The Impact of the Leveson Inquiry

Last Updated on Sunday, 27 November 2011 10:17

On Monday 21st November 2011, Peter Morey took part in discussion on the Islam Channel’s ‘Politics and Media’ show, alongside former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiat. Chaired by Salma Yaqoob, conversation focused on the Leveson Inquiry into press and media ethics and its impact on the media representation of Muslims.

To watch the discussion in full on YouTube, follow the links below.

Politics and Media 21 November 2011 Part 3
Politics and Media 21 November 2011 Part 4

No Right of Reply to Lazy Journalism

Last Updated on Thursday, 03 November 2011 18:27

On Sunday 30 October 2011, both the BBC website (‘MP Mike Freer “threatened at mosque surgery”’) and the Sunday Express newspaper  (‘Muslim Fanatics abuse MP at Mosque’) carried the story that the conservative MP for Finchley, Mike Freer, had been threatened and verbally assaulted during a surgery at the North Finchley mosque two days earlier. The MP’s session was allegedly interrupted by an aggressive group of about a dozen Muslim protesters hurling anti-Semitic and homophobic insults. He was forced to hide in a locked room until the police arrived.

Both the BBC and the Daily Express appeared to be drawing on the same source – probably the Press Association – since their reports were very similar and dwelled on Mr Freer’s account of the incident, his membership of the Conservative Friends of Israel Group, and on the threats to him carried on the website of Muslims Against Crusades, which compared him to Stephen Timms, the east London MP attacked by a fanatic last year.

One ought not to be surprised by this story, carrying, as it does, so many incendiary elements. Moreover it represents a classic case of the framing of Muslims with which this project is concerned: being another account of the antics of that pantomime villain Anjem Choudary, a professional agitator with serious form, who appears to have a Pavlovian impact on news editors everywhere. The antics of his previous group, Islam for UK, in staging noisy protests at the repatriation of the bodies of British soldiers in Wootton Bassett had journalists foaming at the mouth.

One would not wish to trivialise a serious incident and would hope that the full force of the law be brought to bear if any wrongdoing is found. Nor would we suggest that violent radicalism go unreported. However, these two reports were totally lacking the perspective of those other, undoubtedly shocked worshippers and mosque officials who must have witnessed the incident. Why was no attempt apparently made to secure a quote from them, both to corroborate the MP’s account and to express their feelings about this violent intrusion into their space? Instead, Freer’s call to the Metropolitan Police Borough Commander – a piece of shameless rank-pulling unfortunately not open to those other members of the local community who may be the victims of verbal abuse – was covered, as were the internet rantings of Choudary and his group of professional ‘victims’.

We would urge readers to take a look at the conclusion to our recent book, Framing Muslims (Harvard, 2011), where we analyse the symbiotic relationship between a press eager for Muslim scare stories and the bogeyman Choudary who is always happy to oblige them.

One might not expect any more thoroughness or even-handedness in reporting from the Daily Express, with its long track record of scare-mongering anti-Muslim stories. However, for the BBC to reproduce such incomplete and one-dimensional fare is very disappointing. Unfortunately, the media framing of all Muslims as guilty by association is still very much with us.

David Starkey was Framed

Last Updated on Thursday, 03 November 2011 18:17

In August, the television historian David Starkey was widely pilloried for his comments on the BBC’s Newsnight programme that that month’s rioting in Britain’s cities was the fault of ‘black culture’. Starkey suggested that the rioters were comprised of young people who had ‘ become black’ owing to the coarsening influence of American hip hop and gangster rap, and juxtaposed what he saw as its corrupting patois with the ‘proper English’ spoken by high-achieving blacks, such as the MP David Lammy, who could be mistaken for a white man if one closed one’s eyes and just listened to his voice.

The response was swift, with most commentators berating Starkey for racism and suggesting that his lucrative career making (essentially the same) television series about the Tudors (over and over again) was at an end. Right wing commentators, on the other hand, claimed that he was simply articulating a widely held view, previously censored by the media and political establishment.

But, what no one bothered to ask was what Starkey was doing on Newsnight in the first place. What would a Tudor historian have to contribute to a debate on the causes of contemporary urban unrest? A journalist of our acquaintance tentatively suggested that the editors might have invited him on since, as a historian, he might be able to provide some sense of a longer context. Yet Starkey is not at all that type of historian: the comings and goings of Henry VIII’s private life eclipsing any interest in popular revolt in his work.

No, the real reason Starkey was invited on was because he is a controversialist, one of those rent-a-quote ‘experts’ at whose name TV producers’ address books always seem to fall open. Students of the framing of Muslims will recognise the scenario where someone without any real qualifications or knowledge is invited to contribute to media discussions, not in the interests of throwing light on the topic, but rather with the intention to provoke an argument and (presumably) boost viewing figures.

This kind of shorthand has, of course, beset the coverage of Muslim issues for many years. Its appearance in other areas of journalism – and the increasingly adversarial and unenlightening nature of the bear pit atmosphere of programmes like Newsnight – suggest that the media continues to do a disservice to those very real discussions that need to be had about the causes of alienation and contention. Until editorial policies are made more rigorous, and until news programmes decide that presenting well-researched facts, rather than ill-informed opinions, is the task of a free media it is likely that people such as Starkey and the Muslims will continue to be framed.

Framing Muslims, Stereotyping and the EDL

Last Updated on Sunday, 27 November 2011 10:00

On Monday, 5th September 2011, Amina Yaqin and Peter Morey took part in discussion on the Islam Channel's 'Politics and Media' show. Chaired by Salma Yaqoob, the panel included Sabby Dhalu of Unite Against Fascism, Moazzam Begg from Cageprisoners, and Dr Robert Lambert, Co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre.

To watch the discussion in full on YouTube, follow the links below

Politics and Media 5 September 2011 Part 1

Politics and Media 5 September 2011 Part 2

Politics and Media 5 September 2011 Part 3

Politics and Media 5 September 2011 Part 4

Politics and Media 5 September 2011 Part 5

The Only Good Muslim is a Silent One (Part two)

Last Updated on Friday, 19 November 2010 17:43

The second incident worthy of note was the public burning of a poppy by the Islamist extremists of ‘Muslims Against Crusaders’ in Kensington, timed to coincide with the observation of two minutes silence for British war dead on 11 November. The press – seeing another Anjem Choudhary/Islam4UK set of puppets appearing on their radar – reacted with predictable apoplexy. In particular, the Daily Express – which has never bothered to distinguish between Muslim and Islamist - led its coverage with ‘Muslim Cowards Burn Poppy at 11am’, and contrasted the stunt with the dignified observation of the rituals of national mourning taking place elsewhere around the country. The paper’s leader column suggested Muslims ‘should be encouraged to seek out the societies the feel such passionate kinship towards’ since ‘they do not belong in this one’.

The dialogicality of stereotyping is clearly in evidence in this case. The usual self-created, bearded  and robed bogeymen chant death threats to British servicemen, while the press look on with ill-concealed glee and sharpen their pencils for more anti-Muslim copy. This pathetic ritual is played out every few weeks, but also in countless other minor incidents that are less reported.

In this case, a result of the double-sided rabble rousing antics of protesters and press was an attack on a mosque in (faraway) Portsmouth.  The shocked imam condemned the Kensington protesters. However, his words indicated the schism which has come to characterise community attitudes towards war, at the same time forcing us to confront the way in which the British Legion poppy appeal has this year focused on the relatives of those killed in more recent, and more controversial conflicts. Imam Muhmmad Uddin commented: "They have the right to remember them [those killed in war] in your own way and we have the right to remember them in our own way and we shouldn't interfere with each other's [ways]…."It's a matter of respecting each other, it's not a matter of religion. In a society, whether we're Christian or Muslims, we should respect each other."

Rituals of national mourning are notoriously ideological. Yet how can we achieve the catharsis of shared national grief when our current foreign policy divides us so drastically?

The Only Good Muslim is a Silent One (Part One)

Last Updated on Friday, 19 November 2010 17:41

Two recent news stories caught the eye. Between them they illustrate the absurdly narrow frame into which Muslim opinion must be squeezed and how acceptance of any dissenting opinion in Britain is only grudging.

In the first story, Birmingham Tory Gareth Compton ‘humorously’ called for Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to be stoned for questioning the moral authority of politicians to comment on the treatment of women in Iran. Alibhai-Brown is a well-known moderate voice, defender of secular political culture and opponent of extremism. Mr Compton is an obscure local councillor. However, the joke – made on that most public of private forums, Twitter – indicates a default position with regard to Muslim public discourse. As ‘we all know’, this is of course how Muslims would discipline a female voice who dared to speak out against received opinion. (Going further, this is probably how all male Muslims would like to treat women who speak out on any issue whatsoever.) The lazy thinking, not to mention lame humour, involved in such attacks may be merely banal, and one might suggest Ms Alibhai-Brown’s decision to prosecute is an over-reaction. However, it indicates a deep-seated hostility to any articulation of dissent from a hegemonic position, especially when it takes on a stamp of cultural difference. This is particularly marked in, but by no means exclusive to, the Conservative Party.

While the party and its Lib-Dem coalitionists face more and more dissent as cuts begin to bite and the ideological underpinning behind their decisions becomes ever more visible, expect to see more of this kind of facile, rabble-rousing emphasis on those who are ‘like us’, and agree with our opinions and policies, and those who are not. It exists just below the surface in contemporary politics and journalism – ready to be invoked at short notice. As always, the Muslim is first in its sites.

Me and my Muslim Shadow

Last Updated on Monday, 11 January 2010 09:24

On 4th January 2010, Anjem Choudary, leader of Islam4UK, a local derivative of the outlawed extreme Islamist political body Al Muhajiroun, announced his group’s intention to stage a march commemorating the Muslim dead of the war in Afghanistan. The group intended to process, carrying symbolic coffins, through the small Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, until then the gathering place of mourners wishing to pay their respects to the remains of British servicemen killed in the conflict as they made their way through the town on the way from the nearby military airport to which they had been repatriated.

The plan was greeted by the British press with howls of outrage at the sacrilegious disrespect shown to the grieving families of those servicemen honoured by the crowds that now regularly lined the streets for each sombre vigil. Every major national newspaper featured the story prominently with appropriately disgusted headlines, apoplectic op-eds and a steady stream of obligatory token Muslim columnists, wheeled out to heap their own opprobrium on Choudary and his group.

Coming quite soon after another Islamist rump had barracked a returning parade of British troops in Luton, Islam4UK’s plans made dispiriting reading for Muslims who must have felt their collective loyalty fall once again under scrutiny but, one feels, set eyes a-gleaming among the Editoriat of the British dailies, for whom honouring the military dead ultimately trumps whatever reservations their newspapers might otherwise ordinarily express about the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts, and who know the value of a Muslim scare story when they see one.

Choudary subsequently did the round of television and radio news studios and appeared to equivocate about whether the publicised march would, in fact, take place at all. When pressed, he pointed out that the object of the exercise had been to gain publicity for the otherwise unheralded deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, and, no doubt, for his own fringe group. And, as he gleefully pointed out, that day’s headlines were ample evidence of the success of this tactic already. In a sense, any actual parade would now be, to an extent, beside the point: mission already accomplished.

Most journalists and correspondents were too busy indulging their righteous indignation, and eliciting furious splutterings from a competing gaggle of similarly outraged politicians, each vying to seem tougher than the other – discussing banning the march, punishing the organisers and so on – to consider whether or not they may have been ever so slightly outwitted by Choudary: manipulated into giving him exactly that oxygen of publicity that he craved. Only Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent paused to consider whether all the brouhaha might not be exactly what Mr Choudary was after. (Tom Sutcliffe: Outrage would suit this panto villain nicely, Tuesday, 5 January 2010)
And, in truth, this is not really a story of a wily Muslim villain putting one over on a gullible yet public-spirited press. Instead, the teacup-sized storm is a picture perfect example of all those qualities involved in framing Muslims.

