VIDEO: Prevent as the Socialisation of Hate

Presented by Arzu Merali at the final plenary of the Prevent, Islamophobia and Civil Liberties national conference in June 2016.  In it Arzu looks at how the narratives that fuel Islamophobic street level violence and establishment attacks on Muslims are concretised by the narratives of Prevent.  She argues that the capture of the social imagination by Prevent is so complete that even those challenging it are also reproducing its discourse.

Read an adapted transcript below the video

 

 

 

[6 August 2024]The following is a write up of the notes of the presentation, not just a transcript, and so contains additional material omitted during the presentation.

 

———

 

Thank you to the organizers for this fantastic day and this excellent event.

A lot of what I’m going to say I think will be very obvious to all of us here, just bear with me because I need to repeat it. I think it has to be repeated because as a practitioner, somebody who’s trying to battle to get the anti-terror law and other injustices,  I’m very wary of the kind of problems that’s developed around practices and how we inadvertently get caught up in the ideas behind the methods that we are forced to use to mobilize (on some occasions).

Now, as was mentioned, IHRC produced this research the end of last year. I’m going to refer to some of the statistics that we compiled based on survey methods between 2010 and 2014 very briefly. When we’re talking about Prevent as a piece of racist policy that is now part of the law, we need to be very wary and ensure we place racism in the context of the institution. It seems obvious, but we do get lost in this.

According to our surveys, Muslims have experienced in the past and are continuing to experience at ever increasing levels discrimination, hostility, hatred: whether that’s watching demonized representation on the television; Islamophobia, racism in the workplace, at school; being attached on the street, listening to what politicians say; the categories are vast. You can look through statistics, every single facet of that experience has worsened over the four year period between the two surveys that we did.

A summary of our findings finds:

  • Experience of those ‘always’ seeing negative stereotypes of Muslim people in the media rose from 10% in 2010 to 39.4% in 2014.
  • In 2010, 30% of respondents said they ‘never’ saw negative stereotypes of Muslims in the media, in 2014 however, 94% of respondents said they saw negative stereotypes.
  • 21.3% of those who described their religiosity as ‘practising Muslim’ felt they were ‘always’ witnessing politicians philosophise that Islam is problematic.
  • In 2010 fewer than 60% of respondents said they encountered politicians using Islamophobic rhetoric and that figure has risen to almost 85% in 2014.
  • 87.7% of those surveyed agree that ‘those who discriminate against us are highly driven by media content.’
  • The experience of physical assault increased from 13.9% in 2010 to 17.8% in 2014.
  • 58% of those surveyed felt they had experienced being treated with suspicion or being wrongly accused of something.
  • 66% of those surveyed have experienced verbal abuse at some point – a definite increase from the 39.8% in 2010.
  • In 2010, 34.2% agreed that they had seen political policies that negatively affected Muslim people. In 2014 this figure had risen to 59.2%
  • In 2010, 50% of respondents had seen or heard Islamophobia against another person. In 2014, this figure rose to 80%.
  • 51.1% of the sample believed that politicians condone discriminatory acts against Muslims.

 

However, when we talk about Islamophobia in civil society or about racism, we tend to focus or be forced to focus on discrimination in the workplace because there’s an EU directive about that became law over 20 years ago and about hate crime because there’s a developing law around hate crime. in particular how religious aggravation should or can be applied to certain violent offences.

There has been a spike of about 4% when it comes to the experience of hate attacks on the street for Muslims between those two surveys, but our argument is that spike comes not from pre-existing prejudices, racism, etc. although they all pre-exist at the street level. It is because of the hate environment which is created by the relationship between legal institutions, the media, political elites, academia, and so on and so forth. They usually constitute that hate environment. If we don’t focus on that, we can ultimately defeat the kind of mobilization that we’re trying to get together today.

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 following discursive terms contained in the PREVENT policy however, find mirrors in the justifications for street level violence and crucially the rise of organised far-right activity: gender (rights), democracy, security, British (values), human rights, loyalty.

Prevent as a discursive practice, and obviously now as a law, is perhaps the most significant policy actually in that rise of negative experiences according to IHRC’s findings. Simply put, Prevent concretizes Islamophobia /  racism, which legitimizes those attacks at the street level. It’s worth noting that most physical attacks and violent attacks, I will for the moment focus just on that, are perpetrated by so-called ordinary members of the public. They’re actually not perpetrated by members of far-right groups or organized groups, albeit that there is a significant rise in that activity at the street level. This is because people are feeling incited by the environment they live in to take action. You will often find when matters come to trial that perpetrators are often found to say that they “just don’t know what came over me”. Yes, of course you may say that in your defence, but it is a legitimate psychological issue.

The rise of the far right needs to also be looked at. It’s not the cause of Islamophobia. It is the result of racism and Islamophobia. The spike that we’ve had is because the hate environment has been the recruiting sergeant for that type of thinking. I’m sure there’s already been a lot of discussion about Fundamental British Values, if we just want to disaggregate them and boil them down, although obviously the goalposts have been shifting a lot, we have the idea of gender rights, democracy, security, loyalty, British values, human rights. These are all phrases that have been bandied about for 10 years plus when it comes to ‘preventing’ violent extremism and what constitutes that violent extremist or even nonviolent extremism.

When we did an overview of the types of violent attacks that were taking place, we started seeing patterns where you could actually identify outside of the statistics the

themes of attacks. So you have things around child grooming, so people being beaten up, accused, attacked, etc, of being a child groomer. At the same time, women were also being attacked as being facilitators of child grooming. Obviously, the security issue keeps coming up, with people being refused onto public transport, etc.  The there is the issue of veils of any type, or even some sort of distinct clothing.  It is an obsession, it is literally an obsession when it comes to the type of cases that are reported. So the statistics actually have been levelling out in terms of how many women experience attacks of discrimination. When we first did these types of surveys 15 years ago, women were overwhelming victims.

When it comes to loyalty as a thematic, you need to now look beyond the street level.  We all have experiences in this room of this type of accusation, cases, etc. I don’t need to really develop on the attacks on Muslims or even certain sympathizers amongst the left, etc. as perceived by this kind of negative societal discourse. But it’s worth noting that now we have people who you do not necessarily think of as allies, so for example, Matthew Paris in The Times or Janice Turner, who’s actually we have a case study about a load of Islamophobic stuff she wrote in our report, who is now being a sympathizer for Muslims. And this is, bear in mind, based on passing comments within an opinion piece, vaguely moaning about how it’s a bit uncomfortable listening to all the Muslim bashing. And this is on the subscriber only part of the Times website, and there being several thousand extraordinarily racist comments posted attacking these writers for being pro-extremist, Muslim, etc.

This concretisation of Islamophobia / racism, whilst leading to a rise in streets level attacks, has a more insidious effect: it accelerates demonised representation and delegitimises a critique of that to be outside the pale of legitimate speech – thus “free-speech” as a descriptive concept of British society pertains, because demonised speech is not seen a speech/opinion/belief or thought, but as disloyal/threat (violence)/ deviance.  This hate environment breaks the bonds of compassion and empathy: S/he asked for it.

That breakdown is not just a “nasty” side-effect. That breakdown can /does precede mass action against an out group e.g. detentions without charge mass detentions and internment of communities.

All of this highlights one of the points that I want to make about the insidiousness of Prevent. You know, we hear a lot and we use the lines, we all use them, you know, about how Prevent actually undermines the values that it is supposed to be supporting, democracy, fair play, etc. But it’s more than that, it’s more than just being nasty, it’s more than just being hypocritical or applied wrongly. This is another thing that obviously those of us who want to use the courts to challenge this, we have to rely on, okay? And whilst use those tools we must not lose sight of that bigger problem which is Prevent itself being part of the problem but in its entirety as a policy being a problem, it’s not just that it’s being implemented unfairly, it is not just you know a bit on the racist side and you know if it was for everybody it would be fine. What iIm saying sounds obvious but it is also about the space within which Prevent operates.  We keep hearing that it is racist and we need to get rid of it, that’s fine and dandy. We know it’s part of a body of laws that we need to keep looking at comprehensively, which have to removed.

CAMPACC  and ourselves and a few other people have tried getting a petition going, letters to the editor, etc, in this regard: to have all anti-terrorism laws repealed.  We are doing this to bring about the idea about that we need to get rid of all of these bodies of law and why. The way Prevent has worked is not just about the law and the grasp it has physically on the community. It’s about how it gets into the sub-conscious of the community. In particular, the community that is principally targeted by it currently.

When we sent that letter around for signatories, we got a lot of negative responses. There were a lot of Muslim organisations who wanted to sign up but couldn’t because of the pressure they felt, and Muslim organisations are under a lot of pressure, and that’s fine. But we also did get a lot of ‘advice’, and the first two that I remember are from a particular email from an advocacy organisation, I forget which order they went in.  They said, first of all we can’t be naive and think, we don’t have a problem within the community. And the second one was, you can’t ask for laws to be removed.  So already now, the idea of asking, the idea of expectation, the idea of racism and living with institutional racism has become so demonised, so much associated with deviance, and I’ll skip to the whole thing that I’m going to talk about, with regard to free speech and deviance, that we ourselves are the policemen for Prevent, even while we think we’re actually challenging it. I think there’s one point I want you to take away from this, it is to be very, very wary of that.

At the time of this presentation, Arzu Merali was the head of research at Islamic Human Rights Commission.