Suddenly, I'm an 'Islamic Fascist'
by Jonathan Cook
It occurred to me as I watched the story unfolding on my TV of a suspected plot by a group of at least 20 British Muslims to blow up planes between the UK and America that the course of my life and that of the alleged "terrorists" may have run in parallel in more ways than one.
Like a number of them, I am originally from High Wycombe, one of the nondescript commuter towns that ring London. As aerial shots wheeled above the tiled roof of a semi-detached house there, I briefly thought I was looking at my mother's home.
But doubtless my and their lives have diverged in numerous ways. According to news reports, the suspects are probably Pakistani, a large "immigrant" community that has settled in many corners of Britain, including High Wycombe and Birmingham, a gray metropolis in the country's center where at least some of the arrested men are believed to have been born.
Britain's complacent satisfaction with its multiculturalism and tolerance ignores the facts that Pakistanis and other ethnic minorities mostly live in their own segregated spaces on the margins of British life. "Native" Britons like me – the white ones – generally assume that is out of choice: "They stick to their own kind." Many of us rarely come into contact with a Pakistani unless he is serving us what we call "Indian food" or selling us a packet of cigarettes in a corner shop.
So, even though we may have been neighbors of a sort in High Wycombe, my life and theirs probably had few points of contact.
But paradoxically, that changed, I think, five years ago when I left Britain. I moved to Nazareth in Israel, an Arab – Muslim and Christian – community on the very margins of the self-declared Jewish state. In the ghetto of Nazareth, I rarely meet Israeli Jews unless I venture out for work or I find myself sitting next to them in a local restaurant as they order hummus from an Arab waiter, just as I once asked for a madras curry in High Wycombe. When Israeli Jews briefly visit the ghetto, I suddenly realize how much, by living here, I have become an Arab by default.
Living on the margins of any society is an alienating experience that few who are rooted in the heartland of the consensus can ever hope to understand. Such alienation can easily deepen into something less passive, far more destructive, when you find yourself not only marginalized but your loyalty, rationality, even your sanity, called into question.
As we approach the fifth official anniversary of the "war on terror," the foiled UK "terror plot" has neatly provided George W. Bush, the "leader of the free world," with a chance to remind us of our fight against the "Islamic fascists." But what if the war on terror is not really about separating the good guys from the bad guys, but about deciding what a good guy can be allowed to say and think?
What if the "Islamic fascism" President Bush warns us of is not just the terrorism associated with Osama bin Laden and his elusive al-Qaeda network but a set of views that many Arabs, Muslims, and Pakistanis – even the odd humanist – consider normal, even enlightened? What if the war on "Islamic fascism" is less about fighting terrorism and more about silencing those who dissent from the West's endless wars against the Middle East?
The rest is at:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9524
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