Fekete - A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe

A Suitable Enemy

A Suitable Enemy

Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe

LIZ FEKETE

Foreword by
A. Sivanandan

First published 2009 by Pluto Press
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Copyright Liz Fekete 2009

The right of Liz Fekete to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As this book has been a long time in gestation 16 years in fact there are a considerable number of people to thank. It was in 1992 that the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) first launched the European Race Audit (ERA), of which I am head. Not only have IRR staff Harmit Athwal, Arun Kundnani and Rosie Wild provided support and inspiration, but a quite amazing bunch of volunteers from across the Continent have given of their time, translating articles and providing a network for discussion and ideas. And, as they have never received any reward for so doing, if I didnt register my thanks here, I would be a very ungrateful person indeed.

Over the last 16 years, the work of the ERA has grown in importance, and if I have grown with it, then IRR Director A. Sivanandan, is the principal reason why. When I first walked into the Institute as a hopelessly disorganised student and anti-fascist activist in 1982, I would never have predicted that one day I would come to write a book. But Siva helped me to hone my commitment and find my voice. If the reader finds clarity in this book, then the clarity is Sivas, not mine. Race & Class editor Hazel Waters was also a fine teacher. She has spent hours unravelling the knots in my writing, and for this she cannot be thanked enough.

But if Siva and Hazel have been the finest teachers during the last 16 years, over the last year, my best best-friend has been Jenny Bourne, whose support on this project which I little deserved has been unbelievable. (Different versions, of different chapters, landed on her kitchen table literally every weekend.) Writing on refugee, integration and migration policies in so many different countries is no easy task, when your natural inclination on taking up official documents (particularly EU ones) is to glaze over. Mercifully, Frances Webber was on hand for me to test out ideas, to check the text and iron out any wrong interpretations of the law. Thanks also to Naima Bouteldja, Victoria Brittain, Avery Gordon, Penny Green and Robin Virgin for spurring me on as well as my editor at Pluto Press, David Castle.

Sixteen years is a long time to labour over a book, but it has taught me a lot about myself. Most of all, it has taught me gratitude for it was not till the making of this book that I came to recognise the tremendous hardships faced by my father, Andrew Fekete and my mother, Elizabeth Fekete forced migrants from a different era. To them, I express not only my thanks but my remorse for taking half a century to show my appreciation.

FOREWORD

A. Sivanandan

Facts do not speak for themselves not in an age of disinformation, spin and deceit. To derive truth from facts, therefore, is the mark of a rare political intelligence; to envisage trends and tendencies even before the fact is the mark of a rare political instinct. It is this combination of virtues that gives Liz Feketes investigation into Islamophobia, xeno-racism and the rise of the security state in A Suitable Enemy its authenticity and authority. Underscoring all of which, of course, is the sociological imagination that allows her to become the oppressed and the hatred of injustice that calls her to their cause.

The ground, though, has to be cleansed of yesterdays notions of todays racism. Racism changes with changes in the economic and political system, and the nationalist racisms of industrial capitalism have yielded to the common, market racism of global capital.

Hence, for instance, the treatment meted out to (white) East European immigrants cannot be said to stem from a natural fear of strangers, xenophobia, but from a compelling economics of discrimination, akin to racial discrimination, effectively racism under a different colour, xeno-racism. The treatment of the Roma, however, bears the mark of Cain, the outcast, the sub-homines a more savage aspect of racism. And that despite the fact that they too are citizens of Europe. Asylum seekers, of course, are outsiders by definition and mostly non-white, and therefore kept from earning a legitimate livelihood, denied basic social and civil rights, and liable to end up in prison or detention centre, if not already set upon by the passing fascist.

Since 9/11, however, racism has taken a qualitative leap and spawned other racisms in the process. The immigrant is no longer just a classic outsider but also the terrorist within. Since the latter is most likely to be a Muslim, it is natural to hold all Muslims suspect until proved innocent. It is like the Sus law which once criminalised British black youths on suspicion of their being about to commit a crime except that in this case the victims are marked out not so much by their colour as by their beards and headscarves. And, like the black youth, they must walk on tiptoe through the land, looking over their shoulders, inviting of more suspicion or else give up being who they are. These are the choices: you either integrate or disintegrate.

Integration today, in any European language, has, by a political sleight of hand, been equated with assimilation, the aim of which is a homogenous society and not the pluralist multicultural society that integration envisages. Hence the attack on multiculturalism, which, despite its success in Britain, has been interpreted by politicians and pundits in search of homogeneity to mean culturalism, ethnicism, communities closed in on themselves the very antithesis of multi -culturalism. And the focus of that attack now becomes the Muslim communities who are perceived as self-separated not just by culture but by religion too, a political religion at that, with its own system of laws and rules of social conduct and sanctified oppressions a fundamentalist religion of the Book stuck in the Middle Ages, untouched by time or place forever waging jihad against the unbelievers.

That, at any rate, is the populist and rightwing rationale for the crusade against the Muslims. The Left