In response to the victory of George Galloway in the Rotherham by-election, PM Rishi Sunak flew by private jet (funded by the tax payer) from Aberdeen to London, where he stood outside Number 10, and lectured the nation on democracy. To be more precise, the unelected Prime Minister, who himself failed even to win his own leadership race, went on to warn the nation of the threat to democracy, posed by people democratically voting in by-elections, for candidates that aren’t, as Galloway suggests, ‘two cheeks of the same backside’. Other than the threat to democracy, from actual democracy, his speech was an authoritarian Islamophobic diatribe, designed to smear the people of Rotherham as a hate filled mob of Antisemites, determined to destroy Britain’s democratic traditions by voting for a man who had been returned, by the electorate, to the ‘mother of all Parliaments’, no fewer than SEVEN times.
Lee Anderson also caused considerable controversy recently with comments about Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, for which he was duly suspended. Many, including Chris Allen writing in the Conversation, have rightly called out the Islamophobic character of Anderson’s position, claiming that the failure to acknowledge it represents a deep Islamophobia, confined mostly, but not exclusively, to the Conservative Party.
Allen was highly critical of an issue that has long plagued the Tories, but it is not confined to their ranks alone. This was highlighted by the recent debacle over the SNP’s Opposition Day Debate, hijacked by the Speaker Linsday Hoyle under pressure from the Labour Party. Hoyle’s justification for breaking convention by allowing two motions and thus disregarding the SNP’s original terms of debate was a classic example of this undercurrent of Islamophobia. By claiming to be protecting the members of the house from a possible terror attack, he made the tacit suggestion that the pro-Palestine lobby, and in particular the British Muslims who supported the Palestinians, represented an active terror threat. This goes beyond Allen’s narrow assertion that Lee Anderson’s open prejudice, on GB News, was evidence of a deep malaise within the Conservative party itself.
Much of the commentary over the past months has focused on the question – Does the Conservative Party have a problem with Islamophobia? There is so much more to the issue of Islamophobia, and this blog will fill in the gaps.
Islamophobia – a short imperialist history
Islamophobia is a political trope that extents beyond merely hating Muslims for their religious and political beliefs (although this is of course a fundamental part of it). Just as accusations of Antisemitism are used to conflate Zionism with the Jewish religion, Islamophobia represents an international political currency used by white colonial settler states (the US, Canada, and Australia) and by colonisers (the UK and other European states). Islam is to modern day politics what communism was to the cold war period. In colonial states, none more than the UK, Islam is commonly seen as the Other, the potential foreign invader, the dangerous threat to British Values and our way of life. Why is this?
Islamophobia is the consequence of a long and protracted process of Eurocentric (colonial settler) anti Arabo-Islamic prejudice. As Palestinian academic Edward Said showed in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) the West has long constructed a false romanticised notion of Asia, in particular the Middle East, to justify its imperialist ambitions in the region. Islamophobia and the largely manufactured terror threat, are used to this day, to justify foreign wars.
Prejudice and the semiotics of Colonial Rule
The colonial tactic of choice is ‘divide and rule’. To divide populations, binaries must be constructed, (allies/enemies, friendly/dangerous, loyal/rebellious etc.), and groups assigned positions on these binaries. Politics has an inherent binary character, since all classificatory systems have this binary structure – good/bad, strong/weak, civilised/barbarous, etc. Human thought tends to favour one binary over the other – according to ‘structuralism’, presence is prioritised over absence, because absence is traditionally seen as what remains when you take something away. Thus, since it is perceived as a ‘lack’ it takes on something of a negative connotation.
The binary code that structures perception tends to prioritise one binary node over the other, something that the Deconstructionists, such as Derrida claim, structures not only language but most forms of domination. By aligning the masculine with strength and the feminine with weakness, the male becomes superior to the female, since one has a phallus (presence) which the other lacks (absence). White and black are vehicles for an entire set of binary oppositions, light and dark, good and evil, pure and defiled, etc. It is the process of (often unconsciously) privileging one binary over the other that (often unconsciously) structures our perception of reality.
On most, if not all, of these binaries (sociologists call them ‘epistemological couples’), the West has assigned itself the ‘positive’ or favourable aspects while assigning the ‘negative’ or unfavourable aspects to the East. This process represents the very foundation of Islamophobia. Them and Us. The (dangerous) Other. We are noble, they are savage, we are upstanding they are untrustworthy, we are righteous, they are lacking in morals… These binaries become absorbed into our culture, traditions, viewpoints and values, they become so deeply embedded that we fail to notice them or think about them never mind question their veracity. This process results in the formation of what we call Doxa – a set of beliefs that become so taken-for-granted; we don’t question them because we don’t even notice them. They are ‘naturalised’.
Islamophobia and the Scapegoat Mechanism.
So, when Rishi Sunak takes to his lectern warning the nation of a danger to democracy, he is setting up a set of binaries that draw on decades if not centuries of indoctrination, in order to elicit what Johnathan Haidt defines as an ‘emotional’, rather than a ‘rational’ response. By appealing to our Great British values, our religious tolerance, and democratic institutions, Rishi Sunak is evoking a range of ‘patriotic’ emotions while inviting us to think in terms of their opposites, or more accurately, those who oppose them.
If we have Great British Values, then there must exist a dangerous Other, out to undermine these values. If we are tolerant, there must be an intolerant Other, determined to destroy our way of life. The process also reinforces a great deal of the mythology that surrounds notions such as ‘tolerance’, ‘democracy’, and ‘justice’. It reproduces the illusion that the state exists to serve the ‘people’, while actively obfuscating the fact that the state serves the interests of those who have appropriated the state’s institutions for their own ends. But most importantly, the process creates a scapegoat group, which serves an entire plethora of political functions.
Fascism and the Relentless Expansion of the Police State
This is a tactic drawn from Britian’s long and brutal colonial history. Justify your atrocities through victim blaming. Create a scapegoat group in order to refocus people’s anger, and deflect it downwards, away from those causing the atrocities, onto a marginalised group. Use this to justify the relentless expansion of police powers, to limit people’s rights and to redraw the boundaries of the state’s legitimate authority. This is the function of Islamophobia in politics today.
Islamophobia exists in the Tory party and the Labour party, because both can reap the benefits of its deployment in the political sphere. The political mainstream is well aware of the potential consequences of their unconditional support for genocide in Gaza. They know there will be a backlash that will result in more instances such as those witnessed in Rotherham when the people turned their backs on the mainstream candidates and elected George Galloway.
It is entirely understandable, therefore, that the mainstream political class are afraid of the public, whether it be at the ballot box, or in the street. This is why they are trying to remove the right of citizens to peacefully protest. This is why they are trying to limit who can vote and who they can vote for.
Meanwhile Rishi Sunak, speaking from his lectern outside number 10, gave the police his full backing in dealing with dissent in any way they deemed necessary. This is the government’s authoritarian agenda and it’s beginning to look more and more like fascism every day.
