ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The Guardian’s resident-far-left columnist (and associate editor) Seumas Milne has an(other) excellent article in today’s Guardian, this time focusing his ire on the “neocon attack dogs” at hard-right thinktanks like Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion who seem to take perverse pleasure in fanning the flames of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam hatred here in the UK and whose agenda seeks to (mis)inform people that “jihadist terror attacks in Britain are fuelled not by outrage at western violence and support for tyranny in the Muslim world, but by hatred of western culture and freedoms”. (I have written about Policy Exchange’s fraudulent and fabricated research here.)

Milne has devoted numerous columns in recent months to drawing attention to the casual and often crude Islamophobia that has gripped much of our journalistic and political luminaries, on both sides of the Atlantic – a subject I plan to expand upon myself, here on this blog, in the not-too-distant future – and the right-wing, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering, war-mongering political agenda which underlies much of it.

Here is Milne, at the start of today's column:

“Last Saturday, Ahmed Hassan, a 17-year-old Muslim student, was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths at Dewsbury railway station in west Yorkshire. Two have now been charged with his murder, and police say they are investigating whether there was a racial or religious motivation. In the Muslim communities in Dewsbury and neighbouring Batley, where Hassan lived, there's little doubt about it. In the run-up to today's Eid festival, Hassan's family issued a statement saying they hoped their loss would help "unite the community and all faiths.

“But divisions run deep in the area. The far-right British National party, which has increasingly turned its racist venom against Muslims in recent years, won over 5,000 votes in Dewsbury in the last general election, its highest tally in the country. Its leader, Nick Griffin, has argued that his party must capitalise on the "growing wave of public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass media". It's not hard to see why he sees an opportunity. Since the July 2005 bombings in London, there has been a stream of sensationalised and poisonous stories about Britain's Muslims.

“This media onslaught - often based on research by apparently reliable thinktanks - has clearly fed anti-Muslim prejudice. Combined with hyped terror-plot reports, the point has now been reached where Britons are found in polls to be more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major European state. For many Muslims, that heightens a sense of intimidation and alienation. For a minority, it translates into Islamophobic violence on the streets: Asian people are now twice as likely to be stabbed to death as a decade ago, and four out of five convictions for religiously aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims."

Bravo Seumas! Keep it up!