Diversify: A fierce, accessible, empowering guide to why a more open society means a more successful one

Let’s be clear: the vast majority of Muslim men have chosen integration, while still proudly retaining their Muslim identity. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and nor should there be. Keith Ellison, Mahershala Ali, Aziz Ansari, Hasan Minhaj, and Reza Aslan in the US, Zayn Malik, Rageh Omaar, Mo Farah, Sajid Javid, Riz Ahmed, Adil Ray, and London’s mayor Sadiq Khan in the UK are all examples of Muslim men who have made a contribution and commitment to their respective countries, while celebrating their Muslim identity.

However, on 11 September 2001 the question of the integration of Muslim men suddenly became acutely urgent. If you happened to be a Muslim man – indigenous or otherwise – failing to display visible signs of integration into Western society, you immediately became an object of suspicion and fear. In fact, you didn’t necessarily have to be Muslim – just of a light brown complexion and rushing to work, as in the tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, who, on 22 July 2005 (two weeks after the London 7/7 bombings), was mistakenly identified as a potential suicide bomber and shot dead by a team of armed police at Stockwell Tube Station in London. We have reached a point where society has demonized these people in the worst possible way, assuming Muslim men are a threat to our lives and the lives of others.

The backlash against Muslims following the rise of terrorist incidents by Muslim men born in Western countries has been phenomenal, and is probably the greatest challenge to date to our Western model of secular multiculturalism. In response, both Muslim communities and the Western societies they are part of have become vulnerable to extremist views from each side of the argument. The rise of populism has destabilized the political and liberal centre ground in many Western countries, and Muslim men across the socioeconomic groups find themselves on the fault line. For all our sakes we must face the epic twofold challenge in front of us: to tackle the root causes that lead Muslim men to become radicalized in the first place, and to quash the Islamophobia that has reared its ugly head in response.

Five times: the amount more media coverage a terrorist incident receives if the perpetrator is Muslim.

The route to radicalization

We know that poverty, lack of employment opportunities, and alienation from wider Western society offer a more direct route to radicalization. When disenfranchised young Muslim men, who do not identify with their parents’ interpretation of their faith or with mainstream Islam, can opt for a political extremist interpretation, which resonates with their anger over Western foreign policy towards Muslims around the world, everyone is at risk – especially the young men themselves. Our lack of diversity has a lot to answer for.

However, poverty and lack of opportunity is not the only route to radicalization, as well-educated and relatively affluent Muslim men have also embraced and acted on extremist views. This is difficult for liberals and centrists in the secular West to reconcile. How can Muslim men who have been afforded the opportunity to be part of Western society and been rewarded for their contribution opt to actively work towards the destruction of that society? Indeed, the destruction of their neighbours, colleagues, and fellow citizens who, you would assume, are also friends and acquaintances? You’d think that religious freedom, democracy, and the opportunity to achieve prosperity is a pretty good deal. We’ve covered all the bases, right? All the things that should matter to them? What are we supposed to do?

Sadly, it’s never that simple. Growing up in East London, I witnessed the insidious creep of radicalization and its divisive effects first-hand. I had friends at college who I suspect became radicalized before I even knew what that meant. They became estranged from their friends, were told they needed to separate themselves from ‘infidels’ in order to get closer to God. Their style of dress and patterns of behaviour changed, and they became strangers, while we became ‘others’ to them. These were young men we had all previously socialized with and considered friends. Our teachers had no idea how to reach out to them, and neither did we. But we shrugged our shoulders and continued on our life journeys, as it’s only natural that some friends will drop off as we progress from adolescence to adulthood. So what if those who ‘dropped off’ happened to be disenfranchised Muslims with an underlying resentment of Western foreign policy? Who cares?

Well, Londoners did on 7 July 2005 when our citizens were killed and maimed by fellow citizens, for whom Britain was their home but no longer where their hearts resided. I would later discover that two of the bombing suspects had attended a mosque not far from where I grew up.

