Report on "Islam, War and the Media" Conference

This is a very full report and a few pictures from the "under siege: islam, war and the media" conference which took place on saturday at the LSE, organised by MWAW (media workers against the war)

The report covers in detail the speeches made during the first plenary

Read about the the 'journalists and terror laws' workshop here.

plenary: islam, war and media

chair: jeremy dear (NUJ general secretary)

with peter oborne, inayat bunglawala, louise christian, and lyndsey german

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jeremy dear (NUJ general secretary) introduced the plenary reminding us that the issue is not about censorship, or tacit support for jihadists, or special consideration for islam, but about truth, accuracy and balance, and this is where the media is currently failing.

according to a GLA study, in just one week in may 2006, 91% of 352 stories referring to muslims were negative, comprising an astonishing 96% of tabloid coverage. the most common nouns used were terrorist, extremist, islamist, suicide bomber and militant, while adjectives included fanatical, radical, fundamentalist, extremist and militant. these terms demonise, dehumanise and create an environment in which attacks on muslims become legitimised and the attack on their human rights is seen as a just response.

a cardiff university report showed that 36% of articles about muslims since 2001 have related to terrorism

all this would be bad enough even if the bad coverage were true, but it's not. the ricin plot, the plot to bomb old trafford, the banning of christmas, or the banning of the sale of poppies in "terror hotspots", were all untrue but succeed in creating a false impression. richard desmond defended his daily star's 'daily fatwa' page as a 'bit of fun', but on the streets of britain the impact of such reporting is there to see - in violence against muslim communities, the imam blinded in london, the mosque destroyed in basildon, the muslim cemetary vandalised in southall, in daily harassment and intimidation including police stop and search, and much much more.

such poor journalism is no laughing matter. it causes fear, distrust, insecurity, suspicion, alienation. it drives people to the extremes of far right criminality and the BNP. the recession with its implications for jobs and housing will make the situation even worse.

but we shouldn't despair - there is good journalism too - exposing the hatred for what it is, showing the positive side of islam. the NUJ campaigns for improvements in journalism but recognises the context of under-resourcing, cuts in newsrooms, and 'profitable at all cost' mentality, that cares more about sales than the truth.

jeremy introduced peter oborne to the platform, noting his past writing as a right wing commentator for daily mail and editor of 'the spectator', but recent writer of 'muslims under siege' and the C4 'dispatches' programme "it shouldn't happen to a muslim"

peter oborne spoke of how he came to write his recent work despite being a tory. he used to believe the 'british state' was a good thing and tended to be on britain's side in wars such as the falklands and the first gulf war, but as a journalist regarding truth and balance, he became much more sympathetic to the critics of the iraq war after being shocked at being lied to by the british state. he felt it foreign to our traditions and experience and it effectively 'radicalised' him. he had entered journalism to search for the truth, not to be lied to by the state.

he described how when he found something peculiar or interesting he would begin a file. sometimes that file would lead nowhere, but sometimes it would grow. that was how he came to write his book 'the rise of political lying'.

he then began a file on falsehoods in muslim reporting. as the pile soon grew he realised that in modern britain one could write anything, no matter how false or bigoted, one could insult islam with total impunity. it reminded him of the coverage of homosexuals in the sixties, or the coverage of jews leading up to the first and second world wars. a lot of papers were guilty of this, including the broadsheets where for instance polly toynbee is an expert in this - distorting the teachings of islam and characterising it as an evil violent faith. this poisonous lie is propagated to government think tanks, policy makers and core journalists.

in the red tops there is a thirst for articles putting muslims in a lamentable light - famous examples include the totally unfounded 'banning of christmas' story, and a terrible story still on 'the sun' website (despite being exposed) of a muslim hate mob supposedly 'hounding out' british soldiers from a windsor housing estate. 'the sun' was forced finally to issue an apology for a story about a muslim bus driver who supposedly stopped his bus to say his prayers. it turned out his bus had broken down, a replacement driver was on his way and the muslim was actually off-duty. peter oborne expressed his admiration at the depth of religious faith and openness that many muslims have, jokingly comparing it to his church of england faith where people might be almost embarrassed to pray openly.

he stressed that he wasn't looking for any favours for muslims - just that they be treated with the same rigour, decency and accuracy as any other minority. the question is how to deal with it. we need a new discourse, a new decency, we need to confront this head on. he had hoped his pamphlet and C4 film would help, but it didn't kick start the necessary big public debate? and so we must keep pressing for this to happen. the situation is not helped by the fact that there is only one muslim columnist on any major mainstream british newspaper (yasmin alibhai-brown in the independent) and only four muslim MPs out of 650. this is not a community that has found it's voice yet, and is suffering the distortions described.

