“We sat and wept”, said the leader of the Somali Bravanese community to Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of the New North London Synagogue after a fire burned to the ground the al-Rahma Islamic Centre that had been used for prayers, celebrations and educating children.
It is not just the Somali Bravanese Muslims of Muswell Hill who are the victims of this suspected hate crime, but all British Muslims who experience fear and intimidation when their religious community is the target of violence. Hate crimes also undermine the sense of safety, security and belonging of all racial and religious minorities, such as Sikhs, Hindus and Jews.
But in this particular case, fear was quickly replaced by calm. Abubakar Ali of the al-Rahma centre was overwhelmed by the support he received from the rest of the local community: “When it [the fire] started I was shocked. I was emotional. But when I saw the crowds yesterday I was relieved and I was happy. It gave me assurances I have family, friends, neighbours – everyone was behind us.”
The importance of this immediate support by local synagogues and Jewish groups cannot be overstated: it challenges popular assumptions of intractable tensions between British Muslims and Jews. It is important for Muslims and Jews to form alliances because as non-Christian monotheistic religious minorities they face similar forms of prejudice.
British Jews have a long history of experiencing state-sponsored persecution, violence and expulsion that is more extreme than the contemporary situation facing Muslims in Britain. Nevertheless, Muslims can learn important lessons from the extensive experience of British Jews in their fight against racism. The Community Security Trust (CST), which safeguards British Jews, was set up as Jewish voluntary community group without public funding, at a time when the criminal law, the police and statutory agencies did not prioritise the fight against violent racism. The CST has generously shared its experience with other racial and religious minorities, including most recently the newly formed Mama Project (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) that records anti-Muslim attacks, provides community-based advice and supports victims.
What exactly can Muslim communities fighting racism learn from British Jews? The experience of the CST confirms that a strategy has to involve three stakeholders: the individual, the community, and statutory agencies. First, therefore, it is important to build individual confidence among Muslims that encourages them to report rather than endure anti-Muslim hatred. Even minor incidents, such as name-calling on Twitter, should be reported.
Second, community groups such as Mama need support because they are uniquely placed to build trust and respond sensitively. Third, individuals and community groups should work constructively with the police and statutory agencies.
These days, the police are better placed to safeguard Muslims than they were in the past, since hate crimes now cover religion as well as race, and post-Stephen Lawrence policing reforms ensure a greater (albeit not optimal) institutional capacity to fight hate crimes and support victims.
Some suggest that it is safer for ethnic minorities to take the protection and policing of their communities into their own hands – the plans of the jihadist gang jailed for plotting to bomb an EDL rally seems to stem in part from that kind of flawed logic. If the EDL continues as an anti-Muslim “street movement”, the police must stop the cycle of violent retaliation between extremist groups. This requires strengthening links between statutory agencies and local Muslim organisations that have deep roots and legitimacy in their communities. More generally, those who argue for self-policing underestimate the resources needed to fight racism. Moreover, it is not realistic to expect Muslims, an economically deprived and socially excluded group, to have the internal resources to record incidents, support victims or tackle jihadists. Community-based initiatives such as Mama, valuable though they are, cannot replace the work of national statutory agencies, especially for Muslim communities.
Still, tackling hate crimes in an age of austerity and cuts to police budgets will be challenging. Lynne Featherstone MP set out the coalition government’s approach in the 2012 report Challenge it, Report it, Stop it: the Government’s Plan to Tackle Hate Crime. Featherstone’s approach shifted the lead for tackling hate crimes from national statutory agencies to the “local level with professionals, the voluntary sector and communities”. This “deregulation” of hate crime initiatives, at the same time as cutting police budgets, will leave not only Muslims but all citizens vulnerable. It is tantamount to the government trying to extricate itself from the responsibility for recording and tackling extremist hate crime altogether: not only the acts of violent racists who target Muslims but also those jihadists who target white communities.
In the face of the visceral hatred of both the EDL and jihadists, co-operation between Jews and Muslims remains especially important. Although there is no simple relationship between antisemitism and anti-Muslim prejudice, both racisms as well as jihadism share a common feature: they are an attack on our democratic values of tolerance, equality and solidarity. This also explains why antisemitism in the Muslim community, and anti-Muslim prejudice in the Jewish community, are not only wrong in principle but they are also ultimately a self-defeating “own goal”. The spectacle of Muslims repeating anti-Jewish conspiracy theories or Jews disseminating narratives about a Muslim plot to seize control and establish “Londonistan” is like watching turkeys vote for Christmas.
The Jewish experience also provides an important clue about wider ethical responsibility for racism against British Muslims. It is true that many of the perpetrators of racism are young, white, working-class men. Yet, it is also true that the rhetoric of anti-Muslim prejudice was not created by young, white, working-class men in a pub in Muswell Hill. EDL leader Tommy Robinson’s words on Radio 4′s Today programme may have jarred with polite sensibilities, but they were a version of crude, false generalizations about Muslims, sharia and Islam that are commonplace throughout the British media. Just as in the past it was often the educated literati who were responsible for creating a false identity about British Jews that led to their persecution, the originators of anti-Muslim prejudice in the present have largely been educated political and media elites rather than white working-class men. These elites are the wider perpetrator community who provide the legitimating discourse and language for violent racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment