Trevor Phillips's Muslim report: Panders to prejudice

When Trevor Phillips recently told me there was going to be a big report, coupled with a Channel 4 documentary about, ‘What Muslims really think?’, my heart sunk.

The combination of Channel 4, Phillips and Muslims would invariably be about how to get the biggest news headlines. After all, that’s what Channel 4 is paying him to do. I also instinctively knew that the headline, ‘Muslims are very proud of being British’, would not be headline that the Daily Mail, The Express or the Sunday Times would run with, even though it’s true.

The only headlines that would make the monster splash were, therefore, duly served up by the media savvy Phillips. This is how the plan goes: Go to those areas with dense population-more than 20% Muslims- and ask some ‘controversial’ questions, and hey presto we’ll get your big controversial story.

Furthermore, with almost zero political context in any way, shape or form you can build a report that propagates Phillips’s starting point a month ago when he shockingly proclaimed:

Muslims are different from the rest of us."

Back in the real world that Phillips’s has chosen to ignore before undertaking his skewed survey is the backdrop of terrorism - both Paris and more recently Brussels - by what seems a linked Jihadist group. Those events have seen a rampant rise in Islamaphobia here in the UK. But for a long time it’s been open season against all Muslims often on a daily basis. Sometimes its verbal abuse, other times its physical attacks, but mostly it’s from certain sections of the media, which with the help of reports such as Phillips’s they see all Muslims, as Nigel Farage puts it, as ‘the enemy within’.

This media trajectory has been growing over a number of years, with Far Right groups goading Muslims in their own communities such as Bradford, Luton, Leicester and London. Every time there is a terror act British Muslims are expected to go out on the streets and condemn the violence.

Anything less is seen as a betrayal. Heaven forbid, if a Muslim dared to say, ‘I condemn the jihadist terrorist, but I also condemn the thousands of Muslims women and children who are killed by Western and Russian bombs.’

Turning to Phillips’s analysis of the report covering six pages in the Sunday Times, he effortlessly writes misinformation in a bid to justify his work.

For example he states:

While many of us are comfortable condemning less numerous and less powerful minorities, we are reluctant to speak clearly when it comes to Muslims."

Really Trevor? What other minorities can he be talking about: Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, African Christians, and Atheists? Truth is that as the Muslim community, which is not homogeneous, is the most talked about religious minority in the UK today. And the vast majority of the discussion is negative and in Phillips’s case selective.

On to the meat and drink of the report: ‘Why they are different?’. Well, the biggest headlines and, no doubt, Phillips will tease this out in his Channel 4 docudrama, will be that some Muslims, would if they could, have a number of wives. Secondly, others would put homosexuals in jail.

On the first point all Muslims know that it’s against the law to have more than one wife, so why ask the question? You could very easily put a similar provocative question to white male British Christians.

For example: ‘if it were allowed would you like a second wife? Of equally controversial: ‘if it were allowed, would you like to have affairs and not get into trouble? I’m sure a significant number would honestly say yes. We just have to look at the adulterous websites to see there’s already a massive market for that type we would deem as immorality. And let’s also not forget the worst bigotry towards homosexuals comes in no small measure in the shape of physical attacks by white working class men. Might we get a similar response to the illegality of homosexuality if they were questioned?

Sadly, in its totality this is a pernicious report. First it lumps all Muslims together- ‘They are not like us’, secondly the questions are skewed and selective to bring out the worst, and lastly it has no historical or social/political context.

The headlines that the report has set out to achieve will strike real fear for most Muslims. Many have already called us at OBV, ‘What has this man against us?’, one women in tears asked this morning.

It’s a shame, because both Trevor Phillips and Channel 4 could have engaged in a conversation about how we as a society can stop demonising Muslims and ensure that both at home and abroad we have societies that seek greater equality. But instead we have global vested interests abroad, which, at times has meant we don’t care who the good guys are and who’s not.

The old ways within all religions are not dealt with, but suggesting that there is something in the DNA that is demonic and that will never change. Propagating that argument is not only wrong, but a recipe for further division when we should be and could be working together for greater common ground.

Simon Woolley