‘I’ve been inside for nine months” says the T-shirt, worn over a Guantanamo-orange jumpsuit. Except this is no terrorist at all, but a baby that can barely sit up, his image tweeted as part of a recent Twitter campaign mocking the UK government tagged #ToddlerTerror.
Theresa May, the head of the UK’s interior ministry, has just released a report outlining how nurseries and teachers should be monitoring signs of radicalisation among young children and reporting them. It’s part of the government’s wider counter-terrorism agenda that, over the last 10 years or so, has come in for constant criticism for its vilification of the Muslim communities and its determination to see Muslims only as terrorists.
To be so blatant in determining that even Muslim toddlers could threaten the downfall of the state makes their intent quite clear.
We have social media to thank for finding and mocking the ridiculousness of such a proposal with sarcastic tweets hashtagged #ToddlerTerror which follows from a similar one last year #SignsOfARadicalBaby
It’s a particularly sensitive issue for me with a three-year- old daughter. She took a small scarf into her nursery to show everyone what she wears to Sunday school. Will she be reported to the authorities? What about when she loudly recites verses from the Quran in the middle of the supermarket? Will she be excused because she also belts out Let it go from Disney’s Frozen as we walk to the shops?
There’s rich irony in a Christian country persecuting babies as a threat to the state, reminiscent of the biblical tale of King Herod hunting down babies in advance of the foretold birth of Jesus.
In more recent times, the Hitler Youth were expected to act as spies on their families. And plenty of Communist countries even during our lifetimes, employing child spies within households. Ceaucescu’s Romania was one, Vietnam another.
While we may be laughing at the idea of toddler terrorists, we must be alert to the abuse children are exposed to by authorities as pawns in a political fight, and ensure the gravity of this act is not lost in the satire. The way that a state views particular children is a barometer of how it views the community from which those children hail. History bears repeated testimony to this fact.
Throwing suspicion on children has all the hallmarks of state tyranny. Worse, it works to terrorise parents, placing a wedge between them and their children.
In the end it is all abuse, designed to create terror rather than – as the British government and other states and authorities claim – to diagnose it.
So by all means let’s laugh at hashtags and the idea of Lego-wielding toddler terrorists. But let’s not be blind to the fact that suspecting children in this way does not save us from terror but rather perpetuates it.
State surveillance of adults in their private space is hugely problematic. But to suspect and persecute infants is the sign of crazed power. No wonder social media satire seems the most fitting response.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk
