UK Politics

A man attacked Jews in a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur in a despicable act of terror and hate. Yet within hours, much of the media coverage had shifted from reporting the crime to implicating Islam - and by extension British Muslims.

The Daily Mail arguably led the way, with its front page screaming: “He was an Islamic terrorist” - a predictable but telling framing. Other tabloids also branded the attack as terrorism, but none with the Mail’s intensity.

This followed a day of framing that transformed the action of a single individual into a reflection of a faith followed by more than two billion people globally.

Some would insist that the attacker, who was killed by police, was just as the Mail described him. But describing the perpetrator as “Islamic” is itself misleading. Extrajudicial killings and targeting of innocents are explicitly forbidden in Islamic teaching. Any journalist or headline writer should know this.

Yet there is now an increasing chasm between what is obvious or intelligible, and what is actually being delivered by Britain’s right-wing media outlets. It no longer matters whether the term “Islamic terrorist” is a misnomer; it functions as a licence for Islamophobia, conflating a criminal act with an entire religion.