This post is prompted by David Cameron’s
recent speech
setting out a new agenda on addressing the threat of Islamist violent
extremism, and also by the recent launch of a whole series of “counter-jihadi”
initiatives on the British right, including the planning of a Mohammed cartoon
exhibition in London in September. The latter has been the subject of a
report
by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate (HnH). My friend Sarah made some
sympathetic
criticisms of that report at Harry’s Place, for which she got some
sharp
criticism on Twitter. This whole topic is one which frequently inflames
irrational passions and generates more heat than light. This post, therefore,
is an attempt to set out a series of propositions on these issues as an attempt
to cut through some of the hysteria. I
didn’t mean for it to get so long!
“Extremism” is not a
helpful framing of the problem
Cameron frames his approach to Islamism in terms of the
wider generic problem of “extremism”, noting that Islamism is just one of many
forms of “extremism”, along with that of the far right. Cameron is right to
note that other ideologies constitute a threat, and there are certain
similarities between the Islamist far right and the British nationalist far
right. However, the term “extremism” creates more confusion than it solves,
especially when the border between extremism and terrorism is blurred, as it
was in Cameron’s speech, and in fact can do damage.
The idea of “extremism” implicitly contrasts these
ideologies to the “normal”, acceptable politics of the centre ground, of the
mainstream status quo. The concept of “extremism” criminalises the desire for
change. It stops us from looking carefully and critically at the ideologies
caught in its remit – which closes down debate, imagination and criticism, and
stops us from engaging “extremist” ideologies and challenging them politically.
The concept of “extremism” can make minor, marginal ideologies seem more
dangerous than they often are – and therefore can sometimes make them seem
glamourous and exciting.
We know from history that the rubric of “extremism” is most
often used against the left. In recent decades, for example, we have seen huge
amount of resources put into
the
policing and surveillance of left-wing politics, with undercover police
officers inserted into ecological,
anti-fascist
and anti-racist movements, sowing havoc and
ruining
lives. Anti-capitalist groups like Occupy are
lumped
together with al-Qaeda and the IRA in the category of “
domestic
extremism”. The language of the
guidance
on extremism given to universities effectively means that not just jihadism but
also anarchism should be excluded from such institutions. We have seen the
infiltration and disruption of the campaigns led by the families of victims of
racist violence, such as
Stephen
Lawrence’s; collusion in the
blacklisting
of union activists; and acts of
provocation
to push non-violent activists into criminal activity.
Cameron is wrong to
think that extremism in general is a conveyer belt to violent extremism and
terror
Cameron claims that “many [terrorists] were first influenced
by what some would call non-violent extremists”; Islamism, he says, “has often
sucked people in from non-violence to violence”. This is true, as far is at
goes, but it is also true that most followers
of “non-violent” extremism do not get
“sucked” to jihadist violence, just as most
anti-immigrant racists and casual antisemites do not get “sucked” to violent fascism. Not making that clear is
problematic.
The evidence-based blogger Anonymous Mugwump has
collated
all of the research showing very conclusively that there is no necessary or
straightforward step from extremism to violent extremism, no single pathway
from Islamism to terrorism; his case is pretty conclusive.
(Cameron’s mistaken emphasis on this connection is probably
due to the emphasis on the government’s thinking of the thinktank Quilliam, who
have long argued, with little evidential basis, that extremism in general leads
to violent extremism in particular – although their position, as Amjad Khan argues
here,
is more subtle than Cameron’s: non-violent extremism, they say, provides the “mood
music” for terrorism.)
As Anonymous Mugwump notes, there may well be good reasons
to oppose some forms of non-violent extremism – but its connection to terrorism
is not one of them. The category of non-violent extremism is basically a form
of “pre-crime” or thought crime; making it into a security issue is dangerous
because it criminalises beliefs that are not in fact criminally dangerous; it
is a licence for authoritarian over-policing, for policing without the consent
of communities. As I will argue more fully below, while terrorism is a policing
issue, non-violent Islamism is a political
issue, which should be challenged politically, by all of us – citizens,
communities – and not from above by the state.
Cameron is broadly right
to highlight ideology over “root causes”
It is a shibboleth of many liberals and leftists that
terrorism can be explained through “root causes” such as Western imperialism
and foreign policy, or the socio-economic disadvantage of Muslim communities. (Leftists and liberals rarely look for “root
causes” to explain fascism, UKIP support or voting Tory; fascists and xenophobes
are usually dismissed as malevolent or stupid. Why is Islamism unique among far
right ideologies in needing explanation through root causes?)
The late Norman Geras regularly exposed the folly of
root
causism and the
blowback
theory. Cameron echoes Norm in noting that 9/11 came before the Iraq war
and that it is often the most rather than least advantaged who engage in
terrorism, demonstrating that it is the ideology itself, not deprivation or
foreign policy, that is the central explanatory factor. Anonymous Mugwump has
summed up much of the literature refuting blowback theory too (
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here),
and Futile Democracy has
made
some similar points, pointing out how long before 2002 Islamism’s commitment to
violence can be dated.
