Britons are more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major western European country, including France. According to an international Harris poll last month, nearly 30 per cent of British people believe it’s impossible to be both a Muslim and a Briton (compared with 14 per cent who think you can’t be French and a Muslim); 38 per cent think the presence of Muslims in the country is a threat to national security (compared with 21 per cent in the US); and 46 per cent believe that Muslims have too much political power in Britain, far above the level of any other surveyed country. These findings, reported in the Financial Times, would have been the occasion for some soul-searching about where the British society is going, the state of community relations, and a new self-restraint in the way Muslim stories are being covered in the media.
The fact that a large minority of Britons have some of the most Islamophobic attitudes in the western world has passed without comment. This isn’t just a problem of hate-filled tabloid rants, such as the Express’s denunciation of Muslims’ “alien and threatening outfits”, or Richard Littlejohn’s Muslim-baiting in the Mail. For the past three weeks, there has been a stream of hostile coverage in the heavyweight press and on TV current affairs programmes.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the stories themselves. There are obviously legitimate issues to report about jihadist or anti-Jewish strains within the Deobandi school, the agenda of a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir that the government originally wanted to ban, or intimidation of converts to any religion. But in a climate of anti-Muslim prejudice, their disproportionate and sensationalist treatment can only feed ethnic tensions. Nor is the record of these kinds of reports impressive — an earlier Dispatches programme on the preaching of hate in British mosques was recently found by the police and Crown Prosecution Service to have “completely distorted” what speakers had said.
The level of Islamophobia highlighted by the Harris poll is obviously partly a response to the July 2005 bombings and later failed terror attacks. But given the fact that most British people have little contact with Muslims, some are bound to be swayed by the media campaigns of the past couple of years — which have not only focused on jihadist groups but also the niqab and multiculturalism.
The relentless public invective against Muslims and Islamism is also clearly fuelled by a political agenda, which seeks to demonstrate that jihadist violence is driven, as Tony Blair and the US neoconservatives always insisted, by a socially disconnected ideology rather than decades of western invasion, occupation and support for dictatorships across the Muslim world.
Gordon Brown is said to want to mimic the clandestine methods used by the CIA against communism during the cold war in the cultural field to win Muslim hearts and minds. If the government’s sponsorship of the pliant Sufi Muslim Council is any indication of the way he wants to go, that won’t work — nor will any approach that tries to load responsibility for jihadist violence on to the Muslim community while refusing to take responsibility for the government’s own role in fanning the flames by supporting aggression and occupation in the Muslim world.
None of this is an argument for refraining from criticising Muslims or their organisations — but it does highlight the need for context and sensitivity in a climate in which Muslims are under a crude assault that would simply not be accepted if targeted on any other community. The relentless media onslaught in Britain on Muslims, their culture and institutions risks turning into a racist witch-hunt. On the ground, it translates into violent attacks — and Crown Prosecution Service figures show that 82 per cent of convictions for identified religiously aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims. Those attacks reportedly spike not only after terrorist incidents but also in response to media feeding frenzies. Some pro-war liberals like to argue that Islamophobia doesn’t exist — try telling that to those at the sharp end.
Guardian