The racist thugs who terrorised, intimidated and in some cases tried to murder Muslims and other minority groups in the UK over the last few days are in a deep sense victims themselves.
These generally ignorant people now face jail and the destruction of their lives.
Yet they have been taught to hate. To use the official language more often applied to Muslims than the far right, they have been “radicalised”.
Among the radicalisers have been the Conservative Party, including successive prime ministers and home secretaries. The mainstream media – and not just the tabloid press – have also played a destructive and sinister role.
So also have prestigious think tanks such as the Gatestone Institute in the United States, which propagated the noxious and false idea that Britain has “no-go areas”.
There’s no getting away from the fact that the most significant immediate instigator of the violence has been far-right activist Tommy Robinson, via a series of incendiary social media interventions from the poolside of a Mediterranean hotel.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, promoted the fabricated and inflammatory claims about a Muslim role in the Southport stabbings that sparked the violence.
Once the riots were underway, Robinson said the rioters were “justified”.
Tommy Robinson in a suit
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a highly sophisticated politician, was too smart to follow Robinson’s example and refer directly to false stories circulating on social media.
Speaking ahead of the violence, he nevertheless suggested the truth about the Southport stabbings was being withheld, and questioned why the incident was not being treated as terror-related – the kind of dog-whistle politics at which Farage is expert.
It is therefore easy to see why Brendan Cox, widower of the Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered by a far-right activist on the eve of the Brexit referendum, said the remarks made Farage “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit”.
But it should not be forgotten that Farage, and the poisonous bigotry and Islamophobia he represents, have been tolerated and enabled by British journalists and newspaper editors.
For years, British Muslims have been lied about, smeared, demonised and subject to one moral panic after another.
There is virtually no social, cultural or legal protection for Muslims. Organisations that ought to protect them – think of the refusal of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to launch an enquiry into Tory Islamophobia – wash their hands. No wonder we’ve seen this horrific street violence. It’s surprising it’s not happened before.
Britain’s newspapers – and I am not just talking about the tabloids – bear a dark responsibility for the horror and shame of the weekend.
Their false and inflammatory reporting has created an environment where Muslims get targeted.
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle once defended Islamophobia, noting that it “seems to be an entirely rational response to an illiberal, vindictive and frankly fascist creed”. Liddle wrote these words a few years ago, but this school of journalism continues to flourish.
‘Wedge politics’
Remember the response from the Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay press when Farage announced that he would run as an MP and return to frontline politics.
It was treated as a bombshell event, with many sympathetic articles stressing the threat he posed to the Tories.
Yet none of the coverage paid any attention to Farage’s record of Islamophobia, antisemitism or support for racists – or reminded readers that Farage adopted the racist Tory Enoch Powell as his hero from a young age, and remains his most prominent political disciple.
Or consider the Daily Telegraph on 5 August. A deeply misleading splash headline: “Far right clash with Muslims in rioting.”
The paper’s main editorial is devoted to a warning against the term Islamophobia.
Try telling the terrified worshippers left cowering in their mosque in Southport as a racist mob gathered outside torching cars and pelting stones that there’s no such thing as Islamophobia.
If a synagogue had come under attack, the Telegraph would have had no problem blaming antisemitism.
Yet British politicians are the worst culprits. It is the job of a statesman to defuse tensions rather than exploit grievances.
Again and again, the Tories have abused Muslims, sending out the signal they are fair game.
Remember Zac Goldsmith’s toxic campaign to be mayor of London in 2016. Or Michael Gove’s state-sponsored attack on Birmingham schools in alliance with an Islamophobic media – a poisonous fabrication.
Bereft of serious policies, the Tories played “wedge politics” – sowing division and creating culture wars which stirred anger and division.
Sucking up to bigots
At the heart of this was a cynical strategy of sucking up to bigots.
Only last year the Sunak government published a review of Britain’s counter-extremism strategy which concluded that there had been “too much focus” on tackling the far right.
In the wake of the publication of the review, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman praised the far-right polemicist Douglas Murray for his “mainstream, insightful and perfectly decent political views”.
Braverman added that “in no way” was Murray an extremist.
The Muslim Council of Britain took issue with the then-home secretary’s judgement, with an MCB spokesperson, saying: “Let there be no doubt that Murray’s views are anything but mainstream; they are extreme and violently Islamophobic.”
The spokesperson cited a 2006 speech in which Murray called for conditions to be made “harder across the board” for Muslims in Europe, and comments in which he described Muslims as a “demographic time bomb” and called for mosques to be pulled down.
Murray is also on record praising Tommy Robinson as a “citizen journalist”, after Robinson’s well-orchestrated imprisonment for contempt of court at a “grooming gang” trial in Huddersfield.
Braverman’s praise for Murray, made on the floor of the House of Commons, came after the Shawcross report into the counter-extremism Prevent Strategy suggested that individuals on what used to be regarded as the far right should be treated as mainstream.
Shawcross – and Braverman, who has been eerily quiet in the wake of the riots – have a great deal of explaining to do. It is now clear that the Sunak government made a terrible misjudgment about the threat of the far right in Britain.
This helps to explain the almost complete silence from senior Tories about the role of Islamophobia in this weekend’s events.
Labour and the race card
Labour has been better – but not by much. It is stunning how government ministers and officials have been doggedly reluctant to use the term Islamophobia and to properly characterise the rioters as anti-Muslim and racist.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke well on Sunday about denouncing far-right thugs. But he wasn’t right to call them mindless. They knew exactly who they were after: Muslims, minorities and migrants.
Nor should it be forgotten that Starmer too played the race card during the election – making dog-whistle comments about the Bangladeshi community
And why hasn’t Starmer met Muslim community leaders? Why didn’t he record a video addressed to Muslims on Wednesday? Why didn’t the prime minister rush to the Southport mosque which was besieged the day after that first riot to show support?
Nor should it be forgotten that Starmer too played the race card during the general election – making dog-whistle comments about the Bangladeshi community on the Sun newspaper’s election debate.
He gave Farage a free pass in Clacton during the general election, ordering the Labour candidate to stand down.
It’s time that British politicians stopped appeasing far-right politicians.
It doesn’t work, and makes matters worse, as the weekend horror has proved.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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