“It could hardly be more embarrassing: the British Council, charged with promoting British values throughout the world, is forced to fire a senior press officer this week after he penned an extraordinary series of attacks on Islam.

“For those who doubt the very concept of Islamophobia, the columns of Will, aka Harry, Cummins in the Sunday Telegraph should be a set text. His brand of virulent paranoia combines racism – ‘all Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics’ – with a particularly vicious aggression – the massacres in Bosnia were ‘more a tribute to (Muslims’) incompetence than their humanity’.

“This is very nasty stuff and one wouldn’t want to give it more space in another newspaper but for the fact that there is still a well-meaning, but fatally blind strand of opinion which refuses to accept the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Refuses to see how it represents a mutated form of racism, and refuses to see how such comments about Jews or blacks would be quite rightly regarded as unprintable.

“What makes the Cummins case so disturbing is that he didn’t lurk in the backroom of British National party offices, writing Nick Griffin’s speeches. No, he was at the very heart of a quintessential British institution. It exposes, in a way which can no longer be denied, how deep the worm of Islamophobia has crawled.”

Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 4 September 2004

The British Council sacked a senior officer yesterday after investigating allegations that he wrote articles in The Sunday Telegraph that criticised Islam.

The government-funded body, which promotes cultural relations, said that it had dismissed an employee, believed to be Harry Cummins, a long-serving press officer. The investigation followed the publication of four articles written under the pseudonym Will Cummins.

In the pieces, which were attacked by Islamic organisations, Will Cummins said that Muslim voters had a “global jihad agenda”.

In one he said: “Christians are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of almost every Muslim land and behave with a humility quite unlike the menacing behaviour we have come to expect from the Muslims who have forced themselves on Christendom.”

The British Council has distanced itself from the content of the articles. “From the British Council point of view, it has been a pretty distressing and damaging period and we are still digesting the consequences,” a spokesman said.

The Sunday Telegraph declined to comment.

Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2004

Muslim groups and individuals have flooded the British Council with complaints after learning that one of its senior press officers allegedly wrote controversial Sunday Telegraph articles attacking “the black heart of Islam”.

The government-funded body, which recently commissioned a handbook on Islam “to prevent ignorant comments about Muslims being made in [the] national press”, has suspended Harry Cummins while it investigates the claims, which were first disclosed in the Guardian Diary.

He denies writing the articles, which have prompted calls for the Press Complaints Commission to intervene. They appeared under the byline “Will Cummins”, which the Sunday Telegraph later described as a pseudonym.

Muslim organisations say the comment pieces incite racial and religious hatred, and the British Council describes the articles as deeply offensive.

But the Sunday Telegraph has refused to rule out publishing further contributions from the author of the articles. Its editor, Dominic Lawson, told the Guardian that he did not regret printing them.

Guardian, 6 August 2004