In These Sour Times: Islamophobia and the Woolwich Aftermaith
Three days ago, a soldier was murdered in Woolwich by two Islamic extremists carrying knives and meat cleavers. The entire country went bananas. That night, there was a rally in Woolwich town centre by the English Defence League, whose status as the drunken fantasist Mr Bean of fascists hardly makes them less frightening to the local people hiding in their homes whenever they have one of their sick marches. In the past few days, there have been at least 162 Islamophobic hate attacks in the UK, and nine mosques have been targeted with knives, petrol bombs and graffiti. That’s a 900% increase, according to the tracking group Tell Mama UK. Petrol-bomb attacks on mosques are not reported as terrorism, though. Nor are individual acts of anti-Muslim violenc We are expected to understand this quasi-organised campaign of fear as something else - as a ‘backlash’.
Whatever ‘terrorism’ is, it’s up to the state to define. It’s up to the government to define whose brutality is tolerable, and it’s up to the press to define whose ‘extremism’ is a threat to national identity, “an attack on everyone in Britain” (thanks Theresa May) and whose merely an overzealous expression of public sentiment. Two weeks ago a Muslim man was murdered in Birmingham by two white men with machetes, in an act of brutal, bigoted extremism that mirrored what happened in Woolwich, but that wasn’t deemed ‘terrorism’ - it was hardly even news. The cabinet has yet to respond to the sharp, staggering uptick in racial and religious violence; one can’t help think this might have something to do with the fact that the Tories recently took a hammering at the polls from UKIP, a xenophobic, anti-immigrant party whose core demographic isn’t miles away from the profile of EDL sympathisers.
I have written before about the EDL and how frightening they are, and how their leadership’s claim to be less than staggeringly racist is nonsensical . Right now I’m supposed to be sitting indoors writing a book about something completely different, but there’s nothing more important happening in my country right now than this throat-hardening descent into bigotry. I want to be very clear about one thing here:
I am not terrified of Islamic extremism. (emphasis in original.)
Read the rest at http://www.penny-red.com/post/51296503263/in-these-sour-times-islamophobia-and-the-woolwich
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