Gold9472
12-09-2006, 11:10 AM
Whose War on Whose Terror? Reclaiming Our Rights
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/12/whose-war-on-whose-terror-reclaiming.html
Nafeez Ahmed
12/8/2006
Yesterday, I was fortunate to have been one of the opening plenary speakers at the 'Reclaiming Our Rights' conference at the Human Rights and Social Justice Institute at the London Metropolitan University, organized mainly by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC). It was an excellent conference bringing together some of the leading dissident organizations involved in political activism against the anti-terror laws. Speakers included people like Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan; Mark Thomas, political comedian and journalist; Gareth Pierce, leading human rights lawyer; Brian Haw, the permanent Parliament Square protestor; among many others.
Due to a glitch in the schedule, I ended up as the opening speaker. Below is the text on which I based my presentation:
Whose War on Whose Terror?
In the name of security -- that is in the name of defending our security, the security of you and me, the British public -- the government has systematically erected a vast legal apparatus of social control, which in both principle and practice violates our most cherished and hard-won human rights and civil liberties.
State Totalization
Ironically, the government has quite cynically used the law, to violate the very rule of law itself. The overarching direction of the anti terror and civil contingency laws is simple:
1) broadening the scope of activity of the police and intelligence agencies and their ability to not only monitor individuals in both their public and private lives; but also proliferating the array of instruments and pretexts available to them to take punitive action, be it through indefinite detention; obtaining convictions using so-called ‘secret’ evidence whose validity cannot be impartially assessed; deportation; the appropriation of private property, at will, in conditions deemed by the government to constitute civil emergencies, etc.
2) Simultaneously, the anti terror laws narrow down who has the prerogative in implementing these legal instruments in practice, firmly away from publicly-verifiable scrutiny and accountability: They centralize the role of the state itself in administering and executing the decisions which justify implementing such practices, by reducing the pretext to vague and unspecified conditions such as "suspicion", and many other such categories that can be applied by the state, at will, again without public scrutiny and accountability.
In summary, the legal apparatus that has been established in the post-9/11 period, and whose stranglehold has dramatically intensified since 7/7, grants to the state the power to do almost anything it likes against the British public in the name of security. The provisions of this legal apparatus are now so vague, and so totally devoid of external oversight, that within the new legal order of the "War on Terror" it is almost, virtually impossible to challenge state policies, if they come packaged under the title of "security."
Indeed, it is now possible for the government to proscribe any political organisation and imprison or deport any person, British or non-British who 1) expresses, has expressed or will express a political opinion different from the government’s position concerning a violent conflict anywhere in the world; and 2), who associates with anybody or anything, or moreover participates in any activity, that the government deems to be objectionable on the basis of its own self-prescribed interpretations of the new laws. It is now possible to declare unlimited legal power in the case of any sort of social unrest regarding which a Minister declares he is "satisfied" that it constitutes an emergency [Civil Contingencies Act]. It is now possible for the state to involve itself in almost unlimited, unrestricted electronic surveillance [Regulation of Investigator Powers Act]. And so on and so forth.
So far, we have seen an escalating stream of cases illustrating the state’s real objectives in enacting such laws. Summary powers have been and are being used on peaceful protestors. The state has fought with the Law Lords in attempts to send asylum seekers back to countries like Zimbabwe, in the face of direct evidence of the probability of their being tortured or abused. The state has locked up people portrayed as high profile terrorists in Belmarsh for 4 years without even bothering to question them. The number and nature of these cases is so huge that lawyers are struggling to keep up. But clearly, the actual scope of state power now extends far beyond these cases. If anything then, we are seeing not only the state’s unabashed attempt to arrogate to itself even further powers of unhindered, unaccountable social control; we will continue to see the state grow increasingly arrogant in its application of the existing legal apparatus.
