Us (the British) and them (the Muslims)

Reproduced with acknowledgements to Minority Thought.


The front page and main story of today's Daily Express is a clear and unsubtle attempt at maintaining the "us and them" mentality which is so often levelled by that paper against Muslims:


The headline refers to the shouts from "a group of men" (according to the Mail) who were sitting in the public gallery during the trial of Roshonara Choudhry, the woman convicted of stabbing Stephen Timms MP earlier this year.

As the Express reports:

"JEERING Muslim fanatics turned an Old Bailey court into a battleground yesterday after an Al Qaeda follower was jailed for stabbing an MP.

"In unprecedented scenes the angry mob chanted 'British go to hell' as would-be assassin Roshonara Choudhry was handed a sentence of life with a minimum of 15 years."

Rather than leading with the story at hand, the sentencing of Choudhry to "life" imprisonment, the Express has chosen to focus on the deranged rantings of a few nutcases in a courtroom instead. (Both the Daily Mail and The Sun have also gone with this angle, but neither has chosen to put it across in as brazen a way as the Express.).

That there are Muslim extremists who say such things is beyond a doubt. However, the Express' decision to make this the key focus of the story, along with the deliberately ambiguous language used in the headline, is an attempt to imply that these shouts are in some way an expression of what every Muslim thinks about the British.

The Express sees Muslims as a homogeneous mass that is in complete agreement with the ramshackle fanatics at its fringes. The headline is a dog-whistle signal for the idea that "Muslims" disapprove of "us British".

Can you imagine, for example, what the Express would have done if the men who broke into shouts of "Go to hell, Britain" were Christians? Would the Express have replaced "Muslims" with "Christians" in the headline? Would they even have mentioned it so prominently in the first place?

I doubt it.

Continuing the theme of rampant hysteria, the Express' article states that:

"The gang, sitting in the public gallery, chanted 'Allahu akbar' or 'God is great' and another demonstration raged outside the court."

"Raged"? Gosh, that sounds dramatic, doesn't it?

Between the Express, the Daily Mail and The Sun, the "raging" demonstration seems to have comprised of at least three poor souls holding particularly unimaginative print-outs:



In their articles about yesterday's events, the BBC and the Telegraph make no mention of the men holding signs outside or of the shouting from the gallery, and the Guardian makes a passing reference only to

"a small demonstration... taking place outside the court."

An examination of The Sun's article reveals the following:

"Security men bundled the ranting bigots from Court Seven after the disgraceful scenes.

"But the three were allowed to continue their poison rants [sic] in the street - yelling 'British soldiers must die'."

According to this, the demonstration outside appears to have consisted of the same men who were shouting in the gallery. Therefore the Express' claim that "another demonstration raged outside the court" seems pretty baseless.

Nonetheless, expect the wearisome English Defence League to seize this stormy teacup with both of their grubby hands.

(Both Tabloid Watch and Enemies of Reason have written fantastic posts on this.)

More readily fall victims to the Big Lie than to the Small Lie - unless you get caught

We all know that what Churchill might have described as "terminological inexactitudes" are prevalent in our politics. In my borough one party publicly proclaims its acceptance of untruthful campaigning as a fact of political life without any suggestion that it rues the fact.

However, whilst not accepting the inevitability of deceit in political life I do reluctantly accept that there is in politics, as everywhere else, a question of degree. Put another way, there is a world of difference between the sometimes irritating ways of the mainstream politician and the persistent and quite deliberate efforts of the far-right to destabilise our multi-ethnic community by resort to shameless scaremongering and often quite outrageous lies.

This week we witnessed the suspension of Barking & Dagenham councillor and BNP Greater London Authority (GLA) member Richard Barnbrook after he admitted that claims he had made about three alleged murders having taken place is his borough were completely untrue. The disgraced councillor claimed that "dyslexia" had led his extraordinary claims to "come out wrong" (and also, presumably, inspired him to repeat the claims on his blog and to refuse to remove them when it was pointed out to him that there was no factual basis for them).

Although Mr. Barnbrook is of a similar age to myself I never knew him in my far-right days. He clearly arrived on the scene after my time. I can offer no personal insight into the man nor into what makes him tick. However as I write I have heard no word of any impending censure or disciplinary action to be taken against him by his superiors in the BNP, many of whom I did know personally.

What I can say is that it has been a typical tactic of the far-right down through the years to try to whip up the fear and mistrust that it simultaneously claims to be protecting us from. Despite claiming no longer to be a racist party, the BNP is content to allow one of its very most senior members to fabricate three serious crimes in the borough he has been elected to represent and then to try to associate those non-existent crimes in the public mind with the presence of immigrants in our community.

This is not a normal political party we are dealing with here, and institutions such as the BBC should not be treating it as such by attempting to ease it into the mainstream through such devices as its Question Time programme. Democratic politicians from across the board should be doing everything they can to highlight the moral chasm that exists between the likes of the BNP and themselves. And the best way to achieve that, apart from denying fascists the oxygen of publicity, is not to act like them ourselves. To any degree.