Empires of the Mind
Page 27
The military and religious prowess of Salafist fighters had a powerful influence on a small minority of Muslim youth who had difficulties integrating into European society and who criticised France and Great Britain for their violent interventions against Muslim populations from Iraq to Libya and Somalia and for their support of Israel against Palestinians. In the French case the Algerian War and civil war of the 1990s was also carried into the metropolis. Mohammed Merah was born in a Toulouse suburb in 1988 to a family which had migrated from Algeria in 1981 and were fanatical supporters of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). His parents divorced when he was five and Mohammed followed the example of his older brother Abdel Kader, who was imprisoned in 2003 and converted to Salafism by fellow Muslim prisoners. Excluded by French society Mohammed also went to prison and converted to Salafism in 2008. In 2010 he followed Abdel Kader to Egypt, travelling on to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2011, hoping to make contact with al-Qaeda, but without success. Back in France, on 11 and 15 March 2012 he killed two French soldiers of North African origin and one of Guadalupian origin in Montauban and Toulouse, shouting ‘That’s Islam, brother. You kill my brothers, I kill you’. Merah then killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school on 19 March before he was shot by police after a siege in Toulouse on 22 March 2012.13
Nine months later, in December 2012, Mehdi Nemmouche was released from prison in Toulouse. Of Algerian harki origin, born in the northern industrial town of Roubaix in 1985 and brought up in care, he became a petty criminal and spent five years in prison from 2007. There he was converted to Islam and on leaving prison went to the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, which incubated many jihadists, and flew to join ISIS in Syria. The prisoner Nemmouche became a gaoler, standing guard over two French journalists taken hostage in June 2013 by ISIS.14 Nemmouche returned to Europe and on 24 May 2014 attacked the Jewish Museum in Brussels, killing four people, including two Israeli tourists.
Gaolers working for ISIS were also recruited in Britain. Mohammed Enwazi was born to an Iraqi family in Kuwait in 1988 and came with them to the United Kingdom in 1994. He was brought up in West London and graduated from the University of Westminster in 2009 with a 2/2 in Information Systems and Business Management. In 2006 he travelled to Somalia to join up with al-Shabab, a jihadist organisation linked to al-Qaeda. When he tried to repeat this after graduation he was arrested and interrogated by British police. Later in Syria he became notorious as Jihadi John. Michael Adebolajo, a British citizen of Nigerian origin, was brought up a Christian but converted to Islam at the time of the Iraq War in 2003. In 2010 he also attempted to join al-Shabab in Somalia but was arrested in Kenya and sent back to Britain. On 22 May 2013, claiming to be exacting punishment for British attacks on Muslims, he attacked and killed an off-duty soldier, Fusilier Liam Rigby, who was returning to the Royal Artillery Barracks at Woolwich.
These murders helped to crystallise a discourse that had been developing for some time. This argued that terrorism was overwhelmingly the result of Islamic extremism and that it was present not only in Iraq, Syria and North Africa but on the streets of France, Belgium and Britain. It was used to demonstrate that radicalised youth were only the sharp end of the broader problem. Immigrant populations, especially those of Muslim origin, had failed to integrate and also failed to stop their young people becoming radicalised. Immigrants were increasingly denounced as ‘illegal immigrants’ who had no right to stay and should be deported. The urgent priority was to defend the interests and identity of the French and British people.
In a speech delivered in Munich on 5 February 2011 David Cameron argued that there was a link between ‘an ideology, Islamic extremism’, which produced terrorists, and the problem that
young men […] find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream […] We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.15
A dual response to this was necessary. On the one hand, British values must be clearly defined and immigrant communities required to adhere to them. On the other hand, much tougher measures must be adopted to prevent the radicalisation of young people, especially young men, into terrorist activity. The death of Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011 seemed a good moment to take these measures and in June 2011, Home Secretary Theresa May announced her Prevent Strategy:
Osama bin Laden may be dead, but the threat from Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism is not. […] That threat comes both from foreign nationals and terrorists born and bred in Britain. To tackle that threat – as the Prime Minister made clear in his speech in Munich earlier this year – we must not only arrest and prosecute those who breach the law, but we must also stop people being drawn into terrorist-related activity in the first place […] Our new Prevent Strategy will challenge extremist ideology, help protect institutions from extremists and tackle the radicalisation of vulnerable people.16
A further challenge to multiculturalism was delivered by the riots of August 2011 that swept the suburbs of London, Handsworth in Birmingham and other run-down areas with high levels of immigrant populations, unemployment and social deprivation. Triggered by the police shooting of a mixed-race Briton, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham on 4 August 2011, the riots demonstrated that problems of integration affected not only Muslim minorities but black communities which still experienced exclusion and victimisation.17 However, rather than engage with this kind of debate, David Cameron attacked the rioters as ‘feral’ and criminal while Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips took the opportunity to denounce ‘the disaster of multiculturalism – the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was “racist”’; ‘children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture’.18
