/25

Why are we questioning the loyalty of British Muslims? We never ask anyone else | Suzanne Moore |
The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/25/why-are-we-questioning-the-loyalty-of-british-muslims-we-never-ask-anyo

How loyal are you to this country? How proud are you of it? Answer exactly. Explain yourself to me. Tell me how safe you feel. Tell me what you think other people think of you. Let me then declare the truth about you, your family, your faith. You are a Muslim and I am British, you see, so I can ask these things. My loyalty is taken for granted, though it shouldn’t be. Yours is always suspect. Though it shouldn’t be. Thus I can read that a BBC survey this morning found that “95% of Muslims feel a loyalty to Britain”, but that there are “no similar measurements for the general public.” Making it meaningless. And 95% does not count for much when run alongside other aspects of the survey, which showed: “One in four (27%) said that they had some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks in Paris on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.”

What does any of this mean? Are a quarter of our Muslim population going to behead us in our beds? Is the man in the Turkish shop who gives my children sweets secretly cheering on the death cult? This poll just drives the us-and-them mentality. There is a “them”, of course. But “they” are killing out in Syria and Iraq and they are killing mostly other Muslims. There is a “them” in Saudi Arabia, whom we are asked to think of as an “us”, where Prince Charles gets his sword dance on with the right kind of beheaders.