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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS TELLING MUSLIM STORIES TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis journalism think tank at the London School of Economics Producer: Mukul Devichand Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 28.12.06 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 31.12.06 2130-2200 Duration: 27’33” Taking part in order of appearance: Rageh Omaar Journalist at Al-Jazeera International Former BBC Correspondent John Ware Journalist, BBC Professor Tariq Modood Department of Sociology, University of Bristol Nabila, Rosy, Sarah Producers/Presenters of Unveiled Voice internet radio programme Samira Ahmed Presenter and Reporter, Channel Four News Ben Preston Deputy Editor of ‘The Times’ Madeleine Bunting Columnist for ‘The Guardian’ Crispin Black Independent Intelligence Analyst Martin Bright Political Editor, ‘The New Statesman’ Yahya Birt Research Fellow at the Islamic Foundation, Leicester BECKETT: This was the year when the Media took on the Muslims – the Danish Cartoons – The Veil Debate – campaigns against Forced Marriage – all issues taken up by journalists keen to explore the relationship between Muslims and British society. Their avowed purpose was to further integration - but has the nature of the coverage itself made a clash of cultures more likely? OMAAR: People want to know how you feel about certain issues, but the questions are always framed in a fairly accusatory way. WARE: I think it is a battle of ideas. I’m not going to suggest it’s a clash of civilisations, but it’s certainly a battle of ideas. We are fast becoming, it seems to me, the Jihadist ideological epicentre in the West and one really has to wonder why that is so. MODOOD: Various issues that Muslims were raising had dominated the news and here seemed to be an issue where as it were the majority could fight back, could speak back. And the dam burst. BECKETT: Journalists Rageh Omaar and John Ware and Professor Tariq Madood reflecting on a watershed year for Muslims in Britain. Following the London bombings in 2005 the attention of the media was on the direct causes of home-grown terror. This year the focus shifted, to an investigation into the role of Muslims in Britain as a whole. Never before has one minority faith group and their attitudes been subject to such sustained, wide-ranging and fierce inquiry. Not just by their own community press or well-meaning academics but by the mass media. It’s been a challenge to Muslims but it’s also raised moral, political and practical questions about the state of British journalism. HEADLINES ARCHIVE The Danish Embassy in Beirut has been set alight by demonstrators protesting about the now famous cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. A man has admitted plotting to murder people in a series of terrorist attacks. Barot grew up in London and converted from Hinduism to Islam. A Muslim owned dairy in Windsor has been hit by a petrol bomb. The business has been attacked for three consecutive nights. The Metropolitan Police Commission has ordered an inquiry into the case of the Muslim officer who was excused duty at the Israeli Embassy in London. Also tonight, Jack Straw reveals he asks Muslim women if they would take off their veils. BECKETT: This has been an extraordinary time for journalists covering Muslim issues – I stood in the Channel 4 Newsroom this year debating with my presenter whether to show the Danish cartoons. We had to decide whether not to show something that was at the heart of the story. In the end we did not show the cartoons. Mainly because we felt it would cause offence disproportionate to its value on-screen. For me, this shows that the way that we cover Muslim stories is challenging some very basic editorial values. And the way that we have covered Muslim stories seems to be provoking anger in itself. YOUTUBE (Music) Who hijacked my religion? No, but seriously, who hijacked my religion? I mean I turn on the TV and I see this guy explaining Islam, but he’s talking nonsense. BECKETT: It’s a big hit on YouTube - a Muslim film-maker satirising the news media. Watching this videoblog are Nabila, Rosy and Sarah – three Muslim women so disenchanted with mainstream media that they are setting up their own podcast current affairs programme. VOX POP: NABILA, ROSY AND SARAH OF ‘UNVEILED VOICE’ I think it’s just … it’s like saying it’s sort of fed up with how people are representing us, isn’t it? It’s just hilarious. (laughs) He’s saying who hijacked my religion and I’m thinking yeah, exactly, who hijacked my religion? It’s just so powerful that you don’t know how to readdress it because you’re just one person or you’re just a community and you haven’t got the tools or the power that the media has. I feel it’s an injustice on all the Muslims; that sometimes the media can twist and change and distort meanings of things. BECKETT: They’re not the first people to be angered at media coverage - but are these women a sign of a wholesale Muslim rejection of the mainstream media? Well actually, available research suggests that if there is a fragmentation of the Muslim audience it is pretty much in line with general trends in a