public, had culture corners full of books and frames about the rich history of Palestine.  We had mannequins propped up showing off beautiful Palestinian clothing and even had traditional cultural artefacts on display.

We had speeches from several organizations, from the Palestine association to XR youth to anti-fascist and Black lives matter. Who all spoke up for Palestine.  The public wrote dozens of hopeful and encouraging messages with chalk in the town centre.

We concluded with chanting and traditional Palestinian dancing.

From both events, we managed to get into the newspaper several times and raised money for both causes that we donated straight to the causes.

I have also spoken on a zoom conference, talking about my organization and Islamaphobia with oxford university students.  As well as joining the Oxford unity branch and coming together will all the oxford organizations and marching across oxford.

As coronavirus has stopped all activities, we are continuing to raise awareness of social injustices across the world on social media.  Currently, we are working with the community and trying to help them as much as we can. We have offered to be a support to anyone to news someone to talk too, offering private phone calls to anyone who feels alone with mental health on the rise.

We are also going to be providing free meals to anyone in need in the December half term as the government is incompetent and decided to not fund half-term meals for children in need.

To conclude, I want to show people that Muslims do not care about our own issues, but that our religion teaches us to fight injustice anywhere, against anyone.

To raise awareness of world issues and help our community . To educate and fight ignorance.

To spread positivity in a time of uncertainty

Ayesha Abbasi ( Founder of helptheworldoxford ) is a school student living in Oxford

Source: Infernal Machine

Here is the president of the United States fueling the hate chorus of his favourite news networks, using 9/11 to designate a Somali-American Muslim woman as unpatriotic and un-American.

It was clear even during his campaign that  Trump was a moral and political degenerate, devoid of any decency or scruple, who represented the American kleptocracy at its basest.  It was obvious that he was consciously summoning the darkest forces in American society onto the historical stage and weaponising hatred to propel himself to power in a way that no previous president had done before him.

You would have to be blind not to notice these things.   Nevertheless I still thought that the American system had enough checks and balances to neutralise his worst excesses, and I so hoped that his own cluelessness, arrogance, greed and impetuous bellicosity would undermine him and even bring him down.

I didn’t realise how far Trump was willing to go in order to please his political base, while he and his family used the presidential office as a vehicle for enriching themselves still further. I didn’t foresee how relentless, fanatical and devoid of even the semblance of scruple he would be, and how much he would be able to get away with.

I didn’t understand then how much of a grip the radical right had attained over the Republican Party and the American media, and how beholden Trump was to these sectors.

I certainly didn’t imagine that a sitting president would publicly set up a Muslim member of Congress for assassination.  But this is effectively what Trump did yesterday in the case of the Somali-American Democrat representative Ilhan Omar.  To understand the context we need to go back a little.

Many readers will know that Ilhan Omar is of the first two Muslim women to be elected to the US Congress, that she was born in Somalia, that she is leftist, and a strong critic of US foreign policy and of Israel.

All these qualities have made her a natural hate-figure for Trump’s base and for the media networks that feed that hatred.   On 9 March the former judge Jeannine Pirro- one of the most fanatically anti-Muslim presenters on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – questioned Omar’s patriotism and accused her of antisemitism, in a monologue that included the following observation:

Think about this, she’s not getting this anti-Israel sentiment doctrine from the Democratic Party, so if it’s not rooted in the party, where is she getting it from? Think about it. Omar wears a hijab which according to the Quran 33:59 tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution

Many of Fox’s viewers need little encouragement to know what they think about a Muslim-American woman with strong (leftist) political views, and  many would have understood the meaning of these words: that Omar was a Muslim who obeys ‘Sharia law’ rather than the laws of her own country.

Omar has already received numerous death threats, including a phone call to her office two weeks ago which asked on of Omar’s aides

Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?  Why are you working for her? She’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.

Whether Pirro’s rant had anything to do with this reference to the Muslim Brotherhood is not clear, but Pirro’s rant about Omar had already pushed even Fox News to take her off air.

Pirro loves Trump however, and he loves her.  In a series of tweets he called for her reinstatement and published a thread which declared:

Bring back [Judge Jeanine.] The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against Fox News hosts who are doing too well. must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country.

In any other president this would be an unusual intervention, but in the current dystopia there is nothing outlandish about it.  Since then things have got worse.  At the beginning of this week Representative Omar told a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) meeting

 for far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second class citizen, and frankly I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.  CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose our civil liberties.

All of this was obscured in the savage backlash that followed.   Only one phrase stood from Omar’s speech ‘some people did something’ [on 9/11],  which were used to indict Omar as a terrorist apologist and an unpatriotic Muslim who minimised American suffering.  Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel both shared the clip, which McDaniel used to call Omar ‘anti-American.’

Omar’s words were not well-chosen for sure, but there is nothing in her speech to suggest the meaning given to them by her critics, whose tone can be summed up this headline from Murdoch’s New York Post:

On the internet the response was predictably more extreme.    McDaniel’s followers variously called for Omar to be ‘incinerated’, ‘eliminated with extreme prejudice’, sent to Guantanamo, or deported. On Instagram the far-right activist and former reporter for Rebel Media Laura Loomer called Islam a ‘cancer’ and told her followers that Muslims seeking public office should be criminalised.

And yesterday Trump joined this pitchfork mob, by posting this disgraceful tweet with a video showing Omar’s words played repeatedly:

So here is the president of the United States,  fueling the hate chorus of his favourite news networks, and using 9/11 to designate a Somali-American Muslim woman as unpatriotic and un-American, at a time when white supremacist violence and hate crimes have reached new heights, and when Omar has already become a prime target.

So no, I simply did not see this coming.  I did not believe that even Trump would sink this low.  And now that he has, I hope that American society pushes back hard against what is little more than incitement.

And I hope that Congresswoman Omar stays safe,  and that she receives the protection that she clearly needs.

But if anything does happen to her, the man who calls himself president will bear some of the responsibility for it.

Matt Carr is a writer, blogger and freelance print and radio journalist. He blogs at  www.infernalmachine.co.uk.

Source: Splinter

In the face of hatred and discrimination when the rest of the world is apathetic at best, raising hell is the only option.

And conservatives were totally cool with this idea, not making any fuss whatsoever over Omar—whom they’ve constantly attacked with allegations of anti-Semitism since she took office two months ago—encouraging other Muslims to stand up for themselves in the face of hate!

Just kidding. They were not cool with this idea.

“No matter how much we have tried to be the best neighbor, people have always worked on finding a way to not allow for every single civil liberty to be extended to us,” Omar said at the banquet.

“So to me I say, raise hell, make people uncomfortable. Because here’s the truth: far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second class citizen, and frankly I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”

Omar’s comments came just over a week after a self-described white nationalist killed 50 people and injured 50 more at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and one day before a mosque in Escondido, CA, was briefly lit on fire in a suspected arson attempt. A letter left at the scene of the arson even mentioned the New Zealand attacks.

Alas, no amount of visceral hatred toward a group of people suffering at the hands of white terrorism could convince the protesters who picketed the banquet on Saturday, continuing to call Omar an anti-Semite for continuously calling attention to the financial influence of Israel upon U.S. politicians.

Among them were failed alt-right grifters Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl, who have been personally obsessed with Omar and appeared to be a part of the demonstrations around the hotel at which the banquet took place.

“There are very fascinating people outside who for so many years have spoken about an Islam that is oppressive, that lessens and isolates women,” Omar told the crowd. “And today they gather outside to protest a Muslim woman who is in Congress.”

Fox News, never missing an opportunity to rile up its viewership, live-streamed Omar’s entire speech on Facebook. And MAGA chuds on Twitter later shared the clip of Omar telling Muslims to “raise hell” against discrimination, dangerously implying that Omar’s call to action was anything more than an encouragement for advocacy against hate and violence.

But as Omar said, these idiots are going to stay mad no matter what. And in the face of hatred and discrimination when the rest of the world is apathetic at best, raising hell is the only option.

Source: Infernal Machine

We now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions.

To put it simply, societies tumble off the abyss and become what the medieval historian RI Moore once called ‘persecuting societies’ because the forces that might have prevented this outcome  either don’t recognise the warning signs in time or they don’t act on these signs when they have the chance to do something about them.

Here in the UK it is becoming increasingly clear that a transformation has taken place that goes beyond the shenanigans and political convulsions in Westminster, and will not be resolved by ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexits or arguments about the kind of deal on offer.  Consider the events of the last week.

Last Saturday a Romanian woman in Doncaster was savagely beaten by a group of teenagers who called her a ‘Polish cunt’ and told her to ‘fuck off to your country.’ The following Monday the yellow jacket thug James Goddard and his followers virtually took over a court hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, and forced the judge to flee the court. Goddard’s followers went on to storm the Attorney General’s office.

Last Thursday the Labour MP for Brighton Kempton Lloyd Russell-Moyle was attacked on the street and called a traitor because he called for a delay to Brexit.  In the same week MPs were advised to take taxis to and from Westminster in case they were attacked, and  Independent Group MP Anna Soubry announced that she no longer goes home because she is afraid of attacks.

Yesterday the monitoring group Tell Mama reported a staggering 593% rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the UK since the Christchurch massacre. These incidents included attacks on five Birmingham mosques with sledgehammers, another attack on a mosque Scotland, and the stabbing of a teenager in Surrey.  In Oxford, Southampton and north London, Muslim men and women reported gun gestures or firearms noises being directed at them, and verbal abuse that included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die.’