It is perfect because of the visual fit of Anjem Choudary – copiously bearded and, clearly, the self-fashioning bogeyman of secular, liberal Britain: the opportunity afforded the press to run, for the umpteenth wearisome time, an implicit questioning of Muslims’ loyalty to Britain coupled with a contradictory avowal that mainstream Muslims were ‘not like that’ (the Daily Mail website later featured an elderly Muslim couple who had turned out, on a freezing cold day in Wootton Bassett for a vigil marking the return of yet another dead soldier); the lazy journalese in which Choudary was termed a ‘cleric’ despite having, and claiming, no religious training; and, finally and most importantly, because it illustrates the intensity of the embrace in which the two opposing sides in War on Terror discourse have necessarily become entangled. Just as politicians fell over themselves to countenance revoking the principle of free speech they were otherwise incessantly flaunting as something ‘we’ had and ‘they’ didn’t, by banning the march, so the extremists could be buoyed by the certainty that, if the political establishment who began the war did not rise to their bait and the march actually went ahead, then the racist right – always up for a fight – most certainly would. Choudary and Islam4UK had cleverly contrived for themselves a win-win situation, in which every eventuality served their purpose. Here, in the black and white of newsprint and in the digital images of the broadcast media, is a living, breathing instance of that dialogic quality at the heart of the framing of Muslims. Islamist fanatics rely on regular vilification to keep their rebel chic for the young and disaffected, politicians and newspaper editors, likewise depend on regular appearances from members of the Muslim lunatic fringe to remind ‘us’ what ‘we’ are fighting against (and to boost circulation figures). In the depressing catalogue of Muslim framing since 9/11 and 7/7, the Choudary/Islam4UK debacle offers a moment to stop and think about the incestuous dyad which blights representation and prevents things ever moving on very far.

“Big Brother” comes to visit Britain’s Muslim youth

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 November 2009 18:09

In a recent report by Vikram Dodd, the Guardian’s crime correspondent, the £140 million Government funded Prevent (Preventing Violent Extremism Programme) Agenda on tackling extremism in the UK has been found to be an intricate spying programme targeting Britain’s Muslim communities. The information gathering has co-opted local councils, FE colleges, Universities and so on in a bid to protect the more ‘vulnerable’ young Muslims at risk from violent extremism. The Home Office, which administers Prevent, maintain that their intention is to work with communities and root out violent extremism and not to turn ordinary civilians into spooks. Ed Husain, of the Quilliam Foundation spoke out in favour of Prevent’s intelligence gathering anti-terror activity while Shami Chakrabarty, Director of Liberty has described it as a spying exercise which seriously curtails civil liberties. What the programme has effectively done so far is to damage relationships of trust and instead of building community cohesion it has fostered a climate of fear and suspicion. Now it seems community cohesion is to be the friendly face of Prevent. Most notably universities and FE Colleges are seen as prime places for the potential radicalisation of youth and are therefore to be monitored closely in order to prevent the outbreak of violent extremism and to protect ‘vulnerable youth’. Muslim youth who are already targeted in the police ‘stop and search’ campaign cannot it seems be trusted to experience a ‘free’ and ‘secular’ model of education. Instead they must be watched by the nation like the inmates of Channel 4s Big Brother House. Meanwhile a Muslim spokesman such as Ed Husain provides a reassuring face to the public, ‘speaking from within’, as a formerly radicalised member of Hizb-ut Tahrir, who is now committed to national security concerns. For his efforts, Prevent have rewarded Quilliam with a major grant. So it seems that in addition to the ‘crime’ of ‘Flying while Muslim’ we can now add ‘Studying while Muslim’. While Muslim representatives such as Ed Husain have landed safely, one wonders where next the security agendas of new liberalism will lead us in the ongoing War Against Terror.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/16/anti-terrorism-strategy-spies-innocents
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/16/highereducation.topstories3
http://www.an-nisa.org/subpage.asp?id=307&mainid=79
Philip Hensher, ‘Do not expect lecturers to snitch on their students’, The Independent, 17 October 2006, p.31.