As part of my PhD research into the language of counter-terrorism, I occasionally have cause to review publications that counter-terrorism is designed to challenge and this can include reading ISIS’s magazines Dabiq and, more recently, Rumiyah which appears to have replaced Dabiq.
Reading Rumiyah today caused me to read some appalling articles that should never have been written and to see some photos that should never have been taken. Among the most shocking were; instructions on committing murder, advice on slavery and the legitimacy of military occupation, multiple articles that tried to justify extreme brutality (these included images that I have decided not to describe but which were often of executions and were more brutal and shocking than anything that I have seen before), and finally, info-graphics of terror attacks and deaths around the world.
The horror of the publication, both the images and the written content, caused me to question if I should continue in my academic work which critiques PREVENT and the associated language of counter-terrorism; thinking to myself,
“surely there should be a strategy to undermine this appalling material?”
This is the problem, PREVENT and the language of counter-terrorism do not challenge or undermine this material’ they reinforce the notion in Rumiyah that there is a battle between Islam and the West. Added to this, they reinforce the notion that opposition to the state is a violent rather than rhetorical endeavor by associating radical and extreme views with violence. This is aimed at catching those who have already been taken in by the barbaric messages of Dabiq and Rumiyah, not at challenging the messages themselves. Before the relationships with my pupils were changed by PREVENT (casting me as an informant rather than as a teacher) my students regularly engaged me in conversations stemming from the kind of messaging that I read in Rumiyah. These conversations stopped happening when it became my duty to report 'extreme' and 'radical' views. As such, I’m not sure where these views are being aired if not in classrooms where they are always challenged; after all, it’s not difficult to convince a group of kids that the messages in these publications are unacceptable but you do have be able to have the conversation in the first place. Schools are great places for this, so long as the debate is not shut down before it has started. Repealing the PREVENT duty on teachers will enable them to start doing what they are good at, challenging unacceptable views and creating a more harmonious society.
In many ways the Alternative Act of Remembrance in Tavistock Square on Sunday 13th November that was led by the Peace Pledge Union was similar to the usual acts in Whitehall and at war memorials and churches around the country. It was somber and it was reflective but it was quieter and smaller and, counterintuitively for a pacifist event, was more angry than other ceremonies that I have attended in recent years. One speaker reflected on having a recent vigil at the Cenotaph broken up by the police and suggested that the peace movement had become 'the extremists'. Unlike other users of this word that I have referred to in this blog, this author recognised 'extremist' as a relative term and appreciated that the judgement of such a person is in the eye of the beholder. Failure to recognise this is a dangerous way of looking at the world for it risks a situation where the promoters of violence become the televised norm and the pacifists are moved on to hold their small and dignified vigil out of sight in a leafy park. With as great a flow of refugees from war-torn areas as ever before and any challenge to the flow of arms in the other direction perceived as 'extreme', those calling for peace have got a lot to be angry about.
It was a pleasure to speak at King's Think Tank event on Education and Counterterrorism alongside Professor Tahir Abbas (Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute), Professor Gwen Griffith-Dickson (Founder and Director of the Lokahi Foundation and Visiting Professor at King's College London), Dr Rizwaan Sabir, (Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University) and Abu Ahmed (Head, Training and Engagement team OSCT Prevent Unit, Home Office). Below is an approximation of what I had to say but does not include the extensive debate that followed after Abu had laid out the Home Office case for PREVENT. I tend to agree with the audience members who pointed out that the argument for PREVENT is focused on effects (of foreign policy, marginalisation, poverty, PREVENT itself) rather than considering addressing the causes of violence. Gwen made a good point about ‘Occupying PREVENT’ but it’s hard to see how schools could be empowered to do this when they are so fearful of negative judgement from OfSTED, an organisation that is now focused on ensuring that schools are adopting PREVENT.
In response to the title of this event, “yes, you can teach peace”. Teachers know that when you create classrooms where debate flows freely, views that at first appear extreme are aired and challenged. Students and teachers alike are challenged on their views and we all appear and become less extreme.
