NPR Feels the Pain of British Muslims for Ten Minutes (With Fox News Bashing)

March 3rd, 2015 8:08 AM

Last August, NPR aired three segments on a horrific child-abuse scandal in Rotherham, England involving 1400 children. None of these stories mentioned the offenders were Muslim men. The abusers were of “Pakistani descent” -- that's all they would say. (See here, here, and here.)

Rotherham didn’t come up on Monday night’s All Things Considered in a very sensitive ten-minute, 31-second segment with the online headline “Britain's Muslims Still Feel The Need To Explain Themselves.” Anchor Audie Cornish and correspondent Ari Shapiro channeled all the frustration of “tech-savvy” British Muslims, and exactly none of the “anti-Islam” counterpoint.

Here’s a representative sample:

AUDIE CORNISH: What is that like for you?

SALMAN FARSI, EAST LONDON MOSQUE: I think it's tough. It's tough. There's a climate of Islamophobia and a lot of misconceptions.

CORNISH: But what form does that take? When you say Islamophobia, what does that mean for you?

FARSI: Well, for me, directly, here at the mosque it means I have to -- I end up dealing with all of the hate mail -- some of the nasty letters that come to us, some of the DVDs that are sent to us.

CORNISH: DVDs?

FARSI: Yeah.

CORNISH: Of what?

FARSI: Of, you know, various things that someone thinks will offend a Muslim, so pornographic content to, you know, anti-Muslim messages. So it's having to fend off the far right who kind of see the actions of extremists and they blame the whole community. And we pay the price for it.

NPR even allowed Mr. Farsi to blame “mainstream society” and its alleged prejudices if Muslims become radicalized: “ think if mainstream society here in this country, especially, like, politicians, etc. - they don't - if they can't see things from the young people's perspective, then, you know, we're just going to lose them. They're going to become disillusioned, and then, you know, these are the ones that, unfortunately, will go off and join groups that are deemed terrorist.”

“Deemed terrorist?” Cornish didn’t follow up, at least not on the air.

The story grew a bit comical when even pro-Muslim BBC propaganda annoys one Arfah Farooq:

CORNISH: She's British-Pakistani, and since she's 23, she insists the bag of chips she had for lunch is enough. She's annoyed by the latest Muslim-focused headline, a BBC poll touting that 95 percent of Muslims feel loyalty to Britain.

ARFAH FAROOQ: You see in the paper all the time that your identity challenged, challenged, challenged, challenged. But actually, all my friends, all the people I know, like, you know, we're practicing Muslims, et cetera. But, you know, we're still going to support Britain in the Olympics or, you know, England in the football. And all the time, all you get is, are you British or do you have British values?

They didn’t discuss where Farooq has an “anti-“ viewpoint, as in “anti-Israel” and its “apartheid and occupation” policies.

Then they turned to a smaller town in London, and even name-checked Fox News as some sort of Prejudice Central:

CORNISH: But this is London. Every other block is a riotous mix of languages and cultures. And just as, say, New York City doesn't reflect the rest of the U.S., London doesn't exactly reflect the rest of Britain. So we sent our correspondent, Ari Shapiro, to look at some of the ethnic tensions in Birmingham, a city where the percentage of people who don't speak English is twice the national average, a city a Fox News analyst falsely described as a no-go zone for non-Muslims. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal later used the same phrase. So Ari went to Birmingham to see for himself.

So we have the story of Rotherham, which was obviously a large “no-go zone” for stopping pedophilia by men of “Pakistani descent,” but NPR is still riding a high horse against phobias and prejudice. Why not go back to Rotherham instead of picking your city based on your animus against Fox and Republicans?

Somehow, openly gay Ari Shapiro doesn't ask the Muslims about their "homophobia." That would be "off point," apparently. It’s also comical that NPR is willing to create a “no-go zone” against “white” critics of the Muslims, who refuse to speak on the air for fear of being attacked as bigots.

SHAPIRO: This is Abdul Rashid, secretary of the Birmingham Central Mosque. He says the danger is that if people don't mix, they don't understand each other. That may lead to Islamophobia and radicalization.

RASHID: Because the stigmatization and demonizing of a community creates, obviously, hatred in the hearts of some of the people in that community.

SHAPIRO: The ethnic tensions here are real. Some white people we spoke with in Birmingham expressed strong views against Muslims, but they refused to speak on the record. At the mosque, Mohammad Afzal takes the long-view. He was the first Muslim elected to Birmingham City Council in 1982.

MOHAMMAD AFZAL: I remember back in '70s and early '80s, white people used to close their windows and they would say, oh, we got this horrible smell of curry.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter).

AFZAL: But now everybody loves it.

SHAPIRO: That's partly a matter of exposure. You're comfortable with ideas and people that you're familiar with. So we visited a school that is trying to expose kids of different backgrounds to each other. Queensbridge is one of the most diverse schools in Birmingham.

There is one moment where NPR allows the idea that maybe there’s something being said in the mosques that is creating radicalization:

SHAPIRO: The principal of this school, Tim Boyes, is white, but he used to live in Pakistan, and he speaks Urdu. He teaches the Islamic studies course here. And he told me about a conversation he had with a student just the day before our interview. The student repeated something he'd heard at the mosque.

BOYES: The preacher in the mosque, post-Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was saying that, like 9/11, the Paris murders were a CIA conspiracy just to justify aggression on the Muslim world.

SHAPIRO: He took it as a chance to start a conversation about how you know what's true. And he also took it as a good sign that the student trusts him enough to approach him with such questions.

Cornish is next going to France and Germany for more long reports on alleged Islamophobia. She previewed that by going back to “Free Palestine” Farooq to attack the extreme right-wingers:

FAROOQ: I think, comparing myself to other countries in Europe, I'm 100 percent lucky that I'm in Britain and I'm in England. Just with the far right growing in Germany, with the kind of the whole forced secular stuff in France, I am so grateful that I live in Britain.