To funnel all efforts toward the scrutiny of those staples of framing, Muslims' failure to integrate and their propensity for terrorism[,] is to shadow the very kinds of instrumental thinking that has produced the government's Prevent agenda, one of the strands of the antiterror strategy known as CONTEST. Prevent ensures that funds and backing are channeled toward the bodies and initiatives that are approved partners in the fight against al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, conceived as the biggest single threat to Britain today. Yet heavy-handed tactics, such as efforts to persuade higher education institutions to spy on their Muslim students for signs of radicalization, have drawn criticism from civil libertarians and from those who see Prevent as something of a smoke screen, diverting attention from the inconsistencies in domestic and foreign policy that are also at the root of Muslim disaffection. [18] Surprise raids on universities for example that in which a team of heavily armed police swooped down on a group of suspected radicals outside the library at Liverpool John Moores University in April 2009, provide great copy for newspapers and thrilling pictures for news channels. Given the rather low conviction rate that often accompanies such operations, one could wish that a greater number of journalists might have been exercised by the adjacent questions of whether free enquiry in universities was endangered by intrusive policing or whether such raids actually do more to harm than aid community cohesion. A few correspondents did take up these issues. However, for the most part, the narrative spun was a more conventional one about thwarted conspirators and, by implication, a characteristically British disquiet about universities as sites of intellectual pretension justifying moral relativism. Such coverage serves to keep a hegemonic government viewpoint about threat levels and their sources firmly in the public consciousness. Why should the more troubling fine detail be picked over when the idea of radical Muslims around every corner justifies government policy and expenditure? To this extent Prevent, and other measures like it, are not really so much a consultative exercise as a mechanism for forcing Muslims to take responsibility for acts done in their name, even when they may be separated from such acts by vast distances of space, doctrine, and sympathy.
In this scenario, the idea that all Muslims must be drawn into a battle against violent fundamentalism works on the assumption that religion is the foundational principle animating all actions. Cultural acts derive from religion, and any other impinging factors such as class, gender, or doctrinal or regional differences are considered less crucial to the formation of identity. The trouble wit this view- which privileges religious identity above all else-is that by failing to discriminate properly it allows for a resonant chain of association to be set up in which the aberrant activity of Muslim groups (or individuals) in one part of the world are seen as having unavoidable corrupting effects everywhere else. This is a particularly postmodern form of paranoia, since it tends to view the instantaneous crossborder reach of telecommunications and the Internet as the main means of "terrorist" indoctrination. Yet this paranoia also represents a logical consequence of the globalization of capital that we are daily invited to celebrate, even though it is more usually explained by reference to some kind of unspecified propensity for radicanlism to spread rapidly among susceptible Muslims like a form of contagion.
-pgs. 57-59
of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 by Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin (a theory heavy/dense book from what I have read so far)
No comments:
Post a Comment