From Maccabi fans row to charity runs, UK media is conjuring a Muslim threat

When England’s West Midlands Police announced that they would ban Maccabi Tel Aviv’s away fans from attending their team’s match against Aston Villa, it should have been a football story - a policing decision linked to crowd safety. Instead, it became another media spectacle framed around Muslims. 

Hostile commentators quickly pointed out that Birmingham’s Villa Park lies within a constituency that is “29 percent Muslim” - implying, without evidence, that Muslim residents endangered Maccabi fans.

The message was unmistakable: a local public order decision was transformed into a “Muslim problem”. What should have been a policing matter was turned into a proxy battle in Britain’s culture wars. 

The same voices who cheered on these distortions then declared that the decision proved the country was cowering before Islamic influence.

This pattern extends far beyond football. In Cumbria, a modest mosque proposal by the South Lakes Islamic Centre was transformed into a “mega-mosque” outrage, fuelled by misinformation spread by far-right activists and amplified by mainstream outlets, primarily the ultra-rightwing GB News. A prayer space for local families became a symbol of the “Islamisation of the Lake District”.

Likewise, when the East London Mosque hosted its annual charity run - open to men, boys and girls under 13, with a goal of raising funds for refugee aid, food banks and youth projects - the story was recast as an example of “sharia creep”. 

The head of programmes for the East London Mosque said the media did not ask the facility’s large female congregation about this issue, and simply assumed they were banned, thus missing important nuance: “Critics think they’re sticking up for women’s rights, but they’re dismissing that we have a voice and a choice in what we do,” she told the Guardian.

Feeding the narrative

The selective focus tells its own story. While a handful of gender-segregated community events are sensationalised, the wider generosity of British Muslims goes unmentioned, even as research shows that Muslims in the country give four times as much to charity than the average donor - about £708 ($947) per person per year, compared with £165 across the UK. 

Yet this story, highlighting civic virtue and social commitment, has received no coverage from mainstream national, regional and local outlets. The same media that can manufacture outrage over a park run cannot find space to celebrate a community’s generosity. Instead, it feeds the same narrative pipeline: Muslims as a threat, never a contributor.

It is about the corrosion of truth itself, and the ease with which the machinery of outrage can turn neighbours into suspects, and citizens into scapegoats

This narrative did not appear out of nowhere. It has been cultivated over years - fertilised by US President Donald Trump’s conspiratorial claim that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, wanted to “go to sharia law”. Britain’s right-wing media eagerly imported that fiction, using it as a prism through which to frame any Muslim activity in the capital and beyond. Any mosque event, protest or community initiative now risks being reported under the banner of Trump’s falsehoods.

A large section of Britain’s fourth estate now acts as a relay station for US far-right rhetoric, targeting not just Muslims, but also elected British officials who refuse to conform to its narrative. Some of these so-called journalists are so emboldened that they have openly called for British MPs to be deported.

Smearing Muslims can also provide media figures with an expanded platform. The former editor of the Jewish Chronicle - whose tenure saw the paper repeatedly censured by the Independent Press Standards Organisation amid its false claims and attacks on Muslim figures - now appears regularly on broadcast media as a respected commentator.

In one recent interview, he reframed the Villa Park fan ban as the product of Muslim demographics, and in a column for the Telegraph, he lumped “the campaign against Israeli football fans” together with “child sex gangs”, “hate preachers” and “sharia courts”.

If any line is to be drawn or any dots connected, the increase in anti-Muslim bile now being pumped out so brazenly points to a media-politics nexus that does more than vilify Britain’s Muslims. It increasingly undermines the independence of public institutions - from police to the judiciary - and smears elected politicians who refuse to join what journalists John Holmwood and Peter Oborne once called “the real mob”.

Economy of fear

This is not confined to rhetoric. The hostility has bled into physical spaces, with a recent spate of violent attacks - including stabbings, assaults and mosque vandalism - that have been minimised or ignored by a media machine that refuses to acknowledge Muslims as victims. 

Anti-Muslim bile now being pumped out so brazenly points to a media-politics nexus that increasingly undermines the independence of public institutions

The reluctance to treat anti-Muslim violence as a national issue stands in stark contrast to the eagerness to amplify other “controversies”. For example, on the same day that three far-right extremists were jailed for plotting attacks on mosques and an Islamic centre in Leeds, BBC Radio 4 chose to discuss Muslims “not integrating” in the UK, in a segment where the presenter gifted a hostile Conservative MP the opportunity to go full throttle.

A BBC investigation into racist abuse by London police officers - revealing vile Islamophobia - shows how in the hierarchy of racism, the targeting of Muslims gets top billing, and is often exclusive among religious groups. Yet despite this, a BBC Radio 5 Live debate on the Maccabi fan ban saw a veteran presenter dismiss the very term Islamophobia, despite callers and guests airing grotesque prejudices about Muslims hating Jews. Had any other group been targeted in such a manner, regulators and politicians would have intervened instantly.

When Muslims report discrimination, the coverage pivots to free speech. When prejudice surfaces, it is reported as opinion. When Muslims display civic generosity, it is ignored. The formula is structural, not incidental: it sustains an editorial economy built on fear.

What unites these examples - the Villa Park ban, the Cumbria mosque outrage, the East London charity run - is the deliberate inversion of context into controversy. Muslims are never simply participants in British life; they are props in an ongoing morality play about loyalty and threat. Journalism shades into propaganda, feeding the culture war rather than informing the public.

UK media revels in hate after Manchester synagogue attack 

Read More »

This narrowing of the narrative corrodes more than community relations. It corrodes Britain’s institutions. The demonisation of Muslims is accompanied by attacks on the independence of police, the judiciary and any branch that refuses to toe the culture-war line. The same media-political alliance that mocks “woke policing” also demands punitive responses to Muslim speech. In that process, democracy itself is cheapened.

The East London charity run, the Villa Park controversy, the ignored story of Muslim philanthropy - all are fragments of a larger picture. They show how selective questioning, sensational headlines and ideological framing transform normal civic life into a theatre of threat.

In today’s Britain, where Muslims form a vibrant, integral part of society, we must ask: is this journalism or agenda-setting? Are we witnessing public interest reporting, or the steady manufacturing of public fear?

Because if the latter is true - and the evidence mounts by the day - then Britain’s culture war is not just about Muslims. It is about the corrosion of truth itself, and the ease with which the machinery of outrage can turn neighbours into suspects, and citizens into scapegoats.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.