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As Britain burned and Muslims and mosques were attacked by far-right rioters fuelled by disinformation, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, Britain’s most infamous extremist’s reign came to a quiet end at Woolwich Crown Court.
On July 30, as the riots ignited in Southport before spreading across the country in a wave of mayhem that all but monopolised the media, Anjem Choudary was jailed for life for directing the banned terror organisation, Al-Muhajiroun.
For well over a decade, the 58-year-old dubbed a “hate cleric” by the press, was a bogeyman whose notoriety and influence the media helped manufacture.
At the height of his infamy, Choudary’s brand of bravado-Islamism replete with anti-Western ranting and quotes from the Qur’an was devoured by British newspapers and broadcasters.
Between 2016 and 2020, when Choudary was arguably less of a news story than he had been up until his conviction for inviting support for a proscribed terror organisation – the Islamic State – he still featured over 1,500 times on the online pages of British news outlets.
A year later, in July 2021, Metro ran an article which cited Choudary as “The man who became the face of Islamism in Britain”. The article is one of many examples of how the media helped not only make but cement, Choudhury’s reputation.
Six years earlier, in January 2015, Choudary’s views appeared in the same newspaper following the attacks against Charlie Hebdo staff, following the publication of Islamophobic cartoons. Billed, then, as a lawyer, Choudary had been allowed to write an ‘opposing view’ piece for USA TODAY, something many readers branded “shameful”.
Metro‘s coverage of that piece, carried Choudary’s suggestion that – “Muslims don’t believe in freedom of speech”. To the annoyance of most British Muslims, Choudary was once more the go-to voice following a major tragedy and his views were gaining global traction.
The former Assistant Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Miqdaad Versi, summed it up best in an opinion piece for the Guardian in August 2016, stating that Choudary’s “pulpit was not to be found in mosques but on the television screen and in national newspapers”.
Still, even featuring in a US newspaper, was a fall from years past when Choudary frequented the studios of such major nightly news shows as BBC Newsnight and jostled with Jeremy Paxman, among others, about such topics as the “campaign to move Britain over to Shariah Law”.
Choudary was not a Muslim cleric as the media loved to present him, but the media’s cleric, a rent-a-gob, drinker and playboy turned cosplay Mullah.
Oli Rahman a London-based reporter who worked for one of the UK’s largest news agencies has argued that it was the media who helped legitimise Choudary’s views.
In an article for Huck in August 2016, Rahman wrote that he had a “strange sense of discomfort at the thought that I was one of the people who, as a young reporter, inadvertently gave Anjem the chance to air his views”.
Many Muslims were forced into devoting much of their time and energy to denying Choudary’s claims and were left wondering why journalists could not see his opportunist streak.
Taj Ali, co-editor of the Tribune magazine, points out his experience of having to constantly correct the narrative that Luton, a town said to be divided and where extremists linked with Choudary have clashed with counterparts from the now defunct English Defence League (EDL), co-founded by another media-made hate preacher, Tommy Robinson. “I’m constantly correcting journalists when I tell them I’m from Luton and they repeat what they have seen over the years of a place riddled with extremism and communities living parallel lives.”
In musing on his time as a reporter when he would be instructed to give “our friend Anjem a call,” Rahman wrote: “It was the media who wanted his hatred, other Muslims were left to pick up the pieces, condemn him, deflect the blame.”
Picking up the pieces is exactly what Muslims are doing following the wave of violence launched against them across Britain, which shuddered to a halt on August 5 as police swiftly put rioters before the courts and communiti