By downplaying Islamophobic attacks over antisemitism, the BBC is reinforcing racism
demonstrator holds a sign reading ‘No to Islamophobia’ during a protest outside a Reform UK rally in Birmingham on 28 March 2025
Faisal Hanif writes in Middle East Eye on 6 May 2026:
The BBC’s latest Panorama investigation, Antisemitism: Why British Jews Are Afraid, aired on 20 April.
Few would dispute that such scrutiny is necessary, as antisemitism is real, persistent, and demands rigorous journalism. But the question that follows is harder to ignore: why is there no equivalent institutional focus on Islamophobia?
This is not a question of programming balance alone. It points to something deeper – a consistent pattern in which some forms of racism are foregrounded while others are marginalised, qualified, or buried. The evidence is not confined to a single programme. It emerges across coverage decisions, language choices, and editorial judgements – and it is accumulating.
A comparative look at the BBC’s reporting on antisemitism and Islamophobia demonstrates this. In the online piece promoting the Panorama programme, hate crime statistics for England and Wales showed that Muslims were identified as the most targeted religious group in absolute terms – 4,478 recorded incidents. This fact appeared briefly, embedded mid-article, before the narrative shifted. The largest number became a footnote.
In the same piece, the BBC foregrounded a population-adjusted figure: that antisemitic incidents, while lower in absolute terms, were proportionally higher relative to the size of the British Jewish community. This is a legitimate analytical frame, but it was applied selectively.
Following the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, Islamophobic campus incidents rose more than tenfold – from three to 31 cases. Antisemitic incidents rose from 12 to 67. Both are significant. Despite a proportionally sharper escalation in Islamophobia, it received a fraction of the airtime, and the article headlined only the anxieties of Jewish students.