Select Committee on Home Affairs Written Evidence


20.Memorandum submitted by the Jewish Council for Racial Equality

  1.  The impact of terrorism on community relations is negative and damaging. Levels of fearfulness and anxiety are high; all those who are different from ourselves are liable to be seen as potentially hostile. Life-threatening conflict alters our most elementary perceptions: our views become hardened and oversimplified and the "other" is personified in terms of the most prominent perpetrators and identified accordingly. A society that believes itself to be threatened from without, especially when such threat is reinforced by daily experience—armed policemen, warnings of suspect packages, periodic swoops by anti-terrorist officers etc.—is not a rational society. Many of us are no longer inclined to extend the hand of friendship to those whom we do not know; if we are seen to identify with those who are perceived as threatening then our own communal loyalties can be put into question.

  2.  In Britain today, fear of terrorism should be seen in the context of different political trends. These include popular press campaigns against immigrants and asylum seekers, a decline in political involvement, a sense of being distant from the centres of power, and a lack of trust in the political process. All of these cause communities to draw in upon themselves, rather than taking national responsibilities. Unlike previous wars, the war against terror is uncertain and defies definition; we do not know who precisely "the enemy" is, or where and when he or she is likely to strike. This intensifies anxiety, uncertainty and aggression.

  3.  The bottom line is that in the European and local government elections in June of this year more than 800,000 people voted for a party whose sole platform was hostility to immigrants, particularly Muslims. This was a seven-fold increase in the number of votes cast for that party; it did not only represent a protest vote against the major parties as there were alternatives for those who wished to register such a protest. People effectively voted for a single-issue party that had no coherent economic or social policies apart from the single issue that it focused upon, but this did not deter nearly a million voters from supporting it. We are profoundly alarmed by this development.

  4.  We are further alarmed by the prospective impact of terrorist incidents in towns and cities where different communities co-exist uneasily, living parallel lives with minimal interaction. We have first hand experience of the work being done by both churches and mosques in the Lancashire towns to counter political exploitation of communal tensions rooted in poverty, unemployment and cultural difference. In these towns, more than 100,000 votes went to the BNP in the June elections. Although the party did not get a seat, the gravity of the situation was made clear to us, and we noted the great importance of the work of local Christian and Muslim leaders in maintaining the fabric of the community. This vital contribution is rarely brought to the attention of the general public. It is important to note that what we saw was not a multi-cultural society, but rather two communities living in circumstances that can reasonably be described as segregated. Clearly the threat of terrorism greatly exacerbates already existing tensions in areas where local cultures seem unable to accommodate different forms of communal identity.

  5.  The Israeli-Palestinian situation has led to considerable tensions between Muslims and Jews, although these are by no means universal, and there have also been very heartening inter-communal developments. In the current environment it is vital for community workers to challenge negative stereotyping among both Muslims and Jews; political conflict and terrorism harden perceptions very rapidly, especially among those who have personal experience of tragedy, and on-going personal communication between both communities at all levels are of the greatest importance.

14 September 2004





 
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