Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia? | Nesrine Malik

I start this column already resigned to the tune out, to the glaze over, the click away. This is not to say that I do not have faith in you, dear reader, to keep reading and caring. But I am aware, and this is central to the problem, that it is now normal, when it comes to a certain minority in this country, to speak of them as if they were some sort of plague. Islamophobia has become so common as to be mundane in large parts of the British media. Foremost among the offenders is Britain’s oldest political magazine: the Spectator.

A large and comprehensive report from the Centre for Media Monitoring reviewed 3,733 articles published in the Spectator relating to Islam or Muslims. Released last week, it criticised the publication for “a sustained and systemic pattern of biased coverage of Muslims and Islam”, according to the CMM, “with more than half of all relevant articles rated as biased over an eight-year period”. It is grim, grim reading.

Among the conclusions reached by the report are that articles in the magazine regularly portrayed Muslims as a “problem population”, delegitimised the very notion of Islamophobia, and consistently presented Muslims as exceptional or threatening. The overall effect is of a minority that is not only sectarian and separate, but also, ironically, from within its ghetto, dangerous and aggressively colonising British society.

Articles cited refer to Muslim concerns about racist abuse as “dainty sensibilities” and “handwringing”. Presumably, this precious response includes objections to statements in the magazine panicking that “organised Islam is strong and vociferous” and, in reference to the growing population of Muslims in the country, that “there are now more than double the number of semi-literate, virgin-obsessed potential murderers among [sic] our midst”.

Even the mere existence of Muslims in the UK is presented as something akin to a poisonous foreign presence. “Prominent historians … have noted entirely correctly that Islam seems to have things about it which make it uniquely indigestible to the modern secularised state,” wrote one columnist. “We should have second thoughts about approving mosques,” wrote another contributor.

The coverage depicts a country that is going to the dogs. Politicians quake in the face of Muslims, the left aids and abets them, the courts indulge them. The scale of the onslaught is staggering and relentless. It would be unacceptable to speak of another minority group in such terms, but Muslims occupy a sweet spot that makes them convenient subjects for the forces of reaction. They are racialised, they are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, some of them dare to practise their own religion. Their unique profile makes it easy to channel racism, anti-immigration sentiment and just plain old petty parochialism. Islamophobia itself has metastasised, becoming a vehicle for the sort of things you can’t say out loud about people of colour in general, but which you can say about Muslims.

In the foreword of the report, the writer and broadcaster Peter Oborne – the magazine’s former political editor – traces the history of the Spectator, and how it went from condemning the anti-immigration Enoch Powell to “steadily rebuilding his reputation”. Oborne cites a piece from earlier this year that says Powell “had a view of the British polity, values and way of life with which many Britons to this day feel they identify, and that is not least what establishes him as one of the country’s greatest conservative influences”. Now, the publication platforms broader far-right politics, in one article praising Tommy Robinson as likable, “intelligent, quick, articulate, well-informed, good-mannered”.

And yet despite such extremism, the Spectator snugly occupies a position of such respectability that its summer party is attended by Labour and Tory politicians and journalists from across the British media, who rub shoulders there with Nigel Farage and the broader Spectator-verse. “The jamboree remains the most sought-after social ticket of the Westminster summer season,” boasted the Spectator in July after this year’s edition. A refutation of the charge that there is a wholesale coddling of Muslims if there ever was one. There is something crudely and unmistakably symbolic in the magazine’s influence. As the country is riven by far-right politics and protests, as mosques are attacked and hate crimes reach new levels, our elected politicians and opinion-makers are comfortable to drink and make merry among those who mainstream and disseminate inflammatory rhetoric.

But something else struck me while reading example after example of quoted texts. It was all tawdry, poorly written, poorly argued stuff. You come away not with the sense that this is an august magazine dedicating its formidable intellectual and journalistic resources towards a problematic minority it is concerned about, but with the sense that it isn’t a serious publication.

Its articles are the sort of content you get from GB News, or a bellicose radio phone-in, or a tabloid on a tear. A convergence has occurred among the rightwing media, a radicalisation that has alighted on anger and scaremongering, which feeds readers’ and viewers’ fears and paranoia. It is a successful commercial strategy, but there is no community here, no solace or even loving depiction of the precious country vandalised. There is little to bind other than hate and outrage, no hold on what it is we are ostensibly saving from Muslims or immigrants or the left. Tuning in, what one hears in concert is: “You have once again woken up in Britain. Welcome to hell.”

The result is a climate that is hostile and dangerous not just to Muslims but all who it has been decided are stealthily annexing the country. But there is also a wider degradation that comes with the relentless focus on Muslims. The project of developing a vision of conservatism that goes beyond purification has been abandoned. Interested in, say, how the contemporary movement can reconcile austerity and free-market policies with stagnant wages and productivity and declining public services? In the ideological fissures in modern conservatism and its splintering? Perhaps a rant about Muslim public prayer as an act of “public domination” can shed some light on these crucial questions.

The Spectator and its broader universe constitute what is now mostly a low-brow media attempting to dress up racist audience-baiting as high-end journalism, all of which is met not with alarm and objection by establishment politics, but a “cheers” in the sunshine. It is not that Muslims have turned into a bigger problem for the country, but that the country itself, and its so-called intellectual elites, have become small. In resisting the feeling that this is all just how it is, in not glazing over, we resist becoming small along with them.

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