What we are therefore seeing today, then, is not the enactment of law to protect us. On the contrary, at face value, the state is manipulating and abusing the process of law in order to systematically erode, deface and ultimately eliminate the rule of law entirely. And in its place, what is being established is the ability of the state to consolidate policies of social control, to control and intervene in the life of the public at will, with impunity, and without accountability. For now, we can call this process, a process of totalization.
But what is happening is, obviously, not exclusive to Britain, although one might suggest in certain issues Britain is leading the way. What is happening represents a disconcerting phenomenon that cuts across the liberal democracies of the United States, Britain and Western Europe. In all these liberal democracies, similar types of anti terror legislation have been, and are being, actively pursued and enacted by Western states. In other words, these two essential processes which we described above in application to Britain -- the broadening of the scope of the state’s arsenal of social control policies; and the narrowing of the decision-making base in determining the implementation of such policies to a centralized executive incubated from external oversight -- are also occurring in all the major Western liberal democracies.
This has an absolutely critical implication -- it means that the phenomenon of state totalization in the UK cannot be accurately or properly understood in isolation. It has to be understood as a phenomenon that is intimately, intrinsically connected to parallel processes of state totalization continuing and intensifying across the Western world, processes which began in the post-Cold War period, and are now accelerating exponentially post-9/11.
But in turn, if we are to understand this new Western pandemic of state totalization, we must attempt to situate it in the wider social relations within which these totalizing Western states subsist. I have identified three relevant aspects of these social relations.
1. Criminalization of Target Communities
With the burgeoning growth of the new anti terror legal apparatus, we have seen the simultaneous, indeed integrally connected phenomenon of the state’s attempt to increasingly identify and criminalize target communities. The criminalization of these communities is associated with the escalation of activities of police state repression, justified under the mantle of security, and also accompanies the escalation of racial hatred and socio-cultural division.
In Britain, the last few months has seen a litany of escalating hysteria premised on the perception of Islam and Muslims as some sort of grave existential and ideological threat to the national security and national identity of Britain -- a veritable fifth column. Jack Straw, the Leader of the House of Commons, and former Foreign and Home Secretary, tell us that Muslim women who cover the face with a veil or niqab make community relations "more difficult." And this is because, he says, concealing the face is "a visible statement of separation and difference."
We then had Home Secretary John Reid's admonition to Muslim parents in East London that they ought to watch out for "tell-tale" signs of their children becoming terrorist extremists. Dr. Reid qualified his statements in the Sun: "I appeal to you (the Muslim community) to look for changes in your teenage sons -- odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends."
Recently, the conservative political commentator Ian Dale has reported that Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitian Police Commissioner, in a closed meeting said that he knew there would be another terrorist attack on Britain, and that when it happens, there will be a need to consider mass "internment."
These sorts of attempts to gain political capital by fomenting religious suspicion and hostility are intensifying across the EU.
In France, Islamophobia has been a staple of French politics for years, with parties of the mainstream right and left backing the ban of the hijab in public schools for the last several years. A year ago, the heavily Muslim immigrant suburbs of Paris erupted in riots after two youth died while being chased by police. In early November, 72 Muslim airport staff, mostly baggage handlers, were barred from Paris’ main airport on the grounds they posed a security threat. The decision, backed by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, was taken months after the publication of a book by Phillipe de Villiers, a politician of the far-right party Movement for France who will stand in next year’s presidential elections, which talks about Muslim "infiltration" of French airports.
In Germany eight out of sixteen states (that’s roughly half the country) have voted to ban the hijab in public schools. A study by the German Center for Turkish Studies at Essen University found that in parliamentary debates between 2000 and 2004, politicians increasingly drew connections between Islam and terrorism, and made comments putting Muslims in Germany under general suspicion as a security threat, rather than calling for religious tolerance.
In Belgium, the far-right Velaams Belang nearly captured control of the Antwerp city government in mid-October on an openly Islamophobic platform, winning 33.5 percent of the vote, compared to 35 percent assembled by a Socialist coalition.
