When the Twin Towers and Pentagon were hit by commercial airliners hijacked by a cell of the militant group al-Qaeda, there were few who predicted the intensity of violence, repression and instability the world would experience over the following 20 years. Red Pepper stood as one of the few brave outlets – even on the left – that immediately chose to ask the difficult questions as to why such an attack might have taken place.
The focus of the October 2001 issue of the magazine was correctly on the notion that there could never be justice without peace in the world. For the past six months, hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life have marched on the streets of London against Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza, still exclaiming that simple truth – no justice, no peace.
Unlike the mute or actively complicit stances taken by other outlets, Red Pepper was quick to speak out against the invasion of Afghanistan and documented those killed by Nato forces in ‘collateral damage’. This was particularly stark during a period when, even as late as 2012, Amnesty International could run paid adverts for a meeting in Chicago under the slogan ‘Human rights for women and girls in Afghanistan. Nato: Keep the progress going!’ – a message seemingly oblivious to the violence, detention, torture, killing and drone warfare that had wreaked devastation across the country. The ‘war on terror’ has been marked by such complicities, so when brave and ethical stances are taken from the outset, they stand out for those suffering the violence.
Fear of protest
Those early years of the global ‘war on terror’ began with ‘hot wars’ abroad, while slowly being put into place was a ‘cold war’ against critics of the state’s wars abroad as well as Muslim populations at home. The February 2003 anti-Iraq war protests were again covered significantly by Red Pepper, and they exposed not simply governmental disdain for the voices of people on the streets but a fundamental fear of protest itself. Shami Chakrabarti wrote for the magazine that year on the right to protest being undermined through the use of terrorism legislation that was creating entirely new categories of ‘terrorists’.
By then, the use of allegations of ‘terrorism’ as a means of denying rights was already well documented. At Guantanamo Bay, over 750 Muslim men were detained by the end of 2003 without charge or trial – among them British nationals the UK government had been complicit in torturing and placing on rendition flights. Red Pepper amplified the voices of the families of individuals such as Moazzam Begg, exposing to the world the legal and human black hole that the US detention camps at Guantanamo Bay had become. More than that, it was willing to highlight the complicity of the British government in the unlawful activities of the US.
Fear of suspicion
What brought so many of these issues together was the figure of the Muslim man – the terrorist suspect par excellence. Whether it was attempting to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban, bombing democracy into Baghdad, or locking up many thousands of Muslim men across Afghanistan, Iraq and a secret network of global prisons – this suspect was central. It was this suspicion that led to the 2005 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes – an innocent Brazilian going about his business in Stockwell, south London – when British police fired eleven gunshots at him, seven times into his head.
What emerged was in keeping with the pre-conception of the Muslim man as a terror suspect – the British police believed de Menezes to be a Muslim. It was for that very reason that Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered on the streets of Mesa, Arizona, on 15 September 2001 by Frank Silva Roque – again, because even though Sodhi was a Sikh, Roque believed him to be a Muslim. If the ‘war on terror’ has taught us anything, it is that built into the structure of Islamophobia is the pathologising of the Muslim man.
When brave and ethical stances are taken from the outset, they stand out for those suffering the violence
While the Muslim man has remained as the spectre of threat in the logic of counter-terrorism, it is the Muslim woman – especially the hijab-wearing Muslim woman – who remains the most visible symbol of Muslims and Islam in public life. As Nadeine Asbali writes in her 2024 book Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain, there is a neoliberalism that sits at the heart of counter-terrorism efforts, one that turns every part of their daily experience into something that is not only measurable but also requiring of intervention.
When Prevent was first established under Tony Blair’s Labour government, it focused on giving funding to community groups to tackle community disenfranchisement and radicalisation on the ground. Its aims were neoliberal in nature, blaming Muslim communities for their own problems. It conflated female equality with this aim and funded groups that promoted girls’ education, women’s participation in civic life and campaigning against child or forced marriage because it inaccurately linked radicalisation to the disenfranchisement of women rather than bothering to interrogate why Muslim women are barred from access in the first place.
Racist pathologies
With developments in technology, this racist pathologising of Muslims crept into areas that had taken on new meaning as unarmed aerial vehicles began to carry out the killing that was once the domain of human bombardment – a tool that had a long history of use in the colonies. Drone warfare conducted thousands of miles away on PlayStation-style devices, had already been used by the George W Bush administration in Afghanistan but became ubiquitous as a tool of extrajudicial murder in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia under Barack Obama. Mis-assessments were constantly being made: wedding parties frequently being confused with al-Qaeda gatherings, children being mistaken for men – the murders were always supposedly accidents.
These ‘accidents’ are felt seismically, as entire families are detained, tortured or murdered out of existence. There is always a ripple effect from these moments that reverberate across the communities forced to live with the consequences of racist and violent counter-terror policing and militarisation. Today, globally, the Muslim man is deemed the ultimate unmournable killable body – from genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli occupation, to military repression against Kashmiris by India, to ‘deradicalisation’ camps in China that target Uyghur Muslims, to the deadly anti-Muslim migration policies of the UK and EU.
This logic found its way into counter-extremism efforts, which now see Muslim beliefs and behaviours as problematic, not just their outward appearance. The UK’s Prevent strategy remains in place, deciding who is an extremist, needing state-sanctioned deradicalisation. Capitalism is always a market, and a recent report by the Freedom from Torture charity exposed links between the privately-owned London Policing College and Chinese partners with close connections to police training institutions in Xinjiang, where one million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into the re-education camps.
All of which has been faithfully documented by Red Pepper – a necessary contribution to stemming the seemingly endless global tide of structural Islamophobia and racism.
