Faisal Bodi argues that the current disorder on the UK’s streets are the result of relentless Islamophobic discourse from successive governments, and resurgent (global) racist politics. Without a serious culture change, starting at the highest echelons of political circles, the future bodes ill for social order.
As sentences are passed and cell doors slammed shut, a nervous calm hangs over Britain in the wake of far-right inspired riots that brought racist terror back onto our streets. In the short term at least, the fast-tracked, zero-tolerance justice being meted out looks likely to deter repeat performances, thereby re-establishing some semblance of social order. However, looking forward, it would be complacent to allow ourselves anything more than momentary breathing space, for the political, social and economic conditions that have given rise to the current outbreak are too firmly embedded to believe that the appeal of far-right narratives will dissipate any time soon.
Lest I be accused of suggesting otherwise, allow me say that my view that short, sharp justice should restore peace to our streets in no way represents an endorsement of the patently two-tier prosecution regime by which mainly white non-Muslim rioters are being convicted. The established pattern of public order charges is a far cry from the regime imposed in the 2001 social unrest when the majority of Muslims involved were booked for riot, an offence that carries stiffer custodial penalties. That has led some commentators to recommend the implementation of the same or even more serious, anti-terrorism legislation, for which a prima facie case can certainly be made. This in turn has set off a debate about utilising punitive securitisation laws designed primarily to otherise Muslims, the deployment of which in the current context could reinforce the case for their increased targeting in the future. This argument has some merit. An establishment that has unashamedly set out its stall on the toxic foundation of Islamophobia, and already demonstrated that it does not need a legal pretext to enforce it, will persecute Muslims regardless. And while it might be tempting to expect it to apply the same legal yardstick to everyone, this is a morally indefensible position. If we disapprove of the misuse of anti-terror laws, we must disapprove of it for everyone, not just for our community.
In fact, consistency in application of standards must inform any analysis of the riots and their drivers. For that reason, explanations that focus on criminality alone are insufficient and likely to attract criticisms of hypocrisy. In the past when our cities have exploded, usually under the weight of racist policing or threats, we have searched for reasons in structures and processes that give rise to violent outpourings of public dissatisfaction. That is not to validate or give any legitimacy to the far-right. What I am concerned with here is identifying why and how its Islamophobic hate and exclusion narratives have found such a receptive ear in large swathes of white society. While there is no reason to reach for the panic button just yet, the reach of these narratives and the ground they have gained is worrying. Any rearguard action to arrest this momentum must accurately identify the reasons behind their growing appeal.
There is no doubt that this summer’s riots and disturbances were incited by figures with far-right orientations seeking to promote xenophobic agendas. Unlike the 2001 and 2011 disorder, they cannot be viewed as spontaneous or unplanned. This nativist revolt has been many years in the making at the hands of high-profile social media and political personalities such as Stephen Yaxley Lennon (popularly known as Tommy Robinson), Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, Katie Hopkins, David Atherton, just to name a few. With the ultimate aim of stoking a race war, they have tapped into primal fears about loss of identity, culture and exploited Oriental tropes about black crime and sexuality, engineering a climate in which the white majority is cast as neglected, discriminated against and preyed on. Their messaging is consistently inflammatory and apocalyptic: Muslims and/or migrants are taking over and unless it rises up, the white race is doomed to subjugation in its own lands. To varying degrees, they are all proponents of the far-right Great Replacement theory propounded by the French author Renaud Camus, according to which political elites are hatching a conspiracy to replace the majority ‘white’ population in Europe with Muslims from outside.
The extent to which this baseless notion of an Europe overrun by Muslims (Eurabia as it is called) has taken hold in the white imaginary cannot be overstated. It is now a mainstay of mainstream media. Political discourse is infected with its talking points and narratives, to the extent that politicians of all stripes have found themselves adopting it in order to stay popular and relevant. On social media, enabled by platform owners like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk, it is reproduced on an industrial scale for public consumption.