Unfortunately in 2014, the Muslim students in my classes stopped engaging in these debates. Teaching in Tower Hamlets where 90-100% of the students in any class are Muslim, this had a profound impact and gave me great cause for concern and led to me carrying out research to find out what was going on. I have run a focus group for the Tower Hamlets Overview and Scrutiny Committee into Prevent, interviewed many pupils from across the country and spoken to hundreds of students who I teach, I have heard it repeated that students are scared to practice their religion and that they do not feel comfortable to speak openly with adults. Students include their teachers and parents in those that they don’t speak openly with and while it was initially only Muslim students saying this non-Muslims have also started saying this more recently. Questioning students on the causes for their concerns, the universal reply is that they fear being reported to the security services under the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy and that this was causing them to alter their behaviour. Analysis of the PREVENT Strategy reveals to be the embodiment of what might be referred to as discourses of ‘radicalisation’ and of ‘extremism’.
The first thing to note is that political discourses centred on ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ developed after 9/11. In fact, you will struggle to find these words used in explanations of 9/11 in the subsequent few years. It’s notable that Giovanna Borradori’s book recording interviews with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York in the 3 weeks following the tragedy of 9/11 ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ do not appear. In the following years they appear but as political concepts that have no implicit association with violence; the best example of this is the PREVENT Strategy from 2008 which creates such a distinction by only using the terms alongside references to violence, associating them but drawing a distinction for if they were the same they would not be used together. However, in the glossary of the strategy from 2011 that we now follow, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ are defined by their association with violence. These words that previously described relative political stances have become synonymous with violence.
By fixing political opponents to these violent definitions, we are placed in an essentialised world where radicals are people who support meaningless acts of violence rather than people who might conceivably alter the way we interact with and view the world. Further analysis of news and other government documentation suggests that this violent usage has been accepted and was confirmed earlier this summer in a High Court ruling (The London Borough of Tower Hamlets v B [2016]) that stated that the definitions for ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ that are found in PREVENT are ‘so much a part of contemporary life they scarcely need definition’.
Acceptance of the new meaning from the more recent 2011 Strategy, that radicalisation leads to the support of violence, cuts off the avenues by which peaceful political reform might be achieved. This presents subjects of the strategy with a choice, if they value peace over political change this may result in the suppression of discourse that is in opposition to the Government. However, those who desire ‘political change and social reform’ more than they are opposed to violence might have violent or terrorist identities reinforced. It’s important to appreciate here that what we say does not only describe the world, it informs understanding, action and agency, creating identities. This is why parents and teachers alike know to catch the naughty child doing good rather than to keep scolding them for being bad.
PREVENT is a strategy that reveals an aspiration to a politics of consent. I’ll not go into my text analysis now as it’s almost needless to point out that a rhetoric that casts radical or extreme views as pathologically violent presumes that it’s own stance is unassailable. An aspiration to consent might at first appear to be a noble aim but recent philosophers and political theorists have pointed out how this undermines democracy in a plural society and is likely to result in the inadvertent promotion of violence.
Belgian political theorist, Chantalle Mouffe has written that ‘it is undeniable that it [violence] tends to flourish in circumstances in which there are no legitimate political channels for the expression of grievances’ (2005: 81) and she describes the shutting down of discourse in a democracy as ‘letting death in’.
In the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s, conversations on 9/11 and since then he has described the autoimmunity of liberalism and how this aspiration to consensual politics results in violence (Borradori 2003).
And, Przeworski (1991) similarly suggests that a failure to be represented by the democratic process might leave violence as the only option for those excluded.
The application of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy in schools casts teachers as informants. Under these new conditions my pupils and pupils across the country have stopped engaging in the political debate that Mouffe, Derrida and Przeworski see as vital for peace in a democracy. The aligning of political opposition with violence adds a catalyst to this already dangerous situation.
Tonight we should therefore not be discussing whether we can tolerate the repressive logic of counter-extremism and anti-radicalisation strategies in our schools. We need to specifically discuss how they are undermining the mediating and peacemaking mechanisms of our democracy. This ultimately leads to a call for the abandonment of the use of teachers as informants as is demanded by PREVENT.