So, Cameron is broadly right here. He is too quick, though,
to eliminate the possibility that Western policy has any role in driving terror: surely it is possible that Western
intervention can trigger terrorist
vengeance even it does not cause it,
or that narratives which highlight Western intervention might be used by
jihadists to recruit converts? (An analogy would be Israel’s actions and
antisemitic incidents, or Islamist terrorism and anti-Muslim hate crime: the
former trigger the latter but are not
the cause, because for the trigger to
work there needs to already be an ideological matrix which blames Israel’s
actions on all Jews, terrorist actions on all Muslims – or Western intervention
on all Westerners.)
Cameron points to
some of the right reasons Islamist ideologies are attractive
Focusing on the ideology not the “root causes” does not
absolve us from trying to understand why
the ideology appeals. Cameron’s explanation of the appeal is incoherent,
but hits some of the right notes. The lust for adventure, the desire for
identity, a sense of injustice, compassion for suffering members of the ummah
and the pleasure of moral certainty are certainly part of the appeal.
And Cameron gestures towards these. Jihadism, he says, “can offer [young people] a
sense of belonging that they can lack here at home” – while “racism,
discrimination or sickening Islamophobia” lead them to believe there is no
place for them in Britain. (Left-wing critics of Cameron, such as
Nafeez
Ahmed, seem to have completely missed this large section of the speech.)
Cameron is right to
downplay grievances but wrong to dismiss them altogether
As I already noted, Cameron is wrong to refuse the
possibility that there’s some connection between foreign policy or
socio-economic context and terrorism. The right way to frame this, in my view,
is through the category of perceived
grievance. Perceived grievance clearly contributes to the appeal of radical
responses.
Perceived grievances sometimes have no basis in truth (there is no
Western war on Muslims; Jews and Zionists do not control Britain). Some grievances involve a mix of fact and
fantasy (the Iraq war has some questionable motives as well as some good ones,
and lots of people died because of it). Other grievances a firm basis in truth
(Islamophobia is pandemic in modern
Europe; Muslims do experience some
discrimination in the labour market; Assad is
slaughtering Sunni Muslims).
In this sense, the Islamist appeal to British Muslims
mirrors the appeal of UKIP or the far right to some other British people.
Immigration and terrorism does not cause or
“provoke” xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry, but the mixture of real and
imagined grievances accumulating around migration and Islam contributes to the
appeal. If we recognise the role of grievance in driving Islamism (as the left
does), we also need to recognise (as the left refuses to do) its role in
driving right-wing ideology too.
Cameron is right to
emphasise antisemitism and conspiricism in the Islamist mix
Cameron put a surprising amount of emphasis in his speech on
antisemitism and conspiracy theories. I think he was right to do so, for two reasons.
First, because
conspirationism
and antisemitic memes are behind the false narratives in many of the
perceived grievances promoted by Islamist ideology. And second because
antisemitism, or more specifically the shift in gear from casual everyday
antisemitism to an ideologically committed antisemitic worldview, typically
marks
the shift from softer sympathy with Islamism to the kinds of Islamist
ideology most likely to generate terrorism.
(We can see something similar on the far right, both with
antisemitism, which remains the esoteric core of fascist ideology even as
anti-Muslim bigotry becomes a more prominent part of the public appeal, and
with Islamophobia as new far right groups move beyond soft anti-Muslim bigotry
to a full scale, paranoid conspiricist and civilisationist anti-Islamic
ideological worldview.)
Cameron is wrong to
think that failed integration is a driver of extremism
The Islamist appeal to forms of everyday antisemitism that
are wired into British society at large is a good example of how “failed
integration” is the wrong frame for understanding extremism. Many of the
ingredients of Islamism – e.g. anti-Americanism, misogyny, homophobia – are not
unique to Islamism but float around in mainstream society. The humanitarian
impulse that says we must do something about
the suffering of the children of Gaza or Syria is not profoundly un-British
either.
And so it is not surprising that recruits to jihad are not
the least “integrated” of British Muslims, but often the most integrated – including converts. They are English-speaking,
British-educated, often high achieving, often from comfortable socio-economic
backgrounds, on the surface indistinguishable from their non-jihadi peers.
Very few come from the tiny handful of places in Britain
that could be thought of as de facto segregated communities; there are no
all-Muslim ghettos in Portsmouth, Southampton, Brighton, Cardiff or
Lewisham,
to name some of the places where jihadist cells have operated. (I have made
that argument before,
here.)
Young people who turn to radical Wahhabi or Salafi faith or
to political Islam are often doing so in rebellion against their parents’ or
grandparents’ conservative Sufi or Barelvi practices. They go to
English-speaking mosques to get out of Urdu-speaking mosques. They prefer the
multi-ethnic solidarity of jihad to the restrictive ties of ethnic community.
Cameron is right to
care about issues such as FGM and forced marriage, but wrong to link to
Islamism
“Failed integration”, where it exists, might be a problem,
then, but it is not the problem of jihad. Practices such as forced marriage and
female genital mutilation are problems which need to be fought vigorously, but
they are problems that flourish in completely different contexts than those in
which jihadi ideology flourishes. FGM and forced marriage are issues of
patriarchy and cultural –conservatism driven by elders in particular
micro-communities, exactly the cultural conservatism jihadi youth seek to
escape.
By associating these kinds of practices (which are cultural
and not religious, and found among some Muslim ethnic groups and not others)
with jihad, Cameron is helping to sustain a false idea of a generic “Muslim” problem,
rather than thinking seriously about how to combat jihadi ideology. (And in
doing so, of course, sustains the
perceived grievance of a “war on Muslims” that jihadist promote to broaden
their appeal.)
Islamism and the far
right are both dangers, but are not equivalents
The narrative of generic “extremism”, including both the far
right and jihadis, at war with our British mainstream sometimes shades in to
thinking of these different “extremisms” as equivalent to each other. (For
instance, the HnH
report
describes the counter-jihadists as “as dangerous as the Islamists they claim to
dislike” (p.2).) There
are some ways
in which the far right and Islamism do mirror or feed off each other. This is
most obvious with the relationship between the EDL (and its offshoots) and
Anjem Chaudhary’s outfit, locked in a childish cycle of media-amplified
face-offs. But we shouldn’t be too quick to equate the two sides.
Like Islamism, the far right is a very heterogeneous
formation. At its softer end, it blurs with a kind of xenophobic authoritarian
populism which is actually quite mainstream in our political culture. At its
far end, the kind of hardcore Nazism of a Joshua Bonehill is extremely marginal
in its threat or appeal.
Instances of actual violence and terrorism have come from
various points on this spectrum, as I discussed
here.
The new CST
report
on antisemitic incidents in 2015
shows that suggests that the far right remain much more prominent
as known perpetrators than Islamism (122 incidents involved far right
discourse; 16 involved Islamist discourse). And, to use Quilliam’s language,
figures like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon provide the “mood music” for the disturbing
(and growing) number of anti-Muslim attacks on Britain’s streets. So, the far
right
is a threat.
But is it equivalent
to the Islamist threat, as Hope not Hate and others suggest? I don’t think so,
for two reasons. First, the British far right recruits from a fairly large population
of angry white males – but only manages to recruit a tiny proportion of them.
The toxicity of the fascist brand in this constituency keeps it marginal (for
now). Islamism, in contrast, has a much smaller pool to recruit from, but its
appeal seems to be more successful in that constituency. For example, you’re
unlikely to join a student Islamic society without coming into contact with
hardcore jihadist views, whereas the British nationalist far right is actually
quite hard to join.
Second, I think that only at the most extreme end of the
spectrum does violence become a
central
part of far right ideology – whereas the message of military jihad is central
not just to the most extreme jihadists. As Amjad Khan recently wrote, allegedly
“non-violent extremists” such as Hisb-ut-Tahrir
do believe in a caliphate and a war of offensive jihad, and justify
terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The centrality of jihad to a broad
spectrum of Islamists is the danger of terrorism follows more often (even if
not automatically) from the prevalence of Islamism than from the prevalence of
the far right. Hence all but the most hardcore on the far right disavow the likes
of Breivik and Dylann Roof, while quite broad a broad swathe of Islamist
opinion apologise for, defend or even applaud their Breiviks and Roofs (to give
just two examples,
Cage
describe jihadists as
victims of the British
state, while Cage’s director Moazzam Begg has
recently
argued that as a counterweight to ISIS we should back al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s
franchise in Syria!).
The counter-jihadi
movement is toxic and dangerous
This brings us to the counter-jihad movement, that part of
the far right whose central narrative is threat posed to Western civilisation
by Islam, as described in the
new
HnH report. The counter-jihad movement is not homogeneous, but some of its
themes are: a refusal to distinguish between Muslims and people, Islam as a
faith and Islamism as a politics; an obsession with demographics and
immigration which echo older right-wing themes; a civilisationist discourse, which frames more
or less everything in terms of the epic clash of a decadent Western civilisation
against ascendant Islam; its paranoid, conspiracist worldview in which Islam is
not seen in religious or cultural terms but as a vast co-ordinated secret plot;
and a superficial claim to defend liberal values such as women’s or gay rights
or free speech, which typically doesn’t translate into caring about violations
of these values that come from any source other than Islam.
