Eurabiaphobia (Part III) posted by Richard Seymour

The discursive shifts are fascinating in a morbid kind of way - from Muslims Must Root Out This Evil Ideology to Muslims Must Stop Complaining. It was an easy and relatively simple shift. Blair declared, in his usual strident fashion, that Muslims have no legitimate complaints against the West. Deriding the "completely false sense of grievance against the West" shared by the vast bulk of Muslims (and non-Muslims) in the world, Blair said "I think the roots of this extremism lie in the attitudes and ideas as much as organisation". As the BBC reports, the government and its sympathisers are pissed off that "moderate Muslims" (a greasy phrase, but I'm forced to use it for the sake of concision) don't think it's their role to go round telling other Muslims that they shouldn't complain about Western foreign policy. Blunkett in particular finds their resistance "sad", while the government's initiatives are "excellent".

There's an interesting nuance here: the Prime Minister's line is quite clearly guided by the acknowledgment that, yes, those who bombed the tube were indeed motivated by Western foreign policy. He no longer appears to be interested in stupidly disavowing this - rather, he says that any Muslim who shares this outrage at the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is setting up the "attitudes and ideas" from which terrorism breeds. This is the ideology of the evil ideology at work. Interestingly, non-Muslims who share this outrage are not contributing to the attitudes and ideas that contribute to terrorism.

The stories that provided the impetus for all this are 1) that 'Al Qaeda' was trying to penetrate MI5, which sounds like cobblers to me (since British intelligence already use Islamists as assets, and since this story is so vague and poorly sourced that I suspect it is an intelligence leak); 2) a poll of British Muslims found that 13% were prepared to say that the guys who bombed the tube were had become martyrs, even if they didn't agree with the attacks. One small, hard, unmoveable fact seems to have escaped the attention of much of the press covering this story: 100 - 13 = 87. Nevertheless, the government has taken its opportunity to act: Blair is fed up with Muslims, particularly moderate Muslims who refuse to be envoys for New Labour in 'the Muslim community'. The other spur for this outburst from Blair was the fact that the government had been found wanting in fulfilling the recommendations made to it by a Muslim task force last year. They recommended a full, independent inquiry into the 7/7 bombings, which many of the survivors would like to see as well. Blair stridently says this will reveal nothing except that it was four men what done it. They recommended a rebuttal unit to counter racist lies about Muslims in the media. Nothing doing. They recommended a unit to devise a strategy for dealing with Islamophobia in education. Neither sight nor sound yet of this. The only thing Blair seems to have pursued with any energy is locking people up without trial for longer, having people shot at by cops, and slandering Muslims.

Now, the Prime Minister is not, contrary to almost every indication he gives, stupid. He is vain, arrogant, deceitful, racist, shallow, callous and wrong about almost everything he stands for. Yet he is not stupid. He knows that the far right and the reactionary scum press will use his words to whip up hatred and fear of Muslims. He must fully expect this, and therefore desire it. Why? Well, his unpopular wars in Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan can be saved by a nice sleight of hand - if people are frightened of or resentful to Muslims, particularly anyone who raises a voice in opposition to Western policy, then they are less likely to be loudly protesting the government's various wars. There was an interesting bit of information from inside the Labour Party going around before the 2005 election - it was that the government would rather lose three seats to the Tories than one to Respect. In the council elections recently, they proved they would rather lose much of Barking and Dagenham to the BNP than spare a single canvasser from going down to Tower Hamlets. They want the anti-Muslim vote, but they want something more - New Labour has always wanted to arrogate to itself the right to determine what the Left is. This is why its apologists, such as the oleaginous Kamm, use such exhortatory phrases as 'the civilised left'. New Labour's consistent mode of appeal has been - we're all there is, there is no alternative, so you have to back us. They've said this to the working class, and initially they said it to Muslim voters (back when Blair was evincing admiration for the Quran). Respect has given that idea a bloody nose and a kick in the arse for good measure. The antiwar movement has shown that a movement opposing New Labour from the left can be deeply and broadly popular. Successive strikes have shown that the trade union movement still has the power to cause the government serious problems. So New Labour is doing what it has always done - it is attacking left-wing opposition, while conserving and even encouraging the rightist and reactionary opposition, because that is either basically sympathetic to many of the government's policies or opposes them on territory that the government thinks it can win.

New Labour desperately wants to reassert its hegemony on the left vote while also mitigating the likelihood of its foreign policy increasing its electoral rut. It wants to divide people with appeals to racism, as Oona King's spin doctors tried to do when her leaflets informed white Bethnal Green & Bow voters that Galloway was stirring things up among the Muslims. For that reason, a bloody nose and a well-kicked fundament isn't enough - we need to leave the body of Blairism in a trunk (I think Galloway recommended something like this a few weeks back). We need Respect.