A Glimpse Inside the West Bank

Isabella Bellezza-Smull

On Friday, Palestinians worldwide will commemorate those who have died and suffered resisting Israel’s decades-long policy seizing Palestinian land. Demonstrations will occur through May 15, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when over 700,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.9 million were expelled from their homes following the declaration of the State of Israel. Adding insult to injury, the U.S’s highly contested embassy move to Jerusalem will coincide with Nakba Day.

Indeed, Palestinians have plenty to protest in the upcoming weeks. The systematic expropriation of Palestinian land continues unabated and the development of Israeli settlements — well-funded, fortified hilltop cities built in Palestinian territories — has intensified. Just a few months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved building plans for 3,736 new settlement units, announcing that “we are here to stay.” Almost 600,000 Israeli citizens currently reside in settlements — a population growing at a rate two times higher than that within Israel.

I recently visited the West Bank and witnessed the impact of Israel’s land grab and development strategy in the occupied Palestinian territories. I heard from Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and homes for alleged security reasons only to later find mobile homes (or, “outposts”) mark the groundbreaking of yet more Israeli subsidized settlements. I maneuvered fairly freely via an expansive network of Israeli-only bypass roads and highways conveniently linking settlements to each other and facilitating movement to and from Israel. Conversely, I observed hundreds of checkpoints, walls, permit requirements, and Israeli soldiers tightly confining Palestinians to ever shrinking territory. I discovered that this maze of control makes it so a Palestinian might grow up able to view the Mediterranean from her town without ever having received a permit allowing her to travel to its shore. Several Palestinian teens expressed dreams of one day touching the sea.

Israel justifies many of its land grabs and extensive system of control in the West Bank as defensive measures proportionate to the threat of Palestinian and Arab aggression. Recent history is often referenced, like the 1967 Six-Day War provoked by a coalition of neighboring Arab states; two Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, in 1987 and in 2000; and Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians, a strategy that gained traction during the Intifada.

Palestinians, though, view Israel’s security justification as yet another pretext to displace them from their homes. It’s seen as a palatable guise for Israel’s century long “colonial gentrification” of historic Palestine — the uprooting of indigenous peoples by settlers and imperialist powers. While impossible to list the litany of historic grievances, Palestinians often reference the demographic history of the Southern Levant, a region that for hundreds of years has been overwhelmingly populated by an Arab Muslim majority and Arab Christian and Jewish minority. The 1917 Balfour Declaration (whereby the British declared that the then Ottoman region would become a Jewish national home, despite Jews only accounting for 3-5 percent of the population at the time) is referenced as a destructive political landmark that, along with the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution 181, paved the way for the formation of the Jewish state in 1948 against the will of indigenous populations.

Suhad Bishara is an attorney for the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. In her Haifa office, she explained that only 36 percent of the West Bank remains under Palestinian, or joint Palestinian-Israeli, control. Known as Areas A and B, these territories are marked in white on the map.

Roots of the conflict depend on how far back you want to go. Ideological settlers like Ardie, a Chicago-born Israeli who has lived in Israeli settlements in the West Bank since 1985, take the discussion to biblical times. The right of return for the Jewish diaspora, according to Ardie, rests in part on the premise that they— a unified people of the BCE Kingdoms of Israel and Judah— “were there first.” Over coffee and cookies, he explained:

This was Judea before it was Palestine. The Romans named it Philistina after the Philistines, our enemies, to humiliate us, rebrand us, and erase our identity. They overran us and dispersed us, and we lived around the world for thousands of years. We are unique in that we are a people with a memory that compelled us to return to our ancient homeland — and we came back.

While biblical and ancient historical claims to the land of historic Palestine are commonly used to justify Israeli expansion into the occupied territories, their historicity and relevance to the 21st century conflict is often called into question. King Abdullah, for example, asked in 1948 “how Jews can claim a historic right to Palestine, when Arabs have been the overwhelming majority there for nearly 1300 uninterrupted years?” But George Rishmawi from the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People says the blast to the ancient past isn’t very helpful:

The issue isn’t who was here first, thousands of years ago. The issue is who, less than 100 years ago, came here. And what did they do to the people they found?  Displacing more than 700 thousand Palestinians from their land and turning them into refugees can never be justified under any pretext.

