- For centuries in Britain, each sentence of death was
accompanied by a strange ritual. Before handing down the verdict, the judge
would first take a piece of black silk cloth and put it on his head. With
this rather bizarre and ancient drapery covering his powdered wig - itself
a relic, a cultural fossil carried into modern times - he would then render
the prisoner into the hangman's care.
-
- In such a guise, the black cloth
once represented the full, dread measure of state power. Today, however,
a cloth of similar size, shape and color - worn across the faces of a small
number of some of the most vulnerable members of British society - has
become a target of that same dread power, after Britain's high and mighty
unleashed a sudden, thunderous sneak attack on the nation's Muslim minority,
centering the campaign around the tabloid-ready symbol of the veil.
-
- But although the carefully orchestrated
furor over this seldom-seen scrap of material has been so ludicrously disproportionate
that even the Blair-fawning New York Times cried foul in a recent editorial,
the campaign - and its disturbing implications - go far beyond the issue
of religious vestments. Indeed, the veil row is just a covering for what
appears to be a deliberate, wide-ranging program of diversion and division,
aimed at creating a scapegoat - "strangers in our midst," "the
enemy within" - to bear the blame for the sins of the Blair government:
the fear, repression, guilt, lies and rancor produced by the abomination
in Iraq.
-
- The anti-Muslim campaign is not
merely rhetorical - although the heated rhetoric from Tony Blair and many
of his ministers has certainly been bad enough, giving a patina of respectability
to more extremist viewpoints, now seen as a legitimate part of the "national
debate. (Much as the button-pushing imbroglio over immigration in the United
States has transformed fringe white-power advocates into respectable media
figures, lauded by the likes of Lou Dobbs and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
welcomed in the halls of Congress.) No, Blair's Islamophobia-fest has bite
with its bark: not only the on-going evisceration of civil liberties, which
has fallen almost entirely on British Muslims, but new measures as well
- such as the Stasi-like plan to induce university professors and staff
to spy on Muslim students and report all "suspicious" behavior
to the security organs.
-
- The plan, uncovered by the Guardian
on October 16, has already been sent to "selected official bodies
for consultation" and will be foisted on Britain's universities in
December. It acknowledges the fact that the program will make academics
feel they are "collaborating with the 'secret police,'" but still
urges university staff to be pro-active in their spying and informing on
the activities of "Asian-looking students." (In British parlance,
"Asian" usually denotes someone of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi
descent.)
-
- Far from being abashed by this
revelation, the Blair government has openly embraced the program. To be
sure, Education Minister Ruth Kelly - a member of the zealous religious
order, Opus Dei - says it's not really spying; it's just "monitoring"
the activities of certain students in order to "protect" them
from extremists. But for some reason, Kelly's maternal concern has failed
to allay the fears of those captured in the state's benevolent, all-seeing
eye.
-
- The program is "potentially
the widest infringement of the rights of Muslim students that there ever
has been in this country," Wakkas Khan, president of a national Islamic
student group, told the Guardian. "It is clearly targeting Muslim
students and treating them to a higher level of suspicion and scrutiny.
It sounds like you're guilty until you're proven innocent."
-
- Here, of course, Khan has defined
the organizing principle of the Bush-Blair "War on Terror," where
thousands have disappeared into prisons and torture rooms without charges,
without defense, and very often without any evidence whatsoever, beyond
perhaps the word of a paid snitch, a bounty hunter, a personal enemy or
an over-zealous security op looking to make his bones. Blair, like Bush
with his warrantless surveillance program (to cite just one of many tyrannical
examples), is simply bringing the Terror War home.
-
- II
-
- What is surprising, however,
is the suddenness of the current campaign, and its blunt, even coarse nature.
It exploded out of nowhere with an article in a small regional paper, an
October 6 column written by the local MP, Jack Straw - leader of the House
of Commons and former foreign secretary. In the latter capacity he was
one of the prime enablers of the illegal invasion of Iraq, serving as a
key conduit between Blair and Bush as they connived to manipulate their
nations into war - a deceitful process well-documented by the Downing Street
Memos.
-
- In his column, this paragon of
moral rectitude complained about veiled women coming to his office seeking
constituent services. The fact that he couldn't see their faces made him
feel all wiggly, Straw said (in so many words), and he found it hard to
communicate with them. They should all just stop it. In fact, UK Muslims
in general should stop being so strange and separate, and try much harder
to assimilate further into British society.
-
- As was no doubt intended, Straw's
comments instantly ricocheted around the national media, where they conveniently
knocked the frenzy of violence and chaos in Iraq off the front pages. The
article also dovetailed, again most conveniently, with another minor story,
about a young teaching assistant who had been fired for refusing to remove
her veil in front of male colleagues, although she didn't wear it in front
of students. Another Blair cabinet minister leapt showily into this strictly
local matter, backing the school's action - even as yet another Blair minister
publicly denounced British Airways for demanding that a Christian flight
attendant remove her cross while on duty. BA actually prohibits the wearing
of all jewellery on chains by attendants, not just crosses, but this point
of fact was lost in the fine media frothing about the airline's "religious
discrimination" against Christians - jeremiads that appeared alongside
angry calls for "banning the veil."
-
- As the days went by, more Blair
ministers joined the fray, which spread from attacks on the veil to stern
lectures on the Muslim community's stubborn refusal to integrate properly
and its collective failure to denounce terrorism with sufficient self-abasing
rigor. These grievous shortcomings were leading to "dangerous divisions"
in British society, the Blairites said, and fuelling the alarming rise
of hard-right factions like the British National Party.
-
- Here was an echo of old hate-mongering
campaigns. Who was responsible for Germans' hatred of the Jews, according
to the Nazis? Why, the Jews themselves, of course, swanning around with
their weird get-ups and strange rituals and their terrorist conspiracies.
