The Shawcross review was applauded by the right wing media, and shows yet again how Muslims are being unfairly targeted in this country, writes Faisel Hanif for the Middle East Eye:
“In 2006, British novelist Martin Amis said: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’”
Elements of Britain’s right wing, and the anti-Muslim ideologues within it, have seemingly taken these words as a mantra.
The Prevent review authored by William Shawcross, who once said that “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”, could easily be seen as the manifestation of Amis’s words.
His findings have been met with scorn and disdain from Muslims and human rights groups.
But not everyone shares the alarm, because many of its findings read as a compendium of the long lament that Britain’s right-wing media has engaged in for some time.
Almost every week, commentators, reporters or reviewers in the right-wing press complain about how there aren’t enough films depicting Muslim countries as backward hellholes, or how a drama on TV wouldn’t dare depict Islam as it has Christianity.
Even celebrities are urged to give credence to the idea that there just isn’t the same scrutiny of Islam, or that not enough of the bad things done in its name are the subject of fictional representation.
Particularly galling for these commentators is the recent uptick in the dramatisation of the growing far-right threat in Britain. Their main target of scorn is the so-called cultural left, described as “too cowardly, hypocritical and woke to risk a more topical [show] about fundamentalist Islam”.
Read more: Prevent review fulfils dreams of UK’s right-wing media | Middle East Eye
Related resources
- Shawcross Review is a dangerous whitewash (News, 2023)
- Things to remember about the independent review of Prevent (Expert View, 2022)
- The People’s Review of Prevent (Report, 2022)