Indeed, perhaps the most honest justification for the settlements given from a settler was about power — that we live in a world of winners and losers where winners enjoy the spoils of war and losers suffer. Indeed, the ugliness of this logic reflect the facts on the ground today: the highly securitized apartheid reality that accompanies growing Israeli settlements is causing tremendous suffering to Palestinians. Squashed into ever shrinking towns with no territorial contiguity, it’s no wonder Palestinians tend to describe their situation as “living under siege” on “islands surrounded by a sea of Israeli control.” Instead of creating conditions necessary for a future sovereign Palestinian state, the West Bank is being carved up in such a way that makes a 2-state solution practically impossible.

Settlement enclaves encroach into Palestinian cities like Hebron where Israelis build homes on top of Palestinian homes and businesses, accompanied by an extensive system of cages that vertically and horizontally partition space.

In the face of a stifling set of constraints and dismal prospects for a just peace, Palestinians resist in courageous and creative ways. Here are a few stories that illustrate their struggle under occupation and give context to the clashes that are likely to occur between Palestinians protestors and the Israeli military in the weeks to come.

Iyad Burnat is the head of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Israeli wall and settlements.

In response to the continuous uprooting of Palestinian ancient olive trees and confiscation of farmland, the main income source for Bil’in residents, Iyad has led weekly non-violent actions since 2005. His family has paid a heavy price.

Three out of four of Iyad’s sons have either been shot in protest or arrested in home raids. At the time of the photo below, Iyad’s 17 year old had been detained in an Israeli prison for three months, charges undisclosed. This is a common experience. Forty percent of the Palestinian male population can expect to be detained, according to Lana Ramadan from the Addameer prisoners support association based in Ramallah. But unlike their Jewish counterparts, Palestinians exist under military, not civil, law. This means that they can be held by administrative detention — indefinitely, without charge, and without trial. Children are overwhelmingly accused of throwing stones, an offense that can lead to a potential maximum of 10 to 20 years, depending on location. In the face of such adversity, I wondered where Iyad finds the will to endure. Perhaps the answer lies in the slogan of the Bil’in’s Popular Committee: “The occupation will not remove us from our land. We will stay in our land as the roots of olive trees.”

In response to a question about the viability of a future sovereign Palestinian state, Iyad pointed to the expanding Israeli settlement, the Modi’in Illit bloc, and its separation wall before us. “The two state solution is dead. They killed it,” he replied.

This picture was taken shortly after we got picked up by an Israeli military patrol driving down the separation wall (pictured above). Iyad bent down to pick up a handful of earth and, slowly releasing it into the breeze, he advised to “look up to the sky and run against the wind” if tear gassed.

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Farming sisters Fadeyeh and Ne’ameh were cut off from their land after it was seized to form part of a so-called “security” buffer zone around a settlement. The creation of these special security areas became common in the wake of the second Intifada when suicide bombings that targeted Israeli civilians became a common tactic used by Palestinian armed resistance groups.

Theoretically, farmers can apply for permits to tend and cultivate the expropriated land under the watch of Israeli military personnel. In practice, the process is sabotaged by coordination challenges and aggression from settlers. Muhamad Barakat, East Jerusalemite with encyclopedic knowledge of the region, says the sisters typically get 10 days of approved access to their land and suffer beatings and insults from young settlers in the process.

This picture was taken during Fadeyeh and Ne’ameh’s two-mile walk to their land.

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The Bil’in farmer pictured below was cut off from much of the land he and his family used to farm to accommodate the building of a separation wall and buffer zone for the neighboring Israeli Modi’in Illit bloc. Like Fadeyeh and Ne’ameh, he could apply for a permit but is discouraged by the fact that only 40 percent of requests to enter the annexed agricultural land receive positive response. Limits on access have decreased farming in these areas by over 80 percent.

Just an eye-shot away, the settlement’s complexes are kept lush by water Palestinian farmers can’t access for their crops. In the West Bank, water is far from evenly shared. On average, Israeli settlers have access to over 300 liters per day, while neighboring Palestinians are left with 73, well below the World Health Organization’s minimum standards of 100. It comes as no surprise that you can distinguish a Palestinian town from an Israeli settlement by seeing if homes are topped with water tanks, or not.

