In the UK, Islamophobia is so bipartisan, so normalised, that BBC reporters refer to anti-Muslim pogromists as ‘pro-British protesters’
Middle East Eye – 13 August 2024
Imagine this scene, if you can. For several days, violent mobs have massed in the centre of British cities and clashed with police in an attempt to reach synagogues to attack them.
Draped in England flags and Union Jacks, and armed with cricket bats and metal rods, the trouble-makers have dismantled garden walls to throw bricks.
Gangs have swept through residential areas where Jews are known to live, smashing windows and trying to break down doors. The rioters attacked and torched a hotel identified as housing Jewish asylum seekers, an act that could have burned alive the occupants.
For days, the media and politicians have chiefly referred to these events as far-right “thuggery” and spoken of the need to restore law and order.
In the midst of all this, a young Jewish MP is invited onto a major morning TV show to talk about the unfolding events. When she argues that these attacks need to be clearly identified as racist and antisemitic, one of the show’s presenters barracks and ridicules her.
Close by, two white men, a former cabinet minister and an executive at one of the UK’s largest newspapers, are seen openly laughing at her.
Oh, and if this isn’t all getting too fanciful, the TV presenter who mocks the young MP is the husband of the home secretary responsible for policing these events.
Look at how @edballs & @kategarraway treat @zarahsultana.
So hostile.
— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) August 5, 2024
The scenario is so hideously outrageous no one can conceive of it. But it is exactly what took place last week – except that the mob wasn’t targeting Jews, but Muslims; the young MP was not Jewish but Zarah Sultana, the country’s most high-profile Muslim MP; and her demand was not that the violence be identified as antisemitic but as Islamophobic.
It all sounds a lot more plausible now, I’m guessing. Welcome to a Britain that wears its Islamophobia proudly, and not just on the streets of Bolton, Bristol or Birmingham, but in a London TV studio.
‘Pro-British protests’
Islamophobia is so bipartisan in today’s Britain that BBC reporters on at least two occasions referred to the mobs chanting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant slogans as “pro-British protesters“.
BBC reporter has just described rioters as “a pro-British march” pic.twitter.com/IR8695kGWF
— Ted Booth (@tedgbooth) August 4, 2024
The chief focus of nightly news has not been the anti-Muslim racism driving the mob, or the resemblance of the riots to pogroms. Instead, it has highlighted the physical threats faced by the police, the rise of the far-right, the violence and disorder, and the need for a firm response from the police and courts.
The trigger for the riots was disinformation: that three small girls stabbed to death in Southport on 29 July had been killed by a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, the suspected killer was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents and is not Muslim.
But politicians and the media have contributed their own forms of disinformation.
Media coverage has mostly assisted – and echoed – the rioters’ racist agenda by conflating the violent targeting of long-settled Muslim communities with general concerns about “illegal” immigration. The reporting has turned “immigrant” and “Muslim” into synonyms just as readily as it earlier turned “terrorist” and “Muslim” into synonyms.
And for much the same reason.
In doing so, politicians and the media have once again played into the hands of the far-right mob they are seemingly denouncing.
Or seen another way, the mob is playing into the hands of the media and politicians who claim they want calm to prevail while continuing to stir up tensions.
Muslim youth who turned out to defend their homes, as police struggled to cope with the onslaught, were labelled “counter-protesters.” It was as if this was simply a clash between two groups with conflicting grievances, with the police – and the British state – caught in the middle.
Again, can we imagine rioting, hate-filled pogromists trying to burn alive Jews being described as “protesters,” let alone “pro-British?”
None of this has come out of nowhere. The current anti-Muslim mood has been stoked by both sides of the political aisle for years.
The British establishment has every incentive to continue channelling public anger over economic issues – such as shortages of jobs and housing, crumbling services and the rocketing cost of living – onto scapegoats, such as immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims.
Were it not doing so, it might be much easier for the public to identify who are the true culprits – an establishment that has been pushing endless austerity policies while siphoning off the common wealth.
‘Abusive relationship’
The case against the right is easily made.
Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former cabinet minister, has been warning for more than a decade that her party is filled with Muslim-hating bigots, among both the wider membership and senior officials.
She declared back in 2019: “It does feel like I’m in an abusive relationship at the moment… It’s not healthy for me to be there any more with the Conservative party.”
A recent poll found that more than half of Tory party members believe Islam is a threat to what was termed a “British way of life” – far above the wider public.
Such racism stretches from the top to the bottom of the party.
Boris Johnson, whose novel Seventy-Two Virgins compared veiled Muslim women to letterboxes, won endorsement in his prime ministerial run from far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson, who has been fomenting the current wave of riots from a Cyprus hideaway.
Warsi was especially critical of Michael Gove, one of the key actors in successive Conservative governments. She observed: “I think Michael’s view is there is no such thing as a non-problematic Muslim.”
That may explain why the party has repeatedly refused to address proven and rampant Islamophobia within its ranks. For example, officials quietly reinstated 15 councillors suspended over extreme Islamophobic comments once the furore had died down.
Even when the leadership was eventually cornered into agreeing to an independent inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the party, it was quickly watered down, becoming a “general inquiry into prejudice of all kinds.”
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