Nesrine Malik talking:
There was something distinctly different about the response to this one, in terms of the mainstream press and commentary. And the main distinction was that people immediately began, not everyone of course, but those that usually are not, sort of, the “thoughts and prayers” type contingent immediately tried to come out with tempering language and saying this is a terrible thing, but we must not allow this to chill us from criticizing Islam or Muslims. And I thought that was really unusual. I hadn’t really seen that before. It was a response that was usually restricted to the right-wing press in the U.K. in particular, but it had become a mainstream position along with the sympathy and the kind of condolences. There was an immediate chaser to that which is “but let’s not let this get in the way of legitimate concerns and criticism of Islam.”
It’s been remarkable actually how quickly things have changed even when one knew that they were going to change. I’ve been writing for about 10 years now before Islamophobia became fashionable. It was sort of an online troll position where people coalesced around new atheists and Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher in the U.S., as well. There was this sort of strange lefty, liberal, atheist Islamophobia.
And it then escalated very quickly and the velocity increased, I would say in the past five years where we’ve gone from Islamophobia being something you saw on online forums, on comment threads, below-the-line on articles, and on kind of slightly quirky debating programs to mainstream politicians, mainstream columnists, mainstream news programs that would host Islamophobic figures. So very quickly, it has become a kind of integrated part of mainstream popular culture and parallel to that, there was a hardening of immigration policy by the conservative government over the past 10 years under the leadership of Theresa May when she was head of the Home Office.
And that anti-immigration ideology — which is very much a right-wing, conservative party ideology — became tied into Islamophobia as well.
In this particular instance, I was speaking about the kind of prestigious, what we call the broadsheets in the U.K., not the tabloids and their representatives in the television and radio politocracy. And that response is always “this is a terrible thing, but.” There is always a “but.” There is always a qualification either that the attacker was someone who was isolated that we cannot link to any other wider phenomenon. So, to trivialize and minimize the issue or to say, but we have to remember that the original and bigger problem is Muslims and immigration and Islamic terrorism. And so it’s a condemnation of the attack and then an immediate dilution of the condemnation and that serves two purposes. It just removes victimhood from Muslims and says “Well, maybe these particular Muslim didn’t have it coming but some Muslim, somewhere does and these ones just kind of you know, were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
But the second thing it does is that it makes it very hard for people to pin down Islamophobic sentiments because they did say this is terrible they did condemn it. There’s one particular pundit in the UK who spent three hours on her radio show talking to relatives of victims and in the same breath came on social media and said: “But we have to remember, you know, this is not Islamophobia because Islamophobia is about chilling criticism of Islam.” So, these two things at the same time means that people reserve the right to be Islamophobic while speaking at a fork tongue about it, which makes talking to them incredibly difficult because they’re not being honest.
this is something I think has blindsided people and they’re just beginning to come to terms with the fact that this is a far more organized global movement. And I think that the reason for that is purely because white people who fixate on identity politics of other people, of others don’t see themselves as motivated by identity concerns. And if there is a Muslim terrorist or if there is a black terrorist or there’s a brown terrorist, his or her motivations are always ascribed this very coherent ideology because others, non-white people, others have barbaric, backward religions and ideologies that they function on, that they are motivated by. But the perception that white people can be motivated by the same things and it’s remarkable the similarity between the sort of self-aggrandizing narratives of Islamic radical martyrdom, and now militant white supremacist martyrdom. The fact that you know, these two are similar blows people’s minds because you know, white people are just a bit more evolved than that.
And if you look at the similarities particularly striking over the past couple of years with the Internet is that what motivates a lot of Islamic radicalism, particularly with young men, is this sort of being held aloft as a martyr or a hero and being eulogized. And this is exactly what these white supremacist, assassins, and killers want. You know, they have organized manifestos. They record videos. They really enjoy the aftermath of it all. There is a religious aspect to it which is you become a warrior in service of a group cause. But we don’t analyze things in that way because you know other people are lesser and less evolved and have these motivations, whereas white people are more evolved and if they do behave that way, it must be some like isolated nut job.
