Protesters hold placards during a counter-demonstration against far-right activists in Oxford, western England, on 7 August 2024 (Justin Tallis/AFP)
It’s been a bad week for the massed battalions of politicians and journalists who have made common cause with fascists about the threat that Muslims pose to Britain.
They should be named: Nigel Farage, who said with no evidence that three-quarters of Muslims pose no threat to Britain – meaning that one-quarter do.
Suella Braverman did more as home secretary to legitimise Islamophobia than anyone else, and was sacked for questioning the impartiality of the police force over which she as minister had responsibility.
Douglas Murray, the weirdly acceptable face of the hard right, said that Britain needed a “toolbox approach to dealing with the enemy of Islamist extremism”, and that this would involve “people who you and I don’t like” but needed to deal with.
In 2018, Murray called for the release of the English Defence League (EDL)’s founder, Tommy Robinson, and described the organisation as “a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as ‘anti-Islamization’”.
We should also name Robinson himself, who was on holiday in Cyprus when the revolution finally came to the streets of Southport, Hartlepool and Manchester. And Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), who shared fake news that convicted rioters would be sent to detention camps.
For this was the week when, in Murray’s words, the people “you and I don’t like”, but need to deal with, falsely cast the killer of three children as an asylum seeker and a Muslim.
Vilifying Muslim communities
This was the week when Britain weathered the worst fascist insurgency since Cable Street, as mobs attempted to set fire to hotels housing migrants, attacked police with bricks, and now face long prison sentences.
Worse was to follow for the likes of Farage, Braverman and Murray. On Wednesday night, the very Muslim communities they had spent a lifetime vilifying as “no-go areas” stood up to the fascists and forced them off the streets. Palestinian flags were prominent among the ranks of these heroes.
Far from condemning this show of force as “vigilantism”, as Braverman and Murray might have wished, Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley praised the demonstrators, saying fears of disorder were abated due to the work of police and “a show of unity from communities”.
If indeed the rioting is truly over for now, and it is not as the far right promises, the start of a long, hot summer, this week casts a long shadow over the links between the thugs and the very people who have carved careers out of dripping racist, Islamophobic poison into the well of public discourse in Britain for decades.
These bedfellows will not be easy to eject.
Robinson himself is funded by an array of far-right international organisations, which are an intrinsic part of the US right-wing infrastructure supporting Israel.
Long before the events of 7 October, the fascist far right and neoliberal Zionists had much in common: each used lies to vilify their targets
One of them is a Philadelphia-based think-tank, the Middle East Forum, whose president, Daniel Pipes, confirmed to the Times of Israel that his group has spent around $60,000 on three demonstrations defending Robinson, who served four prison terms between 2005 and 2019.
Another supporter is the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Horowitz himself described Robinson in an email to The Guardian in the following terms: “Tommy Robinson is a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs and covered up by your shameful government.”
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 13, Robinson attributed the riots to the presence of Hamas supporters on the streets of London every week.
“Right now we have had jihad attacks every year for 15 years. What we’ve seen since October the 7th is the takeover of our capital city every single week by pro-Hamas, pro-jihadi groups who are encouraging hatred on our streets, and … they’re unchallenged by the police,” Robinson said.
Robinson visited Israel in 2016, posing with tanks in the Golan Heights.
Refusing to back down
Long before the events of 7 October, the fascist far right and neoliberal Zionists had much in common: each used lies to vilify their targets.
The perpetrator of the horrendous knife attack in Southport was born in Wales to Rwandan Christian parents, none of which was an impediment to far-right protesters attacking a local mosque.
Even after the facts about the attacker were revealed, social media personality Andrew Tate, whose video on the Southport killings went viral, refused to back down from broadcaster Piers Morgan on his central claim that the killer was a migrant.
Similarly, the Trojan Horse affair, an alleged Islamist takeover of several primary schools in Birmingham, was a complete fabrication. The truth did not stop Michael Gove, then a government minister, and The Times from campaigning about it.
MP Robert Jenrick, who sponsored legislation against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, continues to spread racist lies that are picked up and repeated by far-right activists.
The former Tory immigration minister said that all those chanting “Allahu akbar” should be immediately arrested, likening it to an extremist chant. It is said by Muslim worshippers every day.
The fascists and the stalwarts of pro-Israel lobbying groups have collectively cast pro-Palestinian supporters in Britain as rapists after the Hamas attack.
In 2017, Murray criticised Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of opening the borders to Syrian refugees, saying it has resulted in “a bit more gang rape and beheadings than we used to have”.
Neither group has uttered a word of condemnation about the organised campaign of rape in Israeli detention camps of Palestinian detainees.
Redefining extremism
This unholy alliance has much else in common.
Their credo is that Israel is stopping a horde of migrants from Muslim nations from invading Europe, that Islam is a threat to the Judeo-Christian way of life, and that Israel is the ethno-nationalist model for how a state cleansed of Muslims should look.
Murray, who has proposed that Muslim migrants should be sent back home, was praised by Israeli President Isaac Herzog as a “compelling voice of moral clarity” for his support of Israel during the Gaza war.
Amichai Chikli, the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs who said he would prefer to see northern Gaza cleared of its inhabitants, described Murray as a fearless truth teller “amidst a symphony of lies … who understands that the war we fight is not limited to the future of Israel. It is a war for the future of humanity.”