Having called for the abandonment of PREVENT, I’ll offer an example to demonstrate how education can teach peace in the absence of this strategy. In 2013 I was a form tutor to a particularly lively class, we would meet every morning and afternoon and we would discuss the news of the day. In one particularly heated encounter, a group cited the Koran to argue that gay people should be denied equal rights. Not surprisingly, the ensuing argument got very heated and lasted for a more than a few days as I vehemently challenged this view along with many of my students. A few months later in July 2013, when the Equal Marriage Act was being debated in Parliament, the same students raised the topic again. This time, arguing that it was surely right and kind to call a union between any people a marriage, no matter what their sexuality, a view that they had heard from me in the earlier debate. I had also learned from them, that they were not trying to be difficult, extreme or radical in their earlier assertions, they were responding in a non-critical manner to received wisdom. A year later a local PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy had been implemented in the school and these same boys were among those who informed me that they no longer engage in political debates because they fear being reported under PREVENT. As one of them had quoted the Koran to justify harming gay men in our earlier discussion, they were right to fear that they would be reported. And this is the problem, with PREVENT in schools these debates will not happen, these extreme views will not see the light of day and will not be challenged.
I am sure that the work of The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism is vital in keeping us safe but we need to have a serious discussion about the aspect of their work that is counterproductive and that is where these strategies are applied to educational settings, places where trust and respect are pre-requisites. Counter-extremism and anti-radicalisation strategies in educational spaces are restricting debate. We need to open education up to the promotion of criticality, something that is being restricted by oppressive testing regimes and well meaning counter-terrorism duties. It is through this promotion of debate that education can contribute to a more harmonious society, offering students the tools to challenge dogma that they might encounter now and in the future. Critical citizens are also required to resist the otherwise unchallenged acceptance of the violent subjectivities that are promoted in the discourses of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ that damagingly associate politically diverse thought with violence. We must free teachers from their duties as informants so that they can return to being facilitators of debates that can promote peace.
The Open Society Justice Initiative's report,Eroding Trust: The UK's PREVENT Counter-Extremism Strategy in Health and Education, that was launched in the Houses of Parliament last night lends a further voice to the call for the abandonment of the PREVENT duty in schools and in medicine. The panel at the launch event was made up of medical and education professionals along with MPs from 3 different parties and a representative of PREVENT. All made a strong case for the need for trust in school and medical settings.
The consensus was continued during the subsequent discussion from the floor that explored the need to create spaces in schools and doctors surgeries where people can speak freely and explore views that others might find controversial and where everyone's views might be challenged. It was accepted by all speakers that this is the way in which alienation and other factors that might lead to acts of violence might be averted.
Given their commitment to spaces for the promotion of free speech, the representatives from the Home Office who repeated their ongoing refrain in asking what should replace PREVENT if it is repealed as the report calls for appeared to be missing the point. Education when it is allowed to function as it did before PREVENT provided these places and Dr. Clare Gerada (former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners) suggested that her GP surgery also provided a similar space before PREVENT. It was the introduction of the PREVENT duty in schools that caused my students to stop engaging in political debate in 2014 and I have written about thisbefore.
The spaces for open discussion that those working in PREVENT maintain they are trying to produce are all around us but they just need to be allowed to function by removing PREVENT.
Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution held a panel discussion where Ross Frenett (Co-Founder and Director of Moonshot CVE, a tech start-up that 'counters violent extremism through data driven innovation'), Yasmin Green (Head of Research and Development at Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas) and Richard Stengel (Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs U.S. Department of State) talked at length about counter-messaging projects being run by Jigsaw and Moonshot. Counter-messaging, Yasmin Green explained, has three phases; first, research is used to learn what sort of content those viewing ISIS recruitment videos are attracted to, secondly, advertising is used to try and engage these people and, finally, by clicking on the adverts the target is directed to videos on the Jigsaw youtube channel. The discussion inadvertently explores issues around freedom in the online space, explains what is being done by governments and companies to counter so-called extremism and proposes how the technology being developed now might be applied in the future.
Half an hour into the discussion, we move from the banning of terrorist adverts by Google to the preference for a start-up business model by Moonshot CVE. Ross Frenett accepts that there is a legitimate criticism that a start-up might 'follow the funding' rather than seeking genuine innovation (see my last post on this) and suggests that they have allayed this concern by not relying on a single revenue stream. He then lays out the advantages of the start-up over a charity model for this kind of work, not relying on government funding allowing them to 'swiftly iterate and take risks'. Going on to describe how this has allowed them to not only 'hack the online' but also the 'physical space' when they recently used drones to deliver counter-messaging in Syria. Returning to the online, he describes the use of artificial intelligence to identify individuals and to engage them in one on one conversations. Yasmine Green elaborates on this, suggesting that 'targeted advertising can match demand for terrorist material with voices that can refute messaging'.
