Michael Bloomberg, the candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, has come under fire for surveillance programs conducted against Muslims while he was mayor of New York. This is not the first time that security policies Bloomberg pursued as mayor have come back to bite him in his presidential campaign; he has had to apologise for the “stop and frisk” policy that the police conducted in New York, and which disproportionately targeted ethnic minorities. The core of both attacks on Bloomberg’s record is a preference for racial or religious profiling as a tool of crime fighting. In both cases, the vast majority of the profiled group, who are not just innocent but deplore the activities of those who are not, can end up resentful at the implication that they are more likely to commit crime. The latest assault on Bloomberg’s record relates to a video released this week of a campaign event in November 2019, in which he was questioned about the surveillance program against Muslims. In the video, he responds: “We only went into mosques when they asked us to come in,” widely interpreted to mean that the surveillance program was conducted only in response to concerns raised by Muslim leaders. If that is what he meant, journalistic reporting and court rulings both show that it is not true; the surveillance programme was widespread, and not necessarily linked to direct suspicions of wrongdoing. In any case, among other responses to this renewed focus is a letter from a group of American Muslim organisations accusing Bloomberg of playing “into dangerous tropes about Islam that are typical of white supremacy discourse. In perpetuating bigoted stereotypes, your actions … put the lives of American Muslims at risk of prejudice and violence.” The letter also claims that Bloomberg’s actions had led “many people” to stop “participating in religious life out of fear.” There is a slight dilemma in how one deals with this letter. On the one hand, the group of organisations that wrote it comes from the same leftist milieu that has produced the blanket opposition to the Prevent counter-extremism program in the UK, and generally promotes the idea of Islam as a community apart, in need of self-appointed leaders to speak for it. Their positions are predictable, and fundamentally based on the promotion of grievance politics, and opposition to groups more representative of the mainstream of the Islamic approach to politics and the state around the world. The language that we use to talk about extremism matters in this fight. The majority of Muslims in the West are horrified by the actions of Islamist terrorists (and many Islamist terrorists would not consider the majority of Muslims in the West to be proper Muslims). Peter Welby On the other hand, the grievances felt by many Muslims in the West are in many cases real and truly felt. The fact that these grievances are then used by organizations whose vision will create further societal division rather than less does not make them any less important. These range from deep concerns over the way that counter-extremism policy is delivered on the ground, to worries about the rise in Islam-bashing rhetoric in politics and the media, and genuine fear over increasing violent attacks against Muslims, with last week’s attack in Germany just one of many recent examples. The criticism of Bloomberg in the past weeks may relate to his actions a decade ago and more, but they are of striking contemporary relevance. The challenge to security services of how to deal with very particular forms of terrorism is not a new one. Much preventive work in tackling crime is based on profiling of some form or another, but when this is not done with care, it leads to the alienation of entire communities, thus making intelligence-led approaches that much harder. In the UK, the allegation has long been that the Prevent program (part of the counter-terrorism toolbox, but focused on preventing the slide into extremism rather than deradicalizing those already ensnared) is in fact an effort to spy on British Muslims, and is based on the blanket belief of the security services that all Muslims are vulnerable to being drawn into extremism. This perception remains widespread, despite high and rising numbers of referrals for vulnerability to far-right or white supremacist extremism. In fact, in the most recently available figures released, there were more referrals for far right extremism than Islamist extremism. The language that we use to talk about extremism matters in this fight. The majority of Muslims in the West are horrified by the actions of Islamist terrorists (and many Islamist terrorists would not consider the majority of Muslims in the West to be proper Muslims). It matters, then, when those in positions of authority in politics or the media talk about ‘Islamic terrorism,’ or the inherent violence of Islam, perpetuating a narrative that Muslims are somehow alien in the West. We need to use language of collaboration in eradicating a common threat, rather than the language that treats Western Islam as carrying a disease. At the same time, the narrative of government and media will not change without help from Western Muslims, and the more that certain groups build campaigns based on a suspicion of government, and create the idea of Muslims as somehow forming a separate community from the rest of their societies, the harder that project will become. Peter Welby is a consultant on religion and global affairs, specializing in the Arab world. Previously he was the managing editor of a think tank on religious extremism, the Centre on Religion & Geopolitics, and worked in public affairs in the Arabian Gulf. He is based in London, and has lived in Egypt and Yemen. Twitter: @pdcwelby. Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view