IS BRITA IN ANTI-MUSLIM?
THE HISTORY of post-war Britain is a proud story of enlightenment and the steady eradication of irrational fears and resentments. Prejudice against foreigners, homosexuals, gays and blacks has been softened or even eliminated. But today, one resentment is stronger than ever. Islamophobia — prejudice against Islam — is Britain’s last remaining socially respectable form of bigotry, and we should be ashamed of ourselves for it.
This dangerous demonising of the country’s 1.6 million Muslim inhabitants is happening all around us. Take the story in a red-top newspaper earlier this year about a bus driver who apparently ordered his passengers off his bus so that he could kneel towards Mecca and pray.
It was taken up by those who want to exaggerate and exploit divisions in our society and added to the growing list of perceived outrages committed by Muslims in this nominally Christian (though largely secular) country of ours. Pictures of the driver on his prayer-mat went the rounds.
Except it didn’t happen like that. The truth was that his bus had been taken out of service by an inspector because it was running late, and the passengers switched to the one behind — not an unusual occurrence by any means, as bus travellers know.
The driver, with his bus temporarily idle, took the opportunity of a break and used it for his prayers. Meanwhile, as CCTV cameras show, the passengers waited for no more than a minute before boarding the next bus and going on their way.
That is the explanation the bus company would have given if it had had the chance. Instead, the newspaper chose to believe its one informant, a 21-year-old plumber, who had arrived late on the scene, jumped to the wrong conclusion and seen the chance to make some money by selling the story.
In these disturbing times, when Muslims are seen as fair game for any mischief or mendacity, the newspaper jumped at it. ‘Get off my bus: I need to pray’, screamed its headline, and another Islamophobic nail was hammered into the coffin of inter-racial harmony in this country.
Again, six months ago, there was a widely reported story that hospital nurses in Yorkshire were having to stop treating other patients while they moved the beds of sick Muslims to face Mecca five times a day.
The source was an unidentified nurse, and there was, as with so many of these Islamophobic urban myths, a small grain of truth about it — caring staff would sometimes help the terminally ill in this fashion. But, as the hospital authorities made absolutely clear, never five times a day. Nonetheless, the story took on a life of its own as angry letters poured in and MPs voiced their protests. The incident is now part of the folklore, a central piece of evidence for those who make the case that Muslims are invading, infecting and destroying the British way of life.
Not surprisingly, it was the terrible 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist outrages in New York and London that detonated much of the reaction we see today, but Islamophobia was causing concern well before these events. Back in the Nineties, the multicultural think-tank, the Runnymede Trust, was warning of its dangers, and a report to this effect was endorsed by the incoming Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, in 1997.
SO IT was sad, therefore, to see Straw, a decade later, joining in the chorus against Muslim women wearing the veil. It was clear to me that this was more than a random rumination from a member of the Government. Rather, Labour appeared to have made the extraordinary decision to try to identify with the general mood of anti-Muslim resentment.
I was shocked. In such volatile times, it was incumbent on all those in positions of influence —— politicians as well as commentators like myself — to get their facts and language right.
Instead, Straw’s intervention liberated the British media to go to extremes. Soon practically every day brought forth news of some fresh
affrontery perpetrated by a Muslim. This cumulative litany of condemnation became an anti-Islamic crusade. Nor is it confined to one side of the political and cultural spectrum. It enlists militant atheists alongside Christian fundamentalists. It unites liberal progressives and curmudgeonly Tory commentators.
Take Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, normally regarded as a model of political correctness and a champion of the oppressed. As long ago as 1997 she wrote: ‘I am an Islamophobe, and proud of it.’
Or this from one Conservative columnist, writing in The Independent: ‘There are widespread fears that Muslim immigrants, reinforced by political pressure and, ultimately, by terrorism, will succeed where Islamic armies failed and change irrevocably the character of European civilisation.’ He was in no doubt that we are fighting a remorseless war against Islam.
This is a gross distortion. There is, of course, no question at all that Britain, along with many other countries, finds itself in a battle with certain groups of Muslim terrorists. But that is not the same as being in a battle with Islam, and it is morally wrong, inflammatory and intellectually feeble to make that claim.
Nonetheless, one columnist in an upmarket Sunday paper could ask rhetorically: ‘Islamophobia? Count me in.’ Imagine him declaring: ‘Anti-semitism? Count me in.’ This just wouldn’t happen. Anti-semitism is recognised as an evil, noxious creed and its adherents barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion.
But there is no social, political or cultural protection for Muslims. As far as the British political, media and literary establishment is concerned, the normal rules of engagement are suspended.
In their arguments, all those making such sweeping dismissals of Islam interpret the Koran as a violent text and Islam itself as bloody and oppressive. They ignore its overwhelming message of peace and tolerance. Paradoxically, the result is they end up sharing the same warped interpretation of a great religion as Osama bin Laden and the violent extremists they denounce.
The vast majority of Muslims view their faith very differently. Shahid Malik, minister for the Department for International Development, is MP for Dewsbury, where the lead July 7 bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, comes from. ‘All Muslims I’ve come across find him and what he did abhorrent,’ Malik told me.