It's notable during the discussion that while Moonshot's full name is Moonshot Countering-Violent Extremism, the reference to people targeted by direct messaging tends to use vague terms such as 'individuals'. The Joint Committee on Human Rights' (JCHR) recent report on Counter-Extremism suggests a reason for this lack of qualification, the JCHR takes issue with the UK Government's failure to define 'extremism' and explains that attempts to progress with proposed legislation in this area would be 'futile' without such a definition. Moonshot and Jigsaw's counter-messaging project will remain unhindered by such judgement or the need for definitions as they have insulated themselves from governmental oversight, they will continue to 'swiftly iterate and take risks' to challenge and change the views of the undefined extremist as they move into the next stage of their counter-messaging project which according to Yasmine Green was not planned, '[we] had not anticipated building what we would end up building which is a machinery that acts independently at scale in other languages...maybe even the successor to this terrorist group when it manifests itself'. 'The successor terrorist group' presumes that we live in a world where the threat of terror is continuous and it's easy to see how this perspective will persist when you have organisations like Jigsaw and Moonshot able to maintain their business of identifying and challenging the threat with a funding model that is entirely lacking in oversight. We've become accustomed to living in a world where signs and pop-ups are individually tailored to define how we should look, feel and spend our money, perhaps a world where this logic extends into our Politics is just the new normal.
Arun Kundnani described in his book, The Muslims Are Coming, how the logic of counterterrorism had been developed in collaboration between the UK and the US after 9/11. As I have talked about in previous blogs, this led to the development of the narratives of extremism and radicalisation that have resulted in the suppression of voices in opposition to the state. This shared logic appears to persist since both the Department of Homeland Security in the US and the Home Office recently announced that they were offering grants of $10Million to 'counter violent extremism' and £1.5Million to 'prevent vulnerable people from becoming radicalised'.
Over the last few years, I have had contact with the Prevent Counterterrorism Strategy as a teacher who was expected to report my students to the security services, as an academic carrying out socio-linguistic research into Prevent, as a contributor to numerous reports for NGOs and media outlets as well as for a local government scrutiny committee into Prevent. This represents a lot of time talking about counterterrorism and the most hard to detect aspect of all of these conversations has had the most profound effect on all participants; by engaging in a conversation that refers to 'radicalisation' or 'extremism' we find ourselves caught in a circular logic that justifies the need for a policy to prevent opposition to the state. To avoid this, one has to constantly and consciously take a step back to remind oneself that views that radically diverge from our own or which might be perceived as extreme do not necessarily pose a violent threat and therefore do not require suppression; for democracy to function they must be allowed.
When someone engages in the competition to win the grant money being offered, they have to engage in the circular logic that radical and extreme views lead to violence (I explored how the justification of this view was only supported by the terms' association with violence in the definitions that counterterrorism policies provide in my last post). To think about applying for these grants reinforces the logic that political views should be suppressed and provides a financial incentive to buy into this idea, making it yet harder to extricate oneself from the repressive logic. I suspect that we'll never know if the decision to launch these grants was devised in a transatlantic meeting straight out of In The Loop or if the timing is coincidental but we can be sure that, rather than promoting innovation, they reinforce a circular logic that is undermining our right to hold and express views in opposition to the state.
I'm generally the last person to argue for market solutions but the quasi-market of these innovation funds is unlikely to offer any kind of real innovation to society.
Here's what I had to say at the launch of the report:
I've been teaching in London for ten years and in Tower Hamlets for the last three, serving a predominantly Muslim community. In 2014 the Muslim students who I teach stopped engaging in the political debate that is a vital part of any teaching practice. This corresponded with the allegations that Birmingham’s schools were being infiltrated by so-called Islamic extremists that became known as the “Trojan Horse” and resulted in OfSTED being sent in and downgrading a number of schools and advising them to follow the PREVENT Strategy. I would like to explain how this has led to Muslim students disengaging from educational debate and how this mechanism risks increasing the threat of terrorism.
At the same time as the events in Birmingham, a letter was sent to all headteachers in Tower Hamlets, offering the services of PREVENT. Headteachers in Tower Hamlets expressed their concern that PREVENT flew in the face of their inclusion agendas but fear of OfSTED compelled them to conform. At the same time the Department for Education briefed the press that there was a “Trojan Horse 2” in Tower Hamlets where the situation was worse than that in Birmingham, I have not seen evidence to support this claim but one school in Tower Hamlets, John Cass, was downgraded for the activities of some of their sixth form students on Facebook and was advised to follow PREVENT.