Twelve years later, London and its global visitors would face the same horror again, but the Westminster terror attack on 22 March 2017 forced us to rethink our assumptions of those most likely to do us harm. We’d always thought young Muslim men were the danger – radicalized, impulsive, and with not too much to lose – but this time the perpetrator was not a young man and neither was he born a Muslim. He was a 52-year-old mixed-race male born Adrian Elms, and was a late convert to Islam. Having previously been imprisoned at Her Majesty’s pleasure several times for violent attacks, he drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and went on to stab Police Constable Keith Palmer, killing four people in total.

This atrocity, as well as the murder of MP Jo Cox in June 2016 by 52-year-old far-right extremist Thomas Mair, and the Finsbury Park attack on 19 June 2017, perpetrated by 47-year-old Darren Osborne – both middle-aged, non-Muslim men – have proved that radicalization in all its forms – be it Islamism, far-right extremism, or Islamophobia – is equally dangerous and that the profile of a ‘terrorist’ is far broader than we thought. It seems some men do not grow out of violence but rather into it, and isolation and exclusion from society leaves them and us vulnerable to the impact of the indiscriminate violence of terrorism.

The multifaceted threat we all now face, not just from terrorism but from extremist responses to it, became disturbingly apparent just two months after the Westminster attack, when the city of Manchester fell victim to perhaps the most heinous of terror attacks so far; this time the target was children – mainly young girls attending the concert of pop sensation Ariana Grande. The devastation resulted in 22 fatalities and 59 injured. And to make matters worse, following the Manchester atrocity there was a reported 500 per cent surge in Islamophobic attacks in Greater Manchester. This is something we must denounce with all our might. We have to stand up for compassion and the rule of law, even when it is hardest to do in the face of hostility – in fact, this is when it’s most important. Less than two weeks after the Manchester attack, London was hit again, this time on London Bridge and in nearby Borough Market, where people were enjoying a night out in cafés and restaurants. The attack lasted just eight minutes, thanks to the brave and speedy acts of the police, but in that short space of time, three young Muslim men armed with knives were able to murder eight innocent victims – from Britain, Australia, France, Canada, and Spain – and injure an additional 48. And again, the police reported a 40 per cent increase in Islamophobic attacks immediately afterwards. London still stands as the multicultural jewel in the United Kingdom’s crown – but the threat to our unity remains.

This is where we must consider the devastating effects of a lack of diversity not only on the minority who are excluded, but also on wider society. And of course the problem is not unique to the UK and US. In recent years Europe has also experienced numerous horrific incidents of Islamist terrorism that have left the world stunned and citizens traumatized. The civil wars in Iraq and Syria have been used by purveyors of a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to attract young European Muslim men and women to travel to these war-torn regions, and this in turn creates a challenge for the authorities: what to do with returning citizens who may pose a terrorist threat following weapons training and potential involvement in atrocities? Some suggestions I’ve heard here in the UK have been that we should remove passports, revoke citizenship from dual nationals, or imprison without trial. I understand the desire and the need in some cases for harsh measures. But these are short-term responses when what we need is a long-term solution: prevention. We must explore other options, since marginalizing these men and allowing them to be ‘other’ exposes them to the very extremism that many would not turn to if fully accepted and supported by society.

The route to integration

So what can we do to tackle this proliferation of radicalization? How about the tough love approach? What about banning burkas and burkinis (French proposals) and enforced English language tests for Muslim mothers (a British proposal advocated by David Cameron)? Oh wait, all those proposed measures, supposedly aimed at dealing with the threat of extremist Muslim men, target Muslim women instead – how unfortunate. How about a ‘Muslim travel ban’, as ordered by the Trump administration in early 2017? Well, according to UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, this gave ISIS a ‘propaganda opportunity’ – and the evidence suggests that the more we isolate or alienate a particular group, the more vulnerable to extremism they are. Again, all these measures are short-term and short-sighted, and motivated as they are by Islamophobia and prejudice, they relegate all Muslim men to the category of ‘other’.

