Targeting Muslims under anti-terror laws freezes intellectual enquiry and needs to be opposed by all radicals, oppositionalists, and leftwingers, urges Michael Copestake (first published in the Weekly Worker)

Running in parallel with the government’s revamped ‘Prevent’ strategy for managing parts of the British Muslim community through its religious and community organisations (under which all those who oppose the ‘war on terror’ are classed as ‘extremist’), are a whole series of other ‘preventative’ anti-terror measures and programmes.

Not only are informants employed within mosques to keep tabs on potential ‘extremists’, but the university system is increasingly being pressed into the service of the state anti-terror apparatus. Not least through the use of extraordinarily wide-ranging and ill-defined anti-terror laws, the state has the ability to monitor and disrupt every form of social resistance or protest. The ideology of ‘order’ is used to legitimise this in a general way, but in the post-9/11 world the crowbar of choice for the state to act against its citizenry has been precisely the threat of terrorism, and of ‘Islamic terrorism’ in particular.

The latest ‘spying on campus’ scandal has surfaced at the University of Nottingham. The actual events took place in 2008, but came to light this month when a report by lecturer Rob Thornton exposed the dishonest conduct of the university and the continued maltreatment of two innocent people. Hicham Yezza and Rizwaan Sabir, a member of staff and student respectively, were reported to the police by the university after a copy of an al Qa’eda training manual was found on a university computer used by the pair. Sabir had been conducting research into militant Islam and had been discussing this with Yezza, also a political activist and editor of the magazine Ceasefire, for his PhD thesis.

By reporting them to special branch the university was complying with the Labour government’s 2006 injunction to universities to keep closer tabs on “Asian-looking” students and also the activities of Islamic societies, whether or not they were inviting ‘radical’ preachers and so on. It rapidly became apparent, of course, that the pair had no connections with terrorism, but they were detained under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000 for six days.

The affair not only had grave consequences for two people engaged in basic research activity, but also has sinister implications for the content of university courses themselves. In the aftermath, and following its complete lack of effort to defend academic freedom from state intrusion, the University of Nottingham’s politics department established a committee to review the reading lists of its lecturers to ensure they do not contain “material that is illegal or could incite violence”. At the time vice-chancellor Sir Colin Campbell stated that those who sought to research terrorism would just have to put up with it if they were detained by the security services – if they were sincere researchers with no terrorist agenda, then they would surely be able to explain themselves.

Interestingly there is no legal definition of what constitutes ‘extremism’ under British law, as was revealed by TheGuardian in 2009, though people familiar with the law may already have known this (October 26 2009). There are the police ‘forward intelligence units’, the national domestic extremism unit and so on – all functioning against ‘extremism’ without any precise definition of what exactly it is.

In the same report we get a working definition: “Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups ‘that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process’. They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.” We have seen, however, green groups targeted by anti-domestic extremism units – the case of police infiltrator Mark Kennedy is a well known example – and the increasing conflation of ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’.

A commission on universities is due in the near future to report on ‘campus extremism’ to the government, which will then decide which student Muslim societies will be banned. But surely one can see the enormous scope afforded to campus bureaucrats and the state here in combating the extreme left, Marxists and anti-war activists? Are we not just another target, like the environmental activists or, now, the Muslim Council of Britain, amongst others? In relation to the use of ‘inflammatory’ academic materials, could we see a situation where Marxist texts – those concerning imperialism most obviously – would be classed as such and removed from reading lists?

From the point of view of the state those outside the intelligence services do not need to understand terrorists – trying to grasp their motives might lead to sympathising with them. Terroristic acts of madness cannot be understood by right-thinking people, so do not even try. In this way the spectre of terrorism can be retained as one of the most powerful weapons in the bourgeois armoury – special outrage is reserved for those who go against the grain and attempt to articulate why, at bottom, desperate conditions produce desperate people. When Cherie Blair, for example, said in 2002 that she could understand why living as a Palestinian under Israeli occupation may drive one to terrorism out of desperation, she was pounced upon.

If the wife of the prime minister could be treated in that way, students and researchers beware.