Immigration is the most prominent of the far-right narratives. Seeking to use the momentum generated by their success in helping secure Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2016, the far-right has latched onto the problem of migrants crossing the channel from mainland Europe and continued immigration in general to raise a moral panic around these alleged concerns, couching their xenophobia in the language of social cohesion and national security. Their slogan “Stop the Boats”, chanted commonly at rallies, is pulled directly from the playbook of former Australian PM Tony Abbott, whose offshore migrant processing policy not only inspired the British Conservative Party’s much derided Rwanda Plan but also formed the central plank of their recent re-election campaign. So febrile is the climate that has been whipped up around these confected threats that in the latest riots, far-right supporters besieged and attempted to burn down two hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and Tamworth.
But the far-right are not the only villains in this piece. Their fearmongering has merged with a more long-running, state-led Project Fear to create today’s environment of hate in which racialised minorities are fair game. From shortly before the turn of the millennium, politicians of all stripes have sought to vilify Islam/Muslims as a necessary tool for manufacturing public consent to maintain global western hegemony by way of the euphemistic War on Terror. Helped by incidents of domestic blowback, they used “terrorism” as a pretext to craft a new enemy to replace the old Red Menace. A frightful panoply of legislation, including the Orwellian pre-crime intervention epitomised by Prevent, was deployed to manage dissent and support for any entity that challenged western militarism. The erosion of civil liberties that this entailed could not be done without instilling the requisite fear of Muslims into the British public. For a glaring recent example of this, we need look no further the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s crusade to present anti-genocide protests in the UK, in which Muslims participated in large numbers, as “hate marches“.
Since it is difficult to unjustly target a minority community without attracting charges of racism, it was also necessary to dismantle the architecture of racial equality that had been erected over the preceding couple of decades. And so began the attack on multi-culturalism. Previously celebrated as a source of social enrichment it was now presented as divisive and conflictual. The riots that engulfed some northern cities in 2001, involving mainly Muslim youths reacting to racist attacks and threats, were now adduced as proof of the centrifugal impact of multiculturalism. Not only were those who took part in the horrific violence read the riot act (draconian sentences were handed down) but the unrest as a whole was viewed through a lens of social breakdown, leading to the rise of social cohesion as a political concept and priority. The official government report into the social unrest, led by Professor Ted Cantle, continued the otherisation and scapegoating of Muslims by placing the roots of the violence in the failure of Muslims to adequately buy into some amorphous set of overarching, common British values. It was a far cry from the Scarman report, which 20 years earlier, had identified racism against black communities and socio-economic exclusion as the principal causes of the 1981 inner city riots. “Scarman located the riots in the social, economic and political complex of acute deprivation and discrimination, and the regeneration funds that flowed as a result ensured there was no repetition of the 80s unrest. Cantle meanwhile only acknowledged in passing that Islamophobia and a desert of opportunity contributed to the riots. It was a classic case of putting the cart before the horse, since perhaps the principal cause of communities living separate lives lies in the socioeconomic immobility produced by poverty,” I wrote in a 2002 article for The Guardian. Where Cantle left off, right-wing think tanks followed, each one further problematising the Muslim community as anti-integrationist and attacking its civil society organisations if they dared to challenge the new orthodoxy. The decision to prosecute Muslims for using the word “coconut” is the latest and possibly most ludicrous manifestation of the state’s offensive against multiculturalism, a message to minoritised communities that even the communalised language they have developed to explain their own oppression must, in the end, submit to white control.
No hate narrative is capable of taking hold in a population without an effective delivery mechanism. Enter social media. Since digital media has undoubtedly been the dominant mode of dissemination for far-right hate narratives it is useful to briefly reflect on its role as an incubator and purveyor of xenophobia. Research shows that social media is a radicalising agent for many, if not most, people who commit racially motivated hate crimes. The manifesto of far-right terrorist, Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, was composed almost entirely from online sources. White supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, USA, in 2015 was said to rely almost entirely on extreme right wing websites for his political learning. Even in cases where the original impetus does not seem to be internet related, far-right websites act as an accelerant, goading the perpetrator to continue with their hate crimes, as appears to have happened to Peter Mangs, the Swedish serial killer who brought a reign of terror to the Swedish city of Malmo in 2009-2010 by targeting mainly people of colour (Mechanisms of online radicalisation: how the internet affects the radicalisation of extreme-right lone actor terrorists: Guri Nordtorp Mølmen & Jacob Aasland Ravndal, 2021). Closer to home, Darren Osborne, who killed an elderly man after driving a van into a crowd of Muslim pedestrians near a mosque in London in 2017, was radicalised by far-right material he had accessed online.
The reproduction of hate narratives circulating online by some of those who participated in the recent unrest supports the “online radicalisation” thesis. With most of the far-right movers and shakers denied platforms in mainstream media, they have found in social media a potentially more potent landscape where they enjoy access to an audience that is receptive to their messaging. Their work is made easier by the way that AI algorithms operate, directing new content to users on the basis of their previous choices. This lends itself to the creation of echo chambers which act to reinforce existing prejudices. More nefarious forces are at work too. Bots, trolls and a hidden army of far-right activists also publish and propagate the narratives, extending their reach. In its latest adversarial threat report, Meta, the umbrella company that owns Facebook and Instagram (among others), reveals that in the three months to June this year, the UK was one of the principal targets of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” on its platforms. “Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is a manipulative communication tactic that uses fake, authentic, and duplicated social media accounts to influence public debate and spread misinformation. CIB can take two forms: domestic non-government campaigns or foreign or government interference (FGI). The goal of CIB is to manipulate public opinion, coerce users, and push users towards political and social extremes”. One company alone, operating out of Vietnam as LT Media but with untraceable owners, spent $1.2m churning out targeted anti-Muslim content. Although much of it was directed at Qatar, Sohan Dsouza, a computational social scientist who has analysed the report, says that “a good deal of the messaging rode atop anti-immigrant/Muslim fear-mongering and catastrophizing content. This rebranded far-right propaganda was targeted as Facebook ads to at least tens of millions in the UK and tens of millions in France leading up to respective elections, and not long before the Southport-spinoff riots…” Dsouza goes on to say that the $1.2m spent on the advertising campaign by unknown persons ranks in the top 5 biggest influencer operations in Meta’s history. Meta’s failure to control the production and promulgation of hate has been mirrored and perhaps even exceeded by ‘X’ (the online platform formerly known as Twitter), where in the name of free speech, racist and Islamophobic content is allowed to circulate. Its owner, the maverick megalomaniac Elon Musk, has been accused of harbouring xenophobic views including that Arabic is “the language of the enemy” and that “civil war is inevitable” as a consequence of population flows from the global South to the global North. Musk even used his platform to spring to the defence of Tommy Robinson, questioning his arrest on the grounds of his right to free speech and also reposting his recent film.
In fact, the way that digital media was weaponised in order to trigger the recent unrest highlights its role as the chief enabler of far-right violence. No sooner did news break of a murderous attack on young girls attending a dance class in the Southport on 29 July, than large far-right accounts were injecting online platforms with their xenophobic poison, speculating without any evidence that the perpetrator was Muslim. The first post to posit a Muslim connection originated from a Cheshire-based businesswoman, named in the media as a Bernie Spofforth (there appears to be some uncertainty around her first name). She posted on X: “Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list. If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.” Although later deleted, the post was quickly picked up by Russian media and the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate and regurgitated by far-right accounts. Spofforth was later arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false information.
Since the case is sub judice it would not be right to comment on its details, but as a general point of discussion, it is illustrative of the manner and scale on which supporters of far-right narratives routinely deploy false information in order to advance white supremacist narratives. Whenever there is a violent crime, legions of keyboard warriors on the right immediately swing into action, seeking to implicate or incriminate Muslims. This is the typical modus operandi: flood the internet with posts speculating Muslim involvement in the hope that enough anti-Muslim sentiment is whipped up to demonise the community even if the eventual facts suggest otherwise. Southport was no exception. In just one hour before Spofforth’s tweet was picked up by a shady Pakistani online news outlet and diffused worldwide, it had already generated 15 million impressions. And by the time the suspected attacker was named as Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a British born teenager of Rwandan descent who came from a churchgoing family, far-right agitators such as Robinson’s right hand man Daniel Thomas were openly inciting people to revolt. A few hours later, Southport’s only mosque, would come under attack from a mob hurling petrol bombs and bricks as terrified Muslims took cover inside.