There was a time when you might have expected people who feel like this to keep their mouths shut—in public at least—in the aftermath of a white supremacist atrocity in which  49 Muslims were savagely murdered.  Instead being chastened by the massacre in Christchurch, however, it’s clear that the perpetrators of these hate crimes were inspired by it, and felt confident enough to actually threaten British Muslim men and women with something similar.

Contemptuous disregard for the rule of law; threats against MPs; violent attacks on foreigners; the exultant celebration of mass murder—if these are not warning signs then I don’t know what is.

None of this fell out of the sky. It’s been clear ever since 2016 that the referendum has actively emboldened and empowered the older far-right and its newer variants, and that Brexit has given these forces a cause celebre and a new constituency that is willing to listen to an ethnonationalist agenda that is profoundly hostile to Muslims, foreigners and immigrants, and also to the Westminster ‘traitors’ and ‘liberal’ elites who supposedly facilitated the foreign (and Muslim) ‘invasion.’

This is why Jo Cox was killed. Yet even when an MP was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain first’, this horrific crime was dismissed as the act of an isolated ‘loner’ with mental health issues.

Three and a half years later, we now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions. We would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the possibility of these threats being realised, and if we are to have any possibility of preventing the country sinking any deeper into the toxic political sewer, we need to recognise that this transformation is partly due to Brexit.

Neither the Brexit right nor the Lexit left likes to admit that Brexit has contributed to this emboldenment and empowerment.  To do so would undermine the image of Brexit as a popular rebellion against the ‘elite’ which both the right and some sectors of the left still adhere to.

Suggest that Brexit is, in part, an ethnonationalist project with racism and xenophobia at its core, and you’re likely to hear the same banal arguments that ‘not all Leavers are racists’ or ‘ it’s not racist to be concerned about immigration’ or ‘a few bad apples don’t define a country’ etc, etc

But we need to join the dots, even if they produce a picture that we would prefer not to see. We need wide and deep mobilisations across the country to defend our communities and uphold the diverse, open society that an emboldened and empowered extreme right is now looking to ‘take back’.

We need to take the country back – from them. And unless we can do this, these forces will get stronger and more vicious, till it is no longer possible to ignore or escape from them.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Source: The Guardian

Across the country many Muslim communities are feeling anxious about the safety of our families and children, and our friends.

One week on, the implications of those terrorist crimes in New Zealand are having a profound and deep impact on Muslim communities across the world, including here in the UK. Many of us are traumatised. Many of us feel horrified. We are devastated. We are broken and we are terrified.

This morning West Midlands police have confirmed their counter-terrorism team is investigating attacks on five mosques in Birmingham damaged by sledgehammers overnight. According to local media reports one mosque in the city was attacked this morning – the windows were smashed. The motivation behind these attacks is not clear but these attacks are designed to increase Muslim fears of vulnerability.

We know that many in our communities, people of faith and no faith alike, feel a deep sense of shock and horror, and there have been many moving and kind individual and community acts of solidarity, sisterhood and brotherhood across the country. Our mosques have been showered with flowers and handwritten messages of solidarity, and cards filled with children’s handwriting.

On Monday I was invited by a group of young activists and community organisers to attend a vigil for New Zealand outside News Corp’s headquarters near London Bridge. News Corp is the Rupert Murdoch-owned media company that publishes newspapers such as the Sun.

Outside the towering glass building, a woman from the Inclusive Mosque Project recited the Islamic call to prayer, the adhan, and recited the prayer Muslims read for the deceased’s soul to rest in eternal peace. The crowd joined her in calling for unity, peace and justice for the victims. We also heard from a young man who had lost his uncle and cousin – gunned down in one of the two mosques attacked in Christchurch. He spoke movingly about how proud he was of his loved ones and how he will hold on to that pride for the rest of his life. I, along with others, was asked to read out the names of the victims and what we knew of them.

What struck me most was how uniquely each life was connected to New Zealand from other parts of the world: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere. We mourn for every life lost, for who they were and for who they never had the chance to become.

Alongside poignant and reflective vigils and random acts of kindness, there has also been a spate of hate crimes reported across the UK, including here in Oxford, where I’m a Labour city councillor. Swastikas and references to the far right and New Zealand were sprayed on the wall of my former school in Oxford, and a Muslim woman reported an incident of a man making shooting sounds as she walked to work. Police have questioned two teenagers over the graffiti. Students at Cheney school disgusted by the racism are designing a mural to celebrate diversity, fearing that the wall would be “haunted by the words” if left blank. In Surrey a 19-year-old man was stabbed in what police suspect was a far-right-inspired terror attack.

Across the country many Muslim communities are feeling anxious about the safety of our families and children, and our friends. To be clear, this anxiety is a constant, we live in the shadow of Islamophobia and in a context where reported hate crime and incidents of racism are on the increase. One young woman I met this week described it as “living in a constant state of low-level anxiety. Being a Muslim woman I feel vulnerable all of the time but especially after a terrorist attack anywhere in the world. It’s a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, except we are living the trauma here and now.”

We are almost six weeks away from the start of Ramadan in early May. This is the busiest time of the year for mosques, with people often travelling from afar to attend special prayers and to break fast in the mosque. Most mosques in the UK are open places of worship – other than during the five prayer times mosques are community spaces where children learn the Qur’an and community activities take place.

In 2017 Muslims were targeted in an attack on a mosque in Finsbury Park, London, when far-right extremist Darren Osborne rammed a van into worshippers leaving Ramadan prayers.

After New Zealand and following calls by the Muslim Council of Britain and other Muslim organisations to strengthen measures to protect Muslims and our mosques, the Home Office has doubled an annual fund for protective security at religious institutions.

However, groups must individually bid for chunks of the £1.6m funding, which is also – and rightly so – open to Christian churches, Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras and other places of worship. Security for Jewish communities is separately awarded £13.4m via the Community Security Trust; Muslim groups are calling for equivalent support.

For some in the Muslim community having a heightened police presence around mosques is not the solution. As a community who are overly policed, the feeling is that mosques should organise their own network of security patrols. Meanwhile, others want to see an increased and visible police presence, at a time of dwindling police resources and numbers.

New Zealand has shown all of us once again that we must not be complacent about the real danger and threat the far right pose to minorities and to the fabric of our society.

• Shaista Aziz is a Labour city councillor in Oxford, journalist and writer. She was a keynote speaker at the conference ¡No Pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far Right, attended by delegations from across Europe in London on 2 March 2019.

A global alliance of neoliberals, racists, and the fascist far-right is capitalising on the upswing of discontent in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

In a sickening twist, the attacker video-recorded and live-streamed himself gunning down the congregation and pumping his bullets into the bodies of the dead, the injured, and those trying to crawl away to safety.

The footage was played live on his Facebook page; shared widely on alt-right platforms such as 8chan, and spread like wildfire across the rest of the internet. Today’s fascists are mobilising on the streets—but cyberspace is their richest recruiting ground, and is the key tool that has enabled them to so rapidly globalise their networks and share tactics and strategy.

This attack was not just an isolated incident. It must be seen in the wider context of rising Islamophobia, spurred on by the political establishment, the mainstream and tabloid media, and institutionalised state racism across the globe.

Directly before his murderous rampage in Christchurch, the attacker, a 28-year-old Australian man named Brenton Tarrant, published a 78-page manifesto in defence of his white supremacist ideology. The UK’s Daily Mail, notorious for its hate-filled, racially motivated headlines, immediately made the manifesto available online for download by its readership.

From Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ to Nigel Farage’s xenophobic Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson’s dehumanisation of Muslim women as ‘letterboxes’ to Matteo Salvini’s racist statement that ‘Islam has no place in the Italian constitution’ and that Italy must be ‘cleansed’ of migrants ‘street by street’, elected fascist politicians are fuelling the rise in anti-Muslim hatred.

In France, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has stated that ‘Islam needs to be put back where there is no place for it’, and has compared Muslims praying peacefully in the streets to a ‘Nazi occupation’.

In India, Narendra Modi, formerly a full-time organiser for the known fascist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was elected prime minister in 2014 despite having presided, in 2002, over the bloodiest communal riots to occur in decades—when over 1000 people—mainly Muslim—were massacred in the state he was governing: Gujarat.

Under Modi, violence and lynchings of Muslims, as well as the assassination and intimidation of left-wing commentators and journalists, is now commonplace and generally occurs with relative impunity.

In China, vast swathes of the Muslim Uyghur population are being housed in concentration camps, euphemistically billed as ‘re-education camps’. In Burma, we have seen the state-sponsored genocide of the Muslim Rohingyas.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has recently announced on social media that ‘Israel is not a state of all its citizens’, later telling his cabinet that Israel is ‘the nation state… only of the Jewish people’—rhetorically de-legitimising the existence of Israel’s significant Muslim population.

Back in Britain, Muslims are already being treated as second-class citizens; indeed, in some instances, they are not even considered citizens at all. The UK Home Office’s treatment of the British-born Shamima Begum is a case in point.

Brainwashed by a radicalising ideology at the age of 15, she was induced to travel to Syria and ten days after her arrival, while still a child, she married Dutch-born convert Yago Riedijk.

While much can be said about how this young under-age girl was failed by the British state, the British state’s response to her requests to return are wholly unlawful and have set a precedent for the stripping of citizenship rights for British-born people without white skin; myself included.

Sajid Javid and the Tory Home Office’s actions send out the message that anyone whose parents or grandparents were not born in this country can now be made stateless at the whim of the British government. Indeed, even if your parents were born in this country, as Shamima Begum’s dead baby may testify from the grave, that does not qualify you for British citizenship.

