A post-election analysis of the UK government’s new proposals to tackle extremism. From 1 July, a broad range of public bodies – from nursery schools to optometrists – will be legally obliged to participate in the government’s Prevent policy to identify would-be extremists. Under the fast-tracked Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, schools, universities and health service…
The shooting of three American Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this month has focused attention on anti-Muslim hatred in the US. The murder of Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19, was initially ignored by mainstream media in the US. Only when large numbers of Twitter users started circulating…
Britons following the news of protests against police killings of black people in the US should not feel too smug about the situation in the UK. Not for the first time, our outrage at American racism goes hand in hand with complacency about Britain’s own history of institutional racism and its manifestations in police…
In the early years of its “war on terror”, the US government developed an international system of secret prisons. Those suspected of being Muslim terrorists were secretly captured by the CIA or the US military and flown between these “black sites” in a process called “extraordinary rendition”. We now know that CIA officers used torture…
An interview with Tom Mills, co-editor of New Left Project. The ‘War on Terror’ is a phrase most closely associated with George W. Bush. How has this war been affected by the change in Presidential administration? By and large the Obama administration has continued the policies and practices that were dominant at the end of the…
The UK government tried to disappear Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to the US, but the basic rules of evidence were unexpectedly applied. Days after Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad were extradited to the US in 2012, the home secretary, Theresa May, began her speech to the Conservative party conference by asking: “Wasn’t it great…
The U.S. government has been snooping on prominent members of the Muslim-American community, according to documents released by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and publicized in a story by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of the online publication Intercept. That story reveals that the NSA and FBI covertly monitored the emails of five Muslim-Americans who…
Blair’s simplistic formula for tackling radical Islam is leading him to support some of the most oppressive forces in the region. Tony Blair’s speech this week at Bloomberg in London reveals a growing support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. A decade ago, Blair was justifying wars in the Middle East on the grounds that they would…
Muslim Americans likely make up the bulk of US domestic spy targets. This is what it’s like for innocent citizens to live in fear. Better oversight of the sprawling American national security apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records.…
London mayor Boris Johnson’s suggestion this week that children of Islamic extremists be taken into care to prevent their being radicalised illustrates perfectly our collective failure to understand the problem of terrorism. After 9/11, so-called terrorism experts funded by governments and neoconservative think-tanks invented the concept of radicalisation to try to explain the violence being…