The counter-jihad movement is toxic and dangerous because it
picks up on real and imagined grievances about Islam and immigration circulating
in mainstream culture and translates them into a fully-formed ideological narrative,
which gives it more reach than the discredited race theories traditional
fascists still cleave to. It is toxic and dangerous because it sees bloody
conflict between the West and Islam as both inevitable and good, thus licensing
both petty and serious hate crimes against Muslims on the streets and even of
terrorist activities such as those of Zack Davies, Pavlo Lapshyn or Ryan McGee.
The counter-jihadi
movement has exactly the wrong strategy for contesting Islamism
Unlike classical fascism, counter-jihadism’s narrative does
contain some elements of the truth. As noted above, Islamism is a clear and present danger, as are illiberal
practices (such as FGM and forced marriage) that exist in some Muslim
populations. But if we’re serious about combating these things,
counter-jihadism takes exactly the wrong approach to doing so.
Using Crusader imagery, flying the George cross, publishing
cartoons of the Prophet fucking goats, getting tanked up on Stella and Charlie
to march through Asian neighbourhoods, muttering about the eclipse of the white
race, demanding bans on halal food – the strategies the counter-jihad movement
uses are far more likely to inflame and entrench Islamist support and to
confirm the grievances Islamists use to recruit.
As I argued above, jihadi terrorism (like far right
terrorism) is a security issue which should be policed as sharply as necessary.
But non-terrorist Islamism (like fascism in general) is a political problem
that should be combated politically. Combating Islamism means clearly
articulating the values it abhors: intellectual doubt, religious tolerance
(including the right to heresy and apostasy and the right not to believe),
secular public space, sexual freedom, the rights of women and non-heterosexual people,
free expression (including the right to laugh and to offend).
But just as UKIP supporters will never be won over by merely
celebrating multiculturalism, winning potential Islamists to these values
requires more than treating them as catchphrases. Instead, we need to work out
how to articulate them in credible and imaginative ways; we need to show we are
prepared for dialogue not just to lecture; we need to show willingness to take
seriously the grievances that Islamism latches on to. And, crucially, we need
to find credible, trusted voices to articulate them.
Cameron is right that
some Muslim voices are drowning out others
The issue of credible, trusted voices is vital. Cameron is
right that some of the least welcome voices are too loud in the Muslim public
sphere.
Malignant
and
unrepresentative “community
leaders” are given
too much
airplay both amongst Muslims and in communicating to the wider world.
It would be great instead if, both in Muslim communities and
in mainstream media, we could hear more varied Muslim voices, young Muslim
voices, reforming Muslim voices, feminist Muslim voices. Fortunately, there are
more now than there were a decade ago. Unfortunately, though, the Muslim voices
nurtured by the state tend to lack credibility on the Muslim street – by being selected
and patronised by the establishment undermines their credibility. Unless
radical and reforming representatives actually come from below, then
conservative and “extremist” voices will continue to be heard the loudest.
The free speech
principle has been hijacked by the anti-Muslim right…
Free speech has been one of the themes the counter-jihadi
movement has used extensively. Now, it is true that free speech is increasingly
fragile, that Islamism – and especially Islamist terrorism, such as that against
Charlie Hebdo in Paris – constitutes one
of the gravest of dangers to free speech.
But Islamism is one among many threats – as a quick glance
at
Spiked or
Index on Censorship would tell
you. Yet the likes of Anne-Marie Waters, Douglas Murray or Charlie Klendjian –
let alone the likes of Paul Weston, Jim Dowson or Pamela Geller – rarely if
ever speak out about threats to free speech from any other source. This shows
that their claim to be advocates of free speech is hollow and cynical, a cover
for anti-Muslim racism.
It is commonly said that if you care about free speech you
should care about the free speech of those you oppose the most. Perhaps my
dislike of the far right should not stop me from defending their right to speak
out. Maybe – that does not mean I should approve their actions when they go out
of their way to provide a platform for racism or when their primary intention
is causing offence.
I don’t know if Hope not Hate is right in claiming that
Waters and the other organisers of the Mohammed cartoons exhibition are doing
it to provoke a civil war. But it certainly is a provocative thing to do,
likely to lead to unrest, and unlikely to have any positive impact in politically
challenging Islamism.
…but it doesn’t mean
we should embrace illiberal strategies
Although I see the toon exhibition as malignant and
dangerous, I do not agree with Hope not Hate’s main policy recommendations in
response to it: ban the exhibition and institute better state surveillance of
counter-jihadis. These kinds of strategies are ill-advised for two reasons.
First, they are ineffective in an age when images circulate on social media
whether the exhibition is banned or not – and indeed will be used by the
counter-jihadis to sell their victimhood narrative, the perceived grievance
they use to recruit. Second, bans and policing are authoritarian solutions,
which empower the state. Instead, we should empower communities and citizens by
promoting an adult conversation about the issues, and by promoting alternative,
democratic values.
