The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  We are here today to tell you, quite loud, quite clear, every single Muslim watching this video on YouTube: on 7/7, you got away with killing and maiming British citizens. You got away with it. You better understand that we have built a network from one end of this country to the other end. We will not tolerate it. And the Islamic community will feel the full force of the English Defence League if we see any of our citizens killed, maimed, or hurt on British soil ever again.

  Again, the logic of Yaxley-Lennon’s statement was identical to that of the terrorists he claimed to be contesting: both justify violence against a whole population deemed responsible for the violence of some of its members. After the murder in Woolwich in May 2013 of British soldier Lee Rigby, Yaxley-Lennon’s threat was realized. As the EDL stepped up its street activity around England to capitalize on the incident, the number of racist attacks against Muslims escalated, including arson and bomb attacks on mosques in Grimsby, Muswell Hill, Walsall, and Tipton.21

  Whatever overlaps exist, it would be wrong to see the EDL’s rhetoric of antiextremism as simply a mask for more familiar forms of far Right politics. In fact, its ideology stems as much from the official antiextremist narrative of the war on terror as from the far Right tradition. According to conventional wisdom, the mobilization of far Right groups in Europe has pressured centrist politicians into adopting more xenophobic positions, leading to far Right ideas entering the mainstream. But the example of the EDL suggests the flow of ideology is more in the opposite direction. The EDL is a movement that appropriated the culturalist and reformist discourses of the official war on terror and gave them organizational form on the streets. It took literally the government’s proposition that there is a war on Islamic extremism. It absorbed the notion from the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism program that the enemy in this war is not a few individuals engaged in violence but an ideology embedded in Muslim communities. Likewise, the notion that Muslims can be categorized as extremist or moderate according to their allegiance to Western values was taken from statements of government policy. The repeated ministerial speeches attacking an imagined multiculturalist orthodoxy (most recently Prime Minister David Cameron’s February 2011 speech in Munich) gave the EDL its belief that state multiculturalism is holding back the fight against Muslim extremism. All it adds of its own is the thought that the politicians running the war are too soft and cowardly, still too caught up in multicultural platitudes, to fight it properly, particularly on the home front—the streets of England—where the EDL fills the gap with its own form of militancy.22 In its criticism of the state, the EDL uses the state’s own discourse against it.

  This suggests that appropriate analogies for the EDL can be found not only in traditions of European racist organizing but also in groups such as the anticommunist John Birch Society and Minutemen militia of the 1950s and 1960s, which forged often violent, far Right movements by appropriating official US cold war ideology. They turned it against the government with the accusation that communist infiltration had weakened its willingness to take on the enemy. Just as the activists of the John Birch Society were convinced that the fluoridation of public water was a communist plot (a theory wonderfully mocked in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove), so the EDL bloggers warn of the “creeping shari’a” of halal food being offered on England’s high streets. Conspiracy theory is essential to EDL’s ideology, because only if the government can be presented as secretly in league or complicit with the enemy is there any need for the EDL to fight its own version of the war on terror.

  From Anti-Semitism to Islamophobia

  Postwar British fascism was never just a matter of hating minorities. It was also an ideology that sought to explain and give order to the social dislocation and depredations felt by the working class through a rival narrative to that of the Left. To achieve this, it presented immigration from the Caribbean and Asia as an alien corruption of the purity of the nation, but it paid equal attention to the ruling class that had allowed this to happen, a betrayal which far Right ideology explained with Jewish conspiracy theory. What appeared to be a British ruling class was, in fact, a mirage. Real power lay with the secret Jewish cabal that pulled the strings of international finance, the media, and the revolutionary Left, as supposedly revealed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the document forged by the tsarist secret police that purports to show how Jews manipulated world events to their advantage. While far Right street activism involved racist violence against African Caribbeans and Asians, far Right ideology saw the real problem as lying elsewhere: the Jews and their hidden agenda of destroying national identity by fostering the immigration and mixing of other races. As David Edgar put it in his 1977 analysis of the politics of the National Front (NF), the far Right “blames the Jews for the blacks.”23 Even as popular racism against Asians and African Caribbeans was the means by which young recruits were drawn into the far Right, anti-Semitism remained a necessary ideological component, because only Jews could play the role of the secret source of economic and political power that had weakened and corrupted the nation. To this extent, British fascist parties such as the NF and the BNP were correctly described as Nazi in their ideology.

  Beginning in 1999, the BNP’s new leader, Nick Griffin, embarked on a strategy of downplaying this neo-Nazi legacy. No doubt he still believed Jews secretly controlled the media—as his 1997 pamphlet “Who Are the Mindbenders?” argued—but publicly he tried to remodel the party along the lines of more successful European counterparts, such as the Front National in France, using the language of defending British cultural identity (rather than white racial identity) against a ruling elite that wanted to destroy it through immigration, multiculturalism, and appeasement of the Muslim enemy within. Instead of talk of a Jewish conspiracy, it was about those in power being too “cosmopolitan” to have the real interests of the British people at heart; and Islamic militancy was invoked to illustrate the dangers of immigration, capitalizing on the Islamophobia of post-9/11 Britain. This message, of course, resonated with many voters—it was, after all, little different from what had been shouted from a thousand newspaper columns since 9/11 and echoed in a more genteel form by both Labour and Conservative ministers. After 2001, the narrowing gap between the party’s rhetoric and mainstream discourse meant the BNP was able to dramatically increase its electoral support, winning two seats in the European parliament in 2009 even while its active membership remained dominated by long-standing neo-Nazis and violent racists.

