12 - Discomfort and Documentary Film: The Figure of the White Extremist in Deeyah Khan’s White Right

Summary

White Right and Deeyah Khan's Filmmaking Practice

Deeyah Khan has directed two documentaries about political extremism. Whereas White Right: Meeting the Enemy (2017) follows neo-Nazi and socalled ‘alt-right’ groups in the US, Jihad: A Story of the Others (2015) portrays reformed radical Islamists in the UK. In these films, Khan reframes the parameters of the debate about radicalisation, moving beyond the question of ideology to consider what might be termed the affective conditions that she views as central to the pull of violent extremist and terrorist movements. She notes her frustration with the popular media discourse about extremism, and she also draws connections between far-right and Islamist extremists in terms of their motivations and personalities. In both cases, Khan argues that media narratives overplay the role of religion or ideology in radicalisation; instead, she suggests that the attraction of extremism is in part about ‘human vulnerabilities (qtd in Urwin 2015), where ‘the vast majority of the people [jihadis or far right extremists] are either lost and looking for a sense of belonging, or looking for a sense of purpose’ (qtd in Saner 2017).

Khan foregrounds her own life story in each film, an autobiography that shows her deep familiarity with vulnerability and the quest for communitarian belonging. Khan was born in Norway in the late 1970s, a time when there were very few immigrants, and even fewer Muslims, in the country. Her mother is from Afghanistan and her father from Pakistan, and from an early age, she attended anti-racist marches with her father. Throughout her childhood and teenage years, Khan worked as a musician and singer, gaining renown in Norway. However, this drew the ire of extremists in the Muslim community, and at 17, Khan left for London to escape intimidation and death threats. Khan's experience of exile contributes to her ability to recognise feelings of isolation, longing and loneliness in the people she interviews.

A BBC interview about multiculturalism in the UK in 2016 sparked her notoriety among white supremacists (see Brand 2017). In the segment in question, Khan asserts that ‘the fact of the matter is that the UK is never going to be white again’. She goes on to note that parents of Pakistani, Iraqi or other Muslim heritages must accept that the lives they had in their countries of origin cannot be recreated exactly in the UK.