Britain’s Islamophobia Cooked

In the UK, Islamophobia is so bipartisan, so normalised, that BBC reporters refer to anti-Muslim pogromists as ‘pro-British protesters’

Middle East Eye yesterday, August 13, cited by Jonathan Cook

I’ve a confession to make and, no, I’m not being tongue in cheek. So mesmerised have I been by events, far from disconnected, in the Middle East, Ukraine and to an extent South Asia (where Manila offers striking parallels with Kiev) that when my stepdaughter asked on Saturday what I made of the riots in our own country, I had to confess I’d been paying scant attention.

But embarrassment and shame on that score are eclipsed by a much greater offence. Sixteen years ago, lost to what back in the day I’d have called petit bourgeois life-stylism,  I put out a mass email, Am I Islamophobic? Probably. In it I set out an idealist and reductive attribution of Islamist terror, and lesser crimes against the liberal weltanschauung, to Quran and Hadith.

My knowledge of the West’s weaponising of jihad was at that point confined to the US proxy war in Afghanistan. Lawrence of Arabia was just Peter O’Toole striding the roof of a steam train while Lee Enfield toting Arabs went wild. I knew less still of Shia cleric collusion in the 1953 Anglo-US ouster of a prime minister elected to nationalise Iran’s oil, or of US-Israeli creation of Hamas – and I knew nothing at all of Salafism on the US payroll in its efforts to regime-change Ba’athist Syria under first Hafez and soon enough Bashar al-Assad.

Such was my ignorance, I bought the idealist thinking of Richard Dawkins (whose writings I still admire on evolution even as I reject his views of Islam). I’d even advanced the super-idealist argument, in that mass email of 2008, that Islam’s not having had a Reformation was a big part of the problem.

(This site did not then exist but nine years later I would use it for Reading the Reformation, a far more materialist assessment of the second great divide in European Christendom, half a millennium ago – and half a millennium after the sun set on Mighty Rome to see Catholic and Orthodox Churches part company. As for that 2008 email, I no longer have it but did post a full recantation – Am I Islamophobe? Not any more.- on November 2, 2017. I don’t rightly recall my thought processes but it can hardly be coincidence that, three days earlier, I’d put out that Reformation piece to mark the 500th anniversary of the day legend places one Martin Luther at Wittenberg Cathedral, nailing his ninety-five ‘grievances’ to a chapel door.)

I wouldn’t be half as red faced had I stopped at Dawkins. But no, never one for doing things by halves, I went on to read and take seriously the demented outpourings of Melanie “Mad Mel” Phillips on the subject. What can I say …

When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to be around him. When I reached 21 though, I was amazed at how much he’d learned in just seven years!

Mark Twain

… other than that I’m a late developer?

Dunfessin. Over to Jonathan Cook, yesterday on Britain’s far right riots and the culpability of the British state. He opens with a thought experiment. What would we make of politicians and media describing angry mobs attacking synagogues as “protestors”?

Starmer’s fingerprints – not just the Tories’ – are all over Britain’s race riots

Imagine this scene, if you can. For several days, violent mobs have massed in the centre of British cities and clashed with police in an attempt to reach synagogues to attack them.

Draped in England flags and Union Jacks, and armed with cricket bats and metal rods, the trouble-makers have dismantled garden walls to throw bricks.

Gangs have swept through residential areas where Jews are known to live, smashing windows and trying to break down doors. The rioters attacked and torched a hotel identified as housing Jewish asylum seekers, an act that could have burned alive the occupants.

For days, the media and politicians have chiefly referred to these events as far-right “thuggery” and spoken of the need to restore law and order.

In the midst of all this, a young Jewish MP is invited onto a major morning TV show to talk about the unfolding events. When she argues that these attacks need to be clearly identified as racist and antisemitic, one of the show’s presenters barracks and ridicules her.

Close by, two white men, a former cabinet minister and an executive at one of the UK’s largest newspapers, are seen openly laughing at her.

Oh, and if this isn’t all getting too fanciful, the TV presenter who mocks the young MP is the husband of the home secretary responsible for policing these events ….

He means Ed Balls, the Labour Friends of Israel backed former Shadow Chancellor who smirked his way through Owen Jones’s account of IDF atrocities on Good Morning Britain. Call me gratuitous, but I’m damned if I’ll let slip the opportunity to remind readers that Balls and his Home Secretary wife Yvette Cooper were in on the house-flipping MP expenses scam.

Meanwhile here’s the clip Jonathan has in mind. He goes on:

The scenario is so hideously outrageous no one can conceive of it. But it is exactly what took place last week – except that the mob wasn’t targeting Jews, but Muslims; the young MP was not Jewish but Zarah Sultana, the country’s most high-profile Muslim MP; and her demand was not that the violence be identified as antisemitic but as Islamophobic.

It all sounds a lot more plausible now, I’m guessing. Welcome to a Britain that wears its Islamophobia proudly, and not just on the streets of Bolton, Bristol or Birmingham, but in a London TV studio.

Islamophobia is so bipartisan in today’s Britain that BBC reporters on at least two occasions referred to the mobs chanting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant slogans as “pro-British protesters“.

The chief focus of nightly news has not been the anti-Muslim racism driving the mob, or the resemblance of the riots to pogroms. Instead, it has highlighted the physical threats faced by the police, the rise of the far-right, the violence and disorder, and the need for a firm response from the police and courts.

The trigger for the riots was disinformation: that three small girls stabbed to death in Southport on 29 July had been killed by a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, the suspected killer was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents and is not Muslim.

But politicians and the media have contributed their own forms of disinformation.

Media coverage has mostly assisted – and echoed – the rioters’ racist agenda by conflating the violent targeting of long-settled Muslim communities with general concerns about “illegal” immigration. The reporting has turned “immigrant” and “Muslim” into synonyms just as readily as it earlier turned “terrorist” and “Muslim” into synonyms.

And for much the same reason.

In doing so, politicians and the media have once again played into the hands of the far-right mob they are seemingly denouncing.

Or seen another way, the mob is playing into the hands of the media and politicians who claim they want calm to prevail while continuing to stir up tensions.

Muslim youth who turned out to defend their homes, as police struggled to cope with the onslaught, were labelled “counter-protesters.” It was as if this was simply a clash between two groups with conflicting grievances, with the police – and the British state – caught in the middle.

Again, can we imagine rioting, hate-filled pogromists trying to burn alive Jews being described as “protesters,” let alone “pro-British?”

None of this has come out of nowhere. The current anti-Muslim mood has been stoked by both sides of the political aisle for years …

Read the full post on Jonathan’s substack …

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