Murray and Musk sat side by side during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent address to the US Congress, which received a series of standing ovations.
Long before 7 October, community leaders who claimed to represent British Jews welcomed the architects of policies that demonised Muslims in the Prevent programme, or attempts to redefine extremism to muzzle pro-Palestinian protests.
The Gaza war only accelerated their love affair with fascists. They collectively mythologised London as a “no-go area” for Jews, despite the fact that Jews were present as individuals and as a group in Palestine solidarity demonstrations.
Today, Murray and Farage are the arsonists blaming the fire they set on the late arrival of the fire brigade
That did not stop the wildly misnamed Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Jewish Leadership Council from calling for the marches to be halted or restricted on the pretext that Jews did not feel safe.
Sayeeda Warsi, who was a junior foreign office minister in David Cameron’s government, said there was a reason why her former boss did not allow Murray and his ilk near policymaking in his government: “They could see what he was,” she wrote on X.
Warsi added: “Braverman quoted and supported Murray at the dispatch box as Home Secretary. This is why I call out some of my colleagues because they are not Conservatives, they are far right populists who have allowed the ‘fruitcakes’, ‘loonies’ & ‘closet racists’ to poison our politics (words in quotes courtesy of David Cameron 2006).”
Today, Murray and Farage are the arsonists blaming the fire they set on the late arrival of the fire brigade.
Labour’s schism
Keir Starmer, for whom the riots are his first major test as prime minister, will be congratulating himself on a job well done, for playing the heavy-handed law-and-order card and appearing to prevail.
But Starmer is privately just as worried about praising the Muslim community, whose leaders, the Muslim Council of Britain, he to this day refuses to meet.
A battle going on in Finchley, north London, reveals the schism running through the heart of Labour.
It started in May when a demonstration was mounted by pro-Palestinian supporters outside the Phoenix Cinema, which was screening a film about the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas on 7 October.
A counter-protest supporting the film quickly appeared, but this time it contained a new and violent element: the EDL, waving English and Israeli flags and shouting racist slurs.
The appearance of the EDL in Finchley, an area with a high concentration of Jewish people, was not accidental.
But when a group calling itself Finchley Against Fascism shared a virtual flyer calling for a demonstration, it said: “Get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley!” The inclusion of Zionists in the hit list came to the attention of local MP Sarah Sackman, herself Jewish, who condemned the whole event.
It’s well past time for a new generation of community leaders to step forward – one that is prepared to walk in solidarity with the oppressed
As journalist Owen Jones commented, if Sackman had just denounced the flyer, without going on to denounce the protest, that would have been understandable. As it is, Sackman denounced the entire event.
It took just one day for Labour to part company with the anti-fascist movement that had helped quell the biggest fascist insurrection in modern history, because in truth, the Labour Party has been hard at work disenfranchising its Muslim voters ever since Israel began its offensive in Gaza.
Labour lost five seats to Independents over its policy of supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself” in Gaza, and its opposition to an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
Far from learning the lessons of that, the losing MPs put their defeat down to a toxic campaign of vilification, not their policies and votes on Gaza – and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper ordered an inquiry.
Britain’s only hope
Sackman is in lockstep with her leader, who has reportedly forbidden Labour’s elected representatives from attending the recent anti-racist demonstrations, just as he did for the pro-Palestinian rallies.
And depressingly true to form, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis posted on X this week: “Many in the British Jewish Community are feeling trapped between the anvil of the hateful far right and the hammer of the conspiratorial extreme left.”
Mirvis added: “The speed with which some have expanded their attacks against fascists and racists, to include attacks on ‘Zionists’, betrays a complete ignorance of who Zionists are and indeed, who Jews are. The apparent ease with which some campaigners have attributed blame to ‘Zionist financiers abroad’, a lie which serves no purpose other than stirring antagonism and resentment, is deeply troubling.”
You cannot hug fascists that claim support for Israel as Israeli leaders themselves have done, allow fascists to join ranks with you in counter-demonstrations to Palestinian marches in London, and then complain that you are caught between a rock and a hard place when fascists show their true colours.
Support for a Jewish homeland in Israel has dragged some British Jews from their rightful place, which is side by side with Muslims as the victims of fascism.
But not all. Many British Jews remain true to their beliefs while being part of the broad pro-Palestinian movement protesting the carnage in Gaza.
Mirvis, who claims to represent the Jewish community, should not be condemning the anti-fascist movement. He should be supporting it because every Jew knows that once fascists deal with one minority, they will turn on another. Every Jew knows that the extreme right is a lethal ally.
When you take the Israel-Palestine conflict out of the equation, and allow the religious communities around mosques and synagogues to get on with their own affairs, there is no friction. They help each other serve the community.
Peace and mutual respect is the default between Jews and Muslims. The ugly history of Israel deforms every attempt to reconcile staunch supporters of a Jewish homeland with the Muslim community.
Very much like the Middle East, seismic events have taken place in Britain over the past week, and nothing changes. No one repents, let alone apologises or admits responsibility for the harm their words have caused.
It’s well past time for a new generation of community leaders to step forward – one that is prepared to walk in solidarity with the oppressed. That is Britain’s only hope.