digital age. Professor Tariq Modood has written widely on ethnicity and citizenship and has advised the Prime Minster on Multiculturalism. He thinks that the way that journalists took their cue from Jack Straw over his comments on the veil showed what it’s like when a vulnerable minority group comes under media fire. MODOOD: If it wasn’t going to make Muslims angry, which was of course one reaction for some people, it would make others kind of sullen and withdrawn, which is ironic because people like Jack Straw said he’d started this debate in order to further integration, to further the confident participation of Muslims in public spaces. And I could see that it was going to end up making Muslims feel we’re going to be misunderstood and we’re going to be harried and harassed anyway, so why bother with this lot? BECKETT: But do you think there’s a point with some journalists that they do feel that there is an element within Muslims in Britain that is different? Now obviously the 7/7 bombers are a tiny minority, but they feel that there is the strand of political Islam that is inimical and therefore has to be if you like exposed, revealed, challenged. MODOOD: I agree with that, Charlie, but the way that most of the reporting covers these stories, you wouldn’t think that the Muslim community itself was in a state of shock and anguish and turmoil. You’d think, ah, the rest of the country is; maybe a few reasonable Muslims are because they think like us anyway – they’re good, decent people like us; but otherwise there are all these Muslims out there and we need to write a story about Muslims. I think that if we had a reporting which tried to distinguish between different kinds of Muslims - those themselves who are being as it were taken unawares by the developments that have taken place - that would have a number of intellectual and political benefits. BECKETT: So the British news media stands accused of getting far too excited about anything to do with Islam. The charge is that journalists crassly bundle all Muslims together. And if they show any signs of difference it’s taken as an act of hostility to the whole of society. Now is it that British journalists don’t understand Islam? Or is it that some Muslims don’t appreciate how the media works? Newsrooms have a peculiar culture of their own, driven by the rapacious demands of the competitive news cycle. More Muslim journalists would help to counter cultural ignorance. But ultimately, most journalists with an Islamic background say that there is a Muslim story that must be told and that it is attitudes not quotas that have to change. Samira Ahmed is a presenter and reporter on Channel 4 News. AHMED: I’m one of those people who doesn’t actually believe in Islamophobia because I think there is a big case to answer; the terrorism is there. BECKETT: But Samira Ahmed still feels that journalists get Muslim stories wrong for a variety of reasons. Take the furore around the disappearance of the 12 year-old Scottish girl who ran away to Pakistan in August. AHMED: The interesting thing about the case of Molly Campbell was that it superficially had none of the characteristics of a story about Muslims as a problem in Britain - you know it wasn’t about face veils, it wasn’t about terrorism - but most of the coverage immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was to do with the issue of Islam and British society being incompatible. The story was a straightforward custody battle and on the day that this girl emerged, had disappeared and there was a news conference, the only source saying that there was a fear she’d been taken off for a forced marriage to Pakistan was apparently a grandparent and the police publicly said they weren’t going to comment on this. I remember just turning across news bulletins that day and they all had a top package with the facts about the story and then they had a second package about the evils of forced marriage with you know a silhouetted interview and so on. And I just remember bursting out laughing because I thought this probably isn’t about forced marriage. For me it reminded me just how deep the ignorance goes and this rather shocking assumption that why would any girl possibly choose to live in Pakistan over Stornaway and that’s when you realise what kind of people actually make editorial decisions in most newsrooms. BECKETT: Ben Preston is one of those people who makes those decisions – he is Deputy Editor of the Times newspaper. He admits that mistakes are made under the daily pressure of filling his pages. PRESTON: You have to remember that news gathering has huge armies of footsoldiers who work for local news agencies who hitherto hadn’t realised that points of difference between the British Muslim community and the wider community were newsworthy. They became newsworthy and suddenly newspapers bombarded on agencies each day with five or six little micro examples of where points of difference were. I mean only last week I was floating down the news cue for the day and saw a story which came in about whether Muslims were making it more difficult to control superbugs in hospital because devout Muslims don’t like to wash their hands in hospitals with anything which uses alcohol. That’s