As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland noted this week, "I try to
imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the
word 'Jew' for 'Muslim' - I wouldn't just feel frightened. I would be looking
for my passport."
-
- Tory leaders - sensing that Blair
was, once again, outflanking them from the right - leapt into the breach.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, berated Muslims for fostering an
"involuntary apartheid," adding that their intransigence was
breeding national division that "could corrode our society."
The security organs also got in on the act, with a leak to the Times about
an unnamed "terrorist suspect" who avoided capture for a few
days "by allegedly disguising" himself in a burka.
-
- Meanwhile, Tony Blair - the most
ostentatiously Christian prime minister in Britain since William Gladstone
prowled the streets in his off-hours looking for prostitutes to save -
kept quiet for days as the official furor grew and eventually, inevitably,
spilled into the streets. Attacks on Muslims sharply increased, the Independent
noted. One mosque was set on fire, another was battered by a brick- throwing
mob, who then stabbed a Muslim teenager. Several Muslim women had veils
torn from their faces in the street, while verbal assaults and threats
escalated.
-
- Finally, Blair broke his silence
in order to ... calm the storm? call for unity and tolerance? urge the
nation to move on to more important matters? No, of course not. Instead,
he heaped more coals on the fire, at one point even refusing point-blank
to say that a Muslim woman in a veil could make a contribution to society.
"That's a very difficult question," he said. Having thus segregated
these women from the rest of society, relegating them to the status of
useless parasites, he went on to denounce the veil as a "mark of separation."
-
- Blair's hypocrisy here is compounded
by the fact that he is probably more responsible that any other individual
for fostering religious divisions in British society today. He has lavished
state funding on a vast expansion of "faith-based" schools, each
under the rule of single religion - Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Greek
Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventist - excluding most children of other faiths.
Yet it is a 24-year-old teaching assistant in a veil - not Blair - who
is fostering religious "separatism."
-
- At every turn, it seemed, the
British Establishment - an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, closely-knit
network drawn almost entirely from a tiny group of elite schools and universities,
and ensconced in unassailable sway and privilege, including the full, dread
power of the state - was condemning a tiny, overwhelmingly powerless minority
for the social and political ills of the nation.
-
- III
-
- But what is the true context
of this asymmetrical "debate?" The numbers tell the story. There
are approximately 1.6 Muslims in Britain - 3 percent out of a total population
of more than 60 million. And of this miniscule minority, only 5 percent
of British Muslim women wear the veil. In other words, this "mark
of separation" that is now, suddenly, "corroding" British
society is actually rejected by 95 percent of all Muslim women. It plays
almost no part in Muslim life in Britain.
-
- Nor does any kind of tolerance
for violent extremism. An extensive survey of British Muslims just released
- to almost zero notice - by the 1990 Trust shows that the number of those
who believe that terrorist attacks are "justifiable" is between
1 and 2 percent. (You could probably find a higher percentage of Americans
who believed that terrorism against, say, the "Zionist Occupation
Government" or illegal immigrants or abortion clinics - or Muslims
- was justified.) Violence and extremism are thus rejected by 98 percent
of all British Muslims; but evidently this is not good enough for Blair
and his ministers.
-
- Terrorism by Islamic extremists
poses a real threat, of course, although in Britain, case after case of
ballyhooed terror scares and high-profile SWAT team raids have turned out
to be false alarms, in which one innocent man (a no-doubt "Asian-looking"
Brazilian) has been killed and two other innocent men have been wounded.
But this threat pales in comparison to the decades-long terror campaign
waged in Britain by Irish nationalists, which, when added to the government's
"counter-terrorism measures," killed more than 3,600 people -
and was supported by a substantially larger margin than 1 to 2 percent
of Britain's "Irish community." The assimilation of "Asian"
Muslims into British society has in fact been far more successful, more
peaceful - and more voluntary - than the centurieslong, still-ongoing struggle
to integrate the Irish "minority."
-
- Moreover, the campaign is clearly
counter-productive. If you make the veil a primary symbol of Muslim identity
- and then lambaste the Muslim community as a whole - you are thus ensuring
that more women will take up the veil, as a symbol of defiance and pride
in their community when it is under attack. You will strengthen the hand
of the very extremists you profess to be rooting out from society, while
fanning the flames of racial hatred among the majority ethnic group: a
major strategic mistake.
-
- That's assuming, of course, that
your actual goal is a well-functioning, tolerant, peaceful society. If
however, your real aim is to use fear and suspicion in a desperate bid
to stay in power, why then, this deadly game of Muslim-bashing is a master
stroke.
-
- Thus the launching of this campaign
of demonization and diversion is no mystery. As the "War on Terror"
loses its effectiveness as a fearmongering political tool for the Bushist-Blairite
axis - as it is more and more discounted by the British and American publics
who can clearly see that it has been used to justify a horrendously murderous
war in Iraq and the destruction of civil liberties at home - the "Coalition"
leaders are having to resort to more and more primitive methods to keep
accountability at bay.
-
- After all, we are talking about
two highly unpopular political factions with the blood of more than half
a million Iraqis - and thousands of their own soldiers - on their hands.
To sustain themselves in power, they cannot appeal to the truth, which
damns them; they cannot appeal to morality, which shames them; they cannot
appeal to their national ideals of liberty and openness, which they have
trampled and discarded.
-
- They have nothing left to offer
but fear - fear of the "other," fear of the strange, fear of
minorities, fear of a woman walking down the street with a black veil over
her face.
-
- Chris Floyd is an American journalist.
His weekly political column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow
Times from 1996 to 2006. His work has appeared in print and online in venues
all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism
Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record
and many others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a
Project Censored award in 2003. He is the author of "Empire Burlesque:
High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium," and is co-founder
and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
|
