A leading Muslim media watchdog in the U.K. coerces journalists into sanitizing their coverage of radical Islam by demanding that they expunge terms like “Islamism,” “Islamic extremism,” or “Muslim extremism” from their writings according to a report published July 7 by The Policy Exchange, a prominent U.K. think tank.
[The Centre for Media Monitoring] states explicitly that it wants to ‘take control of the narrative’ about Islam.
The report states that the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) works to suppress references to the “faith or Islamist motives” of attackers, even during jihadi terror incidents, by labelling such coverage as “Islamophobic.”
The report comes in the wake of a push by the Labour government and Islamist groups to create a broad definition of “Islamophobia.” Religious and secular bodies from Christian Concern to the National Secular Society warn that such a definition would create a new “blasphemy law.”
The 98-page report titled Bad Faith Actor: A Study of the Centre for Media Monitoring, accuses CfMM of devising a scoring system to screen anti-Muslim bias that makes it “impermissible for any news report to make any kind of negative association” with Islam.
Whitewashing Islamist Jihadi and Sexual Violence
“It therefore appears impossible,” the study notes, “for any account of any Islamist terror attack to be unbiased, however truthful or factual it is, unless it avoids all mention of the culprit’s faith.” This imposes “an extraordinarily sweeping demand, made by no other interest group we can think of.”
CfMM even opposes using the term “Islamist” to designate jihadi outfits like Hamas, al-Shabaab (the Somali offshoot of al-Qaeda), and Boko Haram, rejecting such usage as an “arbitrary use of the term ‘Islamist’… in relation to conflict and terrorism.”
Furthermore, the document details how CfMM seeks to inhibit media personnel from suggesting that the government is failing to pursue investigations into misconduct linked to individuals because of their Muslim faith, particularly in the case of the “grooming gangs,” which were predominantly made up of Pakistani Muslim males.
CfMM has also objected to the use of the term “grooming gang” as “problematic,” the report notes, because its media usage “when linked to Muslim men” suggests a “link between the actions of a few criminals with the religion of Islam when in fact their actions are anti-religious.”
Evidence from victims’ testimonies showed how attitudes of Islamist supremacism and Islamist prejudice against non-Muslims played out in the abuse of over 250,000 white, working-class girls in at least 50 British towns and cities since 2001, Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) reported earlier this year.
Mouthpiece for Britain’s Islamist Umbrella Organization
The report examines how the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Britain’s largest umbrella organization comprising over 500 members, including mosques, schools, charitable associations, and professional networks, established CfMM in 2018 to help “change the narrative” about Islam.
The MCB itself has been a “focus of controversy for its linkages to Islamist movements” and was created and controlled by the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami, as per a 2009 report by the Department for Communities and Local Government.
FWI earlier reported on the MCB’s founders’ links to Jamaat-e-Islami, an organization which advocates for the creation of an Islamic state and the imposition of Sharia law. The MCB has challenged the government’s ban on 21 terror outfits, including al-Qaeda, advocated veiling for Muslim girls, and boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day for seven years.
It continues to obstruct counter-terrorism policy, misrepresenting the main deradicalisation programme, Prevent, as a manifestation of “structural Islamophobia” with a “disproportionate focus on Muslims,” the report asserts.
Miqdaad Versi.
(Photo by Geni via Wikimedia.)
CfMM’s founder and “lead strategist,” Miqdaad Versi, who portrays the British media as one of “the biggest drivers of Islamophobia in the country,” also plays the role of MCB’s spokesman. Versi, according to the report, chooses to designate jihadi terrorists as “hateful criminals who align to the Islamic State death cult,” rather than as Islamists or terrorists.
In 2017, the British commentator and cultural critic, Douglas Murray, slammed Versi for double standards, writing: “Miqdaad Versi is happy to apply rigorous standards to others, but holds exceedingly lax standards himself so long as he can carry on his own campaigning work against the U.K. government’s counter-terrorism and counter-extremism programmes.”
Controlling the Narrative
The watchdog’s “real purpose” is to control the mainstream media narrative on Islam by shaping and promoting a “partisan” version of Islam as normative, Policy Exchange’s study asserts. It achieves this by creating a counter-narrative that blames the media for “misrepresenting” Islam.
“CfMM states explicitly that it wants to ‘take control of the narrative’ about Islam,” the report, authored by Andrew Gilligan and Damon Perry, notes.
The watchdog has described the Muslim head covering as “a normative Islamic practice,” and has criticized British TV dramas like Ackley Bridge and Coronation Street for portraying Muslim characters who do not want to wear a hijab, or who drink alcohol, or who are homosexual.
The report explains how CfMM creates a “dependency loop” by using “Islamophobia” accusations to pressure the media outlets into combating such prejudice. Journalists then turn to CfMM which offers them “highly contestable claims about what constitutes normative Islam and how it should be reported.”
Policy Exchange also presents evidence that CfMM exaggerates claims about the number of corrections it has secured from news outlets. Comparing figures of claims reproduced in MCB and CfMM publications, it finds the numbers ranging from 22 to 300.
“As with its claims about corrections, CfMM’s claims of the numbers of articles it has scrutinised vary wildly — itself a sign of unreliability,” the study reports. CfMM claims it has monitored over 200,000 articles and analysed almost 60,000 “online print and broadcast clips” about Muslims.
However, the investigation finds that over its seven years of operation, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) database records that only one complaint by CfMM that resulted in a newspaper being required by the regulator to correct.
Discrediting Rival Muslim Hate Monitors
“Anti-Muslim hatred work does not need people who try and conflate the protection of Islam to the work of countering anti-Muslim hate,” Fiyaz Mughal OBE, founder of Tell MAMA, a British organization monitoring hatred against Muslims, told FWI.
Mughal, who also founded Muslims Against Antisemitism, explained:
However much some ‘Islamophobia activists’ say that they need protections, the current laws provide enough and ample protections. They are simply campaigning to spread the insidious view that even challenging aspects of Islam will lead to people being cancelled, and people need their employment to survive and so fear doing or saying anything that may get them labelled.
In March, MCB and its Islamist allies, including 5 Pillars UK and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), applauded the U.K. government’s decision to suspend financing to the Tell MAMA monitoring service, FWI reported.
While MEND criticized Tell MAMA for having “often avoided the widely accepted term ‘Islamophobia’ in its work,” Newham Muslims urged the government to fund “genuine grassroots organizations” like CfMM.
“I have worked on thousands of anti-Muslim hate cases and these so-called activists have not. They frankly need to stop their insidious activity to defend Islam. No religion needs governments to defend it,” Mughal said.
The Policy Exchange investigation concludes by warning that CfMM “is a bad-faith actor” and “should not be engaged with or taken at face value by journalists, regulators or anyone else.”
CfMM and Versi did not respond to FWI’s request for comment.
