Jack
Straw’s Anti-Muslim Provocation
By Chris Marsden
& Julie Hyland
07 October 2006
World
Socialist Web
Only
in a climate of deliberately cultivated hostility to Muslims could the
comments by Jack Straw opposing women wearing the veil be described
as a contribution towards a “debate.”
The article by Straw, the
former Labour foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons,
in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, a local newspaper in his Blackburn
constituency, was a calculated provocation. It was an appeal to prejudice
intended to solidarise Straw with attempts in government circles and
the media to generate Islamophobia so as to justify Britain’s
warmongering and attacks on democratic rights.
There was, in fact, no need
for Mr. Straw to “initiate” a debate on the veil. Amongst
Muslims, including Islamic scholars, there is no agreement on the veil—known
as a niqab—and many oppose it. It is generally considered a cultural
preference rather than a doctrinal issue.
When the subject has previously
been discussed, debate has centred on whether or not wearing the veil
is a choice freely exercised by women or whether there is an element
of coercion. An overriding consideration has generally been an insistence
on the freedom of worship.
Straw framed his column on
entirely different grounds. He opposed wearing the veil because he personally
dislikes it and claims that it prevents face to face discussions that
are vital to ensuring social cohesion.
There was a calculated undertone
of nationalism to Straw’s argument. He described meeting a man
and his wife who are constituents. She was friendly, polite, respectful,
and gave off “signals which indicate common bonds—the entirely
English accent, the couple’s education (wholly in the UK).”
This jarred with “the
fact of the veil,” which made him feel “uncomfortable,”
he wrote. He decided that in future he would ask his female constituents
to remove the veil when they came to his surgery because wearing it
made “better, positive relations between the two communities more
difficult”
There are, of course, personal
political considerations involved in the publication of this column.
Straw was replaced as foreign secretary by Prime Minister Tony Blair
at the insistence of the United States. His constituency is 30 percent
Muslim.
In March, US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice visited Blackburn and reportedly told President
Bush of her concern that Straw could not be trusted to take a hard line
in the so-called “war on terror.” He had already expressed
reservations on a military strike against Iran. Less than two months
later, Straw was demoted from the Foreign Office to leader of the Commons.
With his column, Straw aimed
to restore his political credentials in right-wing circles and to set
out his stall for the upcoming Labour Party leadership contest. That
he chose to do so by playing on anti-Muslim sentiments speaks volumes
not only about the character of the Labour Party, but of the political
climate it has created.
Straw knew that his smoke
signals would be read correctly in the right quarters. His stance was
immediately praised by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun.
His comments dovetail with
the government’s claims to be waging a struggle for civilised
values and democratic freedoms against religious extremism. Blair has
described both his foreign and domestic policy as “part of a struggle
between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream
Islam.” Home Secretary John Reid has lectured Muslim parents to
guard against fanatics “looking to groom and brainwash your children
for suicide bombing,” and at the Labour Party conference he announced
to applause that he would not be “bullied” by Muslim extremists.
Straw’s decision to
attack the veil, while making a point of defending the headscarf, or
hijab, is in keeping with this type of propaganda His comments open
the way not only for all manner of attacks on Muslims, but also for
an intensification of the ongoing shift away from Britain’s traditional
policy of “multiculturalism” in favour of the cultivation
of a proscriptive “national identity.”
Straw’s article echoes
other recent statements by government ministers that explicitly link
opposition to radical Islam with pronouncements on the failure of multiculturalism.
Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly has suggested that it encourages segregation,
as has the Labour-appointed chair of the Commission for Racial Equality,
Trevor Phillips.
There is no question that
the policy of “celebrating cultural differences” has been
utilised in the past to encourage divisions within the working class,
and that this policy was championed above all by Labour. But the government’s
sudden discovery of such problems is nothing but an attempt to justify
a lurch to the right on questions of social policy and civil liberties.
It is a measure of how sweeping
this attack is that the BBC gave as an example of “Britain’s
brand of multiculturalism”—now being called into question—the
passage of laws “to protect minority groups from religious as
well as racial discrimination” It also suggested that Straw’s
“debate” could be extended to include Sikhs wearing turbans
and Jews wearing kippahs
Laws against religious discrimination
are not examples of “British multiculturalism.” Freedom
of worship is a fundamental democratic right and is enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in 1948.
This states: “Everyone
has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right
includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either
alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest
his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.”
In the aftermath of the Second
World War and the Nazi holocaust against the Jews, no one was in any
doubt about the utterly reactionary character of attempts to impose
a common national identity based on the whipping up of prejudice against
religious and cultural traditions that others found objectionable.
These principles are now
under sustained attack, with Muslims most often the immediate target
and a convenient scapegoat to justify measures that can be later used
against the entire population.
Across Europe, policies are
being enacted against Muslims, such as the banning of the headscarf
in France and certain German states, and even the denial of welfare
benefits to veiled women in parts of Belgium Accompanying this has been
the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a suicide
bomber—justified as an expression of free speech—and demands
by the European Union that laws be enacted to regulate what can be taught
in mosques.
As in the 1930s, this attempt
to poison social discourse by cultivating racism and xenophobia is bound
up with a return to imperialist colonialism by the European bourgeoisie.
There are few men in the
world today who have less right to initiate a debate on the rights of
Muslim women or on social cohesion than Jack Straw. He should be bracketed
alongside Blair, Bush and their ilk as war criminals and enemies of
democratic freedoms.
Straw was home secretary
from 1997 to 2001 and then foreign secretary until 2005. As home secretary
he presided over the extension of anti-terror laws and restrictions
to the right to trial by jury. As foreign secretary he played a crucial
role in mounting the campaign of lies and disinformation used to legitimise
the invasion of Iraq.
These considerations are
what shapes his own intervention and animate the new-found preoccupation
of a host of former liberals and social democrats with the oppression
of women by Islam—figures who one must anticipate will now come
forward in Straw’s defence In contrast, working people must oppose
all such attempts to whip up anti-Muslim prejudice and any and all proposals
to curtail religious and civil liberties. This is an essential component
of the struggle against militarism and war.
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