We have become accustomed to the BBC adopting the language of trans activists. ‘Gender care’ is how the UK’s supposedly impartial state broadcaster refers to the scandalous process of sterilising children who are confused about their sex. ‘Preferred pronouns’ are rigorously observed for men who claim to be women. Could we now be seeing something similar at the BBC where Islamic fundamentalists are concerned?
Whether wittingly or not, an article published on the BBC News website on Friday essentially declared Islam to be humanity’s one true faith. It was a fairly anodyne, magazine-style piece about how people who convert to Islam can sometimes feel lonely during Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Yet in the headline, and peppered throughout the piece, it referred to these converts as ‘reverts’ – a term loaded with Islamist ideology.
Describing Muslim converts as ‘reverts’ implies that they are not converting to a new faith, but reverting to their true, natural state as Muslims – that is, before they were corrupted by, say, atheism or Christianity. It is a term used by Islamists and theocrats to imply that all human beings are born Muslim. Indeed, as Taj Hargey of the Oxford Institute for British Islam points out, it is a ‘divisive term that most Muslims would not use, only extremists and supremacists’.
Following complaints, the BBC has updated the piece to refer to ‘converts’ instead of reverts (although its explanation at the bottom of the article only concedes that this is ‘to help with understanding’).
Strikingly, this is not the first time the BBC has treated Islam as the undisputed divine truth. The now-archived BBC religion minisite from the 2000s described Islam as having been ‘revealed to humanity by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)’. Other religions did not get the same treatment. Christianity, for instance, was described as a statistic: ‘the world’s biggest religion, with about 2.1 billion followers worldwide’.
Why? There’s been no Islamist takeover of the Beeb, of course. The problem is that in the BBC’s PC worldview, Muslims are seen as a perpetually oppressed group. The BBC then seeks to rectify this alleged oppression through ‘positive representation’ in its content, and by letting self-appointed activists have editorial influence.
Most of the time, the results of this activism are more cringeworthy than sinister. BBC soaps, for instance, are replete with positive storylines about the preferred identity group of the day, whether it’s drag queens or ‘Muslim reverts’. Recently, The Archers featured the village busybody, Lynda Snell, taking the unlikely decision to start fasting for Ramadan out of respect for her Muslim lodgers. ‘I feel any opportunity to expand the human experience develops character and deepens our understanding of our fellow travellers upon this Earth’, she said, quite implausibly. When Bobby Beale from EastEnders converted to Islam in 2019, the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live social-media page noted how his new-found faith would have a ‘positive impact on his life… at a time when the media’s treatment of Muslims is in the spotlight… which may be leading to Islamophobia’. Clearly, the BBC no longer feels the need to disguise its woke activism.
When it comes to news reporting, this drive to show Islam in a positive light, in almost all circumstances, is disastrous for objectivity. This isn’t just about giving ordinary Muslims a fair shake in reporting – something we can all agree on. It’s also about how the BBC covers extremists.
In 2020, the BBC was pressured by the Muslim Council of Britain into editing a headline that revealed the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, had prayed before carrying out his massacre. The truth was deemed ‘Islamophobic’. Even worse, last year a BBC Radio London presenter heaped praise on a hardline Islamic cleric, describing a man who once advocated stoning Western women as a ‘highly respected imam’.
The BBC’s blindspot for Islamic fundamentalism is totally inexcusable. The only reversion we need here is back to impartiality.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