‘He doesn’t speak for them, any more than the last bomber in this country before 7/7, a man called David Copeland, who bombed Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho and killed three people and maimed and injured over 80, reflected white or Christian opinion. That’s really the message we’ve got to get across, that evil exists in all walks of life, across all religions, but it doesn’t represent that religion.’
Mr Malik, 40, warned that Muslims have become targets for the rest of society in the same way that Jews were once persecuted: ‘I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust,’ he added.
MUCH media coverage ignores moderate Muslim opinion and serves only to increase hatred and resentment. There was a shiver of horror, for example, when a poll revealed that 81 per cent of Muslims in Britain felt they were Muslim first, and just 7 per cent British first.
What went largely unreported was another poll with significantly different results — 46 per cent of Muslims said British first and Muslim second, just 12 per cent Muslim first and British second. Most importantly, 42 per cent said that they did not differentiate, an option that had not been offered in the previous poll.
People often accuse Muslims of arrogance and of refusing to engage in the British way of life, and undoubtedly there is some truth in these criticisms. But media reports tend to enhance rather than diminish this sense of separateness and confirm stereotypes, however much mistaken.
Earlier this year, a tabloid newspaper dramatically warned that thousands of hospital patients were in danger of catching superbugs because female Muslim medical students refused to follow new hygiene rules and bare their arms below the elbow.
This was supposedly happening at Leicester University, so I and a team of researchers from the Channel 4 Dispatches programme went there to investigate. Not a single member of staff we spoke to had come across any problems with hand-washing.
The students were shocked by the stories. One said: ‘I always roll up my sleeves, and everyone that I know does.’ The university told us that one student had asked a question about the new regulations, but had never objected to them.
Once again, a small grain of truth had been grossly distorted. The insulting claim that Muslim medics were putting their religious beliefs before patients’ safety was simply not backed up by evidence.
Leicester was the site of another distorted story when the highly respected Economist magazine reported that the campus cafeteria was banning pork and serving exclusively halal food. In fact, the student union had made just one out-cafe halal, leaving the other 26 on site, including the main canteen, serving pork as usual.
None of this misreporting would matter so much if it weren’t for its consequences. For many, physical attacks are the manifestation of the growing anti-Muslim sentiment, even though they receive scant attention from the mainstream media.
Sarfraz Sarwar knows this only too well. He has lived in Basildon in Essex for 40 years. Since 9/11, pigs’ trotters have been left outside his front door and the walls covered with graffiti. There was an unsuccessful fire-bomb attack.
Among the incidents we came across in our research was one in Bolton this year, when a group of young people chased Muslim men, shouting racial and religious abuse and wielding a chainsaw.
Barely reported was the story in Cornwall, at a Methodist chapel being converted into an Asian community centre, where the words ‘F*** off you Asian bastards’ were written on a table and a pig’s head nailed to the door.
In Birmingham, three men were jailed for tying a Muslim colleague to railings and force-feeding him bacon. In East Yorkshire, a man was jailed for 16 years after police discovered four home-made nail bombs as well as bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat. He had been preparing himself for a war against Muslims. He was a Nazi sympathiser with links to a far-Right group.
Herein lies a growing danger: Islamophobia, inflamed by media reports, is being hijacked and exploited by the far Right in politics.
The British National Party has in recent years turned away from its usual anti-semitism and anti-black campaigning. Party members are now rebuked for bringing up the Holocaust. Instead, they focus on terrorism, the evils of Islam, and scare stories of Britain becoming an Islamic state.
AND wherever there are tensions between Muslims and the local community, you can bet the BNP will be there, fanning discontent. In Stoke on Trent, where it has nine elected councillors, it has made progress by falsely linking the town’s high unemployment in the wake of the collapse of the pottery industry to Muslim immigration.
The BNP plays upon ordinary people’s sense of not being heard by police and politicians, of being a silent majority. But ordinary Muslim families feel themselves to be virtually a silenced majority, too, all tarred with the brush of extremism and deafened by the clamour of negativity against them.
It is about time that we collectively extended to them the rights and respect other citizens enjoy.
I am not arguing here for special treatment for Muslims. They should be subject to the law of the land and the same democratic scrutiny as the rest of us. Virulent anti-semitism or homophobia being preached in British mosques should be exposed and rooted out.
But by exactly the same token, Muslims should be given the same protection from insults or ignorant abuse as other minority groups.
Regrettably, though they are our fellow citizens, we nevertheless misrepresent them and in certain cases we persecute them. Our attitude can lead only to estrangement and alienation. And therein lies the greatest danger.
Because if we continue to demonise Muslims, we make it all the easier for Al Qaeda to find recruits from within those communities. Islamophobia will backfire on us — and simply magnify the very threat it presumes to address.
DISPATCHES: It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim is broadcast on Monday July 7 at 8pm on Channel 4. An accompanying pamphlet, Muslims Under Siege: Alienating a Vulnerable Community by Peter Oborne and James Jones, is available from Democratic Audit, University of Essex.
Peter Oborne Daily Mail 4.7.2008