Javid, of course, is trying to prove his mettle to the reactionary elements of the population who have ingested decades of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim propaganda. The Tory party, in its bid to stem the hemorrhaging of its electoral support to UKIP, has tacked to the far-right.

Javid, despite himself being of South Asian descent, has capitulated to Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) Robinson’s rhetoric of racial hatred, singling out the race of the perpetrators of the Rotheram sex-gang scandal on social media as  ‘sick Asian paedophiles’—as if their race, not their criminality, was the most important factor.

What is really going on? Racism and Islamophobia have complex and deep historical roots. But this recent upsurge and conjuncture with the rise of fascism has occurred in a specific politico-economic context.

Yaxley-Lennon, alongside many other of the far-right, fascist parties, is funded by big business and backed by billionaires. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the alt-right, racist news network Breitbart, are all financially supported by corporate sponsors—including former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, and Robert Mercer, co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. The dark funding behind the Brexit campaign has also been exposed, and it too has been exposed as a neoliberal project of the disaster capitalists: from Arron Banks to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It is clear that a global alliance of neoliberals, racists, and the fascist far-right has emerged, and they are capitalising on the upswing of discontent that has mushroomed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash—channelling it into hatred towards the ‘other’.

Failed austerity policies, stagnant wages, market liberalisation, the rollback of social security, the intentional refusal of neoliberal governments to invest in social housing, free healthcare, better education, and sustainable jobs, compounded by historic levels of inequality as wealth and profits are hoovered up by the 1%, has unleashed a torrent of rage and discontent.

However, instead of blaming these problems on themselves and the failed neoliberal orthodoxy they have implemented, politicians and media outlets, funded by big business, have scapegoated migrants. Bosses, bankers, and politicians are not to blame: Muslims, refugees, free movement, and people of colour are.

Take, for instance, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. In an article headlined ‘SUN SAYS: We urge our readers to beLEAVE in Britain and vote to quit the EU on June 23’, the erroneous statement that ‘To remain means being powerless to cut mass immigration which keeps wages low and puts catastrophic pressure on our schools, hospitals, roads and housing stock’ was published.

This, of course, is an outright lie. Countless studies have shown that the British economy would be kneecapped without migration, particularly given the ageing population. Indeed research from the Oxford Migration Observatory shows that migration has boosted British workers’ wages and overall economic performance in the medium and long term.

The real reason why wages remain stagnant across the world is the structure of the economy and the weakness of the trade union movement. In Britain, migrant workers are poorly unionised (though incipient steps are being taken to reverse this). Worker ownership and co-operativisation is low. Profits are being hoovered up by CEOs and shareholders. Social democratic parties, instead of fulfilling their historic post-war redistributive role, have cut back taxation and given in to the austerity narrative.

This capitulation of social democrats parties to the neoliberal orthodoxy and racist, migrant-scapegoating rhetoric is particularly dangerous. In an article for the Guardian, Hilary Clinton, former Democrat presidential candidate, stated that her party had to be more harsh on immigration to win. Even the left-wing leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn—usually an ardent and unequivocal defender of migrant and refugee rights—has repeated the claim about migrants depressing wages, stating in March 2018 that Brexit would prevent firms ‘importing cheap labour’ to undercut UK wages.

Len McCluskey, leader of Unite the Union and key backer of Jeremy Corbyn, has also capitulated to the rhetoric. He has urged that the Labour leadership must take concerns about immigration into account, and in a speech in 2016, stated, ‘we are also, I would argue, past the point where working people can be convinced that the free movement of labour has worked for them, their families, their industries, and their communities.’

This is a dangerous admission of defeat from a man whose career was built on the premise of fearlessly and unashamedly defending the working class—and that should, in theory, include the non-British born working class.

The Labour leadership in Britain, and social democratic parties across the world, have got it wrong. They got it wrong when they implemented austerity. They got it wrong when they ran with the narrative of ‘fiscal responsibility’. And they are getting it wrong now, when they are allowing the narrative of migrant-scapegoating for the woes of ordinary people to reign unchecked.

History shows us that appeasement never works. To defeat the far-right, left-wing parties and movements must unapologetically and unashamedly defend and protect the rights of refugees, migrants, and Muslims. They must quash the claims that it is migrants—not a rigged economic system—who undercut workers’ wages.

They must call out and fight back against the racism of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Sajid Javid, and the migrant-scapegoating Leave campaign. Across the globe, they must reach out to Muslim and migrant communities, and put them at the forefront of a united working-class movement to transform the neoliberal capitalist system into a system based on social justice and workers’ co-operation.

As the attacks on the synagogue at Pittsburgh, the murder of the liberal Polish mayor of Gdansk, the brutal stabbing of Labour MP Jo Cox, and now the massacre at Christchurch show, the fascist far-right is out to get us all. We must unite and fight back.

Seema Syeda is a writer, editor, and socialist activist. She is co-author of ‘Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it’, with Neil Faulkner, Phil Hearse, and Samir Dathi. Follow Seema on Twitter @seema_syeda.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight IT
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda.

The film of the 1930s is re-running in slow motion. Fascism is rising again. A tide of nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism is sweeping the world. This book is an urgent call to arms. It argues that we face the clear and present danger of creeping fascism.

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Source: Infernal Machine

Time for politicians to stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism. 

It’s become a cliché in far-right and conservative circles to claim that ‘Islam is not a race’, that Islamophobia doesn’t exist, and that hostility towards Muslims may have some kind  of legitimacy.   At best these arguments are a product of confusion and ignorance, and at worst a deliberate obfuscation intended to avoid accusations of racism.   Either way they are extremely useful to the  ‘new’ far-right and also to ‘hard conservatives’ alike, who have placed Islam and Muslims at the centre of their 21st century ‘clash of civilisations.’

The idea that ‘Islam is not a race’ enables the right to say all the things it used to say about Indians, Pakistanis and Arabs while all the time maintaining that it isn’t their ‘race’ they’re concerned about, it’s just their ‘religion’ or their ‘culture’.  Such arguments allow you depict Muslims as terrorists or terrorist supporters, barbarians, rapists, and invaders without ever having to mention race or racism overtly.

Such arguments assume that racism is only racism when it’s based on  biology or skin colour or the size of one’s skull.  They nevertheless have a powerful political salience, echoing  older confrontations between Islam and Christendom in which Islam was identified as the antithesis of civilisation.  They make it possible for barely-educated psychopathic killers and Oxford graduates to trace grand historical trajectories from the Battle of Tours/Poitiers and Charles Martel, through the Siege of Vienna in 1688 to the  21st century ‘Muslim invasion of Europe’ by immigrants and refugees.

In this way mainstream pundits like Douglas Murray and knuckledragging nazis and white supremacists have been able to propagate paranoid narratives about the Islamicisation of Europe and the ‘end of Europe’ that reach from the pages of the Spectator to the fringes of social media, where violent dreams of murderous ‘resistance’ are gaining traction.

The manifesto produced by the murderer calling himself calling himself ‘Brentan Tarrant’ makes it clear that he was an out-and-out racist, bigot and ethnonationalist.  No one will be surprised that he cited ‘Justiciar Knight Brievik’ as an inspiration for the mass murder he perpetrated yesterday, and said that he had ‘received a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.’  Or that Tarrant listed a number of white supremacist murderers including Dylan Roof and the Finsbury Park Mosque killer Darren Osbourne.

Like his hero Breivik, Tarrant’s manifesto was steeped in paranoid and explicitly racist narratives of ‘white genocide’ and ‘the ‘great replacement’, which identity migrants, refugees and Muslims as a common threat to Europe, and he made it clear that his murders were intended  ‘ to directly reduce immigration rates to Europe by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.’

In killing Muslims in Christchurch in order to ‘save Europe’, Tarrant’s savage atrocities demonstrate how the white supremacist movement that he belongs to has become ‘borderless’ in the age of social media, in much the same way that the transnational terrorist jihad has become borderless.

It’s tempting – and convenient – to depict Tarrant as just another lone psychopath who has been nurtured in the danker corners of the Internet, but the attitudes that led him to kill yesterday belong to a wider spectrum that reaches above and below the media radar.   In his manifesto Tarrant praised the pro-Trump conservative Candace Owens, who only recently launched the Turning Point UK chapter with the observation that Hitler was ‘ok’ until ‘ he became too ‘globalist.’  Tarrant also hailed Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of white identity and common purpose.’

It is clear that the election of Donald Trump has coincided with an increase in far-right extremism.    According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre 2018 report,at least 40 people in the U.S. and Canada were killed last year by individuals ‘motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies,  embracing ideas and philosophies that are cornerstones of the alt-right.’ The SLPC linked the growth of alt-right groups and ‘fight clubs’ to the election of Trump, which  ‘ has opened the White House doors to extremism, not only consulting with hate groups on policies that erode our country’s civil rights protections, but also enabling the infiltration of extremist ideas into the administration’s rhetoric and agenda. Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House.’

This ‘toehold’ is reflected, among other things,  in Trump’s policies at the border, in his ‘Muslim ban’ and his depictions of Muslims and migrants in general, in his tacit support for white supremacists such as the demonstrators at Charlottesville, in the incitement to violence that characterised his election campaign.  Only two days ago Trump  told Breitbart News ‘ I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’

Yesterday the Christchurch murderer ‘went bad.’   And there will almost certainly be others like him, who will take encouragement from a US president who explicitly threatened his political opponents with violence, and will take inspiration from the fear and loathing of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular that have become the cornerstones of the far-right resurgence.

According to a 2018 Europol report ‘The violent right-wing extremist spectrum is expanding, partly fuelled by fears of a perceived Islamisation of society and anxiety over migration.’

These ‘fears’ produced the murderous hatred that we saw yesterday.   It’s time to call out those who propagate them – some of whom are now shedding crocodile tears over Christchurch.

It’s time for politicians to show some real courage and stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism.  It’s time for the security services to treat the far-right threat with the seriousness it deserves.

It’s time to recognise that Islamophobia is real – and it can be deadly.  And even as we mourn the dead of Christchurch, we should reject the rampant racist ethnonationalism that was unleashed yesterday, and stand up for the diverse, open societies that Brentan Tarrant and his cohorts would like to destroy.

 The portrayal of Muslims as the unfathomable ‘other’ leads directly to treating ‘them’ as less than human, or at least less human than ‘us’.

How did this mass Islamophobia, reinforced by anti-Black racism (and anti-Latino racism in the United States), arise? Of course, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of mass racism have subsisted in Western societies since the advent of European imperialism (and in the case of anti-Semitism, before).

But today’s Islamophobia is much deeper and much more widespread. Its roots lie in the 9/11 attack and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ launched by American imperialism. It has been reinforced by mass panic over immigration, much of which comes from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, where most people are Muslims.

There has been a disastrous synergy between the hard right forces in Western politics and the terrorism of Al-Qaeda and then of Isis. Terrorist attacks on civilian populations carried out by people who profess allegiance to Islam, have been weaponised ruthlessly by the political right, using the hugely powerful mass media to establish a series of stereotypes about Muslims.

The most important of these of course is the association of Muslims with terrorism, when evidently the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose and repudiate terrorism. Linked to this has been mystification about the religious and family practices of Muslims, culminating in the caricatures of women who wear the hijab or niqab.

The complete collapse of centre right and centre left politicians in front of anti-immigrant rhetoric that prepared the ground for the far right. Anti-immigrant rhetoric, the constant promise to get tough on immigration, is standard fare for mainstream parties that long proceeded Donald Trump and the new rise of the far right. As Kenan Malik explains:

“Too often when we discuss hateful portrayals of migrants or Muslims or other minorities, we focus on the far right, or on groups such as Pegida, or on countries such as Hungary and politicians such as Viktor Orbán. It is certainly important that we call out such organisations and politicians and eviscerate their arguments.

“But we need also to recognise that the truth about dehumanisation is far more uncomfortable and far closer to home. The ideas and policies promoted by the far right and by populist anti-immigration figures have not come out of nowhere. They have become acceptable because the groundwork has already been laid, and continues to be maintained, by mainstream politicians and commentators.

“There is a tendency among liberals to see a great divide on immigration between the mainstream and the populists and between a more liberal western Europe and a more reactionary east. That is to distort reality. For, while differences clearly exist, the divisions are not nearly as sharp as often suggested. It is the rhetoric and the policies emerging from the mainstream and from western Europe that have helped legitimise the hostility to immigration expressed by the populists and in eastern Europe.”

The fear of ‘excessive’ immigration, of being – as both Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron put it – ‘swamped’ by an alien peoples and cultures, is what lay behind the discourse of the anti-immigrant mainstream, beefed up by fake arguments about how immigrants lower wages, use excessive amounts of health care and live on welfare benefits.

The Daily Mail may describe Tommy Robinson as a racist thug, but the racist ideology and hostility to immigrants which brings Robinson and his fascist bands to the fore, has been a constant theme of the Mail, the Express and Sun, and constant relayed in the discourse of Conservative and New Labour politicians and their favourite media outlets like the Telegraph and BBC.

It is this atmosphere that created the ‘hostile environment’ proclaimed by the Home Office under Theresa May and led directly to the Windrush scandal.

Anti-immigrant racism has led directly to the failure of the European Union countries to develop a strategy for aiding migrants and the toleration of the deaths of many hundreds who have drowned while trying to reach the West. Aiding them would involve countries throughout the EU accepting immigration, and not trying to bottle up immigrants where they first landed, mainly Greece and Italy.

The portrayal of Muslims as the unfathomable ‘other’ leads directly to treating ‘them’ as less than human, or at least less human than ‘us’. Not only are we resigned to letting hundreds drown, while a Royal Navy ship looks out for illegal boats and fails to rescue a single struggling immigrant in the water, we are resigned to allowing tens of thousands of them to die directly or indirectly at the hands of Western military forces or in Western sponsored wars like that in Yemen. And then we wonder why they want to escape and come to Europe.

Muslims have become the ‘perfect enemy’ for the hard right and for right-wing politicians of every kind. They are strange, evil, violent and have incomprehensible atavistic obsessions. Donald Trump’s campaign trial promise to keep out visitors to the US from Muslim countries “until we find out what is going on” says it all. What we do know is that they mean us harm and this justifies the new militarism and repressive regimes at home.

Most of all, it helps provide an ideological framework for xenophobia and nationalism, habitually used to divide and dilute mass protest against austerity and poverty at times of capitalist economic crisis.

Modern racism and xenophobia, of which Islamophobia is the cutting edge, play a key role in dividing the working class and other oppressed sections of society, tying important popular layers to a pro-capitalist and pro-austerity discourse.

Many of the millions who voted for Trump and Brexit, and who vote for organisations like the FN in France, the Liga in Italy and the AfD in Germany, are convinced that immigration is responsible for economic crisis and is a threat to their traditional way of life.

Islamophobia is maintained at numerous levels in the US and Europe. First, state action and new laws targets the Muslims communities. In the United States a raft of measures in the Patriot Act is are designed to survey and control the Muslim community.

In Britain the Prevent strategy is designed to make teachers and social workers police the thoughts and attitudes of their students and clients, and a big majority of referrals have targeted alleged Islamic extremism – only 10% of referrals has targeted right wing extremism. The objective of the Prevent strategy is to intimidate Muslims and create a climate of fear – fear that any kind of protest or activism will get you labelled ‘extremist’.

Islamophobia has generated a massive increase in violent attacks on Muslims, including in the United States especially a series of shootings. A disproportionate number of these attacks have been on women wearing the hijab or niqab.

Discrimination against Muslims in employment and housing is rife in the UK, across Europe and in the US. In Britain Muslims are more likely to live in social housing, more likely to have low paid jobs or be unemployed and more likely to live in poor areas. Even the conservative and pro-NATO OSCE says:

“Intolerance and discrimination against Muslims has become increasingly prevalent in the OSCE region in recent years. The “war on terror”, the global economic crisis, anxieties about national identity and the difficulties in coping with the increasing diversity in many societies have led to a growth in resentment against Muslims and Islam that has sometimes been fuelled by intolerant language in media and political discourse.

“As a result, many Muslims experience a range of discrimination, including verbal harassment, hate speech, violent attacks and religious profiling. Many are also confronted with a lack of equal opportunities in employment, housing, health care and education, and face restrictions on the public expression of their religion.”

State action is backed up by a barrage of anti-Muslim propaganda. Nathan Lean has explained how a multi-million dollar ‘industry’ has grown up in the United States to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. This includes grass roots anti-Muslim organisations like ACT for America, right-wing Christian organisations, bloggers and pundits like Pamela Geller and Milo Yanopoulos, and a huge array of ‘alt-right’ organisations.

These groups have access to massive amounts of funding and their views are constantly relayed in the mass media. And of course support for ‘our boys’ – the US and British military fighting wars in Muslim countries, is drenched in Islamophobia.

The net result of all these things is to strengthen Islamophobic prejudices throughout society. Nathan Lean says all these things interact with one another:

“There is a mutual relationship between all of these things. If anxieties about Muslims – or even blatant prejudices about them – did not exist organically, to some degree, the ground would not be very fertile for anti-Muslim agitators of the Islamophobia industry.

“But, of course, the argument can easily be made that the Islamophobia industry is responsible for the images, narratives, memes, tropes, axioms and even policies that engender a climate of fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims. People are not born prejudiced.

“As the South Pacific song goes: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear”. Some of the people doing that drumming today are those who comprise the Islamophobia industry.”

Extracted from Islamophobia and the rise of a new fascist movement by Phil Hearse

Source: Counterfire

One country after another is introducing racist state policies, often lifted wholesale from the far and fascist Right.

Stoked by the ‘War on Terror’ and the resulting refugee crisis, the process of positioning Muslims as some kind of civilisational threat to the West has taken hold across Europe while digging deep into the sludge of US mainstream politics.

In country after country, racist state policies, often lifted wholesale from the far and fascist Right, now bear down upon those who, by dint of religious faith, cultural heritage, mode of dress, dietary code or other signifier of Islamic ‘otherness’, are deemed to require intrusive monitoring and interventions ranging from the petty to the harshly punitive. This is the context in which the dress choices of some Muslim women are under attack.

Nowhere has the assault gone further, or taken such virulent forms, as in the European Union.

The map accompanying a Wikipedia entry on ‘British debate over veils’ shows how far things have already gone in Europe. Outright bans on wearing the burqa virtually anywhere outside the home are in place in France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Bulgaria and the Baltic states.  A partial ban, proscribing veil-wearing in schools and other specified work settings, applies in Norway. In the Netherlands, it is illegal to wear the burqa or the niqab on public transport or in ‘public areas’ such as hospitals. Other European states, including Italy and Spain, permit local bodies to put in place.

