Racism is the terrorists' greatest recruitment tool 

The problem in Britain is not too much multiculturalism but too little 

Naomi Klein 
Saturday August 13, 2005
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>  

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1548419,00.html



Hussein Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's
failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they
prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq", La
Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being
killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers ... of widows,
mothers and daughters that cry." 

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror
because of its politically correct anti-racism. Yet the comments attributed
to Osman suggest another possible motive for acts of terror against the UK:
rage at perceived extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief - so
prevalent that we barely notice it - that American and European lives are
worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their
deaths in Iraq are not even counted? 

It's not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred extremism.
Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual
architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while
studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by
Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's
encounter with what he later described as America's "evil and fanatic racial
discrimination". 

By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the
creation of the state of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the
thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist
project. For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his core
identity: clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less
than those of European Jews. 

According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University,
this experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake".
When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to his
next life-changing event: he was arrested, severely tortured and convicted
of anti-government conspiracy in a show trial. 

Qutb's political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he
conclude that his torturers were subhuman infidels, he stretched that
categorisation to include the entire state that ordered this brutality,
including the Muslim civilians who passively lent their support to Nasser's
regime. 

Qutb's vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the
killing of "infidels" - now practically everyone - as long as it was done in
the name of Islam. A political movement for an Islamic state was transformed
into a violent ideology that would lay the intellectual groundwork for
al-Qaida. In other words, so-called Islamist terrorism was "home-grown" in
the west long before the July 7 attacks - from its inception it was the
quintessentially modern progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's
concentration camps. 

Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that
ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline:
Arab and Muslim bodies are being debased in torture chambers around the
world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars,
at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and
humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again, this
lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry
young men. Qutb's history carries an urgent message for today: it's not
tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's tolerance for
barbarism committed in our name. 

Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to pass
off two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport more
people to countries where they will likely face torture. And he will keep
fighting wars in which soldiers don't know the names of the towns they are
levelling. (To cite just one recent example, an August 5 Knight Ridder
report quotes a marine sergeant pumping up his squad by telling them, "these
will be the good old days, when you brought ... death and destruction to -
what the fuck is this place called?" Someone piped in helpfully,
"Haqlaniyah.") 

Meanwhile, in Britain, there is no shortage of the "evil and fanatic racial
discrimination" that Qutb denounced. "Of course, too, there have been
isolated and unacceptable acts of a racial or religious hatred," Blair said
before unveiling his 12-point terror-fighting plan. "But they have been
isolated." Isolated? 

The Islamic Human Rights Commission received 320 complaints of racist
attacks in the wake of the bombings; The Monitoring Group, a charity that
provides assistance to victims of racial harassment, has received 83
emergency calls; Scotland Yard says hate crimes are up 600% from this time
last year. And last year was nothing to brag about: "One in five of
Britain's ethnic-minority voters say that they considered leaving Britain
because of racial intolerance," according to a Guardian poll in March. 

This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practised in
Britain (and France, Germany, Canada ... ) has little to do with genuine
equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking
politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic
minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettoes while the centres
of public life remain largely unaffected by seismic shifts in the national
ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the shallowness of this alleged tolerance
more than the speed with which Muslims deemed insufficiently "British" are
being told to "get out" (to quote the Conservative MP Gerald Howarth). 

The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the
diversity now ghettoised on the margins of western societies -
geographically and psychologically - were truly allowed to migrate to the
centres, it might infuse public life in the west with a powerful new
humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow
multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign
deportation orders sending Algerian asylum seekers to torture, or to wage
wars in which only the invaders' dead are counted. A society that truly
lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, would
have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has always been
their greatest recruitment tool: our racism. 

· Research assistance was provided by Andréa Schmidt; a version of this
column was first 

 

 

 

shiraz

'Simama imara'