Ep.66 The Trojan Horse Affair – Britain’s Anti-Terror Industry with Fahad Ansari and Dr Rob Faure Walker
Britain for the past 21 years has been overtaken by what can only be described as a national hysteria. The recent jaw-dropping investigation by the New York Times Serial podcast into the so-called Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham, revealed how this hysteria translated into a deep-seated national display of Islamophobia. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s certainly worth a listen. But in many ways, it no more than confirmed what the Muslim community already knows. We have become accustomed to hearing on an almost daily basis, lazy and malicious tropes about an Islamic threat, dressed as thoughtful research and media analysis.
At the height of the War on Terror, there was a bi-partisan consensus – with both Labour and the Conservative Party queuing up to talk with infantile rhetoric about the end of multiculturalism, the so-called Muslim problem in our midst, segregated communities, entryism and Islam’s inability to modernise. Listeners to this podcast will note from discussions with previous guests, an anti-Islam industry has developed, with academics feeding think-tanks, and in turn feeding journalists and politicians. All complicit in nurturing an atmosphere and language to enable some of the most draconian anti-terror laws in the western world. Even the United States was unable to pass a fraction of what repeated British Home Secretaries have called for.
This is not merely a Conservative Party problem or one limited to the right-wing press. Islamophobia pervades British public life. As Baroness Saeeda Warsi recently said, Muslim hatred has passed the dinner-party test as an acceptable conversation.
Our guests today have been for the past 20 years at the forefront of pushing back against the security state. Fahad Ansari is a lawyer and public activist, who in his professional career has defended many Muslims who have fallen foul of Britain’s nationality laws, including very high-profile cases of citizenship deprivation. He recently won a land-mark case of a British Muslim of Bangladeshi descent who had his passport unlawfully revoked whist visiting his wife in his fathers country. Fahad regularly appears on national and international news channels and is called upon to provide expert evidence to international institutions.
Dr Rob Faure Walker is an academic and author specialising in critiquing Britain’s anti-terror educational policy, also known as Prevent. He has recently published a brilliant book looking at the language of ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’. Rob runs the website Prevent Digest and become interested in the subject after his experiences in a East London school, where he witnessed the detrimental policies of the state on young Muslims first hand.