Brute

Germany, too, is hostile terrain for Muslim women who opt to veil. In line with Chancellor Merkel’s full-throated declaration, in 2016, that “the full face veil is not acceptable in our country. It should be banned, wherever it is legally possible.”

The Bundestag in 2017 enacted a ban on wearing the niqab and burqa for women working the civil service, judiciary and military. A more far-reaching ban operates in Bavaria, homeland of Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader who crowned his appointment as interior minister in Angela Merkel’s coalition government by declaring: “Islam does not belong in Germany.”

But perhaps no European state has gone further than France in delegitimising the sartorial choices of Muslim women. Since 2004, when small girls across France were banned from wearing headscarves at school, the French state and a pliable legal system have made it their business to ridicule, humiliate, browbeat, proscribe, and — as on French beaches a couple of years ago — resort to brute force.

In 2011, France stole a march on the rest of Europe by becoming the first EU member to outlaw the burqa and the niqab in public places, making their wearing illegal virtually anywhere outside the home. Those ‘violating’ the ban are subject to fines of up to 150 euros and may be required to undergo citizenship education. Anyone judged to have forced (“by violence, threats or abuse of power”) another to wear face coverings is liable to a 30,000 euro fine and/or one year’s imprisonment.

It’s instructive to recall the context of the 2011 ban: Marine Le Pen, recently elected leader of the Front National, was already proving herself an inventive architect of Islamophobia, an instigator of expressions and modalities of anti-Muslim racism particularly suited to the French context (she famously compared the sight of Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France.)

No one understood better than Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French president, the political capital to be reaped from a bold shift on to the territory of the fascist Right. As Jim Wolfreys puts it in his new study of Islamophobia in France*:

“[Sarkozy] appeared to grasp better than any other mainstream figure the relationship between racist demagogy and authoritarianism that underpinned the electoral success of the FN… Following [Jean-Marie] Le Pen’s poor showing in the second round of the 2002 presidential election …Sarkozy moved to position himself as the figure capable not just of making speeches about the danger of immigration, but of acting upon them…Sarkozysme was a symptom of the evolution of the French right as it embraced a neoliberal outlook reliant on a negative charge of scapegoating and discrimination” (pp 54-55).

A useful feature of Wolfreys’ study is the linkages it establishes between reactionary, racist cultural policy and neoliberal imperatives. Noting the multiple ways in which neoliberal policies have worked to hollow out core French political formations, particularly the mainstream parties of the left (the Parti Socialiste) and the right (the former UMP, now restyled as Les Républicains), Wolfreys correctly identifies this as part of a Europe-wide phenomenon, one subject to subtle national variation even as it tightens its grip across the continent.

Barring

This helps explain why Islamophobic dress decrees have become as much a feature of contemporary Europe as fine wines, ancient patrimony and al fresco dining.

Thus far legal challenges to the kind of full spectrum ban operative in France and Belgium have failed. In 2014, for example, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law of 2011, accepting the French government’s argument that the ban was based on “a certain idea of living together.”

In March 2017, the European Court of Justice – the EU’s highest court – lent its venerable weight to the harassing of Muslim women when it ruled on the issue of women wearing headscarves at work. Such garments could indeed be banned, averred the court, if part of a general policy barring all visible political and religious symbols.

Throughout Europe, the ECJ’s ruling was accurately identified as offering a green light for further bans. In Germany, the fascist AfD hailed the declaration for sending out “the right signal.” The French right was ecstatic:  “Even the ECJ votes Marine!” brayed one prominent supporter of the Front National.

On the Wikipedia map showing burqa bans across Europe, what stand out are the exceptions to the prohibition (full or partial) rule.  Portugal, Greece and Sweden are among a handful of European states not to have imposed restrictions on what Muslim women may wear as they go about their business and live their lives. Another exception is Britain.

There is something thoroughly EU-compatible about the Boris burqa would-be bandwagon and its mission to change the map.

Source: Counterfire

‘Respectable’ politicians in ‘respectable’ newspapers fuel racist attacks and increase what is already a toxic climate of racism.

It has much wider consequences than this however. Because all past and present evidence shows that racist filth spouted by ‘respectable’ politicians in ‘respectable’ newspapers helps to fuel racist attacks, helps to give credibility and confidence to the far right and fascists, and increases what is an already toxic climate of racism.

The disingenuous claim by Johnson and his supporters that this is just raising a topic of debate, and that Johnson is in fact a liberal because he does not want to ban the burqa, should fool no one. There is no shortage of racists already debating the issue of what Muslim women wear, no shortage of social media posts, no shortage of abuse and sometimes worse directed at Muslim women over their clothing.

The truth is that there is absolutely no point in raising this issue unless you are aiming for a ban. Discussion which just simply abuses Muslims may be satisfying to racists but it has no outcome. Instead, Johnson raised this precisely because he does want a discussion on a ban. It is clear from subsequent responses from other ‘respectable’ figures such as Jacob Rees Mogg and Johnson’s own family – his father, Stanley, and sister, Rachel, have both written newspaper columns defending his stand – that there will be further slippage in this direction. The egregious Christine Hamilton compares burqas to KKK hoods.

What the whole issue does is to raise the level of racism around the question. Why is it suddenly ok to discuss what certain items of clothing make women look like, in a way that it definitely would not be about nuns or Hasidic Jews? Why should the question of what women wear be the subject of discussion by anyone as long as it is their choice? And why is it not an outrage that Tory MP Nadine Dorries is allowed to imply that Muslim women wear such garments to cover up the bruises inflicted by domestic violence?

The argument is not really about the particulars, however, it is about racism. Very few women in any European countries wear the burqa or niqab (apparently 0.01% of Muslim women do in Britain), although far more wear the hijab or headscarf. Muslim women who choose to wear any of these items of clothing may do so for a range of religious or social reasons. It is clear that the majority do choose what they wear, and any coercion either by family or state should be vigorously opposed. But it is no one’s business but theirs how they dress. They should have the right to choose – like any other woman – what and what not to wear without fear of verbal or physical attack.

Islamophobia in the 21^st century targets women heavily, reproducing all sorts of issues to do with fear of sexuality, or of independent women. It is not the job of feminists to go along with this, but to challenge this racism and sexism aimed at one of the most vulnerable groups of women who already face widespread economic and social discrimination.

Behind all this lurks the spectre of Tommy Robinson, the far right and the growth of fascism across Europe. There is an increasing merging of this ‘respectable’ opinion and that of the far right – witness Rod Liddle’s piece for the Spectator which openly calls for more Islamophobia inside the Tory party. What Robinson says today, Johnson says tomorrow. This follows a pattern we are seeing across the developed world, where far right politicians set the agenda over scapegoating Muslims and migrants, and their views are at least adopted by the mainstream parties including those of the social democratic left.

In doing so they make the most hideous racism respectable, and increase the scapegoating rather than stand up to it. Many countries have already banned aspects of Muslim women’s dress and passed other anti-Muslim and anti-migrant laws – including France, Denmark, parts of Germany, and Hungary. There will be increasing pressure here in Britain to move towards a ban – and Johnson has opened the door to Robinson, UKIP and the rest of the racist ragbag.

The alt-right guru and former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, clearly involved in a major and toxic campaign to promote and encourage the far right across Europe, has in recent days praised both Johnson and Robinson, suggesting that the former would make a great prime minister and that the latter is the voice of blue collar workers in Britain. Both are absurd claims, but there is a deliberate process here where fascists and the far right hitch themselves to mainstream politicians, and use them to further spread their doctrine of hate and division.

There’s no pick and mix in the fight against racism
Johnson has been called on to apologise by the Tory leadership and has made it absolutely clear he’s not going to. Nothing will happen to him as a result – partly because Theresa May is too weak to enforce her will within the party, but mainly because the Islamophobic views that Johnson espouses are rife within the Tory party. Social media posts and remarks which show deeply held racist views about Muslims make regular appearances, yet receive only a fraction of the media and political attention apportioned to the issue of anti-Semitism within Labour.

Baroness Warsi and others within the Tory party have been agitating for some time about the level of Islamophobia. Their criticisms are pretty much shrugged off, along with the contemptuous dismissal of the Muslim Council of Britain as ‘extremist’ and the claim that having Sajid Javid as Home Secretary means there isn’t an Islamophobia problem.

Compare this with the endless demands for apologies and repeated pillorying of people within Labour for alleged cases of anti-Semitism. The clamour about this is continuing, with papers like the Daily Mail making repeated attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. I dealt with the question at length in last week’s Briefing, but for the sake of clarity to repeat; it has to be possible to distinguish between anti-Semitism, or racism against Jews as Jews, which can never be acceptable, and criticism of Israel which should not be prohibited or curtailed in any way by claiming that it in itself is anti-Semitic.

It is clear that the attacks are increasingly on Corbyn himself and are about the future of his leadership. They range from outright lies to distortion and innuendo, yet none have produced evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of Corbyn. Their short term aim is the demand that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism along with all its examples should be adopted in full by Labour’s NEC. At least one of those examples would open up those who criticise Israel to charges of anti-Semitism.

Corbyn is being accused of such because he has compared occupation of Gaza with the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, or with Nazi occupation of various European countries. To deny the right to make any historical analogy with events connected to Nazism and the Second World War, even when it is not mainly concerned with the Holocaust, is wrong.

What an awful travesty of anti-racism it is when a paper which has a despicable history of supporting fascism, which regularly scapegoats migrants and Muslims, can set itself up as judge and jury of one of the most committed anti-racist politicians of our times.

