You’re Not Welcome Here!
Words by Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel
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You’re Not Welcome Here!
Race riots are unfolding on the streets of England. This is not the first time the country’s ethnic minorities have had a target on their backs.
Over the weekend, I had a fairly upsetting conversation with my housemate. We were discussing how over the next couple of days it might be safer not to pin our hijabs, on the off chance we were targeted by some right winger on the streets. Best to minimize the risk of injury, we concluded.
Our houseshare is in a quiet part of London, a synagogue a few doors down, the Central Mosque is an easy 20-minute walk. As we split mochis bought from the Japanese store down the road – the news coming in from parts of England became more distressing.
Mosques in Middlesbrough were targeted, as bricks were thrown through windows of affordable housing- cars with Black and Brown drivers were upturned and set alight. Hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and Tamworth were attacked, with rioters setting fires to the buildings. Looting and violence continue to swallow swathes of the country- from Liverpool to Hull to Blackburn. In Sunderland, Filipino nurses on their way to provide emergency cover due to the riots had rocks thrown at them.
The ongoing violence in England was sparked after three young girls were killed in a knife attack in Southport, a town on the east coast of the Irish Sea. Misinformation that a Muslim asylum seeker had been the assailant caused violent disorder to break out in the town and then spread across the country. The suspect, eventually named by the police, turned out to be a Cardiff-born teenager, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana. At Rudakubana’s first hearing, the judge noted that he was mindful of "misinformation" that had spread regarding the accused's identity.
The English Defence League (EDL) has been blamed to an extent for leading calls for violence on social media. A far-right organization, the EDL has been a single-issue pressure group, focusing its campaign on producing and cementing anti-Muslim rhetoric. However, as civil society organizations in the country have put it- the riots are the result of anti-migrant political discourse that has been prevalent in the country over the last election cycle.
“This did not emerge from a vacuum. It’s a product of politicians stirring up Islamophobia and racism, whilst making people worse off. The only way to defeat this movement is to unite, mobilize against fascism, and stand up to racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism,” Sabby Dhalu, co-convenor of Stand up to Racism told The Independent in an interview.
Media houses have come under fire too as they continued to term the rioters as “protestors” and “demonstrators”. In an interview with Sky News, Humza Yusuf, the former Prime Minister of Scotland rebuked the news anchors for referring to the riots as “protests.”
"These are not protests or demonstrations. What we're seeing is far right race riots,” said Yusuf. British MP Zarah Sultana called out fellow politicians from refusing to term the riots as islamophobic in a tense Good Morning Britain interview.
It hasn't just been from within the country that right wing flames have been fanned. X and Tesla owner Elon Musk has been posting in support of alt-right conspiracy theories, claiming that “civil war” in the UK is inevitable.
Even though these riots have had the added danger of digital misinformation and aggression in online spaces - for ethnic minority communities in the UK, this isn’t the first time violence by the alt-right has targeted them.