As race riots erupt across the UK, Arzu looks at the pivotal role of the UK’s counter-terrorism regime, particularly its Prevent program, in inciting this hatred.
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If you haven’t been embedded in discussions about the UK’s anti-terrorism regime for nigh on three decades, then you are most likely wondering why the current far-right violence / riots / pogroms targeting Muslims is not being treated as terrorism. Indeed many, including Muslims, but also anti-radicalisations practitioners across institutions (including police unions) have opined that the rise of the far-right has met the criteria set out in various pieces of legislation to be termed with the terrible ‘T’ word.
In my latest review piece, I am looking at this presentation I made at the Prevent, Islamophobia and Civil Liberties national conference in June 2016.
Looking at this through the lens of the 2024 UK riots, which have targeted Muslims and migrants and been in effect pogroms, this presentation brings the focus back to the state and its security laws, policies and narratives as a key cause for what is happening now. This cannot be stated enough. This has happened despite late attempts to use the legislation to tackle far-right violence and the spread of its narratives.
In 2020-21, the news that far-right referrals to the UK’s flagship Prevent program had outstripped referrals of Muslims, and had done for some time, caused a significant backlash from the establishment, so much so that the government announced it would ensure that Muslim referrals would be increased. There are two key takeaways from this. Firstly, if more evidence were needed, here we see that again the anti-terrorism regime was designed (however neutrally it may be or may not be worded) to spy on Muslims, police their thought and speech, narrow down the political spaces available to them, and make them subject to a different set of laws and norms. Secondly, white or English (for want of better words) racism, supremacism and politically motivated violence are not considered aberrant. There is a long history of this disparity including cases where people with lists of targets including mosques were arrested, charged and tried outside of anti-terrorism laws.
To be clear: the anti-terrorism regime since 1997 has always sought to target Muslims. The public discourse around terrorism has been shaped by this framing of what terrorism is[1], and the political space for Muslims to express legitimate grievances shrunk to non-existent as a result. This is not an abstract denial of political freedom. It has real world, violent consequences: from mob hatred on the streets to mass incarceration and worse from the state. The genocide in Bosnia is but three decades past.
In the research published as ‘Environment of Hate: the New Normal for Muslims in the UK’, myself and co-author Saied R. Ameli argued that:
The discursive praxis of PREVENT… may be one of if not the most significant factor in the rise of ‘street-level’ hatred against those perceived to be Muslim, as well as normalising differential treatment of communities of colour and culture using the rhetoric of community cohesion and British values (as a challenge to and heralding the end of state sanctioned multi-culturalism).
The authors argue that a more detailed and systematic study, including mass data collection be undertaken to assess how the conceptual underpinnings of the discourse of PREVENT as represented in media, policy and political discourse inhere in ideas of supremacism and right (including the right to individual and collective violence) against the ‘other’…
The state’s role in this is essential. We have seen for decades how anti-racist activism – whether that is critiquing structural and street racism, or campaigning for justice in Palestine – have been demonised by successive governments of supposedly different political ilks. Indeed there has been a severe backlash against pro-Palestinian activism since October 2023 has come from both main legacy parties in the UK (and which saw the incoming government suffer notable losses of their base vote as a result). The fact that mainstream media is regurgitating the narrative that the British police have been implementing two-tier policing (that somehow they have been discriminatory against the white working class and lenient to the racialised other) is both ludicrous and terrifying.
July has already seen a community uprising in Harehills, when police assisted social services in removing children from a Roma family, in what appears to be – at the very least – a heavy handed and provocative way. We have the video evidence of shocking police brutality at Manchester airport against Muslim men, the background to which has now been presented by the family’s lawyer, Aamer Anwar.
Apparently, this happened at Manchester airport last night
Would love to hear from @gmpolice pic.twitter.com/Pwe9xmAyXB
— Abdul Raheem Rudolph 🇵🇸 (@rudol9h) July 24, 2024
The long decades of reports into institutional police racism, are somehow erased from media and thus public memory. How can the fourth estate have any credibility when it now simply parrots racist talking points to the point of absurdity?
My 2016 presentation (and the research it was based on) states that the rise of the far-right is a result of state Islamophobia, not a cause of Islamophobia. The UK’s Prevent duty and subsequent (2015) law, concretised Islamophobic narratives around: gender (rights), democracy, security, British (values), human rights, loyalty. The research undertaken by IHRC and published in 2015 highlighted how street level attacks against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims, were, in their perpetrators’ minds, a form of ‘retaliatory’ action based on these narratives. Further attacks on Muslim civil society, as well as governmental and media discourses around Muslims were increasingly focusing on these narratives in particular around loyalty and entryism, security threats and dangers to democracy.
Whilst in 2016 (and before the vote for Brexit) the street level attacks were still primarily the acts of individuals, the potential for both organised street level action (as we are now seeing in 2024) and extreme state violence existed and were flagged up as imminent dangers:
On the one hand there is confidence in individuals of whatever ilk to commit attacks or perpetrate discrimination and indeed to revert to racist modes of behaviour associated with decades gone. Part of this behaviour is mobilisation against anti- racist activism. State mobilisation against those challenging societal ills, including racism, gives succour to pre-existing right- wing groups, legitimising such thinking and providing a recruiting tool.
Whilst those provoked to attack are a minority, the hate environment also breaks bonds of compassion and empathy. As described above, when attacks take place, there can often be a veil of silence amongst those also present with no one offering to help. Ameli et al have remarked on this previously as a worrying precursor to a serious breakdown of social bonds that can precede mass action against an out-group… With this default assumption of ‘no going back’ warning signs can be missed e.g. detentions without charge based on profiling turning into mass detentions and internment of communities.
In 2024, we can see that the orchestrated mob violence let loose on minoritized communities using Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric (which are not mutually exclusive) is already eliciting more muted responses from the state, its institutions and the media. As people are being arrested and taken to court, comparisons between the charging of defendants and sentencing of those found guilty with e.g. the 2011 and 2001 riots must be urgently made. Already there has been a reluctance to name the violence as racist, and then as Islamophobic.
Yesterday journalist and former Labour now Green Party advocate Owen Jones, described the riots as ‘terrorism’, providing a thread of government figures hyping up Islamophobic narratives over the years and (correctly) stating that they have stoked up the violence we are living through today. It’s good to see some of the mainstream now understanding this[2]. But we cannot wait around trying to get this understood to be something that has, both in the public imagination and in law, become a term associated almost exclusively with Muslims. It’s a distracting argument, and more evidence (as I argue in the 2016 presentation) of the capture of the social imagination that Prevent has achieved.
Even if we could get the definition of terrorism applied to far-right groups, why would we want to? The legal regime of countering ‘terrorism’ in the UK, has always been about the power of naming, and that power lies with the state and its institutions. The problem of misapplication will not go away if another group is included. We don’t need the power to shift goalposts in arbitrary (and ultimately unjust) ways, like this and previous governments. We need honest government, committed to the hard task of equality for all the citizens and denizens of this country.
We don’t need a protracted fight or discussion over what constitutes terrorism. As IHRC and CAMPACC have been arguing for many years, what we need is the equal application of criminal laws to do with mass and or political and or racist violence, alongside repeal of the anti-terrorism regime and the active countering of the Islamophobic narratives that have been set in the culture by it. Without the swift recognition of the state as to its culpability in the violence being meted out on our streets, things will get rapidly worse. The checklist for mass violence against Muslims is now in full operation. What is next?
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Follow her on X and Instagram @arzumerali, and Facebook @ArzuMeraliOfficial.
Photo: Far-right protestors opposing the Al-Quds Day rally in 2010, London, UK, ©IHRC
[1] There has been an inevitable mission creep, sweeping up environmental groups and left groups in the labelling, and thus diminishing the political space in which their dissent exists. It is quite possible that the anti-terror laws will be used on a larger scale to crush these movements. However, far-right violence, however organised, murderous and vile, was never to be thought of in these terms. The fact that MPs, media and commentators can even describe rioters as protestors, and the racist ideologies underpinning their attacks on Muslims and racialised others as grievances, speaks volumes as to how these laws will always operate.
[2] There is also a considerable amount of culpability from the mainstream media, not least during the period when the anti-semitism charge levelled at Jeremy Corbyn post the 2017 snap election, subtly changed in its coding to encompass ideas of being ‘pro-immigrant’, ‘pro-Muslim’, ‘pro-terrorist’.
Related articles:
Far-Right in Europe: Is the Threat Taken Seriously?
The Wrong Side of Britishness: Anti-Muslim Narratives in the UK