What an even greater travesty it is when the Tory party, which created the hostile environment for the Windrush generation and which only just over a decade ago had as an election slogan ‘are you thinking what I’m thinking’, dog whistling anti-immigration politics, can join in the attacks on Corbyn, at the very time when its most popular politician is donning the clothes of the far right in his pitch for power?

We should remember one thing. You can’t pick and mix as the Tories are doing. If you pay lip service to opposing racism against Jews, then you have to oppose racism against Muslims or anyone else come to that. The fight against racism is indivisible – which is why the left has always made it central to its politics.

Lindsey German is national convenor of Stop the War Coalition.

Those who fight for a society of multiracial equality have a lot of work to do, and they have to start by fighting the new fascists.

In Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Austria, fascist or hard-right parties are already in the government. In France the Front National and in Germany the AfD (Alliance for Germany) continue to pose a threat. And in Britain Tommy Robinson’s ‘Democratic’ Football Lads Alliance is the most credible and dangerous fascist force for decades – much more credible, with much more support, than the National Front in the 1970s.

These phenomena are part of a global shift to the right exemplified also by the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the vote for Brexit in Britain. It represents the complete failure of social democracy and other ‘centre-left’ forces to put forward credible policies to meet the austerity crisis of neoliberalism. Indeed many of these parties, like the Blairite Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the SPD in Germany and the Italian Democratic Left, have been the government, or part of the government, that has administered neoliberal austerity. However, if this has caused a polarisation to the left and the right, today the tide is overwhelmingly to the right.

Roots of Islamophobia

The calling cards of the fascists and hard right are xenophobia and racism, usually laced with an admixture of misogyny and homophobia. But the cutting edge has been anti-immigrant racism, and the cutting edge of that has been Islamophobia, at a level which parallels anti-Semitism in Germany before the advent of the Nazis in power in January 1933. How did this mass Islamophobia, reinforced by anti-Black racism (and anti-Latino racism in the United States), arise?  Of course, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of mass racism have subsisted in Western societies since the advent of European imperialism (and in the case of anti-Semitism, before). But today’s Islamophobia is much deeper and much more widespread. Its roots lie in the 9/11 attack and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ launched by American imperialism. It has been reinforced by mass panic over immigration, much of which comes from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, where most people are Muslims.

There has been a disastrous synergy between the hard right forces in Western politics and the terrorism of Al-Qaeda and then of Isis. Terrorist attacks on civilian populations carried out by people who profess allegiance to Islam, have been weaponised ruthlessly by the political right, using the hugely powerful mass media to establish a series of stereotypes about Muslims. The most important of these of course is the association of Muslims with terrorism, when evidently the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose and repudiate terrorism. Linked to this has been mystification about the religious and family practices of Muslims, culminating in the caricatures of women who wear the hijab or niqab.

War on Terror

Every stage of capitalism generates a dominant ideological ‘glue’, a way of justifying the status quo and tying the working class to the existing order. In the 40 years of the ‘cold war’, roughly from 1949 to 1989, the dominant ideology was that of the superiority of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy. This was tied together by political anti-communism, which targeted the foreign enemy (mainly the Soviet bloc plus China) and tried to associate the regimes in these states with the political left domestically – the ‘enemy within’.

This ideological framework of anti-communism was shared by the major pro- capitalist parties, in Europe mainly centre-left and centre right, and in the United States the Democrats and Republicans. Much of the European labour movement, for example the Social Democrats in Germany and the Labour Party in Britain, bought into this anti-communist framework, which also coincided with the era of mainly progressive economic growth, full employment and welfare states. In most advanced capitalist countries liberal democratic regimes were compelled to tolerate powerful labour movements and extensive democratic rights.

But there were exceptions to this ‘benign capitalism’ model, most notably the treatment of ethnic minorities but also some harsh anti-left domestic regimes – such as the United States during the 1950s McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunt and the autocratic Gaullist regime in France after 1958. Even so, social democratic and centre right politicians were able to point to real gains for the working class and contrast their societies with the apparently undemocratic regimes in the Soviet Union ad Eastern Europe. The ideology of consumer capitalism, plus anti-communism under the umbrella of American military dominance, was powerful because it appeared to coincide with reality.

This dominant ideological framework began to fray at the edges during the 1960s and ‘70s but paradoxically was struck a decisive blow by its victory – the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-communism could hardly function as a central ideological plank when communism had collapsed. In fact the ideologues of Western capitalism struggled in the post-1949 period to come up with a credible political ideology for integrating the working class and uniting the political leaders of each class, the political elites and intelligentsia in an overall pro-capitalist framework. Francis Fukuyama tried warming up Hegel’s ‘end of history’ thesis, arguing that liberal capitalism was the end point of human historical development and from now on the world would glide to a prosperous, liberal democratic, nirvana (1). This was too rarefied an idea to have much mass purchase, especially as it was immediately disproved by events like the first Gulf War. This was especially the case because of the advent of neoliberalism and growing economic crisis. The idea of benign capitalist development that benefitted everyone could not be sustained.

The opportunity for a new ideology to replace anti-communism, with deep roots in mass consciousness, came with the 9/11 attacks in the United States, which as everyone knows killed more than 3000 people, and caused a huge wave of shock and grief in America. George Bush Junior’s militaristic and deeply conservative team rapidly rolled out the ‘war on terror’. Within five months of the attack Bush was using his 2002 State of the Union address to declare ‘either you are with us or against us’. A new enemy – ‘terrorism’- had been declared, and one which conveniently used US military power to reinforce American political dominance in the West.

It could hardly escape anyone’s attention that the jihadi terrorism that targeted the United States was led by Muslims and conducted in the name of Islam. Fuelled by the grossly undemocratic Patriot Act and utterly reactionary new sources like Fox News, hostility and suspicion towards Muslims became normalised in the United States. Every survey has shown that in Europe and the United States terrorism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

This has not stopped the stereotyping and targeting of Muslim communities by all the forcers of the reactionary right and by Western capitalist states. The Patriot Act, permitting extensive new rights of detention without trial, increased border security, intrusive surveillance and search measures, was mainly aimed at Muslims and passed within five weeks of 9/11. According to the FBI racist attacks on Muslims increased by 16000% in 2002, and even 15 years later was at five times the pre-2001 level. The ‘othering’ of Muslims, stereotyping them as a suspicious, potential ‘enemy within’ became part of mass consciousness. The visceral anti-communism of the McCarthyite witch hunt period in the 1950s, was replaced by a visceral Islamophobia post-9/11.

Amongst Western political elites and the middle-class intelligentsia, a new theory emerged with much more purchase than Fukuyama’s brittle ‘end of history’. This was the ‘clash of civilisations’ idea, popularised by Samuel Huntington’s book (2), but first put forward by Bernard Lewis in his 1990 article, The Roots of Muslim Rage (3). Lewis discusses a range of possible explanations to the question ‘why do they hate us’? ‘Us’ in this case being the West and by extension Israel. Finally, he comes to this conclusion:

“Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”

So for Lewis, Muslim rage is aimed at modernity and secularism. Huntington argues that there are three main contending civilisations – Judeo-Christian, Muslim and Confucian (read: China). While Lewis’ account of Islamic resentment against the West is probably accurate as far as conscious Islamist political organisations are concerned, as an account of the consciousness of the Muslim masses it is a wild caricature.  Both Lewis and Huntington posit the decisive contest between Judeo-Christian civilisation and Christian civilisation as a centuries-long contest, which has been waged for 1300 years. In his 1993 article in the magazine Foreign Affairs (4) Huntington claimed:

“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.”

In a stinging rebuke to the clash of civilisations thesis, Edward Said wrote:

“Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader’s indignant passion as a member of the ‘West,’ and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West’s, and especially America’s, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.”

Moreover: “A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in (former US deputy defence secretary) Paul Wolfowitz’s nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn’t make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, ‘ours’ as well as ‘theirs’.”(5)

For Said the writings of Lewis and Huntington was part of a new ‘Orientalism’, his word for describing the writings and art of late 19^th century European intellectuals who pictured the cultures of Asia and the Middle East as dark, mysterious and barbaric.

Of course Lewis and Huntington did not have a mass audience in the early 1990s for their clash of civilisation ideas. But once the 9/11 attack had taken place in 2001, the neoliberal, militaristic government in the United States, as well as right wing opinion formers world-wide, reached for the clash of civilisations idea, which became a useful framework for the ‘war on terror’. It is notable for example that the precursor of the hard right AfD (Alliance for Germany) that now has 94 seats in the Bundestag, was the street activist PEGIDA movement. Its name literally means Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West. Events like the November 2004 shooting of Dutch film maker Theo van Gough b y a man of Moroccan origin could be easily used to create the stereotype – ‘we’ are liberal, ‘they’ are violent and illiberal. Most importantly ‘we’ must keep them out.

Terrorist attacks and the refugee crisis

The incoherence of the clash of civilisations idea did not of course stop it being picked up and used by every racist and xenophobe in politics and the media. The notion that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’, that they are a potential enemy internally and externally, has gone deep into popular consciousness in the West. But Islamophobia and terrorist attacks in the US and Western Europe have a terrible synergy. While the number of victims of this nihilistic terrorism is small compared with the huge number killed in Muslims lands by Western military intervention, it is still an awful litany of hundreds of ordinary citizens needlessly and ruthlessly killed.

