by Chaminda Jayanetti

Will a new campaign against Islamophobia have more effect than its predecessors?

These days the Bishopsgate Institute appears slightly anomalous on the City of London street that bears its name. A Grade II listed Victorian building, its stylised architecture and twin turrets sit cramped between redbrick branches of high street banks and betting shops.

The Bishopsgate Institute was standing back in October 1936, the last time Britain was grappling with a global capitalist meltdown. As depression set in and poverty increased, East London’s Jewish community found itself the target of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. On 4th October 1936, thousands of blackshirted thugs tried to march through the heart of East London’s Jewish community. They were stopped on Cable Street, a short walk from the Bishopsgate Institute, by an army of more than 300,000 anti-fascist campaigners that simply blocked their path and drove them away. Nazism in Britain never recovered.

Fast-forward to a warm summer evening in 2009, and all these historical connotations are belted out amidst the rhetoric in one of the Bishopsgate Institute’s public halls. Then, it was the British Union of Fascists. Now, it’s the BNP and the English Defence League. Then, it was a blackshirt march on Cable Street. Now, it’s two British far-right members in the European Parliament, and surly ‘anti-extremism’ protests outside a succession of British mosques. Then, it was the Jewish community under threat. Now, according to a succession of speakers, it is Britain’s Muslims.

This is the launch rally of a new campaign to stamp out Islamophobia in Britain. The campaign’s founders – almost entirely made up of leading figures from the Stop the War Coalition – have named it Kafa, which is Arabic for ‘Enough’. Kafa seeks to stem the tide of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Britain. That the targeting of Muslims - by police, politicians, media - is now prevalent in Britain is beyond worthwhile dispute. Muslims Under Siege, a 2008 report by the journalists Peter Oborne and James Jones, detailed the torrent of fabricated or misreported ‘news’ about Muslims – threatening returning soldiers in Windsor (no evidence of Muslim involvement); banning Christmas in Lambeth (untrue); banning piggy banks in Natwest and Halifax (complete lies); the list goes on. Meanwhile, in the run-up to Kafa’s launch meeting, mosques were firebombed in Luton and Greenwich. Far-right activists caught with explosives lining the walls of their bedsits – David Jackson, Robert Cottage, Neil Lewington – get far less attention than their Muslim equivalents.

If it seems like we’ve been here before, that’s because we have. The Stop the War Coalition included opposition to Islamophobia on its list of aims virtually from the outset. However, as the focus of the coalition’s activity shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Gaza, ‘Stop Islamophobia’ was always left on the undercard, at the end of a list of other demands.

This is where Kafa is different. Its founding statement lists six key issues that it wants to challenge: anti-terror arrests that come to nothing; violent attacks on Muslims; the targeting of Muslims by the BNP; the policing of Muslims on demonstrations; media coverage; and the harassment of Muslim leaders by government ministers.

Left-wing Guardian columnist Seamus Milne, a Kafa supporter, said that terrorist incidents – both real and imagined – led to a rise in Islamophobic media coverage, followed by attacks on Muslims and institutions. “When that happens again I think people will respond to it, and when you have an organisation that’s there ready and waiting, people can turn to it. We haven’t had that up to this point. That’s been a big failure.”

There have been previous attempts. In 2007 the then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone helped launch the Coalition to Defend Freedom of Religious and Cultural Expression, the aims and backers of which had considerable overlap with Kafa. It was born with great fanfare but quickly fell silent, particularly after Livingstone’s defeat to Boris Johnson in May 2008.

So can Kafa deliver? Eight years of meetings, rallies and rhetorical hand-wringing have made little material difference. “It has to be embedded in the communities around the country,” said Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition and another Kafa supporter. “That’s what’s not happened before; that’s what we aim to do.”

In terms of practical action, one of the first items on Kafa’s agenda is lobbying London’s Metropolitan Police over stop and search powers. Kafa also has concerns about the policing of Muslims on demonstrations, while the use of the anti-terror laws will undoubtedly be an ongoing focus.

The media is also in Kafa’s sights. Dr Daud Abdullah is deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which represents many of Britain’s mosques. Another supporter of Kafa, he picked out the libel laws as one way of defending the Muslim community: “Those who fabricate reports based on false evidence, based on forged documents, and try to pin it on the Muslim community, we will challenge that in the courts.”

This strategy is already evident. Dr Abdullah himself threatened legal action against former cabinet minister Hazel Blears after she accused him of condoning attacks on British troops and violence against Jews – accusations he vigorously rejected. In July the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secured £45,000 in damages over accusations made on the BBC that the MCB condoned the kidnapping and killing of British soldiers.

This is all well and good for Muslims who can afford hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees. But while individuals can rely on the libel laws, entire communities cannot. When The Sun falsely accused ‘Muslims’ of vandalising soldiers’ homes in Windsor, the libel laws provided no protection. Complaints resulted in a four-line clarification – not apology – on page four of the newspaper, four months after the original article was published.

The Guardian’s Milne admitted the tabloid press is a hard nut to crack. He said the first target for Kafa’s media campaigning should be the BBC as it is publicly funded, while Murray noted its obligation of balance. After that will come the ‘serious’ press. Milne explained: “The more serious and more liberal parts of the media are giving credibility to the cruder racism of papers like the Express and the Daily Mail. If the parts which present themselves as more liberal can be held to account it will be easier to tackle the others.”

Measuring the success of any such campaign is not easy. Dr Abdullah said that in a year’s time, “certainly we would like to see a dramatic decline in the number of stop and searches on our streets, in the detentions without charge, in the control orders that have been imposed upon many Muslims, and in the denial of the right to travel of many Muslims.”

Perhaps the best measurement of Kafa’s future impact will simply be whether we hear about it after the initial flurry of activity. Will the Metropolitan Police chiefs give up using the terror threat to justify stop and search? Will the editor of The Sun hesitate before publishing flimsy front-page ‘scoops’ about Muslims? Only when decision-makers start altering their decision-making processes to avoid an unfair focus on Muslims will Kafa be able to claim success.