The Myths of Terrorism

English Defence League in Britain.
Image credits: Gavin Lynn

After the Woolwich murder, Rory Morgan argues why there is so much unjustified hatred for Islam in the United Kingdom.

With the recent horrific attack in Woolwich there has been a significant rise in hate crimes directed at Muslims. The Faith Matters hotline (a service set up to deal with anti-Muslim attacks) recorded 162 incidents on the Wednesday after the attack, a dramatic growth in the daily average of six. Even six is too many. This seems to once again show a severe spike in the great problem this country has with Islamophobia. Many will say that this stems directly from the attackers’ loose connections with the faith, but when considering solid facts it seems more that the British and western media outlets are truly the ones to blame for this now growing problem of unfair racial generalisation and prejudice.

Political academic Mark Goodwin recently tweeted that in a study of media articles between 2000-2008 only 2% framed Muslims positively. It would be ridiculous to deny that the events of 9/11 in 2001 and the London July bombings of 2005 have had a colossal impact on the representations of Muslims in the press, but here is where the problem truly lies. The press has made the faith of Islam almost synonymous with terrorism, despite the fact the overwhelming majority of Muslims view such events with an equal measure of horror as the rest of the world does and are as likely to become a terrorist as anyone else. The equivalent would be everyone in the 1980s regarding all Irish Catholics as terrorists because of the actions of the IRA, or all atheists sharing communist tendencies because of the Communist regime’s minor affiliation. This problem is also not helped by the fact that television shows such as Homeland and Spooks continually portray Muslims as scheming terrorists, helping to assert a negative stereotype of Muslims in the western world.

 

An “‘Us’ and ‘Them’” culture seems to have developed with 47% of Britons stating they considered Muslims a threat in a YouGov poll. This is despite the fact that 83% of Muslims are proud to be a British citizen, and 82% want to live in diverse and mixed neighbourhoods, two statistics that suggest contentment with the country and the other people in it. These figures very much indicate that it is less the attitudes and behaviour of the Islamic community that is the problem, and more the label of extremism that has been forced on to them by the press. You only have to go on the Daily Mail website to see articles almost specifically designed to promote racial hatred, with one recent article even publicising various YouTube videos of unhinged fanatical individuals celebrating terrorism. Similar videos can be found of Christian extremists, and should a paper with such a large readership really be devoting an entire article on the basis of a site that also has videos of dancing cats?

It also feels very bizarre for so many Britons to affirm their disdain for Islamic beliefs and values when the vast majority have neither read the Qur’an nor visited a mosque and are instead subject to information from tabloid newspapers and questionable websites. The Qur’an does not advocate killing and the many verses often quoted by extremists are taken out of the true context of defending oneself until safety has been restored. Unfortunately the media seems to have gone through a similar process of indoctrination that extremists do, taking verses out of the correct context and allowing the true teachings to be warped into something unrecognisable in meaning and intent.

The press coverage surrounding the attack in Woolwich has been focused strongly on the religious beliefs of Michael Adebolajo, who has identified himself as Muslim. In the video of his speech shortly after the attacks what he is saying is far less shocking than the composure and relatively calm appearance he exudes (considering he has just gruesomely murdered a man). Anyone who is able to adopt such an attitude, verging on sterile, in such circumstances must surely be considered mentally unstable. It seems quite farfetched to suggest a widely followed religious doctrine can be viewed as the sole cause for such acts of violence from individuals like this. The focus of the press should be more on the individual sanity of the attackers and just how they managed to become so indoctrinated with extremism, rather than treating Adebolajo as a mouth piece for the massive Muslim community in the UK. Actual spokespeople for the faith, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, Ramadhan Foundation and the Islamic Society of Britain, have, unsurprisingly, all condemned the actions.

Despite all of these truths, the stigma of extremism continues to stick to Islam. What is even more distressing is that recent and previous statistics continue to show that far more Muslims are victims of acts of terrorism than any other group. The Global Terrorism index from 2002-2011 shows that no Western nations come close to placing in the top ten of those countries worst-affected by terrorism, yet Islamic countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan feature in the top five. There is almost a cruel irony to Muslims being blamed and identified with something from which they feel the most negative consequences. The sad truth is that the British population are more interested in the extremely rare attacks that occur on their doorstep, rather than the far more pressing and frequents ones that occur on the other side of the world.