The response of politicians and much of the press to these challenges was not to seek to understand them but rather to ramp up social fears and to scapegoat minorities. British Pakistani Sayeeda Warsi, who served as minister of state for faith and communities in the Cameron government, recalled that after the Lee Rigby murder, ‘We didn’t discuss the two terrorists, their profile, their history […] We didn’t even take on board their own reasons, the words they spoke after the attack, or the note Adebolajo handed over as an explanation.’19 Fear of terrorism was increased by the rise in refugees from Libya, Syria and Iraq from a million in March 2013, to two million in September 2013, half of them children, of whom a minority made attempts to reach safety in Europe, travelling by flimsy and overcrowded boats from Turkey to Greece or from Libya to Italy. However, rather than being recognised as asylum seekers from intolerable war zones, these refugees were attacked in the press as ‘illegal’ immigrants, who harboured criminals or terrorists in their midst, threatening the security, prosperity and identity of the home countries. Among the migrants Muslims were singled out as a particular threat, not least to whip up antagonism and fear. ‘You know there’s nothing better than a Muslim asylum seeker’, said one British journalist off the record, ‘that’s a sort of jackpot I suppose […] It’s very much the cartoon baddy, the caricature […] All social ills can be traced back to immigrants and asylum seekers flooding into this country.’20
Theresa May made the most of this in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference on 30 September 2013. She cited the Lee Rigby murder as a case of ‘international terrorism’ and argued that his killers wanted to ‘start a war in London’. She sought approval for her treatment of ‘foreign criminals’ such as Abu Hamza, extradited to the United States on 5 October 2012, and Abu Qatada, deported to Jordan on 7 July 2013. She then related these cases to the question of illegal immigrants, who were deemed to be no better than ‘foreign criminals’. As for foreign students, ‘many of these people weren’t students at all’. A n
ew Immigration Act was promised which would stop illegal immigrants accessing jobs, housing or the NHS, and make it easier to deport them. This deliberately created a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants, who all fell under some kind of suspicion. Their numbers must be cut and their life-chances diminished in order to protect the interests of the British people.
It is a simple question of fairness. Because it’s not the rich who lose out when immigration is out of control, it’s people who work hard for a modest wage. They’re the people who live in communities that struggle to deal with sudden social changes, who rely on public services that can’t cope with demand, who lose out on jobs and have their wages forced down when immigration is too high. Only the Conservatives can be trusted to control immigration. Only the Conservatives can be trusted to get tough on crime. And only the Conservatives can be trusted to be fair for the hard-working, law-abiding majority […] Let’s remember that we share the values of the British people.21
Who, though, were the ‘British people’? After a brief flirtation with Britain as a multicultural society, there was a general retreat to a monocultural version of British national identity which did not include but excluded minorities. This was explained by Jamaican-born and Oxford-educated cultural theorist Stuart Hall as a response to the decline of empire and to the challenge of immigration. He observed that in this context ‘Englishness can feel more fragile, beleaguered and defensive than it once did’, and that defensiveness led to the stigmatisation and marginalisation of those who could not or would not adhere to it.22
In 2014 the question of ‘British values’ was returned to by David Cameron. These were never clearly defined but it was presumed that they would be immediately recognised as common sense by people who identified as British while being alien to those who did not. These values, he claimed, writing in The Mail on Sunday on 15 June 2014, had been invented in Britain and exported to the rest of the world on the wings of empire.
We should be proud of what Britain has done to defend freedom and develop these institutions – Parliamentary democracy, a free press, the rule of law – that are so essential for people all over the world. This is the country that helped fight fascism, topple communism and abolish slavery; we invented the steam engine, the light bulb, the internet; and we also gave so much of the world the way of life that they hold so dear. As President Obama put it when he addressed MPs and peers in Parliament, ‘What began on this island would inspire millions throughout the continent of Europe and across the world.’23
The exclusiveness of these British values did not go uncontested. Sayeeda Warsi, who resigned from the Cameron government in August 2014, described them as ‘the space where we police views and thoughts, and we punish opinions which do not break the law’. They were a ‘loyalty test’ to demonstrate to Muslims that ‘they didn’t match up to our “British values”: they didn’t belong’. Their very vagueness allowed for responses that divided those who defined as British from immigrants. When schoolchildren were asked what ‘British values’ meant, said Warsi, they answered ‘fish and chips’, ‘drinking tea’, ‘celebrating the Queen’s birthday’ and ‘we need to get rid of these immigrants, they’re taking our jobs’.24
Regardless, Cameron returned to the subject in a Birmingham school in July 2015, underlining even more strongly the exclusiveness of British values and denouncing the failed project of multiculturalism.
For all our successes as multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here. Indeed, there is a danger in some of our communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths and backgrounds.25
‘British values’ were a way of testing and policing immigrant communities and imposing the code of the former coloniser on the formerly colonised, as Kieran Yates, a young British writer of Punjabi origin, pointed out.
