The fact that Britain’s major TV news channels are hosting and broadcasting blatant broadsides against British Muslims including the allegations that they do not subscribe to British values and are “trying to change our way of life” may have shocked some people.

Those who choose an occupation where all things Muslims are read and watched, know that this was not someone off.

Nigel Farage, bought the daily fodder of GB News on to mainstream news even eliciting shock and some pushback from Sky News host Trevor Philips.

Those who have followed the trajectory of Islamophobia in Britain spotted the irony with Phillips having similarly opined just several years earlier that “Muslims see the world differently from the rest of us” and are becoming a “nation within a nation”.

But as the US based journalist Mehdi Hasan writes, “It’s difficult to imagine any British media outlet allowing a sweeping bigoted dishonest rant like this about any other minority community in the UK. Just change the word ‘Muslim’ to ‘Jew’ and ask yourself if the host would have been so friendly and conciliatory in his response.” Before any debate is had the answer we all know is a firm, no.

This is general election season and the non-Parliamentary candidate has been given prime air time on the biggest News channels including the BBC, to not only repeat his mantra of immigration is bad, but to single out Muslims as particularly so.

The BBC this week attempted to explain why Farage is so relevant saying in the nineteenth paragraph of its story that the Reform UK president singling out Muslims was merely “accusations of Islamophobia”, and that the man who has stood seven times for a Parliamentary seat and been rejected by voters each time, added “excitement” to the general election campaign.

It says something about the acceptability of Islamophobia when the national broadcaster finds excitement in what many consider out and out racism against one community.

Perhaps that is what journalism in Britain has now become, titillation and controversy for hacks and news directors and not the serious issues which ought to be the focus of election coverage. As the long time political editor of the Daily Mirror Kevin Maguire said: “Nigel Farage would be cancelled if he said that about British Jews. But somehow Islamophobia is acceptable in certain quarters.”

Enter Ofcom, a broadcast regulator tasked with making sure that “viewers and listeners are protected from harmful or offensive material on TV, radio and on-demand”. Except it seems, if you are Muslim.

The visceral reaction of Britain’s media and the anti-Muslim contingent amongst its commentarial to the result of the local elections shows that it’s not the Muslim Vote but the Muslim voice which irks.

Last month a presenter who was found to have shared racist content on a secret Telegram account according to the charity Hope Not Hate, broadcast the far-right conspiracy of Taqiyya, claiming Muslims were allowed to lie or manipulate the truth in order to get ahead. Fellow guests have claimed that Sharia law is in operation in large swathes of the UK – Islamic principles include not letting women work – and ‘how Islam supposedly teaches that non-Muslims are just to be conquered, destroyed they have to submit to Allah’.

Ofcom has regularly cited context as a factor in how it assesses complaints. The context here is that Muslims are being accused of disloyalty because they don’t particularly like a genocide being committed in Gaza and are using the ballot box to express that displeasure. But whilst it has come to dominate proceedings, Gaza is just the latest hot issue which has exercised a right wing who are in the midst of a forever culture war with Muslims the front and center target. That is the context which Ofcom so readily ignores.

Source: Byline Times