BBC joins open season on attacking Muslims
The BBC News website has recycled a three year old story from the Daily Express, which is no less a fabrication now than it was in 2007. But truth and journalistic integrity are ever absent when it comes to an anti-Muslim story in the tabloid media.
By David Crouch and Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
12 July 2010
The BBC has joined the bandwagon stoking anti-Muslim hatred. The front page of its website on 12 July declares: "Schools told 'no swimming in Ramadan' for Muslim pupils".
The report is presented as if it's a new story but in fact it's just recycled "news" from three years ago, when on 21 February 2007 the rabidly Islamophobic Daily Express printed an article under the headline: "Muslims Tell Us How to Run Our Schools".
It wasn't true when the Express peddled it and it isn't now the BBC has disgracefully decided to revive a thoroughly discredited story, for reasons best known to itself and the unnamed journalist who wrote it.
The reality is that Staffordshire Council issued sensible guidelines to its schools to help Muslim pupils whose religious observances included fasting during the month of Ramadan.
Far from wanting to ban swimming during Ramadan, the Muslim Council of Britain makes it clear that: "In general, participation in swimming is an acceptable activity whilst fasting."
The BBC's story comes barely a week after a Daily Express front page claimed: "Muslims Force Pool Cover-up", another untrue story, this time about Muslims wanting swimming pool windows to be blacked out.
This was brilliantly demolished and lampooned on the BBC's "The Now Show" last weekend. (The prgramme is still available to hear for the next few days on BBC iPlayer. The item begins 22 minutes in.)
The blog Tabloid Watch reports this non-story as another example of how the gutter media has declared open season for anti-Muslim hysteria. This story originated in the regional press and was in the next two days picked up by the BBC and national newspapers, including the Express, Star, Mail, Sun and Mirror.
The truth was Muslims and non-Muslims -- or "people", as The Now Show described them -- had complained that the tinting -- usual on the ground floor of public swimming pools -- was damaged on some of the local pool windows. This was rectified, said Walsall Council, "for all members of the community and not any particular group."
But what price accuracy when the tabloid media is looking for every opportunity to attack Muslims? It's a dangerous game, fuelling the racism and prejudice which has lead to groups like the English Defence League feeling free to organise threatening and intimidating marches against the whole Muslim community in towns and cities across the country.
How to complain to the BBC for its collusion with Islamophobia:
By phone: 03700 100 222
By email: www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/homepage
By post: To BBC Complaints, PO Box 1922, Glasgow G2 3WT
