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Muslim alienation in the UK? Blame the Israelis!

Is it true that the war in Gaza has heightened community tensions here in Britain? PLUS: Brendan O’Neill on ‘Muslim anger’.

Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi

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Here, Frank Furedi interrogates the idea of ‘sudden radicalisation’ in Britain as a result of the war in Gaza. Further below, Brendan O’Neill says the privileging of ‘Muslim anger’ marks the end of anti-imperialism.

British government officials claim that Israel’s recent actions in Gaza are likely to encourage a ‘process of radicalisation’ amongst British Muslims. The security and counter-terrorism minister, Lord West of Spithead, says the New Labour government’s attempts to contain the radicalisation of British Muslims will have been undermined by Israel’s military venture.

So in Lord West’s view, there is a direct, causal relationship between Israel’s foreign policy and an increased risk of terrorism or anger in Britain. He clarified his outlook on the matter by slamming Tony Blair’s dismissal of any such causal relationship. ‘Well, that was clearly bollocks’, said Lord West (1). West’s linking of the tragic events in Gaza with the growth of radicalisation in the UK echoes warnings made by Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, last month; he, too, is of the opinion that Israel’s actions might help to boost the ideological appeal of radical Islamic sentiments in Britain.

Just as it is wrong to dismiss the idea that foreign policy can, indeed, lead to domestic conflict, so it is overly simplistic to claim that wars and other troubling events abroad cause sudden shifts in people’s outlook. History shows us that, sometimes, brutal colonial wars – Algeria, Malaya and Kenya, for example – had little impact on domestic public opinion. On other occasions, however – Vietnam, Iraq in 2003, and now Gaza – wars abroad have become the focus for mobilisation and protest.

Many associate the radicalisation of the 1960s generation with the impact of the Vietnam War on public opinion. But radical protest in the Sixties was the outcome of various, complex political and social influences, of which the Vietnam War was only one. Usually, the emergence of protest movements is underpinned by changing attitudes and dispositions, as influenced by people’s everyday experience of society. And so it is today.

Many young people have, over the past month, adopted Gaza as the focus of their protest. Yet the alienation and anger of young Muslims predates this war, and even the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Even before the start of the war on terrorism in October 2001, there had been expressions of community anger in the riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in summer 2001. And if there was one defining foreign event that boosted the politicisation of British Muslims, it was Western governments’ campaign against the Serbs in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

The fact is that what security officials characterise as ‘radicalisation’ is better described as ‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’. It has been evident for some time that significant sections of young British Muslims feel estranged from British society, and even reject it. Sometimes, this estrangement is expressed in the form of politicised protest. Most of the time, however, it works as a variant of the contemporary politics of identity.

Much of the language that Muslims use to express their frustration with how they are treated is shaped by Western identity politics. The term ‘Islamophobia’, for example, was not invented by activists in the Middle East. In some, fortunately rare situations, the politicisation of Islamic identity can foster a disposition towards violence. However, such a response should not be described as ‘radical’. Traditionally, the term ‘radical’ referred to more than simply a rejection of society. It conveyed the idea of ‘uprooting’, transforming, putting forward alternative ideas and arguments. Recent protests against Israel, however, have been conventional rather than radical.

The protestors were angry – very angry, sometimes – but their protest was similar to the well-tried humanitarian campaigning of organisations such as Make Poverty History and Oxfam. The protesters’ propaganda drew attention to the plight of ‘the victims’, and particularly children. Even Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an otherwise articulate Islamist group, carried placards with the message: ‘Who will defend the children of Gaza?’ So, paradoxically, even a movement which is deeply hostile to the society that it inhabits embraces the cult of the victim and the language of mainstream British protest.

The response of British Muslims to Gaza points, not to the rise of a powerful new radical ideology, but to an interesting process in which protesters selectively reject the British ‘way of life’ while pragmatically utilising some of its cultural resources. So while many young Muslims resent the moral authority that the Holocaust endows on the suffering of Jewish people, they are more than happy to manipulate the symbolic significance of the Holocaust for their own purposes; they describe events in Gaza as the ‘Palestinian Holocaust’ and compare the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Officialdom’s misdiagnosis of ‘radicalisation’ amongst British Muslims, when in fact it is more accurately described as alienation, is symptomatic of the nervousness of security officials like Lord West today. Blaming the war in Gaza for the politicisation of British Muslims is a way to avoid asking some very difficult questions about the problem of youthful Muslim alienation. No doubt, it is tempting for British officials to point the finger of blame at Israel for their own inability to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims – but at the end of the day, they cannot avoid the fact that the problem is rooted at home.

Insofar as there is any hint of a strategy in relation to tackling radicalisation, it always has a fantasy-like character. Often, the official discourse on radicalisation has much in common with attitudes that underpin the child protection industry. It warns that ‘vulnerable’ and ‘impressionable’ young people may be targeted on websites, campuses and at social venues, and ‘groomed’ by cynical operators. In November 2007, it was reported that the UK government’s Research, Information and Communication Unit would draw up ‘counter-narratives’ to the anti-Western messages on websites ‘designed to influence vulnerable and impressionable audiences here [in the UK]’ (2). In November 2006, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, said ‘it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens’ (3).

Unfortunately, this dramatic framing of the threat as ‘sudden radicalisation’ means that extremism is seen as a kind of psychological virus afflicting the vulnerable and those suffering from a psychological deficit. This depiction of radicalisation as a symptom of vulnerability overlooks the fact that, frequently, ‘Muslim anger’ expresses confidence and self-belief. Indeed, as numerous studies have pointed out, what is quite striking is the activism and idealism of these so-called brainwashed individuals. Moreover, the people who are actively hostile to Britain are rarely brainwashed by manipulative operatives – often they have sought out jihadist websites and online networks. In other words, they may have made a self-conscious and active choice (4).