he finished on an optimistic 'proud to be british' note, that we have actually had fantastic achievements and a long tradition of tolerance and fairness in dealing with minorities in this country, and he wants to correct the betrayal of that tradition that the current trend represents.


next on the platform was inayat bunglawala who was formerly the muslim council of britain's media secretary and now a leading figure in the new organisation 'ENGAGE' which seeks to enable british muslims to engage more effectively with media institutions, and has recently held well-attended launch meetings in places like bolton and blackburn.

inayat spoke of the wide generalisations made about muslims which would be challenged if made about any other group. he spoke of his past ten years of voluntary work with the muslim council, and how unfortunately he realised that peter oborne's examples of media bias were not isolated. there has been an undoubted attempt by quite a few journalists and quite a few newspapers to try and incite anti-muslim prejudice in the uk, and opinion polls on public views of islam show that this campaign has not been unsuccessful.

one of the worst culprits in the mainstream is the richard desmond press and the daily star. inayat himself suffered at the hands of this organisation after the 'prince harry in afghanistan' story broke in the newspapers. he was telephoned by the press association and asked for a comment about whether prince harry was a target. inayat said obviously he a high-value target in afghanistan and he should be brought back so that no harm would come to him, and while they're at it, they should bring all the troops back. two days later, the daily express headlines read? "target harry - muslim fanatics target the prince" and quoted inayat without putting the selective quotes in context.

inayat was in a way fortunate as he was directly named, so an apology was published a few months later and he is now seeking costs and damages, but all too often, similar stories have no named individuals. for instance the express ran the 'christmas is banned' story as a front page spread with no sources, there is no legal recourse against that kind of slur - no actual libel against a single person. in theory, the press complaints commission is there to regulate, but it is a body set up by the press itself and has very narrow parameters. because the muslim council was not actually mentioned in the story, the PCC ruled that they could not have a complaint under the inaccuracy code! there are many such examples.

again, the daily star wrote a piece about 'muslim sickos in maddie threat'. the basis for this story was that in some online forum two people that the 'star' believed to be muslims, had made a kidnap threat against madeleine mccain (who was of course already missing!) and they ran it as a genuine story. of course the desmond newspapers have had to pay substantial damages to the mccain family for other suggestions in those papers, but in this case, muslims have no redress. it is time we think as a society about what can be done to stop this sort of journalism designed to incite prejudice in this country.

politicians have regrettably failed to stand up to this sort of fear-mongering. in parliament there is an anti-semitism committee that looks into anti-jewish prejudice. there is not yet any such similar group for muslims. this is not an unachievable aim despite some politicians fearing that votes might be lost over such a move.

inayat also wanted to counter the suggestion from some quarters, notably journalist nick cohen among others, that somehow the 'left' had sold out by affiliating themselves with muslim causes and abandoning gay rights and women's rights. he felt that quite the opposite was true, and that by working with anti-war movements, prominent muslim organisations had in fact had to look at themselves and question whether it was right to call for an end to anti-muslim propaganda while turning a blind eye to prejudice against other minorities. earlier this year parliament passed equality legislation banning discrimination on the basis of faith, race, sexual orientation, age etc, and the muslim council and other organisations have for the first time supported this legislation. clearly there have been changes in attitudes and social mores.

finally, inayat amplified peter oborne's point about think tanks such as the 'policy exchange' and the 'centre for social cohesion' who institutionalise fear by suggesting that criticism of foreign policy is 'disloyal'. but criticism of the war should not be seen as disloyal - it is not 'unbritish' not to support the invasion of other countries. douglas murray (from the centre for social cohesion) wrote a speech a few years ago entitled "what to do with the problem of islam". his answer was that 'conditions for muslims in europe must be made more difficult across the board', and yet this sort of writing cannot be challenged in law.

there is some progress being made, but there is still much to do.


next on the platform was louise christian, civil rights lawyer recently best known for her tireless campaigning on behalf of british inmates held at guantanamo bay.

she wanted to talk about the way that political over-reaction to terrorist attacks had fuelled 'islamophobia', although she also pointed out she didn't like that word as it almost legitimises it as a condition like a fear of spiders, unlike the simplicity of 'anti-semitism'.

words are important. a notable example is the post 9/11 "war on terrorism" - a contradiction of terms - an impossibility. lawyers understood immediately that if you use the term 'war' in relation to terrorism, (and of course, bush did this almost straight away) then you lose the protection of international human rights law if you are accused of a terrorist crime, and you push things towards the war of law. even though we theoretically have a war of law (the geneva conventions), bush and blair claimed that they didn't apply, and so effectively in setting up guantanamo bay, bush invented a new term, "enemy combatant", and a whole new law, to cover his 'war on terror' (which he himself stated was never going to end).