We have allowed this fear to prevent us from applying the one thing we haven’t yet tried: diversity, inclusion, and tolerance – allowing these men to truly belong. Surely, to transform the minds of these radicalized young men we must create a powerful and undeniable counter-narrative to extremism? Believe it or not, some political decisions can be guided by compassion and love as much as self-interest, even though we shy away from this in the face of right-wing pressure. This is where we offer something the extremists can’t.

A brilliant initiative that shows how this can be done is currently underway in Denmark. After Britain, Denmark has the second largest number of its citizens fighting in Syria, and Steffen Nielsen – a crime prevention adviser in the country – is trying a fresh approach to reach out to them. He has helped develop an innovative rehabilitation programme for young radicalized Danish Muslims, offering them a second chance and the opportunity to be reintegrated back into Danish society. The programme runs in collaboration with welfare services and police in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. Ex-radicals are offered intense therapy and psychological treatment, mentors, and assistance with rebuilding their lives by finding work or accessing further education. The programme also provides support for their families.

Nielsen is the first to admit that the programme is still ‘trial and error’. However, he is committed to this rehabilitative approach, even though not all of the political class in Denmark approve. ‘We are experiencing more political pressure to do something more like the British stuff,’ said Nielsen – revoking British passports, etc. ‘The entire political debate is rife with simplifications. You can choose to shut them out and say, “Okay, you chose to be a jihadist, we can’t use you any more.” Or you can take the inclusive way and say, “Okay, there is always a door if you want to be a contributing member to society.” Not because we are nice people, but because we think that is what works.’

It’s an important point. The problem is far too complex to try only one approach, and we cannot assume there is no way back for those young European citizens who feel disenfranchised and have chosen hatred as a means of finding purpose and meaning. Men who perpetrate violence are, after all, themselves victims of their own violence, whether they die by their own actions – flying a plane of innocent people into a building or detonating a suicide bomb – or are killed or imprisoned by the authorities.

Prominent anti-extremist campaigner and LBC presenter Maajid Nawaz, a former jihadist himself, has clear views on what needs to be done and believes it’s a process we all need to participate in: ‘The only way we can challenge Islamism,’ he says, ‘is to engage with one another. We need to make it as abhorrent as racism has become today. Only then will we stem the tide of angry young Muslims who turn to hate.’

Maajid is not alone. British Muslim businessman Iqbal Wahhab, has put this idea into practice and made it his personal mission to help rehabilitate disenfranchised men by giving them work and responsibility. Through his thriving restaurant Roast (which coincidentally is based in Borough Market, the second location of the London Bridge attack), Iqbal hires ex-offenders and helps train them for a career in the food industry. You can read about one of his most heartening success stories, Mohammed, a young Muslim who now manages a chain of busy cafés, at www.Diversify.org (http://www.Diversify.org). It’s a clear example of the key role the business community can play in helping to steer at-risk men onto a productive path.

It’s ironic that the day after the Westminster attack we buried former IRA commander and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness – initially a man of violence and a former terrorist who then became a statesman and a man of peace. It took many years to end the violence in Northern Ireland, precisely because we weren’t prepared to examine and address the causes of it. I recognize that reaching out to men of violence is never easy or palatable, but violence comes from vulnerability and the inability to achieve aims by other means, so we need to recognize this in potential perpetrators and work with them to achieve much more benign aims, so that we’re not all left to deal with the tragic aftermath of their frustrations.

Of course, when faced with destructive acts of terror, there is an understandable urge to err on the side of enforcement. Those involved in such heinous crimes obviously must be severely prosecuted – but we cannot ignore that there is also a contingent who have lost their way and have not yet reached the point of no return. These young men are British citizens. So what do we do with them? This is the question that determines who we are. Which path do we choose? Rehabilitation or retribution? Our future safety depends on how we answer.

ACTION POINT: Find out when the next #VisitMyMosque day is, go along and meet local Muslims (if you are a non-Muslim yourself).

DISCUSSION POINT: How would Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ have been received if it had been proposed before 9/11?