The second dominant narrative that the far-right has successfully adopted is that of Muslim/immigrant sexual deviancy. They have done this primarily by hijacking one aspect of the issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE) to cultivate a perceived threat associated with a particular ethno/religious group. This particular narrative, neologised as “Muslim grooming gangs” and “Asian grooming gangs”, has risen to the top of public concerns around CSE, irrespective of the absence of any conclusive evidence to support its central claim that organised sexual abuse of minors is predominantly the preserve of British Muslims of Paksitani descent. Never one to miss an opportunity to incite Islamophobia, in April 2023, then home secretary Suella Braverman stated in an article in the Daily Mail that almost all child-grooming gangs were made up of this demographic, even though her own department had previously warned three years earlier that it was “difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor”. The origins of this racialisation of CSE, which rests on the trope of dark-skinned savages with uncontrollable libidos preying on white girls, has been traced by J. Spooner & J.Stubbs to The Times, a newspaper that is known to be one of the establishment’s preferred platforms for conditioning public debate. In other words, the hate narrative appears to have come from the very top. Other media outlets happily parroted The Times’ talking points. Spooner and Stubbs write:
“The legacy spawned by this manufactured ‘Asian model’ of investigation and its subsequent response, is that the modern, colloquial term for ‘on-street’ grooming — ‘Grooming Gangs’ — is not only commonplace, but applies solely to Asian/Muslim offenders. Examination of media reporting by ourselves confirmed our suspicions that all usage of this racially-loaded label applies only to groups of primarily Asian/Muslim offenders.”
As the establishment helped to implant the racial stereotype of the Muslim/Asian grooming-gang into the national psyche (the tail does not always wag the dog), also furnishing it with a veneer of empirical rigour and respectability, the far-right, represented by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Britain First leader Paul Golding filtered it down to the white working class via social media in cruder, more accessible format. Muslims, and latterly migrants as well, are not only a threat to the integrity of our nation but also a clear and present danger to all white children. Under the pretext that the government was covering up the alleged enormity of Muslim/Asian grooming gangs, they mobilised their base to organise protests outside migrant centres and harass innocent migrants as they go about their daily business. This narrative was very conspicuous in the recent disturbances where rioters routinely chanted “Save our Kids”, even if the irony of it was lost on those among them who tried to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers and their children and attacked what they thought were Muslim homes in Middlesborough.
The third narrative is one that runs like an unbroken thread through all recent serious white working class disturbances: economic exclusion. Even where this professed grievance doesn’t burst out into open violence, it is never far from the surface in communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of deindustrialisation and political neglect. It isn’t a coincidence that the worst violence after the Southport riot (which by all accounts was manufactured by far-right thugs who came from outside) erupted in areas suffering from high levels of deprivation such as Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Rotherham and Tamworth. One of my lasting impressions from covering the Oldham riots in 2001 was the misplaced beef that local whites had with Asians about the causes of their hardship. Even though all the data pointed to Asians in the town being markedly more worse off and the victims of some quite disgraceful discrimination in public resource allocation, there was a palpable resentment towards them stemming from the perception that they receive preferential treatment. Our 2001 report found that the:
“influx of money has mostly benefited members of the white community, particularly the town centre. In one specific case, around £5.6 million was allocated to the South Asian area of Glodwick, while the majority of the SRB (Single Regeneration Budget) aid package was spent on white areas. In effect only around 10-15 per cent was spent on regeneration and development in Glodwick. On the contrary, when resources are officially allocated to predominantly white areas, this influx of money does not make the headlines. This disparity in coverage manufactures widespread misunderstanding of the clearly selective allocation of resources. Members of deprived white areas are consequently vulnerable to feeling that Muslim Asian communities are being favoured by the policies of the local authority, particularly as a result of slanted press coverage.”
The scapegoating of ethnic/religious minorities for white economic woes has always been a reliable recruiting tool for the British far-right (as we saw with Brexit where deprived white regions were among the biggest backers of leaving) and in keeping with character, it has sought to exploit the situation by perpetuating myths that have now become commonplace, such as migrants receiving luxury hotel accommodation and being lavished with welfare benefits while British armed forces veterans are left homeless and destitute. These views were frequently echoed by many rioters in the recent violence. But saying that the far-right is responsible for spreading unfounded fears about relative deprivation should not blind us to the fact that real poverty does exist in white working class communities (aggravated in recent times by austerity – the huge cutbacks to public services that had mainly benefitted the poor) which needs to be addressed by the state if they are to become less fertile radicalising grounds for the far-right.
It would also be an injustice not to acknowledge the social upheavals that have ravaged these communities and which make them easy prey for racist demagogues. Prominent among these are family breakdown and secularisation (the two are not mutually exclusive, even if I am treating them separately). The connection between single parenthood and delinquency is well recognised as is the fact that children born into single-parent families are themselves much more likely than children of intact families to fall into poverty and welfare dependence in later years. Bearing this in mind and without wishing to draw any conclusions about causality in the absence of reliable research, it is at least interesting to note that the overlap between areas with the highest proportions of parents not living together at the time of birth (2018) with the location of this summer’s riot outbreaks. Statistics show that “these authorities are not randomly distributed across the country but are largely confined to five broad regions. Eight are found in the North East, eight in the North West, six in London, five in South Wales and three in the Black Country.” Given that many of the rioters have been reported by the media as having multiple previous convictions, the possible relationship between family breakdown and delinquency to vulnerability to far-right grooming certainly appears to be an area worthy of future research.
The accelerating secularisation of western societies is a routinely overlooked variable in analyses of white rioting, largely as a result of the areligious, left-wing bent of most researchers. But the decline of Christianity, in as much as it deprives people of a purpose in life beyond hedonistic materialism, is also a contributory factor to far-right success. Unable to achieve the material progress that capitalist society prioritises as a goal above everything else, they present a captive audience to those who claim that whites are failing because Muslims and other minorities are succeeding. Of course, the perception of Muslim success is relative and doesn’t always accord with reality. But it is fair to say that when they look at working class minority communities they see a version of the communities they have lost, but which Muslims have built, despite state neglect, discrimination and deprivation. As I wrote elsewhere recently:
“Their churches are boarded up, our mosques are multiplying; their families are broken, ours are relatively intact and thriving; their businesses are dead, ours are prospering; their neighbourhoods are deserted, ours are full of youth and life; their elderly are abandoned to die in care, ours are pampered by their children.”
No analysis of the recent riots would be complete without a mention of the geo-politics that increasingly drives global Islamophobia. Indeed, it is the source of much of the money that funds the activities of right-wing demagogues and groups and allows their ideas to flourish. This seems to originate in two separate ideological streams. The first, exemplified by the rise of the likes of Tommy Robinson, can be traced back to Zionist “think tanks” who see in the British far-right a convenient vehicle to promote Islamophobia as a means for justifying Israel’s occupation of Palestine and western support for it. Hilary Aked cites MJ Rosenberg, formerly of the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), summing up this motivation in 2010 when he sought to explain why some pro-Israel actors joined protests against the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in New York: “It is not because they are instinctive bigots. It is that they believe that the more acceptance there is of Muslims here at home, the less reflexive hatred there will be for Muslims abroad. And that, in their view, reduces America’s sympathy for Israel.” This convergence of interests with the far-right impelled The Middle East Forum, a US based propaganda outfit headed by notorious anti-Muslim activist Daniel Pipes, to pay for the organisation of violent far-right rallies in London in support of Robinson after he was jailed for contempt of court in 2018, and also to fund his legal defence. Robert Shillman, a notorious US financier of pro-Israel causes, financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed in 2017 by a right wing Canadian media website, Rebel Media, on a salary of about £5,000 a month. Rebel Media also organised a Canadian speaking tour earlier this year and arranged his legal defence after he was arrested on an immigration charge.
Prof. David Miller, arguably the world’s leading expert on Zionist influence in western politics, attributes the founding of the English Defence League, an anti-Islam far-right group founded by Robinson, formerly a member of the far-right British National party in 2012, to a conscious attempt by US-based pro-Israel organisations to steer the European right away from xenophobia and Judeaphobia to Islamophobia. This argument has considerable merit and has gained traction, especially when you consider that the main rump of the far-right in Europe is now firmly pro-Israel, whether that is the National Front in France or the Freedom Party in Holland or the AfD in Germany. We at the Islamic Human Rights Commission have noted on many occasions the far-right dalliance with Zionism, evident at pro-Israel demonstrations and also at far-right rallies where participants now routinely drape themselves with the flag of the Zionist state. Indeed, our 2018 Islamophobia conference zoomed in on this theme (some of the panellists’ contributions are available to view here, here and here.