not a story that would have appeared on anyone’s agenda a year ago. BECKETT: So in that sense Muslims make money if you like for the media, or you know it’s the hot issue. How much has that changed in the last few months? PRESTON: I think you saw politicians opening up a whole area of debate which hitherto people hadn’t been that interested in going into or some people had been nervous about going into that became the subject of heated, heated discussion. And I think the media will follow where people take them, to a degree. I don’t think these are debates which are being had because the media wants to make money and I think you can probably see more recently how some of the heat has gone out of that debate and how people have come to more settled opinions. That’s a positive outcome from having had a conversation about it and there has been a national conversation about it. OMAAR: The reverse is true: there hasn’t been any kind of sort of debate. BECKETT: Rageh Omaar – a former BBC correspondent – now at Aljazeera. Here’s his description of what he thinks was the real impact of that conversation about the veil sparked by Jack Straw. OMAAR: We went to the home of the teacher who had lost the case against her school for wearing the veil – Ayesha Azmi – and there was lots of national media there, you know reporters and photographers. And do you know, we started talking to the journalists and photographers and they told us that they were there because there was at that time a reward of £50,000 for whoever could get a picture of Ayesha Azmi without her veil. So this is where this debate … You know Jack Straw and Tony Blair with their high falutin sort of you know posture, this is how this debate is playing out in the media. The parameters of analysis in debate have been set, you know being much more aggressive in terms of wanting to sort of rattle the cage of British Muslims is now part and parcel of it. BECKETT: That is the media at its lowest ethical ebb, but are the media’s methods always too crude to handle a complex issue like this? Does the media pander to public demands for drama? Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting. BUNTING: We know as journalists that telly has to be sensational; the picture has to be sensational; you need to get two very, very contrasting viewpoints to get a real clash of opinion on a discussion programme, etcetera. I mean journalism orientates always towards the polarisation of opinion and I think that in this area is extremely problematic because it means that that building of alliances in the centre ground is not something that’s going to happen by and large in the media. BECKETT: Both Rageh Omaar and Madeleine Bunting are suggesting that their craft and the way it works is not up to the job. So perhaps journalists should accept that they must tone down their coverage and focus more on the middle ground? But is that possible when the extremes are so often the story itself? ARCHIVE 7/7 BOMBER: I’m sure by now the media’s painted a suitable picture of me – this predictable propaganda machine. Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. We are at war and I’m a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation. BECKETT: John Ware reported two Panorama investigations into Muslim organisations for the BBC. WARE: Something unique really is going on in Britain is my sense, unique in this sense; that Britain is fast becoming, it seems to me, the epicentre of Jihadist ideology in the West. Now the reasons for this may be very complex, but, my goodness me, we’ve got to get to the bottom of them. BECKETT: Have we got the sophistication not to be pouring petrol on those flames? WARE: Well that’s the key question, isn’t it? We mustn’t pour petrol on it. And we got accused with our programmes of pouring petrol on it. It’s not going to be possible to have a pristine conversation about this incendiary subject without some people getting burnt. You know it’s not possible, it isn’t going to happen. But we’ve got to have the conversation. We haven’t been having this conversation. We have absolutely got to have this conversation. I think this is going to be a very long battle of ideas. I think it is a battle of ideas. I’m not going to suggest it’s a clash of civilisations, but it’s certainly a battle of ideas. BECKETT: But in this debate, this battle of ideas, is British journalism exhibiting enough independent thought and analysis? Journalists instinctively recognise that fear makes for a compelling tale. And the fear in this narrative is of a global Muslim movement dedicated to an attack upon liberal Western values. And British Muslims agree that this story does have an international ideological dimension. They cite the situation in the Middle East as a direct cause of anger and disillusion at home. The way the Middle East is reported matters particularly to British Muslims. Rageh Omaar again. OMAAR: What they do and what they say in the Arab and Islamic world affects us and our lives here and you have to be able to report from all of those points and be able to report from all of those points from a position where people perceive that you are going to be fair and objective and not from a position where people feel that because