Arzu reflects on past work on Islamophobia in the media and the need to understand how it crosscuts and intersects with normalised anti-Muslim hatred across legal, political and educational settings.
Another report on Islamophobia in the media is being launched this week by the Muslim Council of Britain, looking specifically at GB News and claiming it helped incite hatred contributing to the riots this summer past.
Great.
Did we need a new study for that?
This is a harsh statement, but I feel warranted.
I and various colleagues including Saeed R. Ameli and Seyfeddin Kara have spent years writing about this. Indeed our joint work with Samira Ahmed and Syed Mohammad Marandi was launched at the Foreign Press Association in January 2007.
You can download the report here.
We were not the first. See the excellent work of Elizabeth Poole many years prior to this. Look at the analysis of the late Greg Philo and Mike Berry on the media misrepresentations of Palestine and the endless aggression upon by the Zionist regime. There is much more pioneering work on this topic, and most of it is getting on for twenty years old.
Poole was kind enough to give us an interview in 2017 for our CounterNarratives to #Islamophobia project. That project was undertaken by IHRC and five academic partners (the University of Leeds, Central European University, CES at the University of Coimbra and the University of Leiden) across Europe and was launched at the European Parliament in September 2018. Other academics and practitioners also spoke with us to propose workable solutions to the issue of media Islamophobia. Find the UK report here in full. I am serialising the ten counter-narratives one by one on this site (find an index here). The core theme though is that, whatever the project, the wider understanding that informs that project is the need for systemic and institutional change. So by all means, monitor the media and seek redress under existing industry codes when there have been breaches. However also realise that the industry standards, the ombudsmen and the normalised praxis of (in this case) the media are what need change.
In 2007, the British Muslims’ Expectations of the Government volume six liked above, called for such a sea change. It set the stall for theme that would develop in IHRC’s research, through the Muslim Experiences project of 2009 – 2022 (of which Environment of Hate: the New Normal for Muslims in the UK was a key publication) and subsequently formed the basis of the Europewide Counter-Narratives to Islamophobia project. These all argued that long standing cultural tropes and narratives in literature and art taught uncritically mutually reinforce the racist and discriminatory policies of state and its institutions including law and law enforcement, political elites, the media and educational settings.
This is the key point. Understanding both the institutional nature of all racism (whether victims / victim communities are racialised by religion, culture or ethnicity) is the basis upon which all demands from the state must be made.
When working on research on Islamophobia in the US, Canada and the UK, I came across the 1960s Kerner Report from the US. You can find some of the extracted recommendations here in one of the IHRC briefings on Islamophobia in the media.
Maybe this is what the MCB report will call for. I hope so. I hope it recognises that the rise of GB News (whose Islamophobic pitch it focuses on), is the result of decades of normalised Islamophobia in the mainstream. See this thread on X from IHRC that explains this in more detail.
IHRC welcomes the release of work on #Islamophobia / anti-Muslim hatred & in the media. We hope @cfmmuk’s report will be a useful contribution to the literature.
There are some things to note & remember when looking at the rise of far-right or otherwise Islamophobic media.
— IHRC (@ihrc) December 11, 2024
Publicity for the MCB / CfMM report states that there is causality between the content of GB News inciting hatred against Muslims and the riots over the summer. This is a brave claim, however it is one that has been made before many times. There is causality between normalised and institutionalised racism and violence on the streets. This includes in the reporting after 9-11. IHRC was instrumental in advocating for better standards from media and institutions in the wake of this. It was a small glimmer of hope after 7-7 when media and police all refrained from exaggerated reporting, naming of Islam etc. in the first 24 hours after the horrendous events of that day. That small piece of progress blown to Smithereens by the irresponsible rhetoric from then Prime minister Tony Blair. Still in this period, mainstream Muslim organisations did not want to speak about Islamophobia.
If you are wondering why I am dedicating so many critical words to a report that should be seen as a contribution to the struggle for justice for marginalised groups in the UK, well there are many reasons. I will break my silence about my concerns about MCB in one example here. After Environment of Hate was launched in 2015, amongst the widespread media coverage was ITV’s This Morning. They devoted a segment on the findings, and asked an MCB representative on to discuss it. I watched the interview a few days later. My colleagues and the others in the room who were watching it as I walked in urged me not to. It’s bad, they told me. I wasn’t expecting it. The fact that the editors of prime-time mainstream TV were taking the findings of the research as read, meant that an unusual and much needed space had been opened up where Muslims could discuss the hatred being levelled at them in a pro-active way. No apologies needed, no interrogation or hostility from the presenters. The MCB representative, asked first to respond to the report’s findings began with words to this effect, “It is important to recognise that the UK is in fact a very tolerant country.”
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As IHRC outlines in the thread above, GB News is a symptom not a cause of Islamophobia. Civil Society organisations need to understand this is they are to be of use in the struggle against injustice in the society we live in.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London UK. Read more about her here.
Photo: Dignity Day 2015, (c) Sara Russell & IHRC.
