British MPs demand meeting with tabloid editor over ‘misleading’ Muslim survey story
The 10 MPs said in a letter to the Sun on Thursday: “We are writing to request a meeting with you regarding your recent story ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadists’ from Monday 23rd November.”
Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, led the Labour backbench call for an explanation from Tony Gallagher, the tabloid’s editor, saying they were worried about the impact “flawed” and “misleading” stories have in stoking hate crimes.
The group of MPs said editorial decisions that have been made “have consequences on attitudes to Muslims in the UK”, adding that this week there had been an “alarming increase” in attacks on British Muslims.
“Figures this week show that in one week since the barbaric Paris attacks hate crimes against Muslims have increased by 300 per cent in the UK,” said the parliamentarians.
The letter comes after the Sun newspaper published a story based on a study by pollster Survation that questioned 1,003 British Muslims by phone on behalf of the tabloid, which like the Times is owned by tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The survey found that 20% agreed that they had “some” or “a lot” of “sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria”. It did not however specify which warring group they were joining in the complex civil war, which has killed over 250,000 people and displaced millions over more than four years.
The Sun, however, falsely stated that the survey found the sympathy was for those “who have fled the UK to fight for IS in Syria”.
The Survation survey also found that even among non-Muslim Britons, those with sympathy for young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria was 13 per cent, and those with a “lot” of sympathy was 4 per cent (compared to 5 per cent among Muslims).
The MPs go onto highlight other specific points of concern in their letter, such as the Sun only using data from November in the story, rather than explaining the significant fall in sympathy from March, when a similar survey was conducted.
They also criticise the editorial decision to focus solely on the answers of Muslim Britons to the question of sympathies with foreign fighters, with Mahmood pointing out: “This data suggests that the views of Muslims and non-Muslims are not that different.”
The politicians also point out that any mention of Islamic State had been omitted from the question put to surveyed Muslims.
The charges from the Labour MPs, however, may cause some tension with their colleague Sadiq Khan, the party’s London mayoral candidate, who had provided a quote to the Sun for the original story as well as a accompanying comment piece. He said in his piece: “As The Sun’s poll shows, most British Muslims have come across someone with radical views – and I am no different.”
The intervention by the MPs adds to the extensive criticism the Sun has received this week, following a statement from Survation, twhich distanced itself from the headlines and said: “Survation categorically objects to the use of our findings by any group, as has happened on social networks, to incite racial or religious tensions.”
Survation had told the Guardian that it arrived at a list of people to question after filtering its database of 42 million profiles against a list of what it described as “1,500 Muslim surnames”.
Members of the public also complained and the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), the press regulator, said it had received more than 1,200 complaints about the front page by 1pm on Tuesday.
Over 30,000 signed a petition demanding the Sun apologise. “This headline and article is not only an inaccurate lie but is also inflammatory and extremely damaging to our community cohesion,” the petition on change.org read.
The petition said the report – which comes amid indications of rising levels of hate crime against Muslims – “amounts to inciting religious and racial hatred and promotes Islamophobia”.
The Times on Thursday published today a correction for what it said was its “misleading” headline that also claimed a fifth of British Muslims had sympathy for Isis. However, The Sun, Britain’s most popular newspaper, defended its reporting. “People are angry because we dared to tell the truth. Bizarre, no?” columnist Rod Liddle wrote on Thursday.