  The significance of this can best be grasped by recalling the BNP’s first election success, in 1993, when Derek Beackon won a seat on the Tower Hamlets council in East London with the slogan “rights for whites.” At the time, his election was considered shocking enough to prompt a mass campaign that united mainstream politics against him, removing him from office the following year. A key part of that campaign was the argument that voting for the Labour Party rather than the BNP was a better way to address the issues people felt angry about, such as the lack of adequate public housing. Beginning in 2003, the BNP had at least ten councilors in office at any one time, with the real possibility of winning control of a borough or city council, such as that of Burnley. But the response of the political mainstream in that decade was rather different from the early 1990s. The Labour Party, having “modernized” from 1994, had lost its credibility as a vehicle for addressing working-class political concerns; activists on doorsteps who wanted to dissuade would-be BNP voters were thus unable to offer a positive alternative. Moreover, the message from mainstream politics and popular newspapers was not that the BNP was fundamentally wrong but that it was exploiting legitimate grievances better addressed by responsible politicians from the major parties. If the best mainstream argument against the BNP was that it was irresponsible, then it was hardly surprising that it attracted substantial support among the large numbers of people who increasingly saw mainstream politics itself as devoid of any moral responsibility.

  The weakness of this
strategy was illustrated when Labour minister Jack Straw debated Nick Griffin on a specially staged edition of the BBC’s Question Time program in 2009. While Griffin himself was discredited by his weird demeanor and incompetence as a rhetorician, Straw was unable to attack the BNP’s actual policies on multiculturalism and immigration. To say precisely what was wrong in principle with the BNP’s racist identity politics would have called into question the way Labour ministers themselves approached these issues. As Gary Younge noted in the Guardian, “Since New Labour’s politics enabled the BNP, it is in no position to disable it.”24 In the last few years, the BNP’s organizing capacity has been severely reduced, firstly by the leaking of its membership list and secondly by the financial burden of defending itself against a legal challenge to its racist membership policy. But these tactics targeted the messenger, not the message, allowing others to pick up where the BNP had left off. As it turned out, the EDL was well placed to do so. It had not organized as a conventional political party and had no formal members, so it was less vulnerable to the tactics that had been partially effective against the BNP. More significantly, the EDL was better able to tailor its ideology to current circumstances, as it owed its outlook to the war on terror. The BNP’s opportunistic exploitation of Islamophobia after 9/11 carried it to a level of electoral support unimaginable in the 1990s. But, by virtue of its core membership, the party remained tethered to the neo-Nazi tradition and so, unlike the EDL, could not fully realize the potential of the post-9/11 context.

  Given anti-Semitism’s centrality to the European far Right of the twentieth century, the EDL’s new relationship to right-wing Zionism is the most striking indicator of its break with conventional fascist ideology. Along with counterparts in other parts of Europe, the EDL not only eschews anti-Semitism but actively embraces militant Zionists in the defense of the West against its Islamist enemy. Historically, the far Right in Europe tended to oppose Israel, for purely anti-Semitic reasons. But the culturalist politics of the war on terror has reversed this position, with Israel seen as a Western bridgehead within enemy territory. In Belgium, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang (VB) party—formed by members of the neo-fascist Vlaams Blok after it was banned in 2004 for promoting racism—has built links with the Israeli right and succeeded in gaining the support of a minority of Antwerp’s Jewish voters. The VB is historically rooted in anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, but nowadays Islamophobia has substituted for anti-Semitism, and its leader, Filip Dewinter, visits Israel to meet right-wing members of the Knesset. In 2005, he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

  Islam is now the No. 1 enemy not only of Europe, but of the entire free world. After communism, the greatest threat to the West is radical fundamentalist Islam. There are already 25–30 million Muslims on Europe’s soil and this becomes a threat. It’s a real Trojan horse. Thus, I think that an alliance is needed between Western Europe and the State of Israel.25

  In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn pioneered a similar new form of far Right politics founded on defending liberal values against Islamification, his own open homosexuality indicating the distinctiveness of this politics from the traditional far Right (an innovation the EDL’s LGBT division later drew on). Fortuyn’s party became the largest on Rotterdam’s council before he was murdered by an animal rights activist in 2002. Geert Wilders, the leader of the third-largest political party in Holland, continued this new form of politics with the Islamophobic video Fitna and his call for a ban on the Qur’an. On his regular visits to Israel, Wilders has called for annexing the entire West Bank and pushing any would-be Palestinian state to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. According to Dutch newspaper reports, he receives substantial funding from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a major artery of the Islamophobia movement in the US.26

