The campaign to prevent the deportation, for political reasons and without due process, of Hicham Yezza now has a website.

The wider purpose of actions such as this is to terrorise Muslims and anyone whose immigration status is the least bit precarious into keeping their heads down. Hicham Yezza’s political activism (in the name of peace, not holy war) made him a nuisance; his vulnerability made him a target. The weakness and cowardice of those who have seized him and are making busy to hustle him out of the country speaks for itself. They cannot even afford to leave him time to prepare a case in his own defence.

So here is what will happen, if you are a Muslim and someone takes fright at something you are reading, or something you have written. You will be arrested and held without charge, in extremely frightening conditions, while the police ask you leading questions designed to trap you into admitting your involvement in a murderous conspiracy. Your property will be confiscated, your computer, books and papers taken and searched for incriminating material. Your family will be interrogated and their homes searched by police. Your arrest will be publicised, and your name will appear in the newspapers as that of a religious fanatic suspected of involvement in a terrorist plot. When (assuming you are both innocent and lucky) you are released without charge, someone will check up on your immigration status, just on the off chance that this might afford an opportunity to get rid of you without having to prove anything against you. There’s no smoke without fire, after all. And we cannot have the authorities being made to look foolish, heavy-handed or - perish the thought - racist.

This is what is already permitted. The law provides for it, the police and newspapers make it so. It is done with the presumed approval of a wider public, which is supposed to care only for its own safety and to sanction the removal of anything that might cause it alarm. Our role is to cower; the role of the authorities is to protect us, and if this means handing over the occasional innocent person to the tender mercies of the Algerian security apparatus, then so be it. It’s not as if they’re real citizens after all. Security means security for us, not for those who frighten us.

It is in the nature of the security state to grow, to expand its powers and to exercise them more widely. Public safety comes to mean the preservation of order, of social peace, from anything that might disrupt it; from any challenge to authority, from any uncouth or dissenting voice. The injustice shown to Hicham Yezza is outrageous, and demands immediate redress, but it is also part of an ongoing entrenchment and amplification of state power. A little further down the line, and you have the security apparatus of apartheid-era South Africa, combatting a “communist” enemy through secret arrests, detention without trial, torture and assassination. Further still, and you have - what? Chile under Pinochet?

For vulnerable and scapegoated people - Muslims and immigrants, young black people targetted yet again by racist stop and search policies (in the name of protecting the public from “knife crime”) - things are already “a little further down the line”. Those of us who are currently protected by our class, skin colour and nationality must join them there and push back, together, as hard as we possibly can.