According to figures released by the Home Office, 41% of terrorist suspects arrested last year were white, 11.9% were black and 36.2% were Asian. These facts contradict the stereotypical appearance of a terrorist as portrayed by the media.
Whilst American media is often criticised here in the UK for its branding of terrorist or reporting on events. White terrorist suspects are described as a ‘lone wolf’ or an individual with complex mental health issues and people of colour as terrorists acting out a non-western ideological agenda. However, these statistics suggest we need to strongly interrogate our own media portrayals.
The word ‘terrorism’ has been so strongly associated with groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda that it has been made almost synonymous with attacks on the west by the non-west. This generates a hugely racist assumption that terrorists aren’t white and that white terrorists are rare deranged individuals.
Whilst most of the white suspects arrested were not part of any group or organisation the sheer volume of these ‘lone wolves’ shows that they are a huge threat to society. The absence of a unified body makes the individuals seem less significant than a unified terrorist group but with the huge rise of western white nationalism, it has formed a huge group with its own ideologies and beliefs and with its own militant extremists. 14.8% of those arrested had extreme right-wing ideologies.
Right-wing politicians have used terrorist activities to scare and divide the nation between as fictitious ‘them’ and ‘us’. Phrases such as ‘brain washing’ is used to make non-white terrorists seem non-human and beyond help compared to the more scientific diagnoses of mental health conditions given to white terrorist suspects.
This non-human terminology has fed into the rhetoric surrounding Brexit and particularly immigration policy. Terms used to describe refugees such as ‘swarm’ used by David Cameron in July 2015, dehumanise migrants and makes no distinction between types of refugees, migrants or asylum seekers. Racism is not a political belief you can choose to subscribe to; it is the systematic discrimination of one group over another. The inaccurate portrayal of terrorism in the mass media brainwashes the public in the same way the media accuses religion as doing.
