‘Anti-Muslim’ – Isn’t There a Word for That?

Earlier this week, the Today Programme succeeded in waking us up when it used an uncharacteristically direct word to describe the UK riots: “Islamophobic”.

Thus ended the delicately choreographed dance many journalists have been doing with adjectives like “thuggish”, “anti-migrant”, and even “anti-Muslim”, in their slowness to acknowledge arguably the most defining bigotry of our age with a name.

Just a few days ago, Muslim MP Zarah Sultana’s request to call the riots “Islamophobic” prompted sniggers from an otherwise all-white panel on Good Morning Britain.

MP-turned-journalist Ed Balls and Daily-Mail-editor-turned-GB-News-presenter Andrew Pierce performed Olympic gymnastics to paint themselves as victims, while Sultana struggled through their interruptions to describe how it felt to be told “go ‘home’”. 

The Conservative Government repeatedly denied “Islamophobia” was an actual thing while its frontmen warned voters “Islamists are in charge now”, a message the leadership-vying Robert Jenrick doubled down on this week.

He took to Sky News to demand the arrest of anyone shouting “Allahu Akbar” on the streets. What the interviewer failed to point out is that billions of Muslims around the world say this hourly in casual greeting – such is the ignorance of Islam within the institutions that greedily report on it.

This is why in Geneva, a Muslim man greeting an old friend with “God is Great!” (the same exclamation Gazans are seen making when they pull survivors out of rubble), was fined for “disturbing public peace”.

But does the media see complicity in this abject discrimination? Or in feeding the Islamophobic appetite that’s now erupted onto our streets? Lest we offend Ed Balls!

Perhaps the media allowing politicians like him to write their own headlines is part of the problem.

When Boris Johnson used The Telegraph to liken women in burkas to letterboxes and bank robbers, hate crimes rose 375% in a week. When Suella Braverman inaccurately claimed in the Daily Mail that “almost all” those involved in grooming gangs were British Pakistani men, it took the paper six months to retract her lie. And when broadcasters made headlines of her invented “invasion of the South Coast”, a homegrown white British terrorist launched three firebombs into an immigration processing centre in Dover.

“It’s Muslims that are being targeted, because Muslim equals terrorist,” said Rizwana Hamid, guest on Media Storm this week and Director of the Centre for Media Monitoring, which has published one of the most extensive pieces of statistical research on how Muslims and Islam are presented in the British media. Sixty percent of coverage is negative, over a third misrepresentative, and one in five articles have a primary focus on terrorism.

“Muslim is not a victim. Muslim is not a law-abiding citizen of Britain. Muslim is not somebody who contributes to Britain as a whole. Muslim is an extremist and a terrorist,” Hamid said.

This is why “they have been legitimate targets in the eyes of those that are perpetrating riots,” she explained.

Bigotry does not come from bad people so much as bad information. Many rioters may not have acted from ideological conviction, but from directionless grievances whose reigns were seized by extremist propagandists.

And here’s the thing: The propagandist disinformation these extremists pedalled was indistinguishable from mainstream headlines it mimicked when it pinned the Southport stabbing on an Islamist boat-crossing asylum seeker… who doesn’t exist.

Bigotry through bad information is the theme of this week’s Media Storm episode.

Headlines about the gender eligibility of Olympic female boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting have spawned terrifying streams of blind transphobia, such as cartoons depicting Khelif as a violent man beating up a helpless woman.

It’s reported as fact in right-wing media that Khelif has XY chromosomes. But the evidential basis is shaky at best and malicious at worst: rooted in an unidentified gender test by the International Boxing Association, a regulatory body stripped of authority due to corrupt financing and governance, and which has published contradictory claims about what the tests consisted of (while calling Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach a “sodomite”).

True or not, the reports about Khelif exhibit a willingness by journalists to rely on unreliable sources when characterising certain groups, namely, groups unable to respond due to being underrepresented in the media themselves. Like Muslims.

They therefore get “commodified,” says journalist Hussein Kesvani, “used as objects that are there to tell stories”.

“South Asian men, immigrant men, are not subjected to the individualistic moral failings afforded to people who are white.”

Be it terrorism or ‘grooming gangs’, their wrongdoings are “always framed as a clash of civilisations. They are threats to your nation… not individuals who have agency over their own actions.”

This is the context in which the far-right has so easily been able to hijack the Southport tragedy, setting mobs on Muslim men and stealing the spotlight from the thing we should have all, actually, been talking about after the stabbing – male violence against women. Because for everything we don’t know about the Southport stabbing, what we do know is this was a public and deadly explosion of homegrown gender-based violence.

So when we see known misogynists like Laurence Fox and Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson parading as protectors of British girls in their hate cries against Muslims, we feel disgustingly used.

Islamophobes are weaponising women’s fears, just like they weaponise people’s financial or health or immigration fears. Turning hardshipped groups against one another is a classic tactic of egoists and extremists and our best and only way to fight it is dialogue.

“Make time for humanity, make time for education and learning,” pleads imam Sabah Ahmedi on this week’s Media Storm. “If somebody invites you to a synagogue or a church or a mosque, to do something which might take you out of your comfort zone, try it.

“Because yes, I might be different, I might have a beard, I might wear a hat. But that doesn’t mean we don’t bleed red. All of us.”

This week’s Media Storm episode ‘Bigotry & bad information’ is out now.