muslims | ukwatch.net

Newspaper stories say Muslims are 'a threat'

Ellie Keen — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:57:37 +0000

A new report has found that, since 2000, two thirds of newspaper articles about Muslims in Britain portray British Muslims as either ‘a threat’ or ‘problem’ and increasingly utilise negative and stereotypical imagery.

The forty-page report, entitled Images of Islam in the UK, set out to analyse a representative sample of newspaper articles in British tabloids and broadsheets between 2000 and 2008. In particular the authors, the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, sought to engage with the ‘routine, everyday coverage of British Muslims’ over and above the coverage which occurred around key events, such as 11 September 2001 attacks and 7 July 2005 London bombings.

A growing focus

Coverage of British Muslims was shown to have increased significantly year on year, and by 2006 had reached a level twelve times higher than that in 2000. In both 2007 and 2008 coverage continued above 2005 rates, although it had dipped slightly from the peak in 2006. The authors describe how this coverage generated a momentum all of its own, ‘lasting well beyond and independent of’ the newsworthy events of 2001 and 2005.

Consistently negative ‘news hook’

At the same time the report found that the context in which British Muslims were portrayed was of a consistently negative nature. The main focus, or ‘news hook’, for a third of stories on British Muslims was either terrorism or the ‘war on terror’ over the period of the survey, whilst religious and cultural stories highlighting the cultural differences between British Muslims and other British people amounted to 22 per cent. Eleven per cent of all stories focused on Muslim extremism. In stark contrast, only 5 per cent of all stories covered ‘attacks on or problems for British Muslims’ and ‘the notion of Islamophobia scarcely featured as a news topic’.

A significant yet subtle shift in story focus involves the steady increase in the proportion of stories which focus on religious and cultural differences, to such a degree that by 2008 these stories had overtaken terrorism as the single largest subject matter. It could be argued that this change in focus reflects the shift in British government policy, under the cloak of the ‘community cohesion’ framework, which quietly insinuates that ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’ are mutually exclusive identities.

The knock-on effect is that coverage of stories about anti-Muslim racism and attacks on British Muslims are elbowed out: from 10 per cent in 2000 to only 1 per cent in 2008.

Pervasive cultural stereotyping

The report found that four of the five most common story threads associated Islam and/or Muslims ‘with threats, problems or in opposition to dominant British values’ whilst only 2 per cent of these stories suggested ‘that Muslims supported dominant moral values’. In particular, the report highlights a number of stories which frame Britain as ‘becoming a place of Muslim-only, “no-go” areas, where churches were being replaced by mosques, and Sharia law would soon be implemented’.

This insidious perception of Islam as a threat or a problem was further enhanced by the choice of descriptive language in the articles surveyed: the most common nouns employed in relation to Islam or Muslims were ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’ whilst the most widely used adjectives included ‘fanatical’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘radical’ and ‘militant’. In all, ‘references to radical Muslims outnumber references to moderate Muslims by 17 to one’. This choice of descriptive language was consistently used by both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

‘Single Muslim male’ or ‘unidentified male Muslim group’

The newspaper articles surveyed also appeared to rely on a stock set of images: that of the ‘single Muslim male’ or ‘a group of unidentified Muslim men’, often portrayed as either praying or preaching. The insinuation behind these portrayals of groups of Muslim men is, states the report, that they are ‘the object of rather than the source of statements’. Moreover, ‘a group of unidentified Muslim men is seen as an image that “speaks for itself”’: British Muslims are portrayed as one undifferentiated mass.

Islamophobic discourse

A recent report by the Institute of Race Relations, entitled Integration, Islamophobia and civil rights in Europe, concluded that the presence of an Islamophobic discourse across Europe was ‘the primary barrier to integration’. This discourse was, the report found, constructed and disseminated ‘by political parties, the media and the “liberati” in pursuit of an assimilationist agenda’. The findings of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies complement and support these conclusions.

Images of Islam in the UK makes for a stimulating and thought-provoking read. It is delicately argued and convincingly supported by a powerful body of evidence, and effectively demonstrates the degree to which the portrayal of British Muslims in the print media has been hijacked by an Islamophobic climate, which resorts to lazy racial stereotyping and the repetition of negative and damaging stock stories.

Wisdom, Not Intelligence

Ellie Keen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:47:04 +0000

Al-Qaida is working to set up a cell in Britain to target attacks against certain politicians, such as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and to carry out other operations, according to revelations made on Monday’s Newsnight.

The programme reported that British intelligence services were investigating the claims, but no one yet knows whether the call to arms posted on a password-protected website popular with “jihadists” is genuine.

“You don’t ignore this sort of thing,” Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the British joint intelligence committee, told Jeremy Paxman. “It may not be a threat from an existing cell … but it does represent a move in the propaganda game.”

