Restating the case for the 'suspect community': A Reply to Greer

In 2009, in an article for this journal, we argued that UK legal and political developments, following the events of September 2001, had designated Muslims as the ‘enemy within’ and served to construct Muslims as the principal suspect community (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). This work sought to utilize and extend Hillyard's original (1993) thesis, which postulated that, during the period of Irish political violence during the 1970s and into the 1990s, the whole Irish population had become a ‘suspect community’. In 2010, Steven Greer responded with an uncompromising critique of these combined works. In this reply, we rearticulate our case and demonstrate why Greer's arguments are fundamentally flawed.