ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 53 The culture of everyday criminalization and alienation were commented upon by our research participants who often spoke of multiple experiences of harassment (for sometimes years) before they had been accused of extremist activity that led to their passports being removed. Many of the interviewees had families abroad and frequently encountered problems at the airport, being searched, detained for hours and in some cases missing their flights. Here the racial dimensions of profiling were particularly noted: I don’t wear niqab at airports because I don’t want to get harassed so I wear hijab. (Ayesha) After 9/11, 7/7, [if] you got a beard, [a] certain way of dressing, you [are] targeted in airports. Every Muslim, people are worried. They can see its very against them … Picking on people and making them like aliens. (Mohammed) With the Muslims it is a different set of laws, if you have a ripped shoe they will think you are a shoe bomber … You are already guilty. It is for you to prove your innocence. (Amir) Community surveillance including the surveillance of mosques which have been a prime focus of counter-terrorism policing strategies was pointed to as creating “a climate of fear” (Ibrahim) amongst Muslims and the need to perform self-censorship was seen as imperative. Possibilities for resisting overly zealous policing practices were inhibited by restrictions on freedom of expression. Ibrahim, for example, explained that Muslims “can’t get angry. If he has got an opinion or a view he can’t express it … Many youth who are getting arrested it is because of their tongues, of what they are saying”. The consequence of this suppression of dissent was articulated in terms of an increasing impossibility to be both “British” and “Muslim”, a feeling propelled by British foreign policy and military interventions across the Muslim world, particularly in recent times in Syria. In this sense there was a significant disconnect between the political rhetoric which has often equated all British Muslim interest in the war in Syria with extremist tendencies, illustrated, for example, by Cameron’s (2014) statement that those who “declare their allegiance elsewhere [Syria]” should not enjoy the privileges of British citizenship, and the more complex positioning of these subjects who ranged in their political views, generally opposed military intervention and occupation, in a number of cases had engaged in charity work to assist the plight of refugees which aligned with commitments to their faith, but still often expressed Britain as their home. Re-orienting colonial governmentalities The power of the trope of the terrorism suspect, as a signifier conjuring national and global security threat, is that it legitimates the use of