One hundred and ninety-one people were killed in train bombings in Madrid in 2004; 52 people were killed in the 2005 attacks on the London transport system; 130 people were killed in the Paris attacks in 2015; and 22 people were killed in the Manchester attack in 2017. These are just some of the more notable attacks. This recourse to terror is a direct and widely predicted result of the countless dead in the West’s brutal wars on Muslim lands.

In addition to straight Islamophobia, obviously the other, overlapping, element that fuels the racist right in Europe is the refugee crisis. Millions of people have crossed into Europe in the past 15 years and the number has accelerated sharply to over a million a year by 2016.

Three things are central to understanding this. First a huge percentage of migrants come from countries that have been wrecked by war, and generally these have been started by the West. Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq are major examples, but of course many come from Syria. Second in countries where direct Western military intervention is not a factor, Western states and corporations are often complicit in wars and economic collapse. As Slavov Zizek explains in relation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC):

“…A UN report into the illegal exploitation of resources in the Congo found that is mainly about access to and control of, and trade in five key mineral resources: cobalt, diamonds, copper, coltan and gold. Beneath the façade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the workings of global capitalism. Congo no loner exists as a unified state; it is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords, with armies that usually include drugged children. Each of these warlords has business links with a foreign company or corporation controlling the mainly mining wealth of the region” (6)

Third, the complete collapse of centre right and centre left politicians in front of anti-immigrant rhetoric that prepared the ground for the far right. Anti-immigrant rhetoric, the constant promise to get tough on immigration, is standard fare for mainstream parties that long proceeded Donald Trump and the new rise of the far right. As Kenan Malik explains:

“Too often when we discuss hateful portrayals of migrants or Muslims or other minorities, we focus on the far right, or on groups such as Pegida, or on countries such as Hungary and politicians such as Viktor Orbán. It is certainly important that we call out such organisations and politicians and eviscerate their arguments.

“But we need also to recognise that the truth about dehumanisation is far more uncomfortable and far closer to home. The ideas and policies promoted by the far right and by populist anti-immigration figures have not come out of nowhere. They have become acceptable because the groundwork has already been laid, and continues to be maintained, by mainstream politicians and commentators.

“There is a tendency among liberals to see a great divide on immigration between the mainstream and the populists and between a more liberal western Europe and a more reactionary east. That is to distort reality. For, while differences clearly exist, the divisions are not nearly as sharp as often suggested. It is the rhetoric and the policies emerging from the mainstream and from western Europe that have helped legitimise the hostility to immigration expressed by the populists and in eastern Europe.” (7)

The fear of ‘excessive’ immigration, of being – as both Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron put it – ‘swamped’ by an alien peoples and cultures, is what lay behind the discourse of the anti-immigrant mainstream, beefed up by fake arguments about how immigrants lower wages, use excessive amounts of health care and live on welfare benefits. The Daily Mail may describe Tommy Robinson as a racist thug, but the racist ideology and hostility to immigrants which brings Robinson and his fascist bands to the fore, has been a constant theme of the Mail, the Express and Sun, and constant relayed in the discourse of Conservative and New Labour politicians and their favourite media outlets like the Telegraph and BBC.

It is this atmosphere that created the ‘hostile environment’ proclaimed by the Home Office under Theresa May and led directly to the Windrush scandal. Anti-immigrant racism has led directly to the failure of the European Union countries to develop a strategy for aiding migrants and the toleration of the deaths of many hundreds who have drowned while trying to reach the West. Aiding them would involve countries throughout the EU accepting immigration, and not trying to bottle up immigrants where they first landed, mainly Greece and Italy.

The portrayal of Muslims as the unfathomable ‘other’ leads directly to treating ‘them’ as less than human, or at least less human than ‘us’. Not only are we resigned to letting hundreds drown, while a Royal Navy ship looks out for illegal boats and fails to rescue a single struggling immigrant in the water, we are resigned to allowing tens of thousands of them to die directly or indirectly at the hands of Western military forces or in Western sponsored wars like that in Yemen. And then we wonder why they want to escape and come to Europe.

Muslims have become the ‘perfect enemy’ for the hard right and for right-wing politicians of every kind. They are strange, evil, violent and have incomprehensible atavistic obsessions. Donald Trump’s campaign trial promise to keep out visitors to the US from Muslim countries “until we find out what is going on” says it all. What we do know is that they mean us harm and this justifies the new militarism and repressive regimes at home. Most of all, it helps provide an ideological framework for xenophobia and nationalism, habitually used to divide and dilute mass protest against austerity and poverty at times of capitalist economic crisis.

Functioning of Islamophobia

Modern racism and xenophobia, of which Islamophobia is the cutting edge, play a key role in dividing the working class and other oppressed sections of society, tying important popular layers to a pro-capitalist and pro-austerity discourse. Many of the millions who voted for Trump and Brexit, and who vote for organisations like the FN in France, the Liga in Italy and the AfD in Germany, are convinced that immigration is responsible for economic crisis and is a threat to their traditional way of life. The French philosopher Michel Foucault talked about the creation of ‘regimes of truth’ by ‘discourse’ – constant repetition by the media and intellectuals. Foucault abandoned any notion of class interests, but we can use his terminology to understand anti-immigrant racism. The ‘regime of truth’ that has been created is that ‘they’ are alien, ‘they’ threaten our values, and if not stopped ‘they’ will swamp ‘us’.

Islamophobia is maintained at numerous levels in the US and Europe. First, state action and new laws targets the Muslims communities. In the United States a raft of measures in the Patriot Act is are designed to survey and control the Muslim community. In Britain the Prevent strategy is designed to make teachers and social workers police the thoughts and attitudes of their students and clients, and a big majority of referrals have targeted alleged Islamic extremism –  only 10% of referrals has targeted right wing extremism. The objective of the Prevent strategy is to intimidate Muslims and create a climate of fear – fear that any kind of protest or activism will get you labelled ‘extremist’.

In France measures against Islamic religious observance have included the 2004 ban on wearing the hijab (headscarf) in schools, a ban on the niqab (face covering in public places), and the insistence by some local authorities that schools in the locality must not serve alternatives to pork at lunchtime, a practice that has continued despite a 2017 court ruling against it. In several other European countries there are bans on the niqab.

Austria had decided to close seven mosques and expel 6o imams. The siting of mosques continues to be a subject of political controversy in many European towns, and a focus of extreme right-wing activism.

Islamophobia has generated a massive increase in violent attacks on Muslims, including in the United States especially a series of shootings. A disproportionate number of these attacks have been on women wearing the hijab or niqab.

Discrimination against Muslims in employment and housing is rife in the UK, across Europe and in the US. In Britain Muslims are more likely to live in social housing, more likely to have low paid jobs or be unemployed and more likely to live in poor areas.

Even the conservative and pro-NATO OSCE says:

“Intolerance and discrimination against Muslims has become increasingly prevalent in the OSCE region in recent years. The “war on terror”, the global economic crisis, anxieties about national identity and the difficulties in coping with the increasing diversity in many societies have led to a growth in resentment against Muslims and Islam that has sometimes been fuelled by intolerant language in media and political discourse.

“As a result, many Muslims experience a range of discrimination, including verbal harassment, hate speech, violent attacks and religious profiling. Many are also confronted with a lack of equal opportunities in employment, housing, health care and education, and face restrictions on the public expression of their religion.” (8)

State action is backed up by a barrage of anti-Muslim propaganda. Nathan Lean has explained how a multi-million dollar ‘industry’ has grown up in the United States to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. This includes grass roots anti-Muslim organisations like ACT for America, right-wing Christian organisations, bloggers and pundits like Pamela Geller and Milo Yanopoulos, and a huge array of ‘alt-right’ organisations. These groups have access to massive amounts of funding and their views are constantly relayed in the mass media. And of course support for ‘our boys’ – the US and British military fighting wars in Muslim countries, is drenched in Islamophobia.

The net result of all these things is to strengthen Islamophobic prejudices throughout society. Nathan Lean says all these things interact with one another:

“There is a mutual relationship between all of these things. If anxieties about Muslims – or even blatant prejudices about them – did not exist organically, to some degree, the ground would not be very fertile for anti-Muslim agitators of the Islamophobia industry.

“But, of course, the argument can easily be made that the Islamophobia industry is responsible for the images, narratives, memes, tropes, axioms and even policies that engender a climate of fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims. People are not born prejudiced.

“As the South Pacific song goes: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear”. Some of the people doing that drumming today are those who comprise the Islamophobia industry.” (9)

The imprisonment of Tommy Robinson for contempt of court arises from his action around a court case in which a group of Pakistani men are accused of grooming and raping vulnerable young women. His clear aim of course it to caricature Muslims as threatening ‘our’ women, and to associate Muslims with rape culture and paedophilia. It’s true that in several areas men from Muslim backgrounds have been involved in this activity. But is untrue that these grooming and rape crimes against young women are mainly carried out by Muslim men. The movement for Tommy Robinson’s release, supported by far-right movements across Europe, is Islamophobic and racist to the core. Many involved in the Football Lad’s Alliance – probably a majority – are working class. But to imagine that this new fascist movement will disappear when working class struggle attains a higher level than today, is naïve in the extreme. The new fascist movement must be confronted and fought, and its ideas challenged, though every means available to the radical left, the labour movement and the whole gamut of progressive movements on a European level and beyond.

