As Tommy Robinson and the far right mobilise, Des Freedman argues why racism against Muslims is central to their strategy – and why we can’t let them become ‘respectable’ 

Just ahead of the second round of the recent French parliamentary elections, the BBC’s Europe editor, Katya Adler, wrote a long piece on the rise of Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN). Acknowledging that it was now unlikely to secure an overall majority, she nevertheless concluded that it was going to significantly increase its parliamentary presence thus breaking a ‘decades-old taboo’ on the presence of the far right at the heart of mainstream French politics.

According to Adler, this was the result of a ‘detoxification’ exercise over the last decade, shedding the antisemitism of the leadership of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and fostering instead a new, cleaner image that has been a ‘roaring success’ for the party. ‘Crucially for Marine Le Pen’, wrote Adler, ‘those who support her aren’t embarrassed to admit it any more. The RN is no longer viewed as an extremist protest movement.’

This is an argument that has been pushed by some French commentators. The journalist Valery Lerouge has claimed that  it makes more sense to talk about the RN as ‘nationalist right’ because ‘if you look at the history of the far right, you’re talking about a party that is racist, antisemitic and homophobic. Far right harkens back to fascism, and that’s not where we are anymore.’ According to the political analyst Jean-Yves Camus, ‘the legacy of fascism and historical extreme right is no more…For more French people, this is simply a far-right party with a law and order and anti-immigration agenda.’

The notion that the RN has suddenly become more respectable because it now apparently focuses on cost of living issues, doesn’t talk about the Holocaust as a ‘mere detail of history’ as Le Pen’s father did and is simply adopting an ‘anti-immigration agenda’ (as if this is somehow a harmless activity) is a classic error in understanding fascist movements as they exploit the electoral process as part of an attempt to strengthen their influence. 

The RN is not moving towards the centre but instead, at least in public, simply swapping its long history of antisemitism for anti-Muslim racism. According to Chris Bambery, ‘far from being a break with France’s fascist tradition, it sits easily with it’. The RN’s 143 seats in the National Assembly should not be allowed to provide it with the ‘gift of respectability’, as the historian Robert Paxton wrote about earlier fascist movements, but instead should be a strong reminder that a united front against the RN is still necessary.

While the RN does of course talk about economic issues, its priority is to stoke a culture war – with serious implications for the lives of the victims – in relation to Arab immigration which is, by far, the most salient issue for the far right. In fact 77% of RN supporters in a recent poll said that they were motivated by concerns over immigration, compared to 69% concerned about cost of living issues and only 6% by ‘social inequality’. 

The RN has turned on Muslims, blaming them for France’s social problems and, as the Financial Times put it recently, ‘a sense that the French “way of life” is in danger or that they do not “feel at home” in France anymore’. The RN’s would-be parliamentary leader Jordan Bardella has promised to fight ‘a “cultural battle” against Islamism’ (including further restrictions on wearing of the veil and burkinis) while the party’s proposal to end ‘birthright citizenship’ is wholly aimed at Arab citizens. 

Indeed, much like the mainstream media and centrist politicians, the RN is now cynically using antisemitism as a weapon against the left. Le Pen herself has vigorously defended Israel’s right to defend itself after 7 October and attacked, in particular, the left-wing leader of La France Insoumise, Jean Luc Mélenchon, for antisemitism simply because of his pro-Palestinian views.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, the former British National Party member and founder of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson is drawing on exactly the same themes as Le Pen but with a more explicit attempt to build a movement based in the streets and not just parliament. Robinson is attempting to rally fascists, ‘patriots’ and assorted thugs on 27 July in London to ‘take the country back’ – a move that needs to be countered by the biggest possible protest.

Robinson’s main target (even more than ‘wokeness’) are Muslims – their places of worship, their dress and their support for Palestinian sovereignty – who he sees as the most pressing threat to ‘the British way of life’. The sight, following the recent general election, of Muslim pro-Palestinian candidates being elected as MPs and being sworn in to Parliament in Punjabi or while holding a Qu’ran was simply too much for him to bear.

Robinson describes the Qu’ran as a ‘vile death manual’ and is obsessed by the large numbers of Muslims in Britain and France. Whatever his private thoughts on Jews, as with Marine Le Pen, his public persona condemns antisemitism and he reserves special vitriol for pro-Palestinian activists, recently tweeting – without any irony – about his outrage at the defacing of the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam. 

Meanwhile, he remains a stalwart public cheerleader for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and presents himself as a strong Zionist while, nevertheless, still easily slipping into old tropes about Jewish supremacy.

Across Western Europe, Islamophobia provides homegrown fascists with the majority of their ‘grievances’ and appears to be the bigots’ racism of choice at the moment in these countries. 

However, Islamophobia is a crowded field with centrist politicians and media mainstreaming anti-Muslim racism, allowing both fascists to mobilise and the state to divide working class communities by introducing counter-terror measures like Prevent that are disproportionately used against Muslims. 

Indeed, anti-Muslim racism has been normalised in parts of British society to such an extent that, as the former Chair of the Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi, once put it, Islamophobia has ‘passed the dinner-table test’. Judging by the conversations at the dinner tables, cabinet meetings and constituency events she would have attended, Islamophobia is now the ‘last respectable racism’.

The media bear a particular responsibility for normalising Islamophobia in Britain. A report by the Centre for Media Monitoring in 2021 found that some 60% of articles mentioning Muslims identified them with negative behaviour with 14% of these articles assessed as ‘biased’ against and 21% as ‘antagonistic’ to Muslims. More than one in five articles specifically associated Muslims with terrorism or extremism. As Hamza Yusuf concluded, ‘Islamophobia is embedded and institutionalised, and particularly pervasive in the media.’

Meanwhile the media are clearly more obsessed with highlighting antisemitism – at least as defined by pro-Israel actors – as an urgent problem than they are about calling out Islamophobia (not least because, as we have seen, they are so deeply embedded in reproducing the latter). In the last two years, there have been more than 20,000 stories referencing antisemitism in contrast to less than 10,000 mentioning either Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism. The Times and the Financial Times, for example, have both run six times as many stories mentioning antisemitism than Islamophobia while the Guardian has run three times as many. There appears to have been a deliberate focus on antisemitism, rather than Islamophobia – following on from former’s use as a key weapon to undermine Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader – specifically in order to weaken pro-Palestine forces and the left. 

All this means that we need to mobilise for the counter-protest on 27 July and to draw as many people as possible into a united campaign against the anti-Muslim racism of Tommy Robinson and his supporters. Such a movement will make it harder to racists to scapegoat any minority group and build the unity we need to show solidarity with all the oppressed.