The geo-political nature of the new far-right threat is also borne out by reported attempts by Tommy Robinson to draft other British ethnic and religious minorities into a broader anti-Muslim alliance. The “i” newspaper claims to have been shown details of efforts by Robinson to woo Hindus, Sikhs and Jews into an anti-Islam alliance that would also rely on known football hooligan “firms” with which he is reputed to enjoy strong links. “During private meetings about future rallies, Robinson insisted that any promotional video would not mention Muslims specifically, but rather call people to march in support of British values stating that the UK is under attack,” reports the “i”. There are no details about how much headway, if any, has been made but with the spread of far-right inspired Hindutva ideology and violence in the UK, the British Hindutva leaning community would appear to offer a fertile recruiting ground alongside Zionist British Jewry. According to the article, another aim of the alliance was to counter the pro-Palestine protests that have become a feature of British towns and cities since Israel unleashed its genocidal onslaught on Gaza last October.
The second channel of funding is the alt-right. The documented links are characterised by its rejection of mainstream politics and racial equality, and the funding of many European far-right activists and politicians, including Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. Some elements of the alt-right are trenchantly pro-Israel (the popular website, Breitbart, being one of them) but there are others who are non-committal or opposed to the West’s staunch support for Israel. What unites them, however, is a shared antipathy towards Islam and Muslims.
In this author’s view, it is no coincidence that the far-right disturbances have erupted at a time when the Gaza genocide has generated widespread international revulsion and criticism of Israel. The far-right has openly agitated for a mass uprising against Muslims and ethnic minorities for many years but the demonisation by British politicians of pro-Palestine activists has given them succour and extended the political space in which to disseminate their views. When Suella Braverman called demonstrations hate marches and advocated the deportation of immigrants who participated, it was a dog whistle and a tacit endorsement of far-right demagogues.
Paradoxically however, the extent to which racist hate narratives have penetrated public and political discourse may have contributed to the failure of the far-right project, in the short term at least. The mass revolt that the far-right craves didn’t materialise, mainly because not enough people have bought into their warped vision of a dystopian non-white dominated society. Inhabiting echo chambers and gorging on puff pieces published by friendly media, they have developed an inflated sense of their own popularity and success. So, when Tommy and his sidekicks pushed the riot button, they quickly realised that the assumed silent majority of sympathisers and supporters they claimed to speak for just didn’t exist. Put simply, they overplayed their hand.
That being said, we cannot afford to be complacent. While these weren’t the first far-right riots in Britain, it is fair to say that they were the first anti-Muslim riots. They were also the first riots to be incited over social media. Interestingly, both these facets were picked up by the 80 Muslim organisations who wrote an open letter to the government on 28 August, demanding among other things an “independent investigation into far-right activities in the UK. This review would focus on the role of social and mainstream media, and political narratives in perpetuating hate and Islamophobia.” The authors also request a renewed engagement by government with Muslim organisations which it has chosen to blackball and in doing so amplified the Islamophobia that fuels the far-right. I assume that the call was made more in hope than in expectation. It would be bordering on deluded to expect a Labour government in hock to Islamophobic white supremacism and Zionist interests to suddenly slam the gearbox into reverse. But in the absence of any action, we are consigning ourselves to a headlong rush into the kind of pogroms that far-sighted thinkers were warning of over three decades ago. “The next time there are gas chambers in Europe, there is no doubt concerning who’ll be inside them,” wrote the late British Muslim philosopher and author, Shabbir Akhtar, in 1989. The latest riots are another reminder that such an eventuality is more than just journalistic hyperbole.
Faisal Bodi is a commentator and former journalist. He has written extensively for the Guardian and Independent as a specialist on Muslim affairs and has also worked for Aljazeera. Faisal has covered many riots over the years including the 2001 unrest in our northern cities and the riots that gripped French cities in 2005. He currently works for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the longest standing Muslim rights advocacy group in the UK, and is co-editor of The Long View.