In 2015 PREVENT became a duty for teachers and it became my duty to report students at risk of being “drawn into terrorism” to the security services via the Police run Channel Program.
As a result of concerns for the impact that PREVENT was having on the students who I teach, I developed an academic interest in PREVENT and am now continuing this research as a PhD at UCL. My interest has also led me to be on the Overview and Scrutiny Committee into PREVENT for Tower Hamlets which has offered me the opportunity to see how PREVENT is applied across the Borough and to spend time with the PREVENT team in Birmingham to gain a more national view of the application of the PREVENT Strategy and Duty. Though PREVENT is engaged in very different ways across the two boroughs, the negative impacts have been widespread and similar.
My research and committee work has enabled me to run focus groups with students from across Tower Hamlets. These students have said that they are proud of their Borough for its diversity, the freedom to express culture and religion that they experience, community cohesion and for the opportunities for young people. However, since PREVENT has taken effect in schools, they have become concerned that it has become “difficult to practice religion in schools”; one boy (who has recently climbed Snowdon 7 times to raise money for a charity to support orphans in Myanmar) had the police called on him for praying in the park with other Muslim friends; another said, “I don’t always say what I think to adults [as I am] worried about how I might be viewed” and when I questioned them further they explained that they included their teachers and parents in the adults who they did not feel safe to speak to anymore. Finally, one young person said that, “[I am] scared to practice my religion”.
The first paragraph of the Home Secretary’s forward to the PREVENT Strategy clearly indicates that it is directed at Islam so over intervention in young Muslims lives is not surprising as I have heard it suggested in Birmingham and in Tower Hamlets that Prevent makes it a duty for all community members to report their concerns about those who are at risk of radicalisation. The definition of radicalisation having changed across the different versions of PREVENT since 2008.
That there have been two very different versions of PREVENT often goes unnoticed but I would briefly like to look into one of the significant differences. The definition of “radicalisation” in 2008 was distinct and separate from violence and terrorism yet in 2011 the strategy made “radicalisation” synonymous with support for terrorism. For those people with radical views, those desiring political change, this has had the effect of suppressing their voices for fear of being perceived as violent under the new violent definition; this was seen when the Muslim students who I serve stopped engaging in debate. However, for individuals whose desire for political change is stronger than their abhorrence of violence, the newly defined “radicalisation” draws them into a terrorist identity. PREVENT thus has the capacity to promote the threat that it purports to suppress.
This promotion of terrorism is a high price to pay for the suppression of debate (if that is what we want), particularly when I consider that in 10 years of teaching, every student with views that I have perceived as extreme has moderated their views as a result of classroom debate. I've often learned from them too. We are after all members of the same society.
The things that made my students proud of Tower Hamlets were the same things that brought me into teaching 10 years ago, celebration of diversity, the promotion of freedom of expression
community cohesion and opportunities for young people. Yet these are now being undermined by PREVENT and this is why I am joining Rights Watch (UK) in calling for a full review of PREVENT that hears from those who are affected. This will be a difficult task as those affected are already scared to speak out but they must be heard if educational opportunities are to be enabled and community safety preserved.
Lee Rigby's murderers were described as extremists and radicals and it has saddened me to hear some describing Jo Cox's murder this week in the same terms. Describing any of these people as extremists or radicals places the responsibility on the ideology of the group that the murderer is purported to represent. Both Far Right movements and Islamist movements come from the same marginalisation of the overarching ideology of today. Neo-liberalism, capitalism, freedom, or whatever name it is given, there is no denying that many feel shut out and that some are compelled to take matters into their own hands and revert to a tactic that was last prevalent at the turn of the 20th century, the propaganda of the deed. The anarchists of Paris and from across Europe believed that if they committed a deed horrendous enough they would set a chain of events in motion that would result in the destruction of the State and in freedom for all. The absence of an anarchist contribution to today's political landscape suggests that they did not succeed.
On 12th February 1894, a young man named Emile Henry was so frustrated by the suffering and lack of social mobility that he saw around him that he set off a bomb in the Cafe Terminus near Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Two days later Martial Bourdan blew himself up whilst attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in London. Both Henry and Bourdan would be familiar with the world today, many people unable to engage in a deeply divided society where the opulence of the rich was unattainable for most. Bourdan's portrayal as Stevie in Joseph Conrad's Novel, The Secret Agent, also shares similarities with how some of today's violent protagonists are described as mentally ill. Again, this denies the responsibility of society for the conditions that lead to these violent acts.