Instead of psychologising about vulnerable young people, or blaming events in Gaza for what is happening in Britain, officials should ask themselves why have they lost touch with a significant minority of their own citizens. A precondition for answering this question is to recognise, openly and publicly, the very real cultural divisions that afflict British communities today.

Frank Furedi’s most recent book, Invitation To Terror: The Expanding Empire of The Unknown, is published by Continuum Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) Visit Furedi’s website here.

‘MUSLIM ANGER’ USURPS ANTI-IMPERIALISM
by Brendan O’Neill

Do you have to have brown skin, a Muslim moniker, a beard and some knowledge of the Koran in order to be angry about Israel’s invasion of Gaza? Reading reports about the rise of ‘Muslim anger’ in Britain, and the potential Gaza-related radicalisation of Muslim youth, you could be forgiven for thinking so. Today, many commentators imply that Britain’s Muslim community has some special right, even responsibility, to be furious about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

British commentators, officials and anti-war activists are positively obsessed by ‘Muslim anger’ over Israeli, British and Western foreign policy. UK government officials send each other memos asking what should be done about the Muslim community’s ‘distress’ over Iraq. Self-selected Muslim community groups cite their ‘community’s anger’ as a way of trying to force the UK government to change its foreign policy. The anti-war movement tries to harness this ‘Muslim fury’ by pushing angry Muslim youth to the front of its otherwise dull, middle-aged demonstrations.

When I spoke on Gaza at a rowdy university debate in London a couple of weeks ago, I was left in no doubt by one of my fellow speakers and some members of the audience that I couldn’t possibly ‘get Gaza’ or feel Palestinian people’s pain, because, well, I am Not A Muslim. My fellow speaker explained that the ummah, the global community of Muslims, is like a single organism: pain in the Palestinian section of the ummah will be felt by the British section of the ummah, kind of like when one identical twin goes to the dentist and the other suddenly gets a toothache. My response – ‘I have no interest in feeling Palestinian people’s pain but rather in supporting their liberty and independence’ – was met with a few looks of bewilderment.

Even acts of violence have been explained as fairly natural expressions of ‘Muslim anger’. Some commentators described (almost justified) the bombings in London on 7 July 2005 as an ‘understandable’ reaction by four angry Muslims to Britain’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it is seriously claimed, and very rarely challenged, that Muslims will be further radicalised and perhaps turned violent by Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip.

Of course, many British Muslims are anti-war. But so are many British blacks, white people, Polish immigrants, pensioners, schoolchildren, dog-owners, homosexuals, and so on. Yet few would say it was ‘understandable’ if a member of one of these groups decided to blow himself up on a train, and pensioner groups do not warn the government about the brimming ‘pensioner anger’ with the war in Iraq or ‘pensioner fury’ at the alleged use of white phosphorous in Gaza.

The idea that Muslims have a special insight into the suffering of their ‘co-religionists’ in the Middle East is strange, and dangerous. I was campaigning against Western militarism – in Iraq (the first time around), Somalia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia – when some of those London students who questioned my Gaza-speaking credentials were still sucking dummies. So would it be ‘understandable’ if I blew myself up on the Tube to work one morning to register my anger with Western warmongering? Why not? Because my skin is white where the 7/7 bombers’ skin was brown? Because I have Catholic origins (since lapsed) rather than Muslim ones?

The uncritical privileging of ‘Muslim anger’ over other arguments against Western military interventionism is a blow for progressive politics. Implicitly making Muslims the key critical voice on British foreign policy – either by officialdom fretting over Muslim radicalisation or veterans of the left exploiting Muslim alienation as an implacable anti-war sentiment – degrades anti-imperialism. That political tradition was based on universalism and solidarity. It took as its starting point the idea that people around the world had common interests and a great deal to gain by standing shoulder-to-shoulder. A French anti-war activist could take the side of a North Vietnamese villager; a Norwegian radical could support the street struggles of republicans in Belfast or Derry.

Today’s ‘Muslim anger’ takes the opposite starting point: that only Muslims can really, truly, deeply understand the pain and suffering of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza because they have a special religious/emotional connection with them. This represents the triumph of the personal over the political; the particularistic over the universal; the politics of ‘shared victimhood’ over solidarity. It shows the extent to which even the once-honourable politics of anti-imperialism have been submerged beneath the narrow and divisive politics of identity, where one’s skin colour and religious background count for more than one’s political views or humanity.

There is also something uncomfortably racial about it. The assumption is that there’s something in British Muslims’ ethnic make-up that makes it more acceptable, or at least ‘understandable’, for them to go mad and possibly turn violent in response to wars abroad. The view seems to be that they are automatons, driven more by emotion and instinct than rational political thought. The danger, of course, is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more that ‘Muslim anger’ and potential Muslim violence are treated as normal reactions, the more that a few young Muslims might consider it legitimate to use individual terror rather than political campaigning to register their natural, ingrained, privileged and very-much-expected Muslim fury.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Minister for terror: Gaza will fuel UK extremism, Guardian, 28 January 2009

(2) Counter-terrorism officials rethink stance on Muslims, Guardian, 20 November 2007

(3) MI5: 30 terror plots being planned in UK, Guardian, 10 November 2006

(4) This point is confirmed by research into the motivation and character of suicide bombers. See for example The Moral Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Scott Atran, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 2006

To enquire about republishing spiked’s content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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