In the aftermath of yesterday’s terror attack outside a Mosque in London, a number of reporters noted that worshippers in the local community were hostile towards the journalists who arrived to cover unfolding events. Tweeting outside the scene, BuzzFeed’s James Ball noted that many of the worshippers had “lots of mistrust for the BBC,” claiming that the news service “lied all the time.” This sentiment has held, with people continuing to criticise the national press coverage. On Facebook livestreams, worshippers outside the Mosque all said the same thing: that “the media will whitewash what happened because the guy who did it isn’t a Muslim.” Some have even accused newspapers and TV channels of humanising Darren Osborne, the perpetrator of the attack—a generosity that wasn’t granted to the dark-skinned Muslim men who carried out the Westminster and London Bridge attacks weeks earlier.
Like most people, I watch the fall out of terror attacks on social media. Like many people, I expected the same script that social media always follows to play out: a couple of hours of right-wing twitter personalities trolling left-wing journalists, tweeting about civilizational war, posting memes about the evils of Islam. The following day, the media would bring on some of these twitter personalities as pundits, and a conversation which ought to be about terrorism would somehow morph into a debate about immigration, asylum and the threat of Muslim refugees—all while Britain’s Muslim communities would be expected to publicly repent.Yet the fallout from yesterday’s attacks felt very different. Partially because of the near pin-drop silence from the typical right-wing pundits and talk show commentators—but also because of the reaction from the media itself.
There are, of course, very practical reasons as to why the Finsbury Park attacker was treated differently. Firstly, counter-extremism experts are still getting to grips with the threat of far-right extremism—a threat that has soared in the past few years according to officials in the Prevent programme. Print news media are likely not to have expected an incident of far-right extremism, and would have to rely on information from the police as it came in. Similarly, broadcast journalists at the scene, under the watch of Ofcom, couldn’t report anything without it being confirmed.
But that’s not to say that the anger of those worshippers—as well as that of Muslim communities throughout the country—was illegitimate. After all, tabloid headlines like the Daily Express’ "Now Muslims demand: GIVE US FULL SHARIA LAW" and the Sun's "1 in 5 Brit Muslims' sympathy for jihadis" have become so commonplace that few would bat an eyelid to see them on the newsstand. And as social media platforms continue to expand, so has the output for right wing commentary. The anti-Muslim group Britain First amasses tens of thousands of views for every video they post on their Facebook page—a page which has more ‘likes’ that any of the three major British political parties.For many of us, this surge in right-wing, Islamophobic commentary may only exist on the fringes of our experience, but Muslim communities all over the country have felt the backlash of this kind of reporting. Tell Mama, a body which monitors anti-Muslim hate crime, have recorded more than 100 mosques that have been vandalised since 2013—a number they believe would be much higher if you could account for unreported crimes.
The Finsbury Park attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, and nor was this attack a one off, despite the front pages today declaring the suspect a “lone wolf.” Instead, it should be understood in the context of years of anti-Muslim headlines, of talk shows that invite on Islamophobic reactionaries— and of the spawning of massive online communities on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit dedicated to anti-Muslim hatred. It’s these communities that suspect Darren Osborne had at least some affiliation with, according to the Guardian, and where, I expect, other right-wing extremists reported to Prevent dwelt, too.
Yet in spite of this context, the Finsbury Park attacks showed a national media caught off guard. It seemed that many couldn’t report on an attack when there wasn’t a mosque to go visit, a tenuous ISIS link to go find, or some sort of connection to a “radical Islamist” from Pakistan. Despite knowing that right wing extremism has been on the rise, there has been remarkably little information about their networks, beliefs and ideology in the public sphere, especially when compared to the coverage of those associated with Islamic extremism. That’s not just a failure toward the Britain’s Muslim communities. It’s a failure to the public too.
