(In comment to: ‘Deporting ‘foreign criminals’ in the middle of the night doesn’t make us safer‘)
“Look at modern British history, and you’ll find that the “criminal” and the “immigrant” blur into one another in popular and official thinking. In Victorian England, crime was often blamed on Irish immigrants (“dangerous classes” were labelled with the Irish-derived name “hooligans”), and then on Jews from eastern Europe. These narratives neatly anticipated the way the spectre of “black criminality” was peddled by the press in postwar Britain, as well as contemporary narratives about Muslims and sexual abuse.”
Now the sexual abuse story, in as much as it was inaccurate and absolutely racist, was largely a south Asian story and particularly Pakistani/Kashmiri (please note I’m NOT legitimising the racist reporting on the issue and the demonisation of an entire ethnicity I neither accept nor condone) but yet somehow it became a Muslim one. How disgusting that sexual abuse and Muslim share the same sentence? And yes whilst I deplore both, for me sexual abuse and Muslim sharing the same sentence in far worse. Yet in the rightly protest against such framing, there was little demarcation made, Muslim and Pakistani were treated synonymous by both non-Muslims and Asian Muslims.