The dilemma of the middle path: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
The idea of extremism raises all sorts of anxieties among different actors in society across the world today. Academics carry out research on sensitive topics. Policymakers devise responses that are proportionate and appropriate. Lawyers concentrate on the balance of measures and their impact on society’s norms. As an academic working on understanding extremism, radicalisation, terrorism and extremism, working in the UK, but also in Turkey and currently here in the Netherlands, having travelled and worked across the MENA region and South Asia, I am treading a path that makes few friends, alienating most who have strong views on the topics.
It is in this space that I find myself embroiled in a scandal relating to accusations of anti-Semitism in a Sunday Times article. While the charge of anti-Semitism is certainly not to be dismissed, I am accused of it because of one offending tweet, which intimated that by over-extending the accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party there is a risk that it only sustains rifts and disputes, taking attention away from fighting intolerance and bigotry directly, that is, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism in all it is forms. My tweet was ill-worded and I deleted it on the day Andrew Gilligan got in touch with me, which was a day before the Sunday Times article was published on 5 May.
While one tweet can cause someone like me to face the possibility of long-term damage, the reality is that I have been working in the field of equalities, research on ethnicity and policy engagement for more than two decades, and in three countries, although most of my work has concentrated on the UK. During my time in the UK, my three children went to an Orthodox Jewish primary school in the city of Birmingham. It was a deliberate choice to broaden their young minds. As an elected parent governor, one of my roles was to ensure that the school placed the interests of all its pupils as one. While the governing body was prone to internal, ideological divisions from time to time, it always placed the needs of all the pupils first, and, for the greater part, the school, parents and children were content. I would like to think that I had a role in helping to shape some of the discussions around bridge building, to the extent that The Guardian wrote a feature on me and my son on this particular topic.
Soon after this article came out, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs interviewed me and my two children, who were at the school at the time. The BBC filmed us at my home in Birmingham to talk about the importance of bridging faiths. All of this was a part of the 2007 Chief Rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah address, aired by the BBC in September 2007. Later that year, I also attended the Limmud Conference and spoke at a workshop in partnership with the Joseph Interfaith Foundation on matters of dialogue and coexistence. There was also a time in 2007 when I featured an Israeli mother who had lost her son and a Palestinian man who had lost his brother to the conflict on a political discussion television show I anchored on an independent satellite television channel. They came on the show to talk about how they worked together, united as one, to promote peace. The honesty, integrity and the humility of these two individuals have remained with me ever since.
In 2012, I spent over a month as a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, talking to Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens extensively, both in scholarly and community settings. What struck me most from my stay was the criticism of Israeli domestic policy regarding Palestinians found locally in the Israeli media — issues hardly ever getting an airing here in Western European news circles. Since then, I have also been on numerous Jewish, Christian and Muslim inter-faith exchanges, including to Volos in Greece, Damascus in Syria and more recently when I spoke with the Jewish, Muslim and Christian chaplains at Eton College in Windsor after delivering a lecture to all the Muslim students there in August 2017.
I utterly abhor anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or racism of any kind, having worked diligently for over 25 years to uphold these values, which I also try to imbue to my own children, my friends and colleagues, and to my students in my classes.
On 8 May, Dr Stephen H Jones and Dr Khadijah Elshayyal wrote an open letter to the Sunday Times. At the time of writing, it has received 37 signatures from UK-based and international academics in support of its central message — that academic freedom is sacrosanct.
On 26 May, after some wranglings, the Sunday Times agreed to publish a shorter version of the above in the Letter Pages, on p.26, as shown below:
