Activists and the Surveillance State by Aziz Choudry

Author:Aziz Choudry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

ISLAMOPHOBIA, WHITE SUPREMACY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

In the context of the ‘war on terror’, while those identified as Arab and Muslim are expelled from the nation in a relational fashion, white and ‘Christian’ identified people are placed at its centre. This is a ‘nation’ built on the colonisation of Indigenous Peoples and anti-Black racism and racist immigration policies. This provides a basis for white supremacy and what is often referred to as ‘Islamophobia’.6

The importance of these struggles was highlighted at a Toronto demonstration I attended with over 6,000 people protesting against Islamophobia and white supremacy following the murders of six men at Quebec City’s Islamic Cultural Centre (Hussan, 2018; Global News, 2018). In the context of a broader speech against white supremacy, on 4 February 2017, Yusra Khogali of Black Lives Matter-Toronto (BLM-TO) called Justin Trudeau a hypocrite and ‘a white supremacist terrorist’ for maintaining racist immigration and refugee policies, the colonisation of Indigenous Peoples and a racist and white supremacist state and society. When she said this in context, most of the crowd was with her, but the mainstream media almost immediately attacked her credibility, dislocating what she said from the context in which she spoke. Unfortunately, most left and social movement activists did not defend her. As a result, the cycle of mobilisation initiated by the Toronto January 21, 2017 Women’s March Against Trump, which saw thousands of people in movement and making political connections, began to be undermined.

This construction of Trudeau as qualitatively different from Harper played a role in limiting opposition to the continuation of national security policing under the Liberal government and in support for the apology from above. While there are significant differences in style and policy between Trudeau and Harper, this has been mobilised to obscure their common commitments to the national security state and maintaining capitalist, racist and patriarchal social relations. In not seeing this, the relevancies of national security come to trap us within the ideological codes of nation and national security (Kinsman & Gentile, 2010, p. 33).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.