The Mail on Sunday has been accused of fuelling Islamophobia after offering students hundreds of pounds to spy on Muslim student societies in an attempt to uncover evidence of “extremism”. The newspaper promised student journalists £100 per meeting to pose as Muslims and secretly record meetings of student Islamic societies to see if any radical organisations were recruiting there.
The offer came in an email from junior reporter Sophie Borland, who graduated from UCL in 2004. It said: “What the editor wants is to pay student reporters to go undercover to one or two meetings of various societies. The reporters would be paid £100 per meeting but IF something came up that turned into a story obviously they would be paid a lot more.”
The email referred to a ‘tip off’ that radicals would be targeting London campuses. Borland referred to “rumours flying around a lot”. The Sunday Times reported on radicals allegedly operating undercover at UCL in the autumn, but Borland said: “If you take a look at their article it really wasn’t based on much. The Sunday Times went really big on it but it wasn’t anything really.”
The Mail on Sunday’s Education Correspondent Glen Owen specifically targeted Imperial College’s Muslim students and Queen Mary’s World Revival Society.
“It’s hard to conceive how the United States will win a ‘war of ideas’ in the Islamic world when American leaders flock to a Washington conference where Muslims are publicly insulted and the U.S. officials fail to voice objections to the bigotry.
The chief inspector of prisons has raised concerns about the treatment of Muslim inmates at Belmarsh maximum security jail in London.
The 
Juan Cole writes: “The constant drumbeat of hatred toward Muslims and Arabs on the American Right, on television and radio and in the press, has gradually had its effect. This according to a Washington Post poll. Even in the year after September 11, a majority of Americans respected Islam and Muslims, but powerful forces in US society are determined to change that, and are gradually succeeding. As they win, Bin Laden also wins, since his whole enterprise was to ‘sharpen the contradictions’ and provoke a clash of civilizations. Some 25% of Americans now say they personally are prejudiced against Muslims. And 33% think that Islam as a religion helps incite violence against non-Muslims, up from 14% after September 11. The Bush administration policy is to continually insinuate that the Muslim world is the new Soviet Union and full of sinister forces that require the US to go to war against them.”