Stop alienating Britain's Muslims

If young British Muslims had any doubts that they are singled out for special treatment in the land of their birth, the punishments being meted out to those who took part in last year's London demonstrations against Israel's war on Gaza will have dispelled them.

The protests near the Israeli embassy at the height of the onslaught were angry: bottles and stones were thrown, a Starbucks was trashed and the police employed unusually violent tactics, even by the standards of other recent confrontations, such as the G20 protests.

But a year later, it turns out that it's the sentences that are truly exceptional. Of 119 people arrested, 78 have been charged, all but two of them young Muslims (most between the ages of 16 and 19), according to Manchester University's Joanna Gilmore, even though such figures in no way reflect the mix of those who took part.

In the past few weeks, 15 have been convicted, mostly of violent disorder, and jailed for between eight months and two-and-a-half years, having switched to guilty pleas to avoid heavier terms.

The severity of the charges and sentencing goes far beyond the official response to any other recent anti-war demonstration. So do the arrests, many of them carried out months after the event in dawn raids by dozens of police officers, who smashed down doors and handcuffed family members as if they were suspected terrorists.

Naturally, none of the more than 30 complaints about police violence were upheld, even where video evidence was available.

Nothing quite like this has happened, in fact, since 2001, when young Asian Muslims rioted in Bradford and other northern English towns and were subjected to heavily disproportionate prison terms.

In the Gaza protest cases, the judge has explicitly relied on the Bradford precedent and repeatedly stated that the sentences he is handing down are intended as a deterrent.

Strong-arm tactics

For many in the Muslim community, the point will be clear: not only that these are political sentences, but that different rules apply to Muslims, who take part in democratic protest at their peril.

It's a dangerous message, especially given the threat from a tiny minority that is drawn towards indiscriminate violence in response to Britain's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and rejects any truck with mainstream politics.

But it's one that is constantly reinforced by politicians and parts of the media, who have increasingly blurred the distinction between violent and non- violent groups, demonised Islamism as an alien threat and branded as extremist any Muslim leader who dares to campaign against western foreign policy in the Muslim world.

That's reflected in the government's targeting of ‘non-violent extremism' and lavish funding of anti-Islamist groups, as well as in Tory plans to ban the non-violent Hizb ut-Tahrir and crack down ever harder on "extremist written material and speech".

In the media, it takes the form of relentless attempts to expose Muslims involved in wider politics as secret fanatics and sympathisers with terrorism.

As recent research co-authored by the former head of the Metropolitan police special branch's Muslim contact unit, Bob Lambert, has shown, such ubiquitous portrayals of Muslim activists as ‘terrorists, sympathisers and subversives' are one factor in the alarming growth of British Islamophobia and the rising tide of anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes that stem from it.

Last month's British Social Attitudes survey found that most people now regard Britain as "deeply divided along religious lines", with hostility to Muslims and Islam far outstripping such attitudes to any other religious group.

On the ground that has translated into murders, assaults and attacks on mosques and Muslim institutions with shamefully little response in politics or the media.

Last year, five mosques in Britain were firebombed, though barely reported in the national press, let alone visited by a government minister. And now there is a street movement, the English Defence League to intimidate and threaten Muslim communities across the country.

Of course, anti-Muslim bigotry the last socially acceptable racismis often explained away by the London bombings of 2005 and the continuing threat of terror attacks, even though by far the greatest number of what the authorities call "terrorist incidents" in the UK take place in Northern Ireland.

Europol figures show that more than 99 per cent of terrorist attacks in Europe over the past three years were carried out by non-Muslims. And in the last nine months, two of the most serious bomb plot convictions were of far right racists, Neil Lewington and Terence Gavan, who were planning to kill Muslims.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the general election, expect some ugly dog whistles from Westminster politicians. With few winnable Muslim votes, the Tories seem especially up for it.

As long as British governments back wars and occupations in the Muslim world, there will continue to be a risk of violence in Britain. But attempts to drive British Muslims out of normal political activity, and the refusal to confront anti-Muslim hatred, can only ratchet up the danger and threaten us all.

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.