Woolwich murder triggers anti-Muslim backlash in UK
The horrific dismemberment of an off-duty British soldier by two UK Muslims outside the British Army barracks in Woolwich, southeast London, has inflicted incalculable damage on the relationship between Britain’s Muslims and wider British society, and that relationship was in no very healthy state to begin with. In the aftermath of the killing, followers of the far-right, Islamophobic English Defense League (EDL) converged on Woolwich, bent on targeting local mosques and inciting an anti-Muslim backlash. Already Muslim monitoring groups are reporting an upsurge in attacks on Muslims, and there may be worse to come, especially in areas where impoverished whites live in close to proximity to Muslims and tension has long been acute. This weekend the EDL is planning a show of strength, with protests in 30 or more locations.
The Woolwich killing comes hard on the heels of two other ugly UK news stories which can only have confirmed popular prejudices that Islam is an essentially vicious faith. This spring saw the jailing of a group of would-be British Muslim terrorists who had plotted to turn an EDL rally into a bloodbath. It also saw the jailing of an Oxford-based gang of British Muslim sex offenders who were found guilty of bestial crimes against young white girls.
All this is happening at a time when British politics is shifting sharply to the right, thanks in no small degree to the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose chief appeal is to white English nationalists furiously resentful of both Britain’s involvement in the European Union and of its emergence as a quintessentially multicultural society. UKIP appeared to be marginalizing the EDL by affording a more mainstream vehicle for xenophobic white Britons, though since the Woolwich murder social media pages have indicated a surge of fresh support for the far-right groups.
The mordant British intellectual of the last century, Malcolm Muggeridge, was apt to deride newspaper editorials that greeted the outbreak of some grave crisis with the pious formula: “It is greatly to be hoped that all those of good will will unite and that wiser counsels will prevail.” Few can feel confident that good will and wiser counsels are going to prevail in the current combustible circumstances. What must fervently be hoped, however, is that, as after the 7/7 London bombings of 2005, Britain manages to live up to its vaunted name as a bastion of tolerance.
What is certain is that grave new harm has been done to Britain as a liberal political culture with a purported commitment to free speech and the pursuit of truth through rational argument and respect for facts. It was already difficult to discuss British foreign policy in considered, dispassionate terms. To be sure, there has been growing acceptance that the intervention of UK military forces alongside those of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan has not yielded the enhanced national security originally held out as its justification. Yet now — in the face of the mass outpouring of patriotic support for Britain’s armed forces that has followed the Woolwich murder, with endless talk of the heroism of British soldiers — sober deliberation on the whole issue of British military interventionism is likely to be harder than ever. There is, moreover, a sharpened public sense that the British government has failed to give soldiers the backing that they need, and it can hardly be denied that the British Army is experiencing drastic reduction in its funding and that ex-soldiers have been woefully ill-served by their political masters.
It is natural that people should find it unbearable to contemplate the possibility that their country’s soldiers have died in vain, even if — perhaps especially if — that is what the evidence suggests. And yet how many firmly believe that the military action that Britain has undertaken over the past decade and more has been other than counterproductive? If pressed, not a few would probably acknowledge that in Afghanistan and in Iraq Britain has squandered much blood and treasure, and that its leaders have been far too prone to forget that Britain long ago ceased to be a great world power with a self-appointed role as a global policeman. The consensus of opinion might even be that a rational UK response to the terrorist threat would have been not to embark on military action in foreign parts at all but to pour resources into domestic security.
Following the Woolwich killing, UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of Britons being united in their determination to face down the terrorist threat. In some sense this may be true. Certainly the great majority are united in their horror of what happened. Yet in a deeper sense it is emotive humbug. For Cameron presides over a government whose policies are worsening the divisions of what was already a divided and dysfunctional society, brimming with alienated and often desperate individuals. In truth, Britain is mired in a mental and moral mess, one made all the more intractable by the tenacity of the national conviction that British military actions serve not just the United Kingdom but the cause of universal justice.
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