Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Islamaphobia Link up to fight the witch-hunt Muslims

Socialist Resistance Rouge- ESF Special  |  page 16

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

One of the effects of the "war against terror" across Europe has been an increase in attacks both from the state and from racists on Muslims.

As we report on p14, the British state has incarcerated Muslims in its own Guantanamo - Belmarsh prison. Hundreds of others have been arrested in dawn raids, only to be released when there is no evidence to hold them even under Britain's draconian antiterror laws.

And of course, the arrests get much more media coverage than the subsequent releases, whipping up Islamaphobic prejudice.

Far right organizations such as the British National Party and the National Front play on this bigotry to terrorise people, attacking them on the streets and where they live.

And the growth in Islamaphobia does not only affect Muslims. There have been instances of attacks on Arab Christians, on atheists, on Hindus and even on Sikhs - despite their distinctive dress.

This follows the pattern we saw in Britain in the 70s for example, where people whose familles came from various different parts of the Indian sub-continent, many of whom were themselves born in Britain - were regularly and violently attacked as "Pakis".

Accuracy has never been the racists' concern. Terry Conway Les murs de la forteresse Europe sont de plus en plus élevés. Deux nouveaux projets sont en train de prendre forme suite sommet Européen de Tampere en octobre 1999.

Premier projet, il se met en place une "liste blanche" de pays en provenance desquels politiques proposent tous des