‘Was it like this for the Irish?’ This was a question posed by Muslim clients of the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, as recounted in her 2010 book Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice. Reflecting on an earlier generation of clients, including the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, the solicitor recalled how Irishmen and women the world over ‘knew and registered every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them’ long before the British public became aware that ‘entire Irish families’ had been wrongly imprisoned. ‘[So] Muslim men and women… are registering the ill-treatment of the community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.’
Pierce argued that Muslims became ‘the new suspect community’ in the wake of 9/11. A new documentary tells the story of four young men from the Midlands (two
