Sections of the British press are encouraging Islamophobia and publishing “brazen lies” that exacerbate community tensions, one of the UK’s leading Muslim journalists has said.
In a controversial attack on his fellow journalists, Mehdi Hasan – The Huffington Post UK’s political director and a columnist for the New Statesman magazine – has claimed that the country’s leading newspapers publish stories about Muslims that they would not dare publish about any other minority group.
In the wake of terrorist attacks such as the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, the UK press has been “given free rein to effectively target, distort, misrepresent and demonise the Islamic faith and its 2.7 million adherents in this country,” Hasan told a packed crowd at the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire on Saturday evening.
As a practicing Muslim and as a working journalist, Hasan said “I love my job… but I find myself awkwardly straddling the divide between British Islam and the British media.”
“I get pretty exhausted of having to constantly endure a barrage of lazy stereotypes, inflammatory headlines, disparaging generalisations and often inaccurate and baseless stories,” he said.
“We have seen in recent years, recent months and, even, recent weeks, a “hailstorm” of press stories that are “unbelievably negative about, hostile towards, distrustful of, Islam and Muslims,” he said.
British Muslims, Hasan pointed out, are singled out as ‘The Other’ by a series of inflammatory front page newspaper headlines. “Dangerous and counter-productive” coverage of Muslim issues, such as the Spectator‘s front page, pictured above, “basically stigmatises all Muslims,” Hasan said – and in particular Muslim children – as violent extremists.
Hasan isn’t alone in his view on the “hysterical” front page – the magazine’s imagery prompted a furious backlash, with critics, including former cabinet minister Baroness Warsi, branding it “appalling” for “stigmatising children and alienating communities.”
Nick Lowles, from the anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate, wrote that the front page was simply “unadulterated hatred… we wouldn’t put up with it against any other religion.”
But in the UK and in relation to Islam, Hasan said, we do put up with it. Muslims are expected to “suck it up” and put up with this “awful, discriminatory, hysterical press coverage,” he claimed.
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