the thing about geneva conventions is that they set up rules between countries during wars which are assumed to have an end, so people are to be held in situations of free association, without interrogation, and then released at the cessation of hostilities. but in afghanistan, people were captured who were not treated as geneva war prisoners, and not tried under any criminal law, but instead labelled 'enemy combatants' and detained indefinitely. blair tried to create a similar definition in this country but was slapped down by the house of lords. instead though, we now have 'control orders' similar to the worst form of house arrest (very like that applied to aung san suu kyi in burma for example!) with no legal protections.

in america, there is apparently a new dawn, a rejection of the terrible bush years, a new freedom, with the arrival of obama barack. but louise receives regular correspondence from the US lawyers fighting for the rights of the 270 prisoners still at guantanamo bay (90% of these prisoners have no evidence against them), and these lawyers are concerned at the back-tracking that is already occurring. although guantanamo may indeed be closed down, we are already hearing of moves to introduce a new law of 'preventative detention'. and there are suggestions of creating new hybrid courts somewhere between military commissions and federal courts, because 'some evidence cannot be considered by federal courts'.

we have similar problems here. unbelievably, the majority of the court of appeal recently ruled that it is ok to withhold the reasons for control orders from people subject to them, although this will now go to the house of lords for further ruling. a system of 'special advocates' have been set up who receive the evidence against detainees in certain 'terrorist' trials and 'control order' cases, but they cannot tell their "client" what that evidence is. they are in an impossible situation, since even when they contest the order they don't have enough information to act properly for the accused as they can't have the response from the one person best placed to respond since that person doesn't know what the accusation is!

the answer to all this is that we need braver politicians. after 9/11, politicians were scared - it wasn't the public demanding new laws, but scared lawmakers. if obama releases the more than 200 guantanamo detainees who have no evidence against them and then one goes on to commit a crime, he will be excoriated. but there is an answer to this - many people have already been released from the guantanamo prison, and one of them, moazzam begg, is here today, and yet there hasn't been a repeat of 9/11. the politicians need to unscramble the mess of rendition, torture, indefinite detention, not only at guantanamo, but all round the world, and especially in iraq and afghanistan where it fuels the very fanaticism it is meant to address.

if obama means anything, if "we can" means anything, if "change" means anything, it's got to be that the US starts respecting international law, it's got to be that they stop holding people without charge, that they stop torture, that they stop rendition, that the 'war on terror' is gone, that if people are suspected of committing criminal offences then they should once again be given fair trials under international law.

in a fair society, media reporting is absolutely crucial, and yet in the area of 'terrorism' it is so often lacking. louise told of a recent client, a woman with a young child who was accused of withholding information from police because her husband was planning to travel to israel and blow himself up. both her and her sister-in-law were eventually found completely innocent and knew nothing about it, but the day before their trial the 'evening standard' published their pictures with the front-page headline "women of terror". the attorney general did nothing to prosecute under the contempt of court act, despite solicitor's complaints.

that kind of prejudicial reporting happens a lot, where the media report the prosecution case without any reference to the defence case.

one other concern is that a lot of the recent and proposed terrorist legislation seems aimed at the criminalisation of ideas. 'possession of materials likely to be of use in terrorism' includes stuff anyone can download from the internet. this led to the detention without charge for six days, of nottingham students, hicham yezza and rizwaan sabir after the discovery of a so-called 'al-qaeda manual' on a computer at the university. actually the 'manual' is open source material downloaded from the US dept of justice website, and also available as a book from amazon - the students required it for academic research. louise also defended a 16 year old who was actually convicted after downloading material and passing it on to someone else.

while some material may be worrying and offensive, and while the muslim community should and does contest this material, the criminalisation of freedom of expression actually only ends up giving legitimacy to those ideas, and the media should be questioning whether these types of offences are the right way to tackle terrorism.

there also needs to be debate over the definition of the word 'terrorism'. we've seen it extended in this country to include the attempt to overthrow any government anywhere in the world, however unfair, thus criminalising all liberation movements. this in the country which was the one place the ANC could operate during the apartheid years in south africa!

louise finished by re-iterating the role the media should have in holding obama barack to his word. although recognising it will be a tall order, she hoped that he might change the path of america and restore justice and that that would have a knock-on effect on the court system here.

the final speaker was lyndsey german, national convenor and chair of the 'stop the war coalition'. she spoke of how the connection between the 'war on terror' and islamophobia is absolutely fundamental.

she said that this 'war on terror', the wars that america has prosecuted going back many years, the sanctions on iraq that had killed at least half a million children, the repression of palestine, all these different issues even before 2001, had all created a situation where prejudice against muslims was part of the world order. since 2001, that has become dramatically worse. we have been taken into two failed wars based on a whole series of lies.

when the 'stop the war coalition' was set up seven years ago, the demands were not just to stop the war on terror, but also to defend civil liberties and oppose the racist backlash, and those last two slogans have become more proportionately important in campaigning over the years, particularly since the london tube bombings, as the backlash against muslims has become ever more visible, and there is a growing portrayal that all muslims are somehow connected to terrorism.

recently some afghans in glasgow organised a protest at the police station in response to the fact they are regularly detained at glasgow airport for many hours when they travel. they get asked which mosque they pray at, how often they pray, what literature they read, and even whether they know where osama bin laden is!? they are angry at this treatment - that they are prima facie guilty and required to prove their innocence. and yet, from reading british mainstream media, you wouldn't know about these protests, you wouldn't know what is happening to these people, and you wouldn't even know what is happening in afghanistan and iraq. very little of that gets through - reports are filtered through the occupying forces apart from a handful of very good independent journalists who are in a tiny minority.

so people always hear the bad news about 'terrorist' muslims, and they do not hear negative reports about what our troops are doing abroad. for instance, ten times more money is spent on defence than on reconstruction in afghanistan - this should be a question for debate - it is not.

there is a perception that racism comes from far-right groups in northern towns or barking, and of course this is partially true, but if this was really just where islamophobia came from then it wouldn't be the fraction of the problem that it is. it is a problem because it is purveyed by all sorts of people who really should know better, including journalists but also government ministers. when jack straw says he objects to the way muslim women dress, this is a sinister signal to all sorts of people to put their prejudices into practice. when you have a supposedly liberal novelist like martin amis saying that "muslims should suffer, and their families should suffer, because then they would understand why they shouldn't support terrorism", these sorts of statements should not be acceptable or respectable in our society, but they ARE seen as acceptable or respectable! they are exactly the same sorts of comments as made in germany in the 1930s about jews.

the second thing that has happened in this 'war on terror' is the notion that there is an 'enemy within' which is really the way the muslim community is talked about by too many people in this country. the anti-war movement has always been a very integrated movement in this country and lindsey expressed pride in this, but she was aware that this has been used by certain parties to suggest that the anti-war movement itself could also be the 'enemy within'. this fits in with attacks on civil liberties like the restrictions on protest within a mile of parliament, where even with permission to protest you can't use a megaphone.

on the night before the demonstrations against george bush's state visit, lyndsey told how at a reception at city hall, she was approached by some of the press who said they'd been told by police that a suicide bomber was going to blow themselves up at the protest the next day. she told them the police hadn't said anything to her, and you'd think they might have told the organisers! of course, this was a story given to the press to enhance the perception that protest was somehow illegitimate.

again, more recently, while ex-servicemen are allowed their demonstration at the cenotaph in whitehall, the 'stop the war coalition' were prevented from walking up whitehall on bush's visit to 10 downing street. the police suggested that lyndsey's organisation couldn't prevent a terrorist from mingling with the crowd. she sarcastically suggested a terrorist might find an easier moment to strike than when under the intense police surveillance and control associated with the protest.

she also mentioned the press 'story' about muslims being against the wearing of the remembrance poppy. she said that racists were trying to use people's sentiments about soldiers who had died in past wars, to justify illegitimate and illegal wars today.

in closing, she pondered once again the connection between racism and islamophobia. some people claim that the religion's tendency to fanatical ideas is the problem rather than any concerns over skin colour or muslim people themselves, but this ignores the fact that most religions have a fanatical tendency and that the vast majority of muslims do not have any such delusion. then there is an argument that if only muslims would integrate more (which she jokingly suggested meant they eat they same food as 'us' like lancashire hotpot) that everything would be ok. she pointed out that the jews in germany were the most integrated jews in the whole of europe, and yet it didn't stop the holocaust because it wasn't about immigration - it was about racism and about scapegoating minorities and that's what is going on today too.

the attacks on civil liberties, the surveillance, makes it harder for people to be brave, but you need civil liberties not so much in times of peace when no-one's attacking you, but in times of war when everyone's attacking you, and that's why it's most important for us now to stand up for the muslim community and be shoulder to shoulder with it and we must organise as journalists to get this message across. she welcomed the NUJ actions against the 'daily star' including the current letter campaign, and urged to continue the monitoring of media, as well as building of bridges with other campaigns. if we stand for equality, against racism and against war, then fighting islamophobia is one of the most important things to do.


jeremy dear rounded up by saying that robust and truthful journalism was an essential weapon against those that would spin their military muscle, but we also have to be aware of the context in which journalism takes place - the control and ownership of the media is a crucial question as is the state of law and the rights of journalists. the drive for greater profit also cuts newsroom staff and undermines investigative journalism, and journalists must organise to stand a chance against these pressures. he made a plea for journalists to join both the MWAW (media workers against the war) and the NUJ (national union of journalists).