This picture was taken in this Bil’in farmer’s new greenhouse, an agricultural technology effective for conserving water. He’ll grow tomatoes, “inshallah” — God willing.

Pictured below is the Bil’in farmer’s youngest son kindly ensuring my cup of tea remained full. His hospitality in what’s left of a home that’s been demolished five times was a heartbreaking show of resilience. Israel pursues an aggressive housing demolition policy in the West Bank, a process that the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolition has shown is highly political. Homes are bulldozed for various alleged reasons, including the clearing of vast tracts of land for military / security purposes; for having built without a permit, even though such permits are disproportionately difficult and expensive for Palestinians to secure; and out of collective punishment, or “deterrence,” against the family of any individual who carries out an attack against an Israeli target. In ninety-five percent of these demolitions, residents had nothing to do with the security offense.

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In the old city of Hebron known as Hebron 2, more than 4,200 Palestinian students must cross checkpoints on their way to school. Muhamad Barakat explained that the learning environment has suffered due to the potential for harassment and humiliation moving through checkpoints. Many opt to move. Indeed, the number of students attending Hebron’s Al-Ibrahimi primary school has dropped from 460 in 2011 to 220 in 2017.

Recycling War Criminals

REBECCA GORDON

A barely noticed anniversary slid by on March 20th. It’s been 15 years since the United States committed the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century: the unprovoked, aggressive invasion of Iraq. The New York Times, which didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in the run-up to that invasion, recently ran an op-ed by an Iraqi novelist living in the United States entitled “Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country,” but that was about it. The Washington Post, another publication that (despite the recent portrayal of its Vietnam-era heroism in the movie The Post) repeatedly editorialized in favor of the invasion, marked the anniversary with a story about the war’s “murky” body count. Its piece concluded that at least 600,000 people died in the decade and a half of war, civil war, and chaos that followed — roughly the population of Washington, D.C.

These days, there’s a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a “terrible mistake,” a “tragic error,” or even the “single worst foreign policy decision in American history.” Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime. In fact, that invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where high Nazi officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was (ironically, in view of later events) the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list. The U.S. position was that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this first “crime against peace.”

Similarly, the many war crimes of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — the extraordinary renditions; the acts of torture at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and CIA black sites all over the world; the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq; the siege and firebombing (with white phosphorus) of the Iraqi city of Fallujah; the massacre of civilians in Haditha, another Iraqi city — all of these arose from the Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq.

It was to secure “evidence” of a (nonexistent) connection between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda attackers of 9/11 that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld upped the ante at Guantánamo in his infamous memo approving torture there. The search for proof of the same connection motivated the torture of Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand. If not for that long-planned invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror” might have ended years ago.

But Wasn’t That Then?

Fifteen years is an eternity in what Gore Vidal once called “the United States of Amnesia.” So why resurrect the ancient history of George W. Bush in the brave new age of Donald Trump? The answer is simple enough: because the Trump administration is already happily recycling some of those Bush-era war crimes along with some of the criminals who committed them. And its top officials, military and civilian, are already threatening to generate new ones of their own.

Last July, the State Department closed the office that, since the Clinton administration, has assisted war crimes victims seeking justice in other countries. Apparently, the Trump administration sees no reason to do anything to limit the impunity of war criminals, whoever they might be. Reporting on the closure, Newsweek quoted Major Todd Pierce, who worked at Guantánamo as a judge advocate general (JAG) defense attorney, this way:

“It just makes official what has been U.S. policy since 9/11, which is that there will be no notice taken of war crimes because so many of them were being committed by our own allies, our military and intelligence officers, and our elected officials. The war crime of conspiring and waging aggressive war still exists, as torture, denial of fair trial rights, and indefinite detention are war crimes. But how embarrassing and revealing of hypocrisy would it be to charge a foreign official with war crimes such as these?”

Guantánamo JAG attorneys like Pierce are among the real, if unsung, heroes of this sorry period. They continue to advocate for their indefinitely detained, still untried clients, most of whom will probably never leave that prison. Despite the executive order President Obama signed on his first day in office to close GITMO, it remains open to this day and Donald Trump has promised to “load it up with some bad dudes,” Geneva Conventions be damned.

