Mick Hartley

Andrew Gilligan of Policy Exchange, in the Times, on the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) – Activist group wants to stifle discussion of Islamism:

The BBC should not have called Khalid Masood, the Westminster terrorist who killed five people, an “Islamic extremist”, because Islam means peace. News outlets are wrong to describe terror groups, including Hamas, Boko Haram and Islamic State, as “Islamist”. Indeed, the very term Islamism is “redundant” and should no longer be used by the press.

The headscarf for women is “normative” and a Muslim writer “misrepresent[ed] Muslim behaviour and belief” when she said there was “no basis in Islam for the niqab”, the full-face veil. The late Andrew Norfolk, of this newspaper, who did more than anyone to expose the grooming scandal, “scapegoated” Muslims.

Welcome to the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a little-scrutinised activist group seeking to skew the national conversation. CfMM is, or has recently been, part of the Muslim Council of Britain, with which successive governments have had a policy of non-engagement for its hardline views. But that has not stopped it from being listened to, welcomed or even employed at influential levels of the media. The CfMM claims to have been “feeding into the BBC’s terminology guidebook” and to have facilitated a focus group on the BBC’s behalf.

That would explain a lot.

CfMM’s purpose is not simply to challenge a relatively small number of errors. It is also, it says, “taking control of the narrative” about Islam: promoting a partisan view held by the MCB and its activists, and discouraging any story painting Muslims in a bad light. Its “60 per cent” negative stories include accurate, factual accounts of Islamist terror attacks. Its “top three offenders” are the news agencies Reuters, AP and AFP.

The government is drawing up an official definition of “Islamophobia”. The aim, in the words of those campaigning for it, is to impose “appropriate limits to free speech” about Muslims. Any definition would give partisans like CfMM a dangerous new weapon. In the meantime, we believe that CfMM should not be engaged with or taken at face value by journalists, regulators or anyone else.

The Policy Exchange report on CfMM, Bad Faith Actor, can be accessed here.