In 2013 anti-racist academic and journalist Sunny Hundal proclaimed the victory of multiculturalism in Britain. While he based himself on real trends – the popularity of multiculturalism among the young in particular – overall he was much too optimistic. Basing himself on an opinion survey by Lord Ashcroft, he noted that 70 per cent of those interviewed regarded multiculturalism as positive. In the era of Brexit, Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson, it’s very doubtful that such a result would be returned. He said:

“It’s official: 45 years after Enoch Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech – the fearmongers have lost the war, while those who think Britain is stronger with a multiracial and multicultural identity have won…the continuous war waged by the rightwing press against multiculturalism has utterly failed. Public opinion has in fact moved in the opposite direction and become less hostile to people of different cultures and ethnicities living in the UK. In other words, interacting with ethnic minorities and watching them contribute to the UK (in sport, business, academia etc) has easily overcome tabloid scaremongering.” (10)

It would be an amazingly positive result if this was true. Now those who fight for a society of multiracial equality have a lot of work to do, and they have to start by fighting the new fascists.

NOTES

• Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin 1993
• Samuel Hunting ton, Clash of Civilisations, Simon and Schuster, 1990
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/
• https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1993-06-01/clash-civilizations
• https://www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance/. See also Said’s longer https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-The-Myth-of-Clash-Civilizations-Transcript.pdf
• Slavov Zizek, Against the Double Blackmail, Penguin Random House, 2016
• (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/10/sunday-essay-how-we-colluded-in-fortress-europe-immigration)
• https://www.osce.org/odihr/countering-discrimination-against-muslims
• Nathan Lean is the author of The Islamophobia Industry (Pluto 2017). This interview is at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/06/groups-spread-hate-islamophobia-industry-170610092856852.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/multiculturalism-won-uk-move-on

Trump demonises Arabs, wanting to banish them from his shores, unaware that an Arab giantess in New York is welcoming all migrants.

The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

The President is obsessed with deporting Arabs
Although, by a superb comic irony,
It was an Arab who modeled for the United States’ icon –
Namely the Statue of Liberty.

The sculptor’s monument was initially designed
For the opening of the Suez canal:
The original depicted an Arab woman holding a torch.
It was destined for the canal’s southern portal.

His first drawings show “a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant”
With a veil modestly hiding her lips,
The sculptor told Egypt’s ruler she represented “Progress”
A beacon, to light the way for oncoming ships.

Unfortunately for the artist, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi,
Egypt’s bankrupt Khedive couldn’t afford its installation
But undeterred, Bartholdi recycled it and offered it to New York
To commemorate the American revolution.

Its first title had been, “Egypt carrying the Light to Asia’
But now the figure’s veil would be removed
And for his prospective US clients Bartholdi called it,
“Liberty enlightening the world”.

But despite Bartholdi’s tweaking the flowing Arab garments
And his turning them into Graeco-Roman dress,
It’s still a huge stone Arab that occupies New York Harbour,
Making fun of the President’s petty mindedness –

And of the President’s paranoia for far more Americans die
As a result of their falling out of bed,
Or their being stung by bees rather than being killed by terrorists
Never mind their fellow-citizens shooting them dead.

Despite the most worthless President in US history
Wishing to banish all Arabs from his shores
An Arab giantess in New York is welcoming migrants
And giving the lie to his immigration laws.

However much the President may demonise Arabs
There’s one who’s rooted to the ground,
Making a better job of symbolising American liberty
Without her having to utter a sound.

Heathcote Williams – poet, playwright, essayist, lyricist, actor, magician, political agitator… and much else besides – died 1 July 2017.

Video: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

Words and narration by Heathcote Williams. Montage by Alan Cox. Source: BabylonRoyal

Together Against Trump
National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More details…

Source: The Guardian

The media needs to be accountable in some way for the content they produce, especially when levels of anti-Muslim hate crime are soaring.

Bodyguard is the most watched drama on BBC television for a least a decade,  with an audience of over ten million. WARNING: spoilers below.

We first see a hijab-wearing woman hiding in the toilet of a busy train, about to detonate a vest she is wearing packed with bombs (stereotype one: Muslim woman as terrorist). It then transpires she is actually a victim who looks frightened and vulnerable while our hero steps in to save the day (stereotype two: the oppressed Muslim woman).

Watching those gripping opening scenes I still hoped that the writers would change the narrative and make her the unsung hero. As the weeks passed my hopes faded. The victim narrative prevailed.

However, my heart sank even further in the series finale when this Muslim woman was revealed to be the terrorist mastermind. As she says, no one suspected her because they were taken in by the “vulnerable Muslim woman as a victim scenario”.

I am exhausted by how Muslim women are continually misrepresented like this in the media. As a victim of an Islamophobic verbal attack after the 9/11 terrorist attack, I don’t appreciate depictions that can fuel Islamophobia. There are many communities in Britain that may not have had much interaction with Muslims, or only ever hear or see Muslims on TV.

I believe the media needs to be accountable in some way for the content they produce, especially when levels of anti-Muslim hate crime are soaring. Instead, we need more powerful narratives and stories that bring about a better understanding of Muslims.

The British actor Riz Ahmed has highlighted the lack of accurate representations of Muslims in the film and TV industry, and subsequently a test called the “Riz test” has been devised to examine this phenomenon using five key questions:

1. Are Muslims portrayed as a victim of, or the perpetrator of, Islamist terrorism?
2. If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? If female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?
3. Are they presented as irrationally angry?
4. Are they superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?
5. Do they appear to be a threat to a western way of life?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, then the representation fails. Bodyguard fails on every count.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, many of whom are pioneering women doctors, lawyers, architects and politicians, but we never see any of them on screen.

Instead writers continually play on stereotypes that have the potential to further heighten Islamophobia. What would it take for a film-maker to consult diverse writers such as myself and change the narrative? It may not make for such exciting TV, but the alternative is for future dramas to emulate Bodyguard and feed hate and play into the hands of those who want to divide us.

Riz Ahmed’s lesson to the media on diversity

Source: Gulf News

I have to agree and do not consider this phenomenon to be particularly new. The British tabloids have worked hard to present Muslims at home and abroad as backward and hostile. I imagine this makes it easier to kill them when we send bombs and armed drones into Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

It is not only the media, but our preparation of History itself that obscures the peaceful, thoughtful and creative Muslim.

Having Muslim friends who were being made to feel extremely uncomfortable after 9/11, I began to wonder if there were any Muslim pacifists. I discovered that there were, and principal among them was the Pashtun ‘peace warrior’ Badshah Abdul Gaffar Khan, a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi — who described him as ‘a miracle’ — and, in every sense, his Muslim counterpart.

What a remarkable and stunning role model he should be for Muslim youth; yet while a statue of Gandhi was unveiled in London’s Parliament Square in March this year, few today have even heard of Badshah Abdul Gaffar Khan.

In the 1940s, while sectarian conflict was tearing India apart, this gentle Pashtun giant of a man established a 100,000-strong ‘Islamic Peace Army’ composed of unarmed men and a few brave women.

Working side by side with Gandhi, Badshah Khan campaigned for peace and an end to British occupation. His followers mounted huge demonstrations and offered no retaliation when scores of their number were shot dead by the British

Badshah Khan was considered so powerful, so notorious, and such a threat to British colonial rule that he was repeatedly imprisoned for sedition, spending many of his 96 years in jail where, even as an old man, he was tortured.

Why then has Badshah Khan been forgotten?

Part of the blame must lie with his own countrymen and fellow religionists for not taking ownership of their history; allowing it, instead, to be repackaged within the parameters of foreign agendas.

Since the ‘Cold War’ ended twenty five years ago there has been no real, existential, threat to Western countries … but without a ‘war’ there is no need for arms. We needed a new enemy and, having deployed the mujaheddin as their main weapon against the USSR in Afghanistan, the West (America in particular) swiftly repackaged Islamic extremism as public enemy number one little more than a decade later.

Islam has replaced communism in the global political paradigm — terrifying, brutal, ruthless and alien. This image has been propagated by the state and media alike to the extent that the notion of a peace-loving Muslim has become oxymoronic, while peace-loving Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews abound.

War is a lucrative business and in the absence of a tangible enemy, the ‘War on Terror’ (read Islamic extremism) keeps the global arms industry — currently worth $1.3 trillion (Dh4.77 trillion) a year — in clover; we cannot have a cuddly Islam any more than we could have had cuddly Communism. Muslim peace icons like Badshah Khan, then, are simply not welcome in this monetised rewriting of history.

There is also the problem of sectarianism which fragments and dilutes Islam and lies at the heart of the current chaos across the Middle East. Badshah Khan fought against sectarianism and the movement he pioneered was inclusive and tolerant.

What a formidable force the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims would constitute if they were united. Would Israel continue to steal land belonging to the Palestinians and attack the imprisoned people of Gaza with impunity? Would Western companies continue to extract the profits from the region’s natural resources which could be used instead to the benefit of its people? Would there be any further need for the region’s gargantuan defence spending?

You can see where I am going with this … ‘divide and rule’ — the term was first used by that ‘friend of the Arabs’, T.E. Lawrence — proved to be an effective formula in preventing (or at least postponing) effective rebellion against colonialism in the Middle East and was applied in India too.

It is my hope that, in rediscovering Badshah Khan, the Muslim world will reclaim its own peaceful role model; an Islamic icon, the Muslim Gandhi.

* Badshah Khan: Islamic Peace Warrior an investigative poem by Heathcote Williams is published by Thin Man Press which is also publishing his upcoming book American Porn, which lifts the veil on US politics from the origins of the nation to Donald Trump.

* Heathcote Williams’ book Brexit Boris – From Mayor to Nightmare, which lays bare why Boris Johnson should be disbarred from ever holding public office, is available from Public Reading Rooms, here…