Jon Gaunt barks at Blair's dogwhistle posted by bat020

Most of the critiques of anti-Muslim racism that appear on the internet unsurprisingly focus on examples of Islamophobia that appear online, typically newspaper columns by liberal pundits in the so-called "quality press".

One side-effect of this is that the harder stuff – the brazen bigotry served up by right wing tabloids to an audience of millions – tends to receive less attention. This in turn makes Islamophobic propaganda appear more "sophisticated" than is actually the case, once its cruder tabloid manifestations are taken into account.

A case in point is the disgusting sub-fascist rant from former BBC "shock jock" Jon Gaunt that appeared in The Sun yesterday on page 11. Headlined "Time to round up the enemy within", it picks up on Tony Blair's dogwhistle over Muslims and barks psychotically. The full text is available here as an RTF file, below are some extracts and comments.

Gaunt starts off by applauding Blair's recent comments that Muslims are failing to do enough to combat their "completely false sense of grievance against the West":

Tony Blair was completely right to say that so-called Muslim leaders need to openly condemn the cancer that exists within their communities. And whether they like it or not this is a MUSLIM problem.

That doesn’t mean all Muslims are terrorists but it does mean that all the terrorists we are facing at the moment were or are Muslims, so the prime responsibility lies with the Muslim community.

Having set up the entire Muslim community as primarily responsible for the 7 July (as opposed to "an extremist minority", the formulation preferred by Blairites), Gaunt proceeds to lay into the alleged "13 per cent" of Muslims that, according to a Populus opinion poll, consider the 7 July bombers to be "martyrs" (whatever that means):

It is time for action and even more harsh words from Blair. Forget about Muslim taskforces, social deprivation and exclusion. I want madmen like this cleaned off the streets. This 13 per cent needs to be identified and rounded up.

Gaunt then broadens out his attack to bash the anti-war movement as a whole. Those who want British troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan are "anti-Semitic" apparently:

It’s some sixth form debating point about our foreign policy and support of Israel and the USA that’s the problem. This warped and simplistic view is unfortunately shared by a majority of British Muslims, according to the survey, and that scares the hell out of me.

You may be against the Iraq war or our troops being in Afghanistan but surely you have to agree that we won’t have our whole foreign policy dictated by a few. Similarly, the anti-Semitic tone of these demands needs to be faced down.

Finally he descends into full-on BNP mode, calling for "Third World" minorities that "infect" our society to be deported if they do not show sufficient respect for "our way of life", our "tolerance" and, errm, our "almost secular" democracy:

We do want to live and let live but we cannot and should not allow the murderous threats and violence of the Third World to infect our society.

For too long we have allowed minorities to dictate to us that we should accept their customs and belief structures while at the same time hiding and almost being afraid to celebrate our own values and beliefs.

The only inquiry necessary is the one that identifies those who are living among us who despise our way of life. Those people who do not want to respect our tolerant, almost secular, liberal democracy and system of law and order.

They have a clear choice to hand back their benefits and go and live in a country that terrorises, inhibits and bans diversity and tolerance. I am sure that many true Brits would be more than happy to show these people to the exits.

It hardly needs to be said that all the classic elements of fascist rhetoric are on proud display here – demonisation of ethnic minorities as an "enemy within", sentimental valorisation of national "values", the mantra that "we" are in peril and are therefore the real victims, and that this existential threat justifies "action" such as rounding the "enemy" up and "clean[s]ing" our streets of them.

What does deserve underlining is the lack of any discernible difference between Gaunt's racist ravings and those of the pro-war liberal Islamophobes that litter cyberspace and the op-ed pages of the posh papers. Blair's language is more coded, but the underlying structure of his argument is the same. The only shift is that Gaunt's obscenities make explicit what Blair merely hints at.

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Finally, and somewhat tangentially, it's worth noting that Blair's complaints against a Muslim "sense of grievance" and his suggestion that the anti-war movement is fundamentally to blame for "extremism" is not new. While his comments to the Commons Liaison Committee on 6 July were widely reported, he made almost identical statements to the same committee back in November 2005:

You have got to challenge this sense of grievance. There is no justifiable sense of grievance... You will not deal with this, in my view, unless you go in and challenge this full-frontally and say, "This is born out of a set of attitudes about America, Israel and Western policy that are simply wrong". Unless you challenge the fundamentals of that view, in my view, what you do is end up in this twilight world of political engagement.

I do not think it is just for me, or ministers, to go and do this, for very obvious reasons. We actually need leaders from the Muslim community, role models from the Muslim community, to go in there and talk about this.

Back then the Muslim "role models" expected to be standard bearers for imperialism within the Muslim community included "our own Muslim MPs". Blair's latest outburst came in response to Sadiq Khan MP's mild dissent from this programme, a fact that probably explains the PM's increased virulence this time round.