Indeed, Secretary of Defense James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis has said that the president has the right to lock up anyone identified as a “combatant” in our forever wars, well, forever. In 2016, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who “has signed up with this enemy” — no matter where “the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us” to fight — should know that he will be a “prisoner until the war is over.” In other words, since the war on terror will never end, anyone the U.S. captures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, or elsewhere will face the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.

Recycling War Criminals

Speaking of Mattis and war crimes, there’s already plenty of blood on his hands. He earned that “Mad Dog” sobriquet while commanding the U.S. Marines who twice in 2004 laid siege to Fallujah. During those sieges, American forces sealed that Iraqi city off so no one could leave, attacked marked ambulances and aid workers, shot women, children, and an ambulance driver, killed almost 6,000 civilians outright, displaced 200,000 more, and destroyed 75% of the city with bombs and other munitions. The civilian toll was vastly disproportionate to any possible military objective — itself the definition of a war crime.

One of the uglier aspects of that battle was the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when exposed to air. If bits of that substance attach to human beings, as long as there’s oxygen to combine with the phosphorus, skin and flesh burn away, sometimes right into the bone. Use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon is forbidden under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. has signed.

In Iraq, Mattis also saw to it that charges would be dropped against soldiers responsible for murdering civilians in the city of Haditha. In a well-documented 2005 massacre — a reprisal for a roadside bomb — American soldiers shot 24 unarmed men, women, and children at close range. As the convening authority for the subsequent judicial hearing, Mattis dismissed the murder charges against all the soldiers accused of that atrocity.

Mattis is hardly the only slightly used war criminal in the Trump administration. As most people know, the president has just nominated Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel to head the Agency. There are times when women might want to celebrate the shattering of a glass ceiling, but this shouldn’t be one of them. Haspel was responsible for running a CIA black site in Thailand, during a period in the Bush years when the Agency’s torture program was operating at full throttle. She was in charge, for instance, when the CIA tortured Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was waterboarded at least three times and, according to the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture report, “interrogated using the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” (The report provided no further details.)

Haspel was also part of the chain of command that ordered the destruction of videotapes of the torture of Abu Zubaydah (waterboarded a staggering 83 times). According to the PBS show Frontline, she drafted the cable that CIA counterterrorism chief José Rodríguez sent out to make sure those tapes disappeared. In many countries, covering up war crimes would itself merit prosecution; in Washington, it earns a promotion.

More on Trump and Torture

Many people remember that Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back waterboarding “and a whole lot worse.” On the campaign trail, he repeatedly insisted that torture “works” and that even “if it doesn’t work, they [whoever “they” may be] deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.” Trump repeated his confidence in the efficacy of torture a few days after his inauguration, saying that “people at the highest level of intelligence” had assured him it worked.

Trump’s nominee to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state is former Tea Party congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Known for his antipathy to Muslims (and to Iran), he once endorsed calling his Indian-American electoral opponent a “turban topper.”

Pompeo is as eager as Trump to restore torture’s good name and legality, although his public pronouncements have sometimes been more circumspect than the president’s. During his CIA confirmation hearings he assured the Senate Intelligence Committee of what most of its members wanted to hear: that he would “absolutely not” reinstitute waterboarding and other forms of torture, even if ordered to do so by the president. However, his written testimony was significantly more equivocal. As the British Independent reported, Pompeo wrote that he would back reviewing the ban on waterboarding if prohibiting the technique was shown to impede the “gathering of vital intelligence.”

Pompeo added that he planned to reopen the question of whether interrogation techniques should be limited to those — none of them considered torture techniques — found in the Army Field Manual, something legally required ever since, in 2009, President Obama issued an executive order to that effect. (“If confirmed,” wrote Pompeo, “I will consult with experts at the [Central Intelligence] Agency and at other organizations in the U.S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country.”) Unlike many of Trump’s appointees, Pompeo is a smart guy, which makes him all the more dangerous.

When President Trump lists his triumphs, often the first one he mentions is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. Gorsuch, too, played a small but juicy role in the Bush torture drama, drafting the president’s signing statement for the Detainee Treatment Act when he worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel back in 2005. That statement officially outlawed any torture of “war on terror” detainees, and yet left open the actual practice of torture because, as Gorsuch assured President Bush, none of the administration’s self-proclaimed “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including waterboarding) amounted to torture in the first place.

Still, of all Trump’s recycled appointments, the most dangerous of all took place only recently. The president fired his national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and replaced him with John Bolton of Iran-Contra and Iraq invasion fame.

Under George W. Bush, Bolton was a key proponent of that invasion, which he’d been advocating since at least 1998 when he signed an infamous letter to Bill Clinton from the Project for a New American Century recommending just such a course of action. In 2002, Bolton, while undersecretary of state for arms control, engineered the dismissal of José Bustani, the head of the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was involved in overseeing Iraq’s disarmament process. A former Bolton deputy told the New York Times that Bolton was dismayed because Bustani “was trying to send chemical-weapons inspectors to Baghdad in advance of the U.S.-led invasion.” Presumably Bolton didn’t want the U.N. trumpeting the bad news that Iraq had no active chemical weapons program at that moment.

Nor has Bolton ever forgotten his first Middle Eastern fascination, Iran, although nowadays he wants to attack it (along with North Korea) rather than conspire with it, as President Reagan and he did in the 1980s. He’s argued in several editorials and as a Fox News commentator — wrongly as it happens — that it would be completely legal for the United States to launch first strikes against both countries. Naturally, he opposes the six-nation pact with Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. When that agreement was signed, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Bolton entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It should (but doesn’t) go without saying that any first strike against another country is again the very definition of the initial crime on that Nuremberg list.

Recycling War Crimes

We can’t blame the Trump administration for the decision to support Saudi Arabia’s grim war in Yemen, a catastrophe for the civilians of that poverty-stricken, now famine-plagued country. That choice was made under Barack Obama. But President Trump hasn’t shown the slightest urge to end the American role in it either. Not after the Saudis threw him that fabulous party in Riyadh, projecting a five-story-high portrait of him on the exterior of the Ritz Carlton there. Not after his warm embrace of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman during his recent visit to the United States. In fact, at their joint press conference, Trump actually criticized former president Obama for bothering the Saudis with complaints about human rights violations in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia itself.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to fund and support the Saudi military’s three-year-old war crime in that country, providing weaponry (including cluster bombs), targeting intelligence, and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft conducting missions there. The conflict, which the New York Times has called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” has killed at least ten thousand people, although accurate numbers are almost impossible to come by. As of December 2017, the Yemen Data Project had catalogued 15,489 separate air attacks, of which almost a third involved no known military targets and another 4,800 hit targets that have yet to be identified. Hospitals and other health facilities have been targeted along with crowded markets. Government funding for public health and sanitation ended in 2016, leading to a cholera epidemic that the Guardian calls “the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern history.”

Through the illegal blockading of Yemen’s ports, Saudi Arabia and its allies have exposed vast numbers of Yemenis to the risk of famine as well. Even before the latest blockade began in November 2017, that country faced the largest food emergency in the world. Now, it is in the early stages of a potentially devastating famine caused entirely by Saudi Arabia’s illegal war, aided and abetted by the United States. In addition, Trump has increased the number of drone assassinations in Yemen, with their ever-present risk of civilian deaths.

Yemen is hardly the only site for actual and potential Trump administration war crimes. In response to requests from his military commanders, the president has, for instance, eased the targeting restrictions that had previously been in place for drone strikes, a decision he’s also failed to report to Congress, as required by law. According to Al-Jazeera, such drone strikes in countries ranging from Libya to Afghanistan will no longer require the presence of an “imminent threat,” which means “the U.S. may now select targets outside of armed conflict,” with increased risk of hitting noncombatants. Also relaxed has been the standard previously in place “of requiring ‘near certainty’ that the target is present” before ordering a strike. Drone operators will now be permitted to attack civilian homes and vehicles, even if they can’t confirm that the human being they are searching for is there. Under Trump, the CIA, which President Obama had largely removed from the drone wars, is once again ordering such attacks along with the military. All of these changes make it more likely that Washington’s serial aerial assassinations will kill significant numbers of civilians in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other target countries.