The very fact we now have a term for Muslim hate crimes draws a worrying parallel to the dangerous anti-Semitic events that occurred seventy years ago at the hands of a psychopath. There are organisations here on British soil which create cause for concern. The English Defence League, at the time of publication, has 136 thousand likes on Facebook and continues to actively target and blame Muslims for these attacks and other domestic problems. The British National Party organised a march on the 1^st June to protest against Islam. In such difficult times for the country there is a worrying likelihood of these organisations increasing in popularity and by extension power.

Islamophobia in the United Kingdom will only disappear when British Muslims are properly accepted as citizens and not viewed as foreign and dangerously different. More needs to be done in the area of education, but not much will change until the media become less concerned with whom these extremists relate themselves to and instead begin to consider how human beings can be led so astray.

Rory Morgan, Online Books Editor

Mantel vs. Middleton

Following Devon author Hilary Mantel’s comments regarding Kate Middleton, Imogen Watson evaluates the public outcy and calls for a closer look at the context.

Lambasted? Newspapers across the country have leapt to the Duchess’s defence. Picture credits: thesoduke

You can hardly have missed the furore over author Hilary Mantel’s comments about the Duchess of Cambridge, previously Kate Middleton. Newspapers across the country have leapt to the Duchess’s defence; the vast majority lambasting Mantel for the unfavourable descriptions of Kate quoted in a voiced extract on BBC Radio Four.

Well what did she say? In Mantel’s speech, she described the Duchess as, ‘as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character’ and ‘precision-made’, before going on to compare her with both Marie Antoinette and Henry VIII’s famous second wife, and mother of Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn.

But that appears to be where the newspapers stopped reading. Upon hearing the initial news, I decided to listen to it myself and make my own judgements. I, too, heard only the extract, and deeming that enough also condemned the author as being harsh and completely unfair. It was the Prime Minister who sent me running in the direction of a transcript. Because David Cameron waded into the whole affair, I thought it time to give the full version of the speech the benefit of the doubt. Where there’s a quote, there’s a context.

And indeed there is, and it is one largely ignored by the media at large. When the speech is read as a whole, something I recommend you do if you are at all interested, Hilary Mantel is making an argument related to the British public’s relationship with the monarchy: the tendency to watch their every move, every decision, every appearance, to examine their actions in comparison with others’, or even to an extent, to idolise them.

The speech itself is called “Hilary Mantel on Royal Bodies”. It is perhaps a fair point – as she says, even BBC News devoted time specifically to how a pregnant woman may or may not be able to walk in high-heeled shoes. She discusses Kate in comparison to the widely-held perspectives of her husband’s generally beloved mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales to make a point – a comparison of another future wife of a King.  It is wise to point out that the speech is not a fully-fledged review of Kate. Mantel also discusses her impressions of the Queen on a visit to Buckingham Palace. It makes for interesting reading, whether you agree or not.

Not just a Royal because of the official portrait, Kate was compared to both Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette by Mantel. Picture credits: The British Monarchy

Arguably, the point could not have been made without the strength of choosing such words as Hilary Mantel did to talk about Kate. However, point or no point, the criticisms of the Duchess of Cambridge are unkind and unwarranted. For someone who is so well-liked, of course the comments came out of the blue. No one, especially not Kate, deserves to be accused of having a ‘perfect plastic smile’, or being ‘designed by a committee’.  Of course marrying into the Royal Family brings a certain unfortunate inevitability of attacks and a certain required openness towards criticism but a cause is usually a prerequisite.

At the same time, in this age of twenty-four hour instant news, media outlets appear to feel unable to take some time to do research in order to get to the bottom, in case of being left behind in the race towards a “scoop”, and that is just irresponsible. The comments were unfair on the Duchess, but by enlarging the comments beyond what they were without any perspective in terms of the speech the news was also reported unfairly, and that simply helps no one involved in the story. Question what you read, and what you hear – therein lies the difference.