Sheldon Adelson’s Super Pac funding has heavily backed Gingrich – and found him a firm pro-Israel and anti-Muslim ally. By donating $10m to the pro-Newt Gingrich Super Pac campaign, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, one of the richest men in the US, and his physician wife, Dr Miriam Adelson, have kept Gingrich in the Republican primary…
Since the end of the Cold War, conservatives have argued that the world should be seen through the lens of a clash between civilizations. The world could be divided, they argued, on the basis of different cultures and their distance from Western values. Countries where the majority of the population is Muslim were grouped together…
Excessive surveillance of Muslims undermines a central component of counter-terrorism work. Under the guise of tackling Islamic extremism, the government has created one of the most elaborate systems of surveillance ever seen in this country. As this newspaper revealed on Saturday, the Preventing Violent Extremism programme, known simply as Prevent, is being used to gather intelligence…
This Institute of Race Relations study of the UK government’s Preventing Violent Extremism policy criticized its sole focus on Muslim populations, the embedding of surveillance in community engagement with Muslims, and the background assumptions about the nature of extremism and radicalization. The paper was accompanied by a front-page report in the Guardian newspaper on the surveillance…
As the neoconservative idea of a clash of civilisations is increasingly challenged, a number of liberal writers — Paul Berman, Nick Cohen, Martin Amis, Andrew Anthony, Bernard Henry-Lévy and Christopher Hitchens — are rethinking the ‘war on terror’ as a cold war against Islamism, defined as a totalitarian political movement analogous to fascism or Stalinism.…
Policy Exchange, the Social Affairs Unit and the Centre for Social Cohesion are driving the political agenda on Muslims in Britain while thinktanks on the left are largely silent. Over the last two months, a number of writers, journalists and policymakers associated with the Policy Exchange (PX) thinktank have taken up key positions on Boris…
It has long been the contention of those on the right of British politics that cultural diversity is a threat to national cohesion and security. However, cultural diversity has been attacked equally vigorously by liberals and by those on the centre left, especially since 2001. The new conventional wisdom is that a national story of…
There can be no social cohesion while an entire group of citizens is cast as the enemy within. The demand, since September 11, has been for a recharging of the batteries of national belonging, for the state to once again connect with the nation. In response, the government has chosen to bind itself to the…
This October 2002 paper explored the contemporary trend in which the secular term ‘Asian’ was being displaced in the UK by religiously-coded definitions of identity, a process that was linked to the emergence of new, religious political/social movements and occasionally accompanied by violence between different South Asian communities in Britain. Potential links between Hindu and Sikh nationalist…