Jo Cox’s pain ran far deeper than the bullets and knives that killed her, writes Sufyan Ismail.
A few days prior to Jo Cox tragically being murdered by a right-wing extremist, I had the pleasure of a private meeting with Jo in Parliament to discuss her ongoing work in tackling Islamophobia and other forms of hate crime. She was keen to discuss how she could do even more to combat hatred against vulnerable minorities.
Of course, nobody could have predicted the tragedy to befall Jo just days after our meeting, however now more than ever, certain frustrations she relayed to me at that final meeting ring true of the current ‘poisonous’ political environment (as Mayor Sadiq Khan put it) which we live in. There were many issues Jo had grave concerns over and in our meeting a few of these came to the fore.
She talked about the continual political and right-wing media demonization of Syrian refugees, a cause very close to her heart. Jo knew full well that Syrian mothers only placed their precious children into potentially unsafe boats because those very boats were safer than Syria itself. Nobody wants to flee their homes, but when ill-informed western foreign policy has in no small part contributed to anarchy in the Middle-East, we surely have a moral duty to assist those who become casualties of our ‘collateral damage’.
Jo was also highly critical of the Government’s ill-conceived PREVENT programme and its detrimental impact on young Muslim children. We discussed how teachers feel their classrooms are becoming ‘wings of the security services’, how senior police officers are now concerned about having to become ‘thought police’ and how a young innocent Muslim child mispronouncing ‘terraced house’ (as ‘terrorist house’) caused such hysteria in today’s Islamophobic environment. The cruelest of ironies of course is that it now appears as if Jo was killed by a right-wing, far-right extremist, precisely the type of person whom PREVENT’s signs of radicalization should have identified and a referral to channel then helped to ‘deradicalise’. PREVENT’s lack of focus on the far right again under the microscope.
Jo, unlike many politicians, was truly connected with her local constituents and thus was never scared to stand up for ‘unfashionable causes’. Just a few weeks ago she invited Shadow Home secretary Andy Burnham to her constituency to see what a real Madrassa (Islamic school) looks like from the inside and to try to dispel the scaremongering advanced by the likes of the Prime Minister to justify their baseless rhetoric on radicalization in mosques which in turn provides the pretext for the Tories’ dangerous mantra on shutting down mosques. Jo was never afraid to stand up for what’s right, even if she stood alone.
We talked further about how today’s Tory Government is far too heavily influenced by powerful lobbyists and think tanks and when credible mainstream Muslim organisations scream to be heard and want to help with deradicalisation, the Prime Minister willfully ignores them in favour of a handful of discredited ‘rogue organisations’ who peddle a dangerous neoconservative narrative and have proven links to Islamophobes, as was exposed by the Home Affairs Select Committee.
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I recall discussing Press Regulation with her and the importance of a free and fair press but one that reports accurately and does not make a living out of spreading malicious hate and lies. We discussed The Sun’s infamous ‘1 in 5 British Muslims supporting Jihadis’ article which deliberately misrepresented the Survation poll’s findings and whipped up further hatred against Muslims. She was disappointed to note that when MEND (Muslim engagement and development), finally won its case against The Sun for misrepresentation, the correction was printed without due prominence on page 2. Jo had been a keen advocate of MEND.
We talked about how Islamophobia is no longer the domain of just the right wing press or indeed far-right extremists but how so much of the right wing political and media establishment has embraced this ‘social evil’ too. She sighed over how senior Tory officials were happy to run a dangerously Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan in the London Mayoral election which had clear racist undertones. I expressed my frustration at how Muslims now face a real catch-22 situation when it comes to engaging in politics. If we don’t engage, we are accused of not integrating and when we do engage, a band of right wing politicians and rogue journalists desperately try to silence us with accusations of ‘entryism’ and being ‘Islamists’. The politics of fear are again in full-swing with the EU referendum with right-wing media and politicians banking on immigration fears to serve as their saviour. It’s no surprise then that Jo’s bereaving spouse Brendan chose to include in his first public statement the words ‘…that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her’.
Jo was willing to fight for what was right and not just what’s ‘politically correct and she possessed an unmistakable personal touch with those around her which is in sharp contrast to the ivory towers many senior politicians live in these days.
So when Jo, by no co-incidence, spoke her final words as “the pain is too much”, the deeper meaning to many of those words was to do with more than just bullets and a knife, but the pain in life she endured in the face of the hatred above and her fight against it. Jo, you will be missed beyond words…
Sufyan Ismail is an award-winning entrepreneur and philanthropist, and the founder of MEND.
@SufyanGIsmail
