CITIZENSHIP: FROM RIGHT TO PRIVILEGE Muslims v. British values The treatment of British Muslims as terrorist suspects goes hand in hand with a public debate on Muslims’ loyalty and allegiance to ‘British values’, amplified by politicians’ and media presentation of Islam as ‘medieval and dangerous, as well as hostile and threatening’:49 > Politicians from David Blunkett50 to Boris Johnson51 have disparaged and rebuked Muslims and Islam in ways which would be seen as unacceptable regarding any other religious community; > Measures such as the 2002 ‘Life in the UK’ test for intending citizens, and regulations introduced in the wake of the 2014 Trojan Horse affair requiring British schools to teach ‘British values’,52 were fed by and fed into the idea that Muslims and Islam were ‘inherently and irrevocably not a part of “our way of life”’;53 > A 2008 study of media found the most common words used to describe British Muslims were all terrorism- and extremism-related;54 > 70 percent of media stories about Muslims in a 3-month sample in 2012 were hostile, ‘informed often by a virulent, racialised Islamophobic discourse’;55 > Misleading or false derogatory stories about Muslims were ‘shared’ on social media hundreds of thousands of times, very often by far-right groups, despite being changed or retracted;56 > For the Muslim Council of Britain, the securitised view of Muslim communities through Prevent had ‘led to a perception that Muslims are not being treated as equal citizens and are instead apart from the rest of the society’.57 Permission to hate Policies and politicians’ statements targeting Muslims, amplified by sensationalist media coverage, have emboldened far-right and racist activity, creating and maintaining a hostile climate in which racist and Islamophobic attacks thrive: 49 Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world, London, Vintage, 1997, p157, cited in Moore et al, Images of Islam: The representation of British Muslims in the national print news media, 2000-2008, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, July 2008, p6. See also Matt Carr, ‘You are now entering Eurabia’, Race & Class 48:1, 2006, 1-22. 50 See e.g., ‘Blunkett: I agree with far Right on Muslims’, Scotsman, 1 June 2002. 51 ‘Boris Johnson faces criticism over burka “letterbox” jibe’, BBC, 6 August 2018; ‘Boris Johnson claimed Islam put Muslim world “centuries behind”’, Guardian, 15 July 2019. 52 See Education Select Committee, Extremism in Schools: the Trojan Horse affair, 2015. 53 ‘Britishness and Muslim-ness: differentiation, demarcation and discrimination in political discourse’, Identity Papers: A Journal of British and Irish Studies 1(2), 2015. 54 Moore et al, Images of Islam: The representation of British Muslims in the national print news media, 2000-2008, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, July 2008. 55 Sian et al, The media and Muslims in the UK, Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, Leeds University, March 2012. 56 ‘Inaccurate or misleading stories about Muslims have been shared hundreds of thousands of times this year’, Buzzfeed, 16 August 2017. 57 The impact of Prevent on Muslim communities’, February 2016. 16