BY DAUD ABDULLAH
Where is this political opportunism taking us? Into the
dark tunnel of national strife. The corrosive
effect of the political and media onslaught against British Muslims is
having its impact on all sections
of society. What is claimed to be an assertion of free speech and
democratic rights is rapidly becoming the demonisation of a community.
Once they are dehumanised, who cares for their democratic, civil or human
rights?
Since John Reid demanded that Muslim "bullies" must be
faced down and Jack Straw declared the veil a "statement of separation",
ministers have fallen over themselves to make increasingly unbridled
attacks on Muslims. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, has accused
our communities of creating a "voluntary apartheid" and colleges have
taken action against veiled teachers and students. The tabloid press has
declared open season on Muslims with one hostile front page story after
another.
In practice this has amounted to incitement to violence.
In recent weeks, verbal and physical attacks on Muslims have surged
alarmingly. Women have had their scarves ripped off. Mosques and Islamic
centres in Preston and Falkirk have been attacked by mobs and firebombed.
Not only is it is dangerous for the media to vilify and
demonise an entire community, even if they are only three per cent of the
population as British Muslims are; so too it is pure brinkmanship for
ministers to fan these flames. By their nature, politicians are an
opportunistic breed. Yet they must have a sense of when to pull back from
the abyss. If they claim that Muslim extremists are the source of all the
ills in British society, then let them recognise that secular extremism is
not the solution. Two extremisms would only tear us apart.
In such charged circumstances people might hope to hear
words of tolerance from others of faith. But alas, the Church of England
has added to the confusion. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu demanded
that Muslims do more to integrate; then a "leaked" document criticised the
government’s multi-faith policy for allegedly pandering to Muslims at the
expense of Christians.
When in modern British history has a community been
subjected to such intrusion and nationally fomented aggression? Muslim
parents are lectured on parenting, imams are ordered to monitor their
worshippers and women are told what to wear. Profit and political
advancement now seem to depend on defamation of Muslims and their faith.
The veil is deemed a symbol of the subjugation of women, whatever the
women themselves say and believe. Newspapers that carried pictures of
veiled women beside hostile stories displayed advertisements over the page
of naked men and women posing together. The secular extremists who lash
out at religious practices, including wearing a crucifix, presumably see
this as a form of liberation.
What is going on is an abuse of power, an echo of what
took us into the quagmire of Iraq – from which the political and media
attack on Muslims is evidently intended to be a distraction.
The government’s refusal for so long to recognise the link
between its own disastrous foreign policy in the Muslim world and the
extremism it was fomenting is now fuelling the flames of Islamophobia. No
one should underestimate the destructive potential of this calculated and
incessant propaganda. Instead of fostering cohesion it is accelerating
division. The Third Reich historian William Shirer recalls that despite
people’s distrust of Nazi propaganda its steady doses of falsification and
distortion in the long run affected even well meaning and decent Germans.
Will we not then learn from history?
(Daud Abdullah is deputy secretary general of the Muslim
Council of Britain.)