And we most certainly mustn’t. Whether or not this is real or simply a dose of psychological warfare, the best way to eliminate the threat on British soil is not to tighten security, which could be futile since any possible attackers are likely to be homegrown, but to strike at the root causes.

The biggest single and most spectacular act Britain can undertake to mitigate the terror threat would be to pull its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawks would dismiss such a move as a sign of moral cowardice and “giving in to the terrorists”. The less ideological will see it for what it is: an expression of moral courage, an admission of a monumental error, and the yielding to justice and reason.

I am constantly astounded by those who claim that there is no causal link between the terror meted out by the Anglo-American war machine and anti-western terrorist activity. Even normally enlightened circles can be prone to viewing terrorism in an existential and historical vacuum; it is far easier on the conscience to deny any culpability in making the world more dangerous.

But al-Qaida has no hesitation making the link. It uses western military action and hegemony in Muslim countries as a rallying cry to recruit the young and disillusioned.

“In the case of the United Kingdom, the level of the threat in this country owes a lot to the government’s support for American wars,” security expert Crispin Black writes.

Last June, Prospect magazine ran an interesting but rather shallow investigation into what motivated the young British bombers who took part in the July 2005 London attacks which left some 50 dead.

In his editorial to the edition, Prospect’s editor, David Goodhart, claimed that the investigation “decisively refutes the claim, often heard in the weeks after 7/7, that [one of the attackers, Mohammad Sidique] Khan had been a well-integrated British-Pakistani Muslim driven to angry despair by the war in Iraq.”

Instead, Goodhart conveniently blames the tension between first and second-generation British Muslims for Khan’s decision to kill himself and other innocent civilians. Meanwhile, Britain can rest its conscience because “the rest of us are largely bystanders in this generational conflict”.

While intergenerational conflict almost certainly plays a role in the radicalisation of a small minority of British Muslims, so does socio-economic marginalisation. But these are only contributing factors when it comes to the few driven to violent action.

Few people give themselves to a cause for purely abstract or political reasons – scratch below the surface and there is invariably a personal motivation. From the suicide bomber who blows himself up because he can’t bear the indignity of unemployment and the daily humiliation of living under occupation, to the shunted lover who runs off and joins the French foreign legion, to the passionate anti-Aids campaigner who lost a loved one to that killer disease – in the right circumstances, the personal sublimates itself to the universal.

If Britain had not invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, then Khan – and the other attackers – would have found no clear channel for their disaffection and he would have continued to teach and be a conservative Wahhabi fundamentalist in private.

Crispin Black suggests it is American culture that makes American Muslims not desire to be disloyal, as opposed to the case in Britain. I very much doubt that that is the primary reason why small groups of disaffected European Muslims radicalise.

I would say it has more to do with the differences in the circumstances of the two communities. A large proportion of disaffected European Muslims are descendants of the manual and semi-skilled workers who came to Europe to fill the labour shortages during the postwar boom years. As unemployment soared, their children and grandchildren were largely unable to pluck themselves from poverty, partly due to neglect in education and partly discrimination. And society did not give them much in the way of support to empower and integrate them.

In America, a large percentage of Muslim and Arab immigrants are successful and well-to-do professionals whose relative wealth and education enables them to get on better in society and shields them against discrimination and the harshness of being at the bottom of the ladder, distrusted and feared.

Some find it hard to accept that anti-western terrorism is “blowback”, but those people are deceiving themselves. In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In politics, this law of nature is distorted – either magnified or diminished – by relative might.

Thus, a small and weak country like Cuba can suffer half a century of isolation for crossing a superpower, while the same superpower can bomb and intimidate smaller countries with relative impunity, and even blame them for it, cushioned by its military might and its geography.

Since it’s easier and less emotionally challenging to grasp something when it occurs to others, perhaps it would be worth considering “blowback” in a non-western context. In Egypt, President Gamal Abdel-Nasser so distrusted the Muslim Brotherhood that he allowed his security apparatus to persecute them mercilessly.

One Islamist intellectual became so bitter and hate-filled at the torture he endured that he penned polemic works in prison which declared that all Muslim societies were “infidels” and living in “Jahiliyyah“, paving the way for the violent jihadist movement that threatened to tip Egypt over the edge in the 1990s.

Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, courted the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups to neutralise the power of the leftists and Nasserists who believed he was not a worthy successor to Nasser. When the Islamists started to oppose him, he cracked down hard on them, rounding up thousands, and eventually a radical splinter group assassinated him.

It’s not too late for Britain to take the wind out of the “blowback” of its military misadventures, but it needs to act soon. Wisdom is far more effective than unreliable intelligence.

This year is the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue and it is a golden opportunity for the European mainstream and the Muslim minority to soul search and have an honest and sober debate that goes beyond the symptoms and diagnoses the cause of the disease.