you know wrongly news organisations are associated with the actions of governments, that you’re Western, you’re going to have a Western viewpoint. And I think that’s been the disastrous thing about the War on Terror and its impact on journalism, is that it has opened up a great chasm and divide where there wasn’t (I believe) five years ago between Western news organisations and Western journalists and the other. BECKETT: And do you think that in a sense there was, I don’t know, a failure of imagination or knowledge in understanding of the Muslim world and therefore not understanding how things like the Iraq adventure would be perceived? OMAAR: I think absolutely. I think the Iraq you know disaster has been covered and analysed as a military event – an invasion, an occupation. It has not been seen as the much larger you know moral, defining you know moral and political issue at the heart of the Islamic and Arab world. BECKETT: Rageh Omaar may be right, that Muslims now don’t trust the media because of its association with Western governments. But does that make the media wrong? Crispin Black approaches this from a very different perspective. He is an independent Intelligence analyst with close understanding of the security services. He agrees that journalists have failed to report the full implications of the Iraq War. He blames it on a kind of liberal reticence that means we’re not facing up to just how deeply British Muslims identify with Muslims suffering and the radical resistance to it, abroad. BLACK: There has been a coyness about understanding Iraq. I’m not saying that Iraq is a justification for terrorism or condoning people who use Iraq as a reason for terrorism, but examining in full the role Iraq has played in radicalisation. Okay there’s human evil, there’s hatred, all the rest of it there, but ultimately the thing has historical and political roots. I think we’ve been reluctant to accept that about Islamist terrorism. I don’t think ultimately the analytical coverage of 9/11 was … It had a kind of iconic coverage, it had a kind of Hollywood coverage, it had a kind of nightmare in Manhattan coverage, which we all saw and felt, but there seemed to be a block after that on any real … real, real probing as to why these men should have done what they did. BECKETT: So ultimately, this story isn’t about culture or even religion. It’s all down to politics in the end. Everyone seems to agree that the media should delve deeper in to the roots of political Islam, if it is to understand the global context of Muslim anger about British foreign policy. But what is political Islam? It is a strand of thinking by some within the Muslim faith in Britain who are evolving a distinctive Muslim form of politics in the UK. Journalists are trying to investigate and to understand this politics. But it is an extremely sensitive area. Journalists often find themselves accused of malice and distortion. ARCHIVE: IN: Now there are a few men and women, brothers and sisters, in Britain, powerful people, who want to demonise you. They want to dehumanise you, so they can push for their long awaited clash of civilisations. I’ve got a message for them: we’re going to stop you. (cheers) BECKETT: John Ware accepts that his journalism is part of a cultural debate – but does that mean that he is attacking Islam? WARE: None of us can be sure that the balance, the pitch we make on these programmes is absolutely right in every respect and so much is at stake; that peoples’ faith means a great deal to them and if a person believes that his or her faith does inform his or her political outlook on life, there’s nothing I or anyone else can do to change that, nor should I necessarily change it. What I can do though is question whether it is a suitable way of conducting politics in this country – this country being mainly a secular country – and I can point out the dangers. BECKETT: But is there a philosophical animus for you in this story, something that you feel is stirring that you distrust and in a sense that’s what motivates you? WARE: Yes, that’s a fair question and I think the answer to that is yes. And what I feel is stirring is a incendiary mix, a potentially incendiary mix of religion and politics, which taken to its ultimate conclusion could be as dangerous as any of history’s grand ideas. BECKETT: John Ware is part of a tradition of investigative journalism that insists that to do its job means not compromising on fundamental liberal editorial values. For journalists those are based, almost unconsciously, on principles such as secular politics, free speech and the competition of ideas. It’s an ethical liberalism. For some, those values are more conscious. Martin Bright works for a left-wing magazine with a history of defending ethnic minority rights. That makes him a political liberal. But he says that radical Islam has now joined the ranks of those seeking to attack the values that motivate his work. BRIGHT: Newspapers have always been the enemies of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, so it’s no surprise to me that the first people who are attacked by representatives of radical Islam in this country are journalists. I think journalists are right to see themselves as the