The description of any of these marginalised and unforgivably violent people, anarchist, Islamist or Far Right, as extreme, radical or mentally ill leads to our failure to discuss and address the root causes of their actions. If we were to recognise that they all stem from the same frustrations, we might be able to start to address the problem. We may not even have to as the racists picketing the local mosque might realise that they have more in common with the Muslims that they are shouting at than with the politician they have voted for. By working together, they would also be more likely to see the improvements in their lives that they are demanding.
Seeing the news that followed the tragic murders in Orlando
and Paris this week led me back to Perry and Puar's work from 2014. The sign of a raised rainbow fist in an article that referred to
the killers' Islamic faiths creates a strong visual representation of their
theory of Homonationalism and was shown in a two page spread in the Evening Standard (see bottom of page) and across UK media.
Both Puar and Perry explore the notion of the Islamic other
as a queer object in their concept of Homonationalism. Their work can be seen
as a progression from Foucault’s interest in the construction of subjectivities
by marginal lifestyles, Zizek noting Foucault’s particular interest in the
‘sadomasochistic sexual universe’ (Zizek, 1989, xxiv). From the perspective of
homonationalism, homosexuals are no longer perceived as queer and deviant
individuals and it is suggested that they have been replaced by a queer and
deviant Muslim other, the same accusations of sexual and moral deviance now
placed on Muslims as was previously ascribed to homosexuals. Puar notes that legislation granting freedoms to homosexuals has often corresponded
with legislation withdrawing freedoms from ethnic minorities (Puar, 2014,
p199). While Mavelli’s exploration of the secular interpretation of Muslims as
irrational subjects has removed secularism's responsibility for the societal
conditions that might lead to acts of political violence expressed by Muslims,
the homonationalist representation of Muslims as queer and deviant has
justified acts of political violence from the West against Muslims (Perry,
2014, p178-9 and Mavelli, 2012 and 2014).
Perry and Puar’s homonationalist interpretations that
Muslims are seen as queer and deviant are supported by Baker et al’s work, The
Representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK Press, 1998-2008 (2011). This
study analysed 200,000 articles in the UK press and found that Muslims were
represented as ‘being quick to anger, oppressive towards women, possessing
extremist beliefs and at risk from radicalisation’ (p2).
President Obama's continued refusal to describe a threat of "radical Islam" follows the recommendations of Baker et al to avoid language that might other Muslims and this chimes with the
main body of the articles on the page of the Evening Standard that caught my eye
last night and which is copied below. While the main article does not connect the Orlando killings with a generalised Muslim
other, the "Islamist Fanatic" in the title makes a
connection that has the capacity to divide communities as Baker cautioned against. The
placing of the Paris attack which is more easily tied to the notion of an
Islamic threat on the same page as the Orlando killing implies a connection between the Orlando
attack and a religious ideology in a way that could not be justified in the
content of the articles.
The rainbow fist quite rightly signifies solidarity with the
LGBT community who have suffered the most tragic of attacks and everyone should
be proud that we live in a world where more and more people are free to express
their sexuality but Homonationalism cautions that this liberation may correspond
with the repression of ethnic minorities and it is easy to see from this page of the Evening Standard where the gaze of the security services might turn.
That the clenched fist rises out of words "French Authorities" and a
headline that implies that they had not done enough to stop the attack in Paris
suggests that a call for repression of Islam continues.
Baker, J. Gabrieltos, C. and McEnery, T. (2011) The
Representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK Press, 1998-2008
Perry, B. (2014) “Towards an Ontogenesis of Queerness and
Divinity: Queer Political Theology and Terrorist Assemblages.”Culture and
Religion 15 (2): 117–186.
Puar, J. (2014) Reading religion back into Terrorist
Assemblages: Author's response, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary
Journal, 15:2,198-210
Mavelli, L. (2014) Widening participation, the
instrumentalization of knowledge and the reproduction of inequality, Teaching
in Higher Education. Vol. 19, No. 8,p860-869
Mavelli, L. (2012) Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The
Secular and the Postsecular. London: Routledge
Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso:
London
Evening Standard 14.6.16