You can tell a lot about an organisation by the language it uses. The military, for instance, are infamous for using euphemisms like collateral damage, rather than civilian deaths. Post traumatic stress disorder sounds so much nicer than the brutally honest shell shock.
Big business likes to talk about ‘downsizing’, rather than ‘mass sackings’. Both sides of the abortion debate avoid calling themselves what they are, pro- or anti-abortion, resorting instead to euphemisms like pro-life and pro-choice.
But nobody uses language to hide what they really mean more than the mainstream media. Recently, senior management at Australia’s taxpayer-funded media was caught out urging journalists to use the phrase, Minor-Attracted Persons, rather than paedophiles. The ABC is one of the worst offenders in promulgating the imported American nonsense-phrase First Nations.
These are more than just rhetorical dodges: they conceal an often revolting agenda. Calling paedophiles ‘Minor-Attracted Persons’ is deliberately designed to ‘reduce the stigma’ surrounding child molesters. To what end? What other end could there be?
Then there’s the BBC. Nobody lies and abuses language quite like the BBC.
The same organisation that spent decades enabling and covering up for one of Britain’s most prolific paedophiles spent almost as long trying to bury the horrific truth of the industrial-scale rape of white British children. Even on the rare occasions the Beeb bothers reporting on the one of the worst criminal scandals in British history, it bricks it up behind a wall of obfuscating language. Grooming gangs, instead of ‘racist child rape gangs’. ‘Asians’, instead of ‘Pakistani Muslims’.
A more subtle case of the BBC’s bizarre Islamophilia is its recent use of the term reverts to describe non-Muslims who have converted to Islam. That there was a dark agenda to the use of the term is borne out by the speed with which the BBC amended the term when people took notice.