August 8, 2024
The racist thugs
who terrorised, intimidated and in some cases tried to murder Muslims and other
minority groups in the UK over the last few days are in a deep sense victims
themselves.
These generally
ignorant people now face jail and the destruction of their lives.
Yet they have
been taught to hate. To use the official language more often applied to Muslims
than the far right, they have been “radicalised”.
Among the
radicalisers have been the Conservative Party, including successive prime
ministers and home secretaries. The mainstream media – and not just the tabloid
press – have also played a destructive and sinister role.
So also have
prestigious think tanks such as the Gatestone Institute in the United States,
which propagated the noxious and false idea that Britain has “no-go areas”.
There’s no
getting away from the fact that the most significant immediate instigator of
the violence has been far-right activist Tommy Robinson, via a series of
incendiary social media interventions from the poolside of a Mediterranean
hotel.
Robinson, whose
real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, promoted the fabricated and inflammatory
claims about a Muslim role in the Southport stabbings that sparked the
violence.
Once the riots
were underway, Robinson said the rioters were “justified”.
Tommy Robinson
in a suit
Reform UK leader
Nigel Farage, a highly sophisticated politician, was too smart to follow
Robinson’s example and refer directly to false stories circulating on social
media.
Speaking ahead
of the violence, he nevertheless suggested the truth about the Southport
stabbings was being withheld, and questioned why the incident was not being
treated as terror-related – the kind of dog-whistle politics at which Farage is
expert.
It is therefore
easy to see why Brendan Cox, widower of the Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered
by a far-right activist on the eve of the Brexit referendum, said the remarks
made Farage “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit”.
But it should
not be forgotten that Farage, and the poisonous bigotry and Islamophobia he
represents, have been tolerated and enabled by British journalists and
newspaper editors.
For years,
British Muslims have been lied about, smeared, demonised and subject to one
moral panic after another.
There is
virtually no social, cultural or legal protection for Muslims. Organisations
that ought to protect them – think of the refusal of the Equality and Human
Rights Commission to launch an enquiry into Tory Islamophobia – wash their hands. No wonder we’ve seen this
horrific street violence. It’s surprising it’s not happened before.
Britain’s
newspapers – and I am not just talking about the tabloids – bear a dark
responsibility for the horror and shame of the weekend.
Their false and
inflammatory reporting has created an environment where Muslims get targeted.
Spectator
columnist Rod Liddle once defended Islamophobia, noting that it “seems to be an
entirely rational response to an illiberal, vindictive and frankly fascist
creed”. Liddle wrote these words a few years ago, but this school of journalism
continues to flourish.
‘Wedge politics’
Remember the
response from the Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay press when Farage announced
that he would run as an MP and return to frontline politics.
It was treated
as a bombshell event, with many sympathetic articles stressing the threat he
posed to the Tories.
Yet none of the
coverage paid any attention to Farage’s record of Islamophobia, antisemitism or
support for racists – or reminded readers that Farage adopted the racist Tory
Enoch Powell as his hero from a young age, and remains his most prominent
political disciple.
Or consider the
Daily Telegraph on 5 August. A deeply misleading splash headline: “Far right
clash with Muslims in rioting.”
The paper’s main
editorial is devoted to a warning against the term Islamophobia.
Try telling the
terrified worshippers left cowering in their mosque in Southport as a racist
mob gathered outside torching cars and pelting stones that there’s no such
thing as Islamophobia.
If a synagogue
had come under attack, the Telegraph would have had no problem blaming
antisemitism.
Yet British
politicians are the worst culprits. It is the job of a statesman to defuse
tensions rather than exploit grievances.
Again and again,
the Tories have abused Muslims, sending out the signal they are fair game.
Remember Zac
Goldsmith’s toxic campaign to be mayor of London in 2016. Or Michael Gove’s
state-sponsored attack on Birmingham schools in alliance with an Islamophobic
media – a poisonous fabrication.
Bereft of
serious policies, the Tories played “wedge politics” – sowing division and
creating culture wars which stirred anger and division.
Sucking up to
bigots
At the heart of
this was a cynical strategy of sucking up to bigots.
Only last year
the Sunak government published a review of Britain’s counter-extremism strategy
which concluded that there had been “too much focus” on tackling the far right.
In the wake of
the publication of the review, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman praised the
far-right polemicist Douglas Murray for his “mainstream, insightful and
perfectly decent political views”.
Braverman added
that “in no way” was Murray an extremist.
The Muslim
Council of Britain took issue with the then-home secretary’s judgement, with an
MCB spokesperson, saying: “Let there be no doubt that Murray’s views are
anything but mainstream; they are extreme and violently Islamophobic.”
The spokesperson
cited a 2006 speech in which Murray called for conditions to be made “harder
across the board” for Muslims in Europe, and comments in which he described
Muslims as a “demographic time bomb” and called for mosques to be pulled down.
Murray is also
on record praising Tommy Robinson as a “citizen journalist”, after Robinson’s
well-orchestrated imprisonment for contempt of court at a “grooming gang” trial
in Huddersfield.
Braverman’s
praise for Murray, made on the floor of the House of Commons, came after the
Shawcross report into the counter-extremism Prevent Strategy suggested that
individuals on what used to be regarded as the far right should be treated as
mainstream.
Shawcross – and
Braverman, who has been eerily quiet in the wake of the riots – have a great
deal of explaining to do. It is now clear that the Sunak government made a
terrible misjudgment about the threat of the far right in Britain.
This helps to
explain the almost complete silence from senior Tories about the role of
Islamophobia in this weekend’s events.
Labour and the
race card
Labour has been
better – but not by much. It is stunning how government ministers and officials
have been doggedly reluctant to use the term Islamophobia and to properly
characterise the rioters as anti-Muslim and racist.
Prime Minister
Keir Starmer spoke well on Sunday about denouncing far-right thugs. But he
wasn’t right to call them mindless. They knew exactly who they were after:
Muslims, minorities and migrants.
And why hasn’t
Starmer met Muslim community leaders? Why didn’t he record a video addressed to
Muslims on Wednesday? Why didn’t the prime minister rush to the Southport
mosque which was besieged the day after that first riot to show support?
Nor should it be
forgotten that Starmer too played the race card during the general election –
making dog-whistle comments about the Bangladeshi community on the Sun
newspaper’s election debate.
He gave Farage a
free pass in Clacton during the general election, ordering the Labour candidate
to stand down.
It’s time that
British politicians stopped appeasing far-right politicians.
It doesn’t work,
and makes matters worse, as the weekend horror has proved.
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