guardians of liberal values. So I think it is not contradicatory for investigative journalists in this country to attack the government for its over authoritarian use of illiberal laws, to crack down on what it sees as radical Islam, at the same time as developing a sophisticated critique of the authoritarian, totalitarian ideology of those radical Islamists. BECKETT: But the accusation is not that liberal journalists are wrong to challenge authority. It’s that they are exaggerating the dangers of radical Islam. Are political Muslims simply a convenient target? Rageh Omaar. OMAAR: I think that how you show that, yes, I really am liberal is your stance against how you perceive you know this threat of Islam, which is this monolithic you know backward looking, extremist, you know threat to your liberal traditions. And I think it is just a knee jerk reaction. MODOOD: Even kind of liberal, thoughtful, objective people can have blind spots. BECKETT: Professor Tariq Modood MODOOD: Blind spots that are reinforced by other peoples blind spots, so that there is a kind of as it were consensus that oh these issues are really important, that these issues suggest to us that Muslims are problematic or more problematic than we thought, and I think there certainly is that element in the way that the media relates to Muslims. BECKETT: Citics of the media like Professor Modood argue that journalists are, in effect, trying to explain everything about Muslims in terms of what liberals define as the extremes. They say that liberals have to accept that their perspective is, in itself, a form of bias. Journalists respond by saying that complaining about the liberal media is an excuse to avoid engagement. And not all Muslims would disagree. Yaya Birt is a Research Fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester. In the past it’s come under scrutiny from people like John Ware and Martin Bright - but – and this is interesting - he also believes that Muslim groups and movements should do much more to engage in the public debate. BIRT: Many of these movements are moving on, but there’s a reticence and I think it’s a very damaging reticence to publicly distance themselves from the kind of simplistic and crude kind of anti-West rhetoric that say emerged in the 1930s onwards in the Muslim world. And that’s really yet to have been done properly and they’re not doing it because they feel it would be disloyal and they would be selling out, but in fact they would be liberating themselves from that legacy, which to my mind is largely malign. BECKETT: And the media’s role in that? BIRT: There are obviously polarised views at play. The point is is how do those views play out across the Muslim communities as a whole, and that’s a very complex story that has not really been told. For instance how certain ideas or ideologies became widespread, how they were resisted and so on, and so that that story’s never been reported. If it was reported, it would reveal a lot about the dynamic and rather than holding a whole community to account, would understand how certain political agendas are promoted and played out and resisted in fact within Muslim communities. BECKETT: So can both the media critics and the journalists be right? I think they can. When telling Muslim stories journalists must get their facts right - they must get stories in perspective – and, as Yaya Birt says, be much more aware of the cultural and political range of the debate within that, elusive category, British Muslims. Liberals should also understand that their perspective is in itself part of the story. Remember the Muslim women setting up their own internet show? They too recognise this is about [British] liberalism as much as [British] Islam. ROSY: Maybe what a lot of people who do work in the media feel is that Muslims are taking advantage of free and liberal societies to actually impose or you know to actually make something which is not liberal you know part of that society, so in a sense their society becomes less liberal because of that. So I think there’s that debate within Western societies as well, about what they’re about – what is a British person, what is a liberal, what is democracy about, what is freedom about? Now what happens when Islam comes into the picture is that they have to address these debates head on. It’s easier to just attack rather than actually try and see what is happening - you know what is meant by pluralism, yeah, what is meant by all of that and how much do we accept our difference. And all of those debates are being played out within Western societies. BECKETT: Indeed, Journalism is having to mediate a series of moral arguments about our so-called post multicultural society. And it’s a tough assignment. But if that debate is to succeed, then it must be on the terms of the best of liberal journalism - however imperfect that can be. The liberal beliefs of freedom of expression, the right to criticise, and the right to robust debate are up for discussion but they can’t be abandoned. Muslims must enter that debate openly. Only that way can they challenge any illiberal inaccuracies or bias where it occurs. It’s where extreme views of any kind remain hidden and unquestioned that they are able to flourish. 5