The message was clear: either you’re on the side of Britain, of how we think, act and live, or you’re against it. It’s hard not to see that language as divisive. As a result, it’s sort of become a buzzword for proving your allegiance to British identity, whatever that might mean. We should challenge that idea and make the point that British immigrant identities are great and funny and important to the social and cultural fabric. Who we are and what we value need to be visible.26
The instruction in British values was accompanied by a new syllabus on the teaching of British history. This was to tell a single, continuous history of the nation from the earliest times, highlighting national sovereignty and empire. In October 2010 Education Secretary Michael Gove told the Conservative Party Conference that
The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well, this trashing of our past has to stop.27
Gove chaired a committee that rewrote the national curriculum and prescribed that pupils aged 11 to 14 should ‘know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world’.28 The credo was reprised by David Starkey, speaking to a teachers’ conference in 2011. He argued that the continuous history of the British people was also that of the white British: ‘Britain is a white mono-culture and schools should focus on our own history.’29
This conflation of continuity, oneness and whiteness which deliberately excluded non-white peoples, whether abroad or at home, was brilliantly critiqued by Stuart Hall, who explained that:
Whiteness remains a signifier of a particular unique and uninterrupted progressive history, an advanced civilization crowned by a worldwide imperium. We are this because they are not. ‘They’, the blacks in our history, become the constitutive outside of this national story […] And yet, this fantasy of a return to a reconstituted ‘oneness’ and to the elimination of difference, tends not to unify, heal and resolve but, on the contrary, it releases pathological impulses.30
Despite the constraints of the new syllabus, ways around it were found by a small number of academics and teachers committed to history as a way to integrate diversity and multiculturalism. Professors Claire Alexander and Joya Chatterji had completed a project called Bangla.stories, based on interviews with Bengali Muslims caught up in the 1947 Partition, the Bangladesh War of Liberation and migration to Britain.31 ‘Who and what’, they asked, ‘are included in “British history” and who or what are excluded? How does “our island story” engage with centuries of migration to and from its shores? […] Our island story is necessarily a globalized one, and has always been, and Britain itself has always been, ethnically, culturally and socially diverse.’32 In 2014 they pioneered a ‘History Lessons’ project among schoolchildren in multi-ethnic cities – London, Manchester, Leicester, Sheffield and Cardiff. In their own families, in the classroom, on guided walks in the neighbourhood and in local museums the children explored stories of immigration. With the help of teachers, museum staff and film-makers they discovered histories that brought to life global trade, industry, empire, slavery, immigration and diversity. Far from being excluded from a monocultural national history, one London teacher reflected at the end of the project, children whose families came from overseas ‘can see themselves reflected back in the history classroom’.33
In France too, the challenges of jihadism and immigration were reinforcing a monocultural, anti-Islamist nationalism. Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints, first published in 1973 and which foretold an armada of a thousand ships and a million migrants landing on the south coast of France, was republished in 2011 with a preface entitled ‘Big Other’. This argued that Islam was a threat but was ‘only the most organised and determined component of the subme
rsion’ that was threatening native French people (les Français de souche). ‘The most exotic ethnic groups, tribes and nationalities are banging on our gates and when they have forced them their heritage is assured.’ By 2050, he predicted, over 50 per cent of those living in France would be of extra-European origin and the only alternatives were a ‘clash’ or ‘a sort of Reconquista’.34 This book was the favourite reading of Front National leader Marine Le Pen, who recommended it to her supporters in 2015, and of Steve Bannon, co-founder of Breitbart News and chief strategist of Donald Trump.35 In response to these immigration fears an organisation of French youth called Génération Identitaire, formed in September 2012, declared that it was ‘the barricade manned by young people fighting for their identity’.36 Meanwhile another veteran reactionary, Renaud Camus, published Le Grand Remplacement, which issued the same warning that the French people were being ‘replaced’ by immigrants.37 He gave a speech on 4 November 2012 at Orange in France in which he praised the courage and patriotism of these young people who the previous month had occupied the roof of a mosque being built in Poitiers, refighting the 732 Battle of Poitiers in which Charles Martel had checked the advance of the Muslim armies and thus achieved mythic status.38
The new socialist regime of François Hollande, elected president of the Republic on 6 May 2012, had to deal with these questions of jihadism, immigration, empire and French national identity. On 15 May 2012, the day of his inauguration, Hollande paid a visit to the statue of Jules Ferry in the Tuileries Gardens. Ferry was the architect in 1881–2 of free, compulsory lay education up to the age of 13 in the schools of the Republic, but he also presided over the expansion of the French Empire into Tunisia and Indo-China, and this had to be addressed in a progressive France. ‘Every man is fallible’, said Hollande of Ferry. ‘I am not forgetting some of his political mistakes. His defence of colonisation was a moral and political error and, as such, must be condemned.’39