There’s been a spate of bombings and arson attacks on mosques in Britain recently, usually not getting much attention beyond local news and Twitter - this one, in Tipton, made it to the BBC site, but is still buried under “Local/England".
These are attacks designed to create terror in the purest sense of the word - to frighten and intimidate people from going about their everyday business, in this case worship. (They’re also designed to kill - you don’t build a nail bomb just to scare people - but thankfully this one hasn’t achieved that aim.). Why doesn’t a wave of attacks on religious buildings in the heart of England get more media attention? Because the targets are Muslims, duh, but looking at this report gives an indication of exactly how that works:
[Tipton] was in the news in 2002, when three local men were captured in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay, although police said they did not worship at the mosque.
Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, both 22 at the time, and 26-year-old Shafiq Rasul were dubbed the “Tipton Taliban" and were held at the US camp in Cuba for two years.
What are these two paragraphs - dropped into the report to provide ‘context’ - doing? They’re the result, at best, of journalists following some lazy associative paths - hold on, weren’t some Muslim guys from Tipton caught up in something a few years ago? googlegoogle Oh yeah! But that line of “reporting" could have ended at “police said they did not worship at the mosque", the hunch going ignored. Except it didn’t. It sits in the report so that the readers can ALSO be reminded of some entirely unlinked other local Muslims, ‘extremist Muslims’ at that, who were involved in an incident 11 years ago that has nothing at all to do with the current news story.
That helpful reminder - ‘local colour’ - serves to create a sense of, not quite balance exactly, it’s not explicitly justifying bombing a mosque in the middle of Ramadan - but it underlines that a story about Islam in the British press is always also a story about “Islamism", about extremism, even when you’d think the only relevant extremists in this case are the people planting a fucking nailbomb.
There are ideas lurking here which the British public are actually fairly comfortable with - cycles of violence, extremism on both sides, the inevitability of terror. They were part of the psychological coping mechanism used by large parts of the British public to ignore 30-odd years of routine political violence in Northern Ireland. The current situation is rather different, in that the attention is so obviously asymmetrical, but for violence against Muslims and their institutions it feels like the outcome is the same: normalisation rather than any sense of outrage, or even the ritualised public soul-searching the press demands of “the Muslim community" every time a Muslim does something dreadful.