In the Netherlands, this past November the government decided to enforce a total ban on women wearing burqas and face veils in public, on the pretext that they endanger "public order, security and the protection of citizens". The decision was announced only days ahead of elections which the ruling centre-right party won, as expected.
These are just a few examples of a phenomenon spreading across the USA and Europe. As the 2005 report of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) on ‘Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims in the EU’ has documented, attacks on Muslims in western Europe have increased dramatically. Across western Europe, such attacks have accompanied an unprecedented escalation in:
"... widespread negative attitudes toward Muslims; unbalanced and stereotypical media reports portraying Muslims as 'alien' to EU societies and as 'an enemy within'; verbal and physical attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions and property; discrimination against Muslims in employment and other areas; aggressive political rhetoric used by right-populist parties to target Muslims;and security and immigration measures contributing to public perceptions of Muslims as a 'fifth column'."
Thus, according to Glyn Ford, a British member of the European Parliament, "Europe is in danger of seeing its extreme-right parties move into the mainstream. Islamophobia has become the prejudice of the day, but the threat from the extreme right is real and it is found across the European Union."
But one needs to go further than this. It’s not merely that the far right is growing increasingly mainstream -- the political mainstream itself is moving in the direction of the far right. We are seeing a disturbing convergence of political ideology and methodology amongst Western states on issues of race, religion and terrorism. The identification and criminalization of target communities, increasingly Muslim communities, across the Western world, is both a cause and an effect of the anti-terror laws. The reduction of Muslim communities to the status of "threat" legitimizes the state’s enactment of increasingly draconian anti-terror laws. Simultaneously, Muslims are the principal, though by no means the exclusive, victims of the same laws (numerous other communities have been victims of these laws, e.g. Kurds, Tamils etc.) The process of ideologically separating these communities, in this case particularly the Muslim community, off from their own societies, by portraying them as incompatible with Western societies by the very practice of their faith, is crucial to the state’s attempts to consolidate and expand its powers of social control.
End Part I
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/12/whose-war-on-whose-terror-reclaiming.html
Nafeez Ahmed
12/8/2006
Yesterday, I was fortunate to have been one of the opening plenary speakers at the 'Reclaiming Our Rights' conference at the Human Rights and Social Justice Institute at the London Metropolitan University, organized mainly by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC). It was an excellent conference bringing together some of the leading dissident organizations involved in political activism against the anti-terror laws. Speakers included people like Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan; Mark Thomas, political comedian and journalist; Gareth Pierce, leading human rights lawyer; Brian Haw, the permanent Parliament Square protestor; among many others.
Due to a glitch in the schedule, I ended up as the opening speaker. Below is the text on which I based my presentation:
Whose War on Whose Terror?
In the name of security -- that is in the name of defending our security, the security of you and me, the British public -- the government has systematically erected a vast legal apparatus of social control, which in both principle and practice violates our most cherished and hard-won human rights and civil liberties.
State Totalization
Ironically, the government has quite cynically used the law, to violate the very rule of law itself. The overarching direction of the anti terror and civil contingency laws is simple:
1) broadening the scope of activity of the police and intelligence agencies and their ability to not only monitor individuals in both their public and private lives; but also proliferating the array of instruments and pretexts available to them to take punitive action, be it through indefinite detention; obtaining convictions using so-called ‘secret’ evidence whose validity cannot be impartially assessed; deportation; the appropriation of private property, at will, in conditions deemed by the government to constitute civil emergencies, etc.
2) Simultaneously, the anti terror laws narrow down who has the prerogative in implementing these legal instruments in practice, firmly away from publicly-verifiable scrutiny and accountability: They centralize the role of the state itself in administering and executing the decisions which justify implementing such practices, by reducing the pretext to vague and unspecified conditions such as "suspicion", and many other such categories that can be applied by the state, at will, again without public scrutiny and accountability.