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_20e26961-6c60-5ea7-900b-8b0964e94b25)

Whitewashed Out (#ulink_20e26961-6c60-5ea7-900b-8b0964e94b25)

‘A working-class hero is something to be.’

John Lennon

The last of the ‘other’ men I am going to look at is by no means the least. They are probably the most powerful group politically and, unlike black and Muslim men, they are not a minority. In fact, they are a sizeable voting bloc who, when mobilized, have the ability to swing a referendum (as we saw with the Brexit vote in Britain) or take over a political party that is the bastion of the elite, as we saw with Trump’s triumph in the Republican primaries. This group has the potential, perhaps more than any ‘other’, to cause waves of social, political, and economic change: 72 per cent of non-college-educated white men voted for Trump

, and 70 per cent of those with only GCSEs or less voted to leave the EU.

Their status as ‘other’ comes not from their race or religion, but from that age-old British institution: class.

Both votes were an expression of white working-class men’s frustrations over globalization and the decline in their living standards. The winners on both sides of the pond were able to link this decline in living standards and employment opportunities to immigration. They successfully promoted fear of the ‘other’, inciting a revolt against the establishment by white working-class men in the UK and US – resulting, in some extreme cases, in violence.

Fear of the ‘other’ is not endemic or inevitable. The UK has not had the same history of segregation as the US, and ‘other’ ethnic groups in the UK have lived alongside the white working class for decades. White working-class men in the US even helped to elect the first African-American president in US history. So what’s changed?

White working-class men have been manipulated and discarded for political and economic expediency for longer than any of the other groups. They’ve been conscripted to colonize the Earth, to fight wars, and to fuel the industrialization of the West. And the reason they have endured these hardships and the exclusion from the full bounties enjoyed by the elites until recently is the unspoken agreement of entitlement – the idea that they, like the people who rule them, are the indigenous group, and are therefore entitled to a modest but credible standard of living, provided they are willing to work. It’s not an unreasonable expectation by any means, considering the contribution they and their predecessors have made to their nation’s prosperity, but somewhere along the way that unspoken agreement has been broken by the ruling class, and it’s left a lot of working-class white men behind. So how exactly did this happen, and what can we do to heal these wounds and regain the trust that has been lost?

The lost world

If you were lucky enough to grow up in a white working-class area in East London as I did, you will have experienced a real community. This area endured the Blitz during the Second World War, so I grew up among a community of elders for whom being a good neighbour was part of survival. If a bomb dropped on your home, it was one of your neighbours who would shelter you and your family. Britain survived the war, and this is a badge of pride among white working-class men, especially if your grandfather served. And this pride and strong sense of community, along with standing up for yourself and your country, doing a good day’s graft (usually manual work), and a willingness to appreciate your lot, were values instilled in white working-class males as standard.

And so they just got on with it. The blue-collar vocations laid out for them did not require higher education, focusing much more on practical and skills-based learning. Back then, the economy had a clear place for this group of men – there would be a job at a local factory where many of their mates worked, and there they would stay until retirement. A lack of social mobility was not a deal-breaker for white working-class men as long as they had employment and their way of life remained unchanged.

But change was in the air, whether they liked it or not. As soon as the elites in Europe and America came to realize that the movement of industry and people was required to maintain their margins as the rest of the world started to develop, the argument that the indigenous population should be entitled to work for a fair day’s pay became worthless. The need to meet the demand for labour after the war ushered in immigration, nearly always in working-class communities. Some working-class men did resent the newcomers, fearing change as many people do, but most welcomed migrants into their homes, local pubs, and families. Some even marched in solidarity with these new immigrants against far-right groups. It’s fair to say that the response to Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of post-Second World War immigrants to the UK, and the subsequent waves of immigration that followed, was mixed across the country. But unlike in America, the overarching moral response was always ‘live and let live’, enabling Britain to claim the mantle of being a bastion of tolerance and diversity. However, this was based on the expectation that the ‘agreement’ between the working class and the elites would be upheld.