Defense Secretary Mattis has also loosened the rules of engagement in Afghanistan by, for example, removing the “proximity requirement” for bombing raids. In other words, U.S. forces are now free to drop bombs even when the target is nowhere near U.S. or Afghan military forces. As Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee last October,

“If they are in an assembly area, a training camp, we know they are an enemy and they are going to threaten the Afghan government or our people, [Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan,] has the wherewithal to make that decision. Wherever we find them, anyone who is trying to throw the NATO plan off, trying to attack the Afghan government, then we can go after them.”

Under such widened rules for air strikes — permitting them anytime our forces notice a group of people “assembling” in an area — the chances of killing civilians go way up. And indeed, civilian casualties rose precipitously in Afghanistan last year.

And then there’s always the chance — the odds have distinctly risen since the appointments of two raging Iranophobes, Pompeo and Bolton, to key national security positions — that Trump will start his very own unprovoked war of aggression. “I’m good at war,” Trump told an Iowa rally in 2015. “I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.” With Mike Pompeo whispering in one ear and John Bolton in the other, it’s frighteningly likely Trump will soon commit his very own war crime by starting an aggressive war against Iran.

How the Islamophobia Industry Silences Voices of Dissent

Antonio Perra

How can a conflict started nearly two decades ago still be so central in the public discourse and so relevant for societal dialogue? How can important achievements of foreign policy fail to change the way societies look at certain issues? And why do we struggle so much to look at terrorist attacks as isolated crimes, but find it so easy to ascribe them to an allegedly inherent, ugly side of a religion?

While it is not easy to answer these questions, a vast body of research points at the domestic dimension of the war on terror, and at the way several echo chambers have perpetuated the idea of a cultural incompatibility between Muslims and non-Muslims across the same spatial and temporal scale. In short, what started as a legitimate concern about criminal atrocities against innocent civilians, was soon turned into a broader issue about “Others’” level of adaptability and acquiescence to our liberal nation states and values.

There are many ways through which this narrative was established and standardised. Right-wing media outlets, questionable think tanks, ardently conservative Christian policy-makers, far-right Zionists, and full-blown xenophobic groups, all played a part in shaping the current approach to Muslims’ integration in Western societies, aided in their efforts by the blistering paced globalisation of the 21^st Century and the resulting identity crisis of neoliberal societies. The volatility of the Middle East, the global financial crisis, and the refugee issue, only served as enablers for nothing short of an Islamophobia industry to develop, flourish, and become the key hijacker of interfaith dialogue and peaceful coexistence.

In his important book “The Islamophobia Industry”, Nathan Lean traces the roots of Islamophobia all the way back to the 1970s, when the United States turned away from the USSR and began to look at the oil-rich lands of the Middle East with increasing interest, starting a process of military interventionism which is at the base of the vicious circle of violence that continues to this day. Hawkish advocates of foreign interventionism see in the depiction of Muslims as enemies of state a way to achieve political and economic gains, and to perpetuate a state of fear and mistrust that keeps the industry afloat. This is why Lean contended that until the West “is no longer engaged in military conflicts with Muslim-majority countries for its own political and economic gain, Islamophobia will continue”.

The case for Britain is somewhat different, yet it remains central to understand how and why exactly the fire of Islamophobia is fuelled. While Britain has not been a key player in the Middle East since the 1950s, it has played a crucial role in the war on terror by establishing an exclusive partnership with hard-line Washington policy-makers, stepping out the realm of international law to pursue questionable objectives of foreign policy. However, the war on terror coupled with Britain’s multiculturalism (an almost unique yet essential legacy left by the former British Empire), has produced a crucial paradox. Can Britain cherish and protect its historical multiculturalism and the coexistence of different faiths and believes at a time in which it is a central player in the war against Islamist terrorism?

Having made of Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern Muslims an integral part of the fabric of British society, more should have been done to safeguard the identities of Muslims after 7/7 unveiled the danger of home-grown terrorism and imposed stringent measures of securitisation. For many years, however, society has regrettably closed an eye on the spreading of anti-Muslim narratives because it subscribed to the idea that a fight against terrorism could legitimise a temporary trumping of civil liberties and mutual respect. People’s fear of becoming victims of what was portrayed as nothing short of a holy war, prevailed over any sort of rational assessment of the many problems that liberal and democratic societies would be faced with.

However, it was not entirely society’s fault. For many non-Muslims, 9/11 and 7/7 were an introduction to a phenomenon it simply did not know it existed. For many, the attacks were not related to international affairs, nor did they have a geopolitical backdrop, but were the side of a religion to which they had paid little or no attention to until that point. Ironically, the same reasoning can be applied to the majority of Muslims who profess their faith in peace and harmony, and were as troubled by the new developments as their non-Muslim counterparts. But being such a new phenomenon, it was normal to ask questions, however uncomfortable, about Islam. It was indeed imperative for western societies so eager to adopt a common, global identity to wonder to what extent the religious complexities of nearly two billion Muslims naturally contained the seeds of violence, or whether the localised context that prompted the emergence of more hard-line interpretation of Islam was the main contributor to what was increasingly seen as the “Islamic problem”.

With time, societies’ concerns with Islam and Muslims increased, partly as a result of isolated, extremist actions emerging from the widespread sense of grievance developed after the 2003 war in Iraq, partly as a result of an incessant campaign aimed at creating a fracture between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As argued by Lean, the depiction of Islam as a controversial religion inherently prone to violence, “makes it easier for states to justify foreign policies that benefit them”, which means that for as long as the idea of a moral incompatibility between Islam and the western world is maintained, the justification for foreign invasions will be widespread. As such, it is not a case that cohorts of far-right and pseudo-liberal thinkers who question the whole of Islam as an identity, are also those more in support of military action in the Middle East. Supporting this narrative means being able to justify an aggressive foreign policy in lands mostly seen as backwards, autocratic and dangerous for our liberal way of thinking.

In recent times, British Islamophobia has taken an interesting turn, extending across seemingly opposite sides of the spectrum and bringing under the same anti-Muslim banner a wide array of players. Indeed, while prejudice impacts every aspect of life among British minorities, from education to housing and from representation in the Criminal Justice System to unemployment, three trends have developed within the framework of the alleged clash of civilization that has punctuated interfaith dialogues since 9/11 and 7/7. Specifically, three segments operating across broader society are responsible for perpetuating the idea that Muslims constitute a threat to our way of life.

Far-right Islamophobia, such as that spread by groups such as English Defence League (EDL) or Britain First (BF), is moulded upon visibly illiberal, fascist principles, aimed at pushing an agenda centred upon a cultural retreat and rejection of multiculturalism. While in some countries such as Hungary, Greece, Germany, and Austria, these voices have found a way into the political sphere, in Britain they remain primarily confined at street level – with the exception of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which however has moved away from a hard-line rhetoric about Islam and non-White ethnicities. Much of the success of these groups stems from a shared rejection of ‘the other’, which aides the building of an abstract British identity that swings between a way forward in a globalised age and nostalgic echoes of 19^th Century Britain.

Far-right Islamophobia is undoubtedly the easiest to spot, and the most opposed to. Its vile, violent and barbaric manifestations are diametrically opposed to liberal and inclusive western societies, and while they still retain some appeal across certain segments of British society – particularly those most affected by the global financial crisis – they are broadly condemned in the mainstream.

The results of Far-Right Islamophobia, however, are devastating, as the case of Darren Osborne – the terrorist of the Finsbury Park mosque – proved. In this regard, Far-Right Islamophobia also differs from the other two because it often leads to prosecutable crimes: in 2016/17, the Islamophobic hate crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police Force amounted to 1,264, a nearly 14% increase from 2015/16.

Way more subtle and equally dangerous, however, is the so-called ‘Liberal’ Islamophobia, which is presented under the mantle of “progressive” Islam – thus able to find consensus among liberal masses – and which is used to advance particular narratives about inherent issues with Islam and Muslims. Organisations such as Tell Mama, or Sara Khan’s Inspire and others, have established themselves as spokespeople for “progressive” Muslims simply by subscribing to the level of religiosity tolerable by broader society, which in turn sets a standard as to what is an acceptable version of Islam. More than that, they also call for scrutiny of the religion and its followers, thus justifying, seemingly from a Muslim’s perspective, concerns about those Muslim communities who hold different views from theirs. It is critical to point out that their success depends entirely on their ability to reject more extreme ideas related to an irreconcilable clash of civilisations and cultures – such as those advanced by Far-Right groups – while simultaneously admitting that there is, in fact, an inherent problem of religion.