And this is where the fixation on identity politics, particularly on the left, really frustrates me because I’m just like, it’s all identity politics. And if anything white identity politics has been turned a blind eye to. There are statistics actually that over the past 20, 30 years that the FBI has allocated, you know, a huge amount of money to fighting Islamic radicalism and almost none to fighting right-wing white supremacist activism or activity. And there was a report in the New York Times like six months ago saying “We missed it.”
And now, they kind of can’t contain it. But it wasn’t only the authorities that missed it the media missed it, as well.
It’s a strange position to be in, to kind of watch all this stuff unfold and expect it to and know it’s going to get worse but still get shocked when it does. I was very shocked by the openness of the attacks on Ilhan Omar and you know, people basically just stopped short of saying we don’t want a Muslim in government. We don’t want a Muslim in a political position.
We are in a position now where if you are a Muslim in any public position. Even if you don’t — I don’t particularly, I don’t wear a hijab. I’m not particularly, you know, you wouldn’t know I was Muslim by looking at me, but the moment that people realized I’m speaking from a Muslim perspective not even as a practicing Muslim necessarily, from Muslim perspective, there’s suspicions about my motivations. What do I think of gay people? Do I believe in this? Do I support ISIS? And I think that there’s just no way you can win that discussion because you’re just constantly apologizing, and constantly explaining and constantly distancing yourself.
And so what I think Ilhan has been doing has been great, which is sort of apologizing when she needs to apologize where she feels like she has fallen into a trap, where she said something that was you know, slightly could be construed as anti-Semitic, et cetera. But I think she’s playing a blinder actually in that she is not leaning in to any of the other allegations or trying to defend Islam or say do you know Islam is a religion of peace? And do you know how many Muslims you know, commit terrorist acts vis-a-vis? All that needs to stop, you know, we’ve spent years doing that. Muslims in the public space have spent years trying to explain the sort of distance between radical Islam and the average Muslim which is huge and I think she’s done a very good job in maintaining that line, but I just don’t how tenable it is. I don’t know how long she can go on with these sort of daily attacks without her defanging her a little bit and making her afraid to say anything. Because the moment she opens her mouth someone tries to construe it as you know, some Muslim barbarism.
The past few days really wore me down because I just felt so dispirited by this qualified response that I hadn’t really heard before in the mainstream and I thought God, we can’t even have this. We can’t even have a moment of sanctity once people have been killed. We can’t even have a moratorium where people can just say this is terrible and be quiet. We have to desecrate it now by still talking about Islamophobia and how it’s a fiction and how we shouldn’t stop criticizing Muslim ideas. That really knocked me for six. It really affected me and I was surprised by that because I just thought you know, I thought I was used to this kind of stuff but this was a bit of a curveball.
So, emotionally it’s been hard, but the other thing that I really struggle with is the amount of time wasted talking about this stuff. The amount of time I waste writing about and explaining — and this is why my last piece, I was just like I’m done doing this because you know, we’re getting nowhere — the time I spent trying to make nuanced arguments to try and tell people what was happening, to try and stop people from slip-sliding into this terrible situation that we’re in and then, you know trying to parse the freedom of speech fallacies and the political correctness fallacies and the identity politics fixation and the calling out people on the left as well for being complicit and lazy-thinking about this but then also challenging the right. Kind of having no friends, really. I just felt like that was just a humongous waste of time and I’m a journalist. I’m not a Muslimsplainer, you know.
And I want to write about Brexit and Trump and the economy and other things I’m massively interested in. And so the main thing that I’m surprised at actually is as someone who is relatively secular in their outlook, that I’ve spent so much of my career defending a religion that I just happened to be born in. I realized very early on that it was not about religion, that it was about racism and it was about xenophobia and it was going to turn into something nasty and racialized. So, it’s a combination of being slightly emotionally worn down by the kind of harrowing experience of seeing it all unfold, inexorably before your very eyes. And the second thing is realizing that you know, you are kind of stuck doing this way more than you would like to as a professional.
— source theintercept.com | Mar 20 2019