But as infrastructure in other parts of the world developed, it was no longer necessary to import labour and skills to the West, since we could just as easily export the working-class jobs to the rest of the world where costs (wages) were cheaper. Great for bosses and those with capital to invest; not so great for the white working-class male.

Fast-forward a few decades to the twenty-first century, and working-class neighbourhoods have experienced yet more dramatic change. The Thatcherite revolution in the UK, and Reaganomics in the US, oversaw deindustrialization of their respective industrial bases, resulting in the erosion of traditional white working-class jobs. Economically, the decline in manufacturing has hit the working-class male the hardest, demoting him in many cases from full-time breadwinner for his family and household. His jobs have been replaced by less well-paid and often part-time service sector jobs that (from a traditional male perspective) require skills aligned more with female workers. Many of these jobs are paid as zero hours contracts intended to supplement the family income, as opposed to replacing a bread-winner’s salary, yet in many cases this is exactly what has happened. The result is quite a come-down for the white working-class man: as a factory worker he took pride in the goods he made, which were shipped across the globe, but somehow making and serving lattes for a minimum wage doesn’t quite match up.

If white working-class males wanted to maintain their standard of living they would need to do what ‘foreign’ parents were demanding of their kids – work hard at school. But by now, white working-class males had the lowest levels of educational attainment and parents without a traditional reverence for higher education, and this trend continued.

A white working-class boy is less than half as likely to get five good GCSEs, including the core subjects, as the average student in England.

At present, white working-class boys have the lowest literacy levels in British schools and are the least likely group to attend university. Throw in the free movement of higher-educated and skilled multilingual migrants from former communist Eastern Europe, with a couple of colourful demagogues who can spice up discontent with provocative statements, and we have ourselves a working-class populist revolt seasoned with an unfortunate taste of resentment. As an ardent pro-EU campaigner, I am disheartened to see the results of this shift to the right in Western democracies – but I also understand the legitimate concerns of those communities that have been failed by globalization. I have no criticism for the victims – they are the symptom, not the cause – and until we treat the cause, the symptoms will just get worse.

Toxic masculinity

A key exacerbating factor in the populist revolt we are now witnessing is the disenfranchised white working-class male’s notion of traditional masculinity. Within this subculture, authority tends to be spurned, and violence – often in the form of hooliganism – is deemed acceptable. Males in academia and office jobs are not viewed as ‘proper men’: they have soft hands, never break a sweat, and don’t build or make anything. They put on ‘airs and graces’ and work in offices where political correctness wins the day. The white working-class male prefers blunt straight-talking.

But what happens when the world moves on from this version of masculinity? Professor Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, is one of the world’s leading authorities on masculinity. He examines the parallel phenomenon happening in the US in his book Angry White Men, and writes that many of the white working-class men from forgotten Rust Belt communities feel ‘betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway’. In many ways the plight of the white working-class male may perhaps be the easiest to dissect in terms of understanding where the growing dissent comes from. According to Kimmel, the men he studied see positions that were once their birthright disappearing, and are no longer sure where they fit in the societal pecking order. They are white and male in a society that values those two attributes above all others – yet being white and male no longer has the same guarantees, at least not for white men who look and sound like them.

In adult men this state of confusion can lead to what Michael Kimmel describes as ‘aggrieved entitlement’, and the need for scapegoats in the form of ‘feminazis’ like Hillary Clinton or Mexican immigrants, who need to be ‘walled’ out of America in order to make the country ‘Great Again’.

This is not a new phenomenon: Kimmel’s book was written in 2013, long before the 2016 US election, and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore also tried to alert Liberals and Democrats about the anger that was building in rural communities up and down the country,

even predicting in his 2016 film, Michael Moore in Trumpland, that Trump would win. But it’s only now that the real scale of the problem is making itself apparent. Aside from the obvious political ramifications, in America it has also resulted in an alarming increase in early death rates among the middle-aged. This growing pandemic has been termed ‘deaths of despair’ by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.