  Like Wilders and Dewinter, the EDL highlights its sliver of Jewish support as a badge of postracialism. Its Jewish division made links to far Right Jewish groups in the US, such as the Jewish Task Force, led by Victor Vancier (national chairman in the 1970s of the terrorist Jewish Defense League), and gave it the credibility to forge links with Pamela Geller, the New York–based Islamophobic blogger, and her Stop the Islamization of America group. In September 2010, EDL leaders attended protests in lower Manhattan against the Park51 community center. A month after this visit, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a Tea Party activist who believes that “the Muslim onslaught is at the gates,” came to London to speak at an EDL rally, where he announced: “We will never surrender to the sword of Islam.”27 Around the same time, the EDL was noticed by US neoconservatives. The Hudson Institute, part of the Israel lobby in Washington, DC, published an article praising

  members of the EDL holding their flags with pride, putting their arms around men and women of every age and ethnicity … It seemed that the nationalism of the EDL was a cousin of American nationalism, in which everyone can be proud of his nation, and of being a citizen, under the flag of the nation.28

  Earlier in 2007, US-based Islamophobic activists had begun to take an interest in forming a trans-Atlantic movement, involving various far Right groupings across Europe. Activists such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer had attended a 2007 conference called Counter Jihad in Brussels, along with Vlaams Belang leaders and Bat Ye’or, author of the Eurabia conspiracy theory (discussed below). To US Islamophobes the protests of the EDL seemed a welcome revolt against Islam by the native English. Britain had long appeared the most Islamized nation in an Islamizing continent, and London had become Londonistan, a city given over to Islamic domination and a warning sign of what would happen in the US if creeping shari’a was not halted.

  Just as the older far Right narrative had had a structural need for a Jewish conspiracy theory to explain the purported complicity of national governments with their enemies, so too the EDL’s rhetoric cannot dispense with conspiracy theory. After all, one might ask, why the need for popular mobilization for the antiextremist cause when the UK government already takes a tough stance on fighting radical Islam? The answer is that government rhetoric about fighting Islamism is mere appearance; behind the scenes ruling elites are secretly in league with the Islamic enemy. One account of how this is happening, popular with the EDL, is the Eurabia conspiracy theory, outlined in Bat Ye’or’s 2005 book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Her claim is that the Euro-Arab Dialogue—a program initiated by the European Community’s political establishment, following the 1973 oil crisis, to forge closer links with Arab nations—was actually a secret plot by European politicians and civil servants to facilitate Muslim immigration, subjugate Europe, and transform the continent into an Arab colony, Eurabia. Like the Jewish conspiracy theory of the Protocols, no evidence is offered. Nevertheless, through the mainstream conservative writing of Oriana Fallaci, Niall Ferguson, and Melanie Phillips, the term “Eurabia” has come to be associated with an image of Europe as cowardly and weak in the face of Islamic intimidation, allowing itself to be colonized by an increasing Muslim presence.29 But as well as making use of the Eurabia conspiracy theory, the EDL also borrowed heavily from the new shari’a conspiracy theories that Islamophobic networks in the US had been promoting.

  The Shari’a Conspiracy Theory

  There is no American equivalent to the EDL. Rather than building a street-based movement, the US Islamophobic far Right operates through networks of bloggers, pundits, activists, and propagandists who shape public opinion through the media. They rely on large amounts of funding and publicity from different parts of the conservative movement—from Tea Party activists to ultra-Zionists—and a number of mainstream media outlets and politicians willing to amplify their message. Most important, as with the EDL in Britain, their message resonates because it aligns with significant elements of the war on terror’s official discourse. Although its influence was felt most strongly after the election of President Obama, the far Right’s campaign began in the early years of the terror war, with attacks on pro-Palestinian campus activism.30 In 2002, with growing support, particularly among student
s, for the rights of Palestinians, neoconservative activists such as Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz began to launch campaigns aimed at discrediting pro-Palestinian academics. Pipes set up Campus Watch, which posted dossiers on university professors who supported Palestinian rights and encouraged students to report remarks or behavior considered critical of Israel. Targeted professors were inundated with hostile e-mails, including death threats. A similar tactic had been used earlier by another Israel lobby organization, the Anti-Defamation League, which in the 1980s distributed a booklet containing “background information on pro-Arab sympathizers active on college campuses” to its student supporters.31 In 2003, David Horowitz started DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a database that was intended to identify left-wing groups and individuals accused of enabling Islamism and undermining American values. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, organized by Horowitz in 2007, was another attempt to mobilize the same agenda on campuses. The emerging far Right Islamophobia network scored its first success that same year, with an attack on the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a secular Arabic-English elementary school planned to open in Brooklyn, New York. Without evidence, the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser, was accused of being a jihadist. Mayor Michael Bloomberg caved in and threatened to shut down the school, prompting her to resign.