Hassan Mahamdallie | ukwatch.net

Islamophobia: a New Strain of Bigotry

Ellie Keen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:35:45 +0000

Attacks on Muslims by politicians and the media have been on the rise since the 9/11 attacks. Now, when author Martin Amis’s abusive tirades against Islam are broadcast and published without qualm, Hassan Mahamdallie asks if Islamophobia has become society’s acceptable racism.

The new imperialist era that Western leaders have embarked upon, and its repercussions, have wrought extraordinary transformations on sections of the intelligentsia. Take the example of Martin Amis. Since the 9/11 attacks the once voguish novelist, author of books including London Fields, has been steadily building up a body of work that has essentially argued that Islamism is the new fascist threat akin to Hitler’s regime. He argues that this threat demands extraordinary measures up to and including war, that Islam itself has become dominated by a death cult, and that the flaccid multicultural values of the liberal left in Western societies have made us soft and open to attack.

Martin Amis said in an interview with the New York Times that he was not Islamophobic but “Islamismphobic” – that is opposed to militant Islam – but this has taken him into that dark territory populated by anti-Muslim bigots, imperialist warmongers and apocalyptic right wingers who believe that the Muslim world is the greatest threat to civilisation.

Notoriously, Amis embarked on a “thought experiment”, as his supporters would later have it, in an interview with the Times in September 2006. Amis mused, “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

“They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.”

In the same interview the author also warned, “They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.”

The Marxist philosopher Terry Eagleton took Martin Amis to task. Eagleton lectures, as does Amis, at the University of Manchester School of Arts. Eagleton reasonably pointed out, “Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent.”

Eagleton’s observations made him the target of Amis’s supporters, who bandied about the accusation that Marxists like Eagleton supported Islamist acts of terror. To this slur Eagleton retorted, “Blowing the heads off little children in the name of Allah was not exactly what Marx had in mind. Amis’s panic-stricken reaction to 9/11 is part of a wider hysteria that has swept over sections of the liberal left, one to which creative writers seem particularly prone.”

The controversy rumbled on. Then, in November of last year, one of Amis’s contemporaries, Ronan Bennett, wrote the article “Shame On Us” in which he took Amis to task. Bennett’s well-argued Guardian article concluded, “Amis got away with it. He got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.”

Bennett’s article, precisely because it was so powerful and forensic, raised howls of protest from Amis’s supporters, who had been attempting to cast Amis in the public imagination as a brave, transgressive figure, who refused to be victimised by “the PC Brigade”. For them Amis, for “telling it like it is” about the Islamist/Muslim danger embodied the finest features of the Western Enlightenment.

Christopher Hitchens, who completed his journey to the right when he backed George Bush and Tony Blair in their war on Iraq, jumped to defend his friend. Hitchens replied to Bennett that Amis was being satirical in the tradition of Jonathan Swift when he had embarked on his “experiment in the limits of permissible thought”. But what does this explain? Nothing at all.

Enlightenment values?

Is Hitchens really arguing that the act of making your foul and innermost prejudices public is a brave and progressive act in and of itself? Are we now to congratulate every fascist that crawls out of the woodwork to make speeches inciting attacks on Muslims (or Jews) as a brave “thought experimenter”? What precisely is the Enlightenment value at stake here?

It is revealing that, in his defence of Amis, Hitchens also argues that anti-Muslim racism is not the same as other racisms, because Muslims do not constitute a “race”.

Hitchens should know that the vast majority of Muslims in this country are from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East or Africa. That is how they enter the racist paradigm. In the 1970s I was chased down the road by skinheads shouting “Paki”. Now I could be jumped by some BNP thugs shouting, “Fucking Muslim terrorist!” The kicks and punches would feel exactly the same, whatever the racially-inspired epithet attached to them. However, the defence that “I am attacking a religion, not a race,” is the “defence” favoured by the BNP, by which the fascist organisation exploits a loophole in our anti-discrimination laws.