It is through the presence of these individuals in the mainstream that the line between extremism and religious conservativism gets blurred. Because society has been taught that conservative religious views can lead to extremism, liberal Muslims are seen as the only ‘type’ of Muslims that can coexist with western societies because, quite ironically, they have fully embraced their liberalism. The presence of these ‘leaders’, enables the thinking that any different religious manifestation should be investigated, scrutinised, and possibly opposed.

One classic example is the issue of the Islamic veil, seen as a remnant of the past and thus irreconcilable in societies that value equal rights and liberalism. Gradually, the hijab, and even more so the niqab, have come to be categorised as signs of overzealous religious devotion, if not full-blown oppression, without ever been seen as the free expression of a woman’s religiosity.

A third dimension of Islamophobia is that of Securitization-driven Islamophobia, which includes Think Tanks that seek to tackle violent and non-violent extremism as part of the broader war on terror agenda. Organisations such as the Quilliam Foundation (QF) or the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) are especially insidious because they borrow elements of both Far-Right and Liberal Islamophobia, masking their own under the banner of necessary efforts to forestall terrorist attacks. While QF and HJS have a different origin – the former was founded by two ex-extremists and the latter by neoconservative pseudo-intellectuals – they share remarkably similar traits in the way they approach the issue of interfaith coexistence and terrorism, while also being dangerously highly influential among policy-makers.

While both QF and HJS are recipients of funds from the International Islamophobia network, as exposed by Spinwatch, they also have repeatedly expressed alarming views that strongly resemble the rhetoric adopted by Far-Right activists. Maajid Nawaz from QF openly declared that “multiculturalism has failed”, and Douglas Murray from HJS went as far as saying that “to have less terrorism the UK needs less Islam”. However, a key enabler of Securitization-driven Islamophobia is that it employs elitists, self-appointed pseudo-experts that masquerade their Islamophobia as an opposition to extremism rather than as an irrational rejection of a specific religious identity. While contributing to spreading divisive and Islamophobic theories, these cohorts of specialists-wannabes do little more than providing an eco-chamber for existing governmental strategies and amplify their powers and scope, regardless of their effectiveness and empirical limitations.

Furthermore, the Securitization-driven Islamophobia is (at times) able to elude accusations of extremism by professing an acceptance of ‘moderate’ forms of Islam. Borrowing from the Liberal Islamophobia, they pass judgement as to what constitutes an acceptable religious behaviour while nonchalantly labelling more conservative forms of religious identities as extreme, and thus in contrast to the western way of life, if not explicitly dangerous.

It is difficult to ascertain whether this Islamophobia spectrum is dominated by a genuine conviction that Islam is a dangerous religion or by economic and political reasons, although it could be reasonably be inferred that the truth lays somewhere in the middle. Indeed, the Islamophobia business is worth $57 million in the United States alone, and the international web of alliances that sustains it – the so-called “Islamophobia Network” – is a self-fuelling machine that relies on fear and misinformation. The economic and political gains of maintaining the Islamophobia industry afloat, however, also depend on the appeal that the industry has in broader society, that is, the extent to which the industry can convince the public that Muslims and Islam are dangerous. The scaremongering campaign is thus capable of instilling genuine concern across society and influencing policies and voting patterns, while simultaneously increasing societal divides by pitting one minority against the other.

The fight against Islamophobia, just as the fight against anti-Semitism or any other form of prejudicial hate, begins by raising awareness of the many faces of those who make profits through fear and bigotry. Acknowledging the existence of a well-orchestrated attempt to create a civilizational struggle is an important step towards a greater ability to defeat prejudice, and an effective antidote against misinformation and stigmatisation.

Even more importantly, recognising the political and economic motivations behind the actions of the Islamophobia network can lead to the deconstruction of the narratives it advances, thus allowing a shift of focus towards what matters the most: mental health issues, foreign policy, isolation, unemployment, socio-economic deprivation and a whole host of other factors that could lead an individual to radicalisation.