What is Islamophobia

Islamophobia in the state.

Many people are increasingly aware that Muslims are the targets of racism, but at the same time we see voices that refuse to acknowledge that anti-Muslim racism, also called Islamophobia, exists. These people tend to focus on the fact that Islam is a religion, not a race, and therefore it's not racism.

Whilst it might seem a reasonable argument on the surface, the problem with it is that it's based on the idea that there is such a thing as race, on which racial prejudice is based. In fact, this notion has long been discredited by both natural and social sciences. Separating people by race came from the time of European colonialism. with the idea that Europeans were biologically or culturally superior to non-Europeans.

Though this strand of thinking has never gone away, it has been discredited scientifically. Humanity isn't divided into races. There is one human race and within it there are a diversity of people from different cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The key difference which is usually taken to indicate a person's race is the concentration of melanin in one's skin. What makes these differences significant is the political practice of categorizing these groups and assigning advantages or disadvantages to them. It's what we mean when we say race is socially constructed. It's not an objective scientific category. It's made real by racist discrimination and actions.

The state is central.

Many would think that Islamophobia is just the discriminatory attitudes that individual people have, but in reality the state, and specifically the counter-terrorism apparatus, has a much bigger part to play.

Since 2001, the war on terror has seen a ratcheting up of powers available to police and intelligence agencies. In the UK, since 2000, a total of 15 new terrorism acts have been introduced, often concerned with extremism and radicalisation. The extraordinary nature of these measures means that they often bypass the standard legal principles of the criminal justice system.

Muslims are specifically being targeted through legislation, policing, intelligence and surveillance, On top of these, the definitions of radicalisation and extremism are extremely vague, so vague in fact that they can't be defined legally, resulting in practice in even more disproportionate treatment of Muslims.

Take one example, Schedule 7, a really draconian piece of legislation from the Terrorism Act 2000. Schedule 7 is a power which allows border officers to stop and search without any need to justify or explain why. The evidence suggests people who are more likely to be assumed as Muslims are disproportionately targeted under Schedule 7. People of Pakistani ethnicity are over 150 times more likely to be detained under Schedule 7 than white people.

Over the last 20 years, the counter-terrorism apparatus in the UK has spread from its traditional home in the police and intelligence services to occupy almost every part of the public sector. In the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the PREVENT duty was introduced. The thinking behind PREVENT is the idea that terrorism comes about in the context of extremist ideas and there is some sort of continuum between radical ideas and terrorism. It is a policy that aims to tackle free crime, ideas and activities that are apparently on a path to later becoming a crime.

But it's unclear exactly how someone would determine whether a person is going to go on to commit a crime. The government's definition of extremism is broader than terrorism. It's defined as vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.

Schools, universities, nurseries, libraries, the health service and other public institutions are now legally obliged to tackle extremism and radicalisation. This effectively turns school teachers, doctors, nurses and others into untrained counter-terrorism operatives and due to the vague and politically subjective definitions any Muslim into a potential security threat. Just one example of its overreach is a nursery in Brighton which had its Ofsted rating downgraded because they were not doing enough about radicalisation and extremism.

The neoconservative movement.

With the state acting as the backbone to structural Islamophobia, key social movements produce certain Islamophobic ideas, then feed them into government policy and practice. One of these movements, neoconservatism, has been at the center of pushing counter-terrorism policy in ever more authoritarian directions.

We mostly hear about the neocons in the context of the push in the United States to invade Iraq. But while the neocons originate in the US, they've spread their movement internationally, including, notably, to the UK. For example, neoconservative think tanks in the UK influence the change in scope in the second iteration of Prevent, from violent extremism to non-violent extremism. In practice, this expanded the target of Prevent to include environmental campaigners, anti-nuclear activists, anti-war groups, as well as many Muslim groups engaged in peaceful political activity.

To look at the ideology behind the movement, “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board. Europe must look like a less attractive proposition. In the current war the enemy is, as a demographic and political fact, massed not just on foreign shores, but within the gates of our cities.”

Extremism Analysis Unit

The Henry Jackson Society, another neoconservative think tank, produces an annual report on extremist speakers and events on campus, where they name specific organisations and individuals who they claim are extremists. The data compiled is based on dubious research without clear evidence base or appropriate methodologies. The reports often include prominent or politically active Muslims who are critical of government counter-terrorism and foreign policy or PREVENT. It's essentially a smearing operation.

On the 17th of September 2015, days before the prevent duty came into effect, David Cameron, then the Prime Minister, made a speech where he named and shamed a number of universities where he claimed extremist events took place. He also named six speakers as expressing views contrary to British values. According to the government, this information had come from the newly formed Extremism Analysis Unit in the Home Office, a government body that had been set up to monitor and analyse extremism in public institutions. However, it later transpired that the names had come to the Extremism Analysis Unit directly from the Henry Jackson Society.

In fact, the government press release seemed to have been directly copied and pasted from the 2015 Preventing Prevent report by the student wing of the Henry Jackson Society. The neoconservative movement isn't restricted to the US and the UK.

Through feeding into and working with the state institutions and governments across Europe, policies such as PREVENT have become law in many other countries. The UK first introduced a PREVENT policy back in 2003. Following that, similar policies targeting peaceful Muslim groups were introduced across Europe in the Netherlands in 2005, France in 2014, and Spain in 2015.

All these organisations and methods, mainly operating through the counter-terrorism apparatus of the state, are absolutely central to the spread of Islamophobia. They target Muslims and create a suspect community based on vagueness and prejudice when policy is put into practice. This is pushed further in an authoritarian direction and reinforced by neoconservative groups with Islamophobic and pro-imperial agendas that produces and replicates harmful laws and attitudes that undermine rights, freedoms and democracy of Muslims and many other groups.

This animation was produced with co-financing support from the European Union.