In summary, the legal apparatus that has been established in the post-9/11 period, and whose stranglehold has dramatically intensified since 7/7, grants to the state the power to do almost anything it likes against the British public in the name of security. The provisions of this legal apparatus are now so vague, and so totally devoid of external oversight, that within the new legal order of the "War on Terror" it is almost, virtually impossible to challenge state policies, if they come packaged under the title of "security."
Indeed, it is now possible for the government to proscribe any political organisation and imprison or deport any person, British or non-British who 1) expresses, has expressed or will express a political opinion different from the government’s position concerning a violent conflict anywhere in the world; and 2), who associates with anybody or anything, or moreover participates in any activity, that the government deems to be objectionable on the basis of its own self-prescribed interpretations of the new laws. It is now possible to declare unlimited legal power in the case of any sort of social unrest regarding which a Minister declares he is "satisfied" that it constitutes an emergency [Civil Contingencies Act]. It is now possible for the state to involve itself in almost unlimited, unrestricted electronic surveillance [Regulation of Investigator Powers Act]. And so on and so forth.
So far, we have seen an escalating stream of cases illustrating the state’s real objectives in enacting such laws. Summary powers have been and are being used on peaceful protestors. The state has fought with the Law Lords in attempts to send asylum seekers back to countries like Zimbabwe, in the face of direct evidence of the probability of their being tortured or abused. The state has locked up people portrayed as high profile terrorists in Belmarsh for 4 years without even bothering to question them. The number and nature of these cases is so huge that lawyers are struggling to keep up. But clearly, the actual scope of state power now extends far beyond these cases. If anything then, we are seeing not only the state’s unabashed attempt to arrogate to itself even further powers of unhindered, unaccountable social control; we will continue to see the state grow increasingly arrogant in its application of the existing legal apparatus.
What we are therefore seeing today, then, is not the enactment of law to protect us. On the contrary, at face value, the state is manipulating and abusing the process of law in order to systematically erode, deface and ultimately eliminate the rule of law entirely. And in its place, what is being established is the ability of the state to consolidate policies of social control, to control and intervene in the life of the public at will, with impunity, and without accountability. For now, we can call this process, a process of totalization.
But what is happening is, obviously, not exclusive to Britain, although one might suggest in certain issues Britain is leading the way. What is happening represents a disconcerting phenomenon that cuts across the liberal democracies of the United States, Britain and Western Europe. In all these liberal democracies, similar types of anti terror legislation have been, and are being, actively pursued and enacted by Western states. In other words, these two essential processes which we described above in application to Britain -- the broadening of the scope of the state’s arsenal of social control policies; and the narrowing of the decision-making base in determining the implementation of such policies to a centralized executive incubated from external oversight -- are also occurring in all the major Western liberal democracies.
This has an absolutely critical implication -- it means that the phenomenon of state totalization in the UK cannot be accurately or properly understood in isolation. It has to be understood as a phenomenon that is intimately, intrinsically connected to parallel processes of state totalization continuing and intensifying across the Western world, processes which began in the post-Cold War period, and are now accelerating exponentially post-9/11.
But in turn, if we are to understand this new Western pandemic of state totalization, we must attempt to situate it in the wider social relations within which these totalizing Western states subsist. I have identified three relevant aspects of these social relations.
1. Criminalization of Target Communities
With the burgeoning growth of the new anti terror legal apparatus, we have seen the simultaneous, indeed integrally connected phenomenon of the state’s attempt to increasingly identify and criminalize target communities. The criminalization of these communities is associated with the escalation of activities of police state repression, justified under the mantle of security, and also accompanies the escalation of racial hatred and socio-cultural division.
In Britain, the last few months has seen a litany of escalating hysteria premised on the perception of Islam and Muslims as some sort of grave existential and ideological threat to the national security and national identity of Britain -- a veritable fifth column. Jack Straw, the Leader of the House of Commons, and former Foreign and Home Secretary, tell us that Muslim women who cover the face with a veil or niqab make community relations "more difficult." And this is because, he says, concealing the face is "a visible statement of separation and difference."
We then had Home Secretary John Reid's admonition to Muslim parents in East London that they ought to watch out for "tell-tale" signs of their children becoming terrorist extremists. Dr. Reid qualified his statements in the Sun: "I appeal to you (the Muslim community) to look for changes in your teenage sons -- odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends."
Recently, the conservative political commentator Ian Dale has reported that Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitian Police Commissioner, in a closed meeting said that he knew there would be another terrorist attack on Britain, and that when it happens, there will be a need to consider mass "internment."
These sorts of attempts to gain political capital by fomenting religious suspicion and hostility are intensifying across the EU.
In France, Islamophobia has been a staple of French politics for years, with parties of the mainstream right and left backing the ban of the hijab in public schools for the last several years. A year ago, the heavily Muslim immigrant suburbs of Paris erupted in riots after two youth died while being chased by police. In early November, 72 Muslim airport staff, mostly baggage handlers, were barred from Paris’ main airport on the grounds they posed a security threat. The decision, backed by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, was taken months after the publication of a book by Phillipe de Villiers, a politician of the far-right party Movement for France who will stand in next year’s presidential elections, which talks about Muslim "infiltration" of French airports.
In Germany eight out of sixteen states (that’s roughly half the country) have voted to ban the hijab in public schools. A study by the German Center for Turkish Studies at Essen University found that in parliamentary debates between 2000 and 2004, politicians increasingly drew connections between Islam and terrorism, and made comments putting Muslims in Germany under general suspicion as a security threat, rather than calling for religious tolerance.
In Belgium, the far-right Velaams Belang nearly captured control of the Antwerp city government in mid-October on an openly Islamophobic platform, winning 33.5 percent of the vote, compared to 35 percent assembled by a Socialist coalition.
In the Netherlands, this past November the government decided to enforce a total ban on women wearing burqas and face veils in public, on the pretext that they endanger "public order, security and the protection of citizens". The decision was announced only days ahead of elections which the ruling centre-right party won, as expected.
These are just a few examples of a phenomenon spreading across the USA and Europe. As the 2005 report of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) on ‘Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims in the EU’ has documented, attacks on Muslims in western Europe have increased dramatically. Across western Europe, such attacks have accompanied an unprecedented escalation in:
"... widespread negative attitudes toward Muslims; unbalanced and stereotypical media reports portraying Muslims as 'alien' to EU societies and as 'an enemy within'; verbal and physical attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions and property; discrimination against Muslims in employment and other areas; aggressive political rhetoric used by right-populist parties to target Muslims;and security and immigration measures contributing to public perceptions of Muslims as a 'fifth column'."
Thus, according to Glyn Ford, a British member of the European Parliament, "Europe is in danger of seeing its extreme-right parties move into the mainstream. Islamophobia has become the prejudice of the day, but the threat from the extreme right is real and it is found across the European Union."
But one needs to go further than this. It’s not merely that the far right is growing increasingly mainstream -- the political mainstream itself is moving in the direction of the far right. We are seeing a disturbing convergence of political ideology and methodology amongst Western states on issues of race, religion and terrorism. The identification and criminalization of target communities, increasingly Muslim communities, across the Western world, is both a cause and an effect of the anti-terror laws. The reduction of Muslim communities to the status of "threat" legitimizes the state’s enactment of increasingly draconian anti-terror laws. Simultaneously, Muslims are the principal, though by no means the exclusive, victims of the same laws (numerous other communities have been victims of these laws, e.g. Kurds, Tamils etc.) The process of ideologically separating these communities, in this case particularly the Muslim community, off from their own societies, by portraying them as incompatible with Western societies by the very practice of their faith, is crucial to the state’s attempts to consolidate and expand its powers of social control.
End Part I