Persecution of Religious Minorities: Middle East

Debate between Peter Grant and Kate Green

Tuesday 19th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. It is important that as part of the healing process, victims are helped to understand that the people who persecuted them—those who raped them or murdered their families—were not acting in the name of Islam, Christianity or any other faith. If they were acting in the name of any ideology at all, it was the ideology of Satanism—the ideology of pure evil. For victims to understand that helps the healing process, and it also helps in the very difficult task of ensuring that victims are not left with a lifelong feeling of anger or hatred towards others from the religious community that they hold responsible for their ill treatment.

[Kate Green]

I very much agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying. The debate is in part about the effect of persecution in the middle east on this country. Does he agree that in a climate in this country in which my Muslim and other constituents are reporting a rise in hatred and abuse directed at them because of their faith and ethnic background, it is important for the UK Government and authorities as clearly and often as possible to make exactly the point that he is making: that these acts are not carried out in the name of Islam or any faith?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. I do not know whether the hon. Lady has been sneaking a look at my notes over my shoulder, but I am going to come to that point. To be honest, I am sometimes uncomfortable with that line of argument about the impact that persecution in the middle east has in the United Kingdom. We all have a responsibility to speak out and act against that persecution, regardless of whether it threatens anything about our way of life on these islands. It is more important to look at the impact that the United Kingdom can have on areas in which genocide and persecution are happening, and whether what happens in these nations is creating a climate that makes such horrors more or less likely in future. I must say that as an example of a tolerant, pluralist society, we do not do anything like as well as we sometimes like to think we do.

Our approach must be founded on significant humility and shame about what has been allowed to happen on these islands in the name of good government, not just back in the middle ages but much more recently. I have mentioned before in a Westminster Hall debate that within my lifetime, a magazine was criminally prosecuted in a United Kingdom court for printing a poem that was deemed to be offensive to Christians. I personally found that poem offensive, but that is no ground to threaten to throw someone in jail. Within my lifetime, citizens of the United Kingdom have had to flee their homes in fear because of persecution and harassment from their neighbours for following the wrong religious tradition, and there were jobs that people were not allowed to take if they were of the wrong religion. We might like to think that we have moved on from those days, but we have not moved on that far and we did not move on that long ago. When we look at other parts of the world where intolerance has grown to extreme levels, let us not forget our own often shameful recent past.

In specific reference to the comment by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), what does anyone think was the impact on tolerance and understanding when a newspaper complained recently that Channel 4 had the temerity to allow a Muslim woman to report on a terrorist attack? What effect on understanding and tolerance does anyone think could possibly have been created when one of the United Kingdom’s highest paid newspaper columnists wrote an article suggesting that the celebration of Ramadan was somehow a threat to our peace and security?

We cannot afford to be silent about this undermining of tolerance—this deliberate and systematic attempt to create a climate of fear, of misunderstanding and, yes, of contempt and hatred of people who happen follow a different religion—right here in this city, because apart from anything else, that is presented as the attitude of the typical westerner, the typical United Kingdom citizen and the typical Christian and used as an excuse by the extremists in Syria and Iraq.

To persecute a minority, the first thing that the persecutor has to do is to create a fear of that minority. The Nazis could never have got the acquiescence of so many people for the persecution of the Jews had they not been able to make people scared of the Jews. There are journalists and others on these islands and in this very city who are embarking on a deliberate attempt to make us scared of the Muslims in order to make us hate the Muslims. At the same time as we speak out and act against the persecution of minorities in the middle east and elsewhere, we must recognise that that fuelling of hatred against religious minorities on our own islands has an impact on the way that conflicts and oppression can be addressed elsewhere.

I wish we did not have to have this debate. I would love to think that our successors two or three parliamentary generations from now will never have to have this debate. I am not convinced that we as a society—I include myself—are doing nearly enough to deal with the seeds of hatred, ignorance and intolerance in their early days to prevent them from growing into the unbelievable barbarity that we have heard described. I pray that one day, when we say “never again”, it really will be never, ever again.