The novelist Ian McEwan, whose clincher was, “I’ve known Martin Amis for almost 35 years, and he’s no racist,” also made a virtue out of the act of attacking “mainstream” Islam. For him this was “not to be racist, but to exercise the gift of consciousness and the privilege of liberty”. The implication seems to be that novelists can say and write what odious rubbish they like and we have to accept it. The Enlightenment figure Voltaire never said he was beyond criticism – in fact he engaged in furious debates, usually with people in power.

Amis was unrepentant, of course. He replied to Bennett, “As a multiculturalist ideologue, Bennett cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every 35 years, and b) this entails certain consequences.”

Amis is not an isolated aberration. As Terry Eagleton points out, he is only one of a host of powerfully placed commentators, many ex-left, across Europe and the US who have created this nightmarish vision of ever encroaching “Islamofascism” (although not a phrase Amis uses) as a stick to beat Muslims and those who seek to defend them with, and as an ideological cover for imperialism.

One of the striking features of Amis’s recent writings is the closed nature of his literary imagination. You would think that an intellectual and novelist would be inquiring about their subject, that they would have a passion for accuracy and an essential truth, or perhaps some empathy or understanding. None of this is present in Amis’s work. His mind is shut. Islamists, Al Qaida operatives, busily breeding Muslims, all are crudely one-dimensional.

So the vision that he constructs from this bundle of inaccuracies, misreading of the Quran, generalisations and caricatures has no real purchase. It only appeals, if at all, to blind prejudices (if the reader is that way inclined). For Amis the world changed on 9/11. “September 11 has given us a planet we barely recognise.” He cannot see that the terrorist attacks on the West are a shard of a nightmare that the great powers have visited on the populations of the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere through colonisation, imperialism and their attendant slaughter and immiseration on a vast scale.

So when Amis talks of Abu Ghraib, he sees it as a “shameful deviation” – not a manifestation of a wider abuse of the Iraqi population occupied by violent forces that act as a law unto themselves. It is the West’s loss of “moral advantage” at Abu Ghraib according to Amis. What moral advantage did it have before Abu Ghraib? This inability to recognise that the people of the Middle East may view the impact of imperialism and “modernity” somewhat differently than Amis does from his comfy perch betrays a certain ruthless arrogance.

It is also very difficult to see what is progressive and brave in continually turning the heat on oppressed minority populations in Europe. As Gary Younge wrote, “The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects, but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim, they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb – it is simply suffering from one of the oldest viruses harboured among its most established populations.”

One almost wishes that Amis and his ilk take a deeper look at their Enlightenment heroes whose names they like to wave at their critics.

Edward Gibbon wrote the classic Enlightenment text The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes from 1776 to 1788). He included in his study an extensive chapter on the prophet Muhammad and the early development of Islam. Gibbon held Muhammad’s achievements in the highest regard. He could also admire the unifying nature and attendant philosophical leap that Islam represented at the time.

Compare Gibbon with the casual abuse of Amis, who wrote of the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, “[He]...spent his childhood memorising the Quran. He was ten by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him: and so it proves.”

The great French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire was not anti-religion. He is probably best described as a deist who believed in a god out of reason and not faith. What he detested was the abuse of power of the establishment and the established church in France at the time – the Roman Catholic church, and its oppressive nature. Indeed Voltaire spent much of his later life defending oppressed people who practised minority religions (Protestants) against heinous injustices meted out by the state and the religious hierarchy.

Voltaire’s most famous campaign in favour of the oppressed was in defence of Jean Calas, a Protestant cloth merchant from Toulouse. In 1761 Calas was wrongly accused of murdering his own son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. There was not a shred of evidence against Calas, but he was nevertheless condemned to death, broken on the wheel, strangled and his body burnt. Voltaire was appalled, and furiously campaigned for a posthumous pardon for Calas.

Voltaire published his famous broadside, A Treatise on Tolerance, in support of Calas and wrote to a friend saying, “I am beside myself. I am concerned as a man, and a bit also as a philosopher. What I want to know is, on which side is the horror of fanaticism?”

Boost for Bigots

Alex Doherty — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 10:54:44 +0000

What a godsend Trevor Phillips has become for the right wing press and New Labour.

It began in April 2004 when the Commission for Racial Equality boss declared in the Times that multiculturalism should be ‘killed off’ – although he did concede that ‘people should be allowed to be a bit different. It’s a good thing that people are different in Yorkshire than they are in Cornwall.’ He went on to warn young Muslims that they should ‘work by the rules of British people’ and accept the common values of Britain, ‘democracy rather than violence’. The right wing applauded their new and unexpected ally, and no doubt Tony Blair, then as now engaged in a war against the wishes of the majority of the population, drew comfort from Phillips’s stance.

In his next intervention Phillips managed the feat of blaming the left and progressive teachers for the way our schools fail black children while simultaneously advocating segregated classes.

It is clear that Phillips’s further career prospects under New Labour now hinge on slaying the ‘evil’ dragon of multiculturalism and blaming the victims of largely government-driven racism for their own misfortune.

Domestic impact of Iraq

His latest speech, delivered in Manchester and again much trailed in the Times, ‘After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation’, argued that multiculturalism had led to ghetto communities and that we were in danger of replicating the segregated US. He followed this by an article (at the start of Ramadan) in which he attacked supposed politically correct ‘special favours’ for minority religious groups. Phillips asserted, without evidence, that anyone who resented these ‘favours’ was silenced, and that this ‘tyranny of silence is now a breeding ground for far right extremism’. To top it all off, Phillips then delivered a speech to a fringe group at the Tory Party conference in which he questioned why councils printed information in different languages, effectively rehabilitated ‘coloured’ as an acceptable description for black people, and concluded that things are so bad we need a ‘highway code for multi-ethnic Britain, our unwritten handbook for getting on with each other’.

Phillips is proving a boon for a government that wants to divert attention from the domestic impact of Iraq by switching the focus onto the supposed ‘alien’, self-segregating and dangerous nature of Britain’s Muslims. Not only has Phillips encouraged every right wing newspaper hack, he has also provided ideological cover for liberal pundits who have been itching to tread the David Aaronovitch road of jettisoning their past by renouncing any principles they had, eager now to show that they too can stick the boot into poor immigrants – especially Muslims. So Polly Toynbee wrote a blow-hard column, ‘Why Trevor is Right’, attacking multiculturalism and demanding that Muslims ‘embrace modern British values’. Deborah Orr wrote an extraordinary column in the Independent in the wake of Phillips’s latest speech headlined ‘Why We Should Bin Black History Month’, attacking multiculturalism as ‘feeble’, ‘stupid’ and ‘an excuse for tokenism, laziness, patronisation, ghettoisation, simmering resentment, poverty, alienation, fundamentalism and terrorism’. How powerful an ideology it must be to be responsible for all this!

But are Trevor and his allies right? Are we really sleepwalking to segregation? It pays to examine the facts, and along the way try to separate the crucial difference between cause and effect. The first thing to say is that the ‘alarm bells’ ringing in Phillips and his friends’ heads are not necessarily ringing in other people’s heads. Is it the case that we are dividing off into a racially segregated society, and becoming hostile to and unknowing of each other?

A couple of weeks before Phillips’s latest speech the pollsters Mori, commissioned by the BBC, ran an interesting poll. This found that, despite all the anti-Muslim and anti-asylum prejudice encouraged by the government and peddled by the media, the majority of people (62 percent) agree with the statement that ‘multiculturalism makes Britain a better place’. The poll also showed that nearly seven out of ten of the population disagree that ‘the policy of multiculturalism in Britain has become a mistake and should be abandoned’. Eighty six percent of people disagreed with the statement that ‘my area doesn’t feel like Britain any more because of immigration’. Nearly six out of ten people polled also believed that we should be ‘more concerned about ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities are protected’.

So who exactly is Trevor Phillips speaking for when he steams into multiculturalism? Mori and other polls consistently show that the public do not necessarily, as Phillips judges, see multiculturalism as a conspiracy to undermine ‘white’ society. On the contrary, for most people it is a basic recognition that we live in a society that has more than one culture, that it is the richer for it, and that people should be treated equally. As such it is a general expression of anti-racism. This government, with Phillips’s help, is busy undermining support for multiculturalism in favour of ‘community cohesion’, which is nothing more than a New Labour version of the old Alf Garnett mantra, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ To do this Phillips has resorted to distorting the reality of inner city life, where we live and why.

It should have been an embarrassment for Phillips to quote a demographics expert in support of his theory of US-style ‘hard segregation’, only to have that same expert flatly contradict him the next day. Professor Ceri Peach, of Oxford University’s Centre for the Environment, wrote in to the Guardian to say that Phillips’s ‘alarmist picture’ was not borne out by reality. He wrote, ‘Let us be clear, there is not a single ward in Britain in which the population is 100 percent minority ethnic population. Tracts of 90 percent to 100 percent are common in the US. The proportion of individual minority ethnic groups in 2001 living in wards in Britain where they form as much as 50 percent of the population is 22 percent. There are several wards where, if one aggregates all minority ethnic populations together, they form the majority. However, 78 percent of the minority ethnic population do not live in such wards.’

Peach went on to write that analysis showed that between 1991 and 2001 there were ‘decreasing or stable degrees of segregation in English cities’. In other words, indicators are, if anything, going in the opposite direction to that argued by Phillips.

Phillips’s twisting of reality is shown up by the most authoritative study around. Dr Ludi Simpson of the University of Manchester has researched the notion of Muslims self-segregating themselves, looking specifically at Bradford, and concluded that ‘geographical analyses have become unnecessarily racialised to the point that it is not the geography but the analysis which is racially patterned’. In other words, it is not the case that the population is drifting apart on racial lines – rather it is commentators such as Phillips and his New Labour cohorts who are imposing a racial ‘spin’ on what is actually a different and more positive reality.

Ludi Simpson’s study picks out a few simple truths. He attacks those such as Phillips who want to confuse the cause with the effects. The reason why Pakistanis, for example, were originally concentrated in a particular area was not due to self-segregation, but a combination of closeness to the textile mills in which they laboured and discriminatory (mostly Labour) local government policies that acted to separate them off geographically from the local white population. For example, in 1991 the CRE found that Oldham council actively discriminated against Asian applicants by segregating them from white households. It is well documented that estate agents selected the properties on offer according to the colour of the customer who walked in the door. So who has been segregating who?

Simpson also points out that for self-segregation to take place an ethnic group would have to be shown to be migrating into an area – in other words buying property where everyone else from your ethnic group lives. But there is no evidence of this as a major factor in where people choose to live. What is the case is that in some areas there is a growing population of a particular ethnic minority group – but that is not because people are moving into the area, it’s because people, especially with growing young families, don’t have the means to move out. Far from Asians wanting to live in ghettoised ‘comfort zones’, most people would like to move away. Simpson quotes a Bradford study by Deborah Phillips and Peter Radcliffe that concluded, ‘[We] found that most Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would be happy to live in areas where both Asian and white families live, although many have reservations about living in all-white neighbourhoods because of fears about racism.’

Segregation, Simpson argues, has more to do with poverty, aggravated by racism, than any other factors. What are needed are government policies to give working class Asians a way out of poverty so they can have choices presently enjoyed by the more affluent in society. But instead New Labour has created a society where the gap between the rich and the poor grows bigger, where social mobility is deteriorating, and where less working class children of all backgrounds are able to enjoy decent higher education.

None of this is mentioned by Phillips, yet it is a scandal of massive proportions. As Gary Younge wrote in the Guardian, ‘Bangladeshis have the highest rate of unemployment, reaching just over 40 percent for men under 25. These people are not segregated – they are alienated. If they need to be integrated into anything as a matter of urgency, it is the workforce and the education system. A decent job with a decent income is still the best path out of the crudest forms of racism and fundamentalism. Polls and studies show a link between wealth and the propensity to integrate.’

Ludi Simpson’s conclusion is a devastating reply to Phillips’s loose and dangerous talk: ‘In 2001, the phenomenon of racial self-segregation gained the status of a legend. It was coined in a review of race relations in Bradford, repeated in government reports, and passed from one news item to another… The legend uses racialised language. “Flight” is the term used to describe white movement, while self-segregation is reserved for other groups (including a government minister’s complaint of “Muslim isolationism”)... The evidence does not support this legend… The legend of self-segregation can now be seen as a myth.’

Institutional racism

However, this is not an excuse for complacency on the part of anti-racists opposed to what Phillips is doing. We are all aware that in a third New Labour term, far from things getting better, they can get worse. The government’s attacks on Muslims and asylum seekers, combined with policies that favour the wealthy and powerful, have the potential to make Phillips’s picture real. If the government succeeds in driving a wedge between black, Asian and white by branding all Muslims potential terrorists, then we could see racism and all its consequences on the rise.

It is indicative that Phillips mentioned 7/7 in the title of his talk, and yet had nothing to say about his New Labour friends’ bloody imperial adventures and their domestic blowback, for which no one but Blair and his supporters are to blame, or the witch-hunting of Muslim organisations and individuals across the spectrum, including Yussuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, the very moderate Muslim Council of Britain and modernist Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan. Behind Phillips’s pronouncements hide an unwillingness by New Labour to even acknowledge the pervasive institutionalised racism that really does blight society and destroy lives, let alone combat it.

As some commentators have pointed out in response to Phillips’s speech, there are forces acting to exclude and isolate members of an ethnic minority group – not Asian Muslims, but African-Caribbean boys. This blows the biggest New Labour totem out of the water – the idea that the closer you come to the ‘British norm,’ the more likely you are to be integrated into society and reap the rewards. Today black Caribbean young men are likely to be more poverty-stricken than their fathers and grandfathers. The black male unemployment rate is at the same levels today as it was in the days of the 1948 Windrush generation. Yet where are the high level ‘alarm bells’, the brave and determined government declarations, the morning press conferences, the urgent task forces and legislation to crack this situation?

As Professor Danny Dorling from the University of Sheffield wrote in the Observer, ‘There are shocking statistics concerning segregation that Phillips does need to address. In some areas African-Caribbean boys are up to 15 times more likely to be excluded from school than are white boys, and up to 12 times more likely to be incarcerated in prison in Britain. Children and young people are being segregated out of classrooms and disproportionately into prisons by ethnicity in this country.’ Dorling went on to point out, ‘Cut up Britain horizontally rather than by neighbourhood, and you do find minority-majority areas. For example, above the fifth floor of all housing in England and Wales a minority of children are white. Most children growing up in the tower blocks of London and Birmingham – the majority of children “living in the sky” in Britain – are black.’

Stafford Scott is a well respected and longtime community activist on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham. He wrote in the Guardian that 20 years after the riot against the police on that estate ‘almost nothing has changed. While outwardly Broadwater Farm may look different…for most young people there the issues are exactly the same as they have ever been. The key issue is institutionalised racism and its impact, whether through bad policing, education or a lack of jobs… Things are still so bad that even now we are being described by service providers as “hard to reach communities”. It is an odd term that means very little, because some service providers, such as the police, always know where to find black people when they need to.’

Phillips’s attacks on multiculturalism and complicity with the government’s agenda are obscuring the real burning issues around race, class and the destructive impact of New Labour’s imperialism. The tragedy is that many people who generally support multiculturalism will feel undermined, confused and demoralised by the constant attacks by Phillips and his ilk. They will feel unable to defend progressive unifying ideas and anti-racist struggles, while the bigots will feel puffed up that a black man is articulating their prejudices.

All politicians, Trevor Phillips included, should be judged by Paul Foot’s incisive and remarkably contemporary maxim from his 1965 book Immigration and Race in British Politics: ‘Politics can drive the knife home or remove its menace… No one can underestimate the danger of that choice. The tiger of racialism, once unleashed, knows no master. It devours its liberators and its prey with equal ferocity.’