Why is the BBC so scared of criticising Islam?
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
The Beeb’s removal of a clip featuring the new head of the Muslim Council of Britain is a chilling sign of the times.
If you want to understand what’s going wrong at the BBC right now, you could do worse than look at the bizarre Zara Mohammed controversy. The Beeb has removed from social media a clip of Ms Mohammed, the new head of the Muslim Council of Britain, being interviewed on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Cancel-culture mobs had complained that the interview was a form of ‘bullying’ and that it had undertones of ‘Islamophobia’. And now the BBC has caved to these crazy, unfounded criticisms and shoved the interview clip in the memory hole. This reveals a lot about the great moral anchoring of the BBC in the 21st century.
[…] There’s another, even more worrying aspect to this crusade against ‘Islamophobia’: it contains its own kind of racism. The idea that Muslims must be shielded from difficult questions or from open, frank debate about the problem of radical Islam is itself racist. It infantilises Muslims. It separates them off from the rest of the community and says they need special protection from the rough and tumble of public life. There is a neo-colonialist feel to the belief among sections of the well-paid, middle-class commentariat that they must protect Muslims like Ms Mohammed from perfectly normal forms of public engagement. This implicit denigration of Muslims’ capacity to partake in public discourse, this diminishing of their intellectual and moral agency, contains far higher levels of racial paternalism than the media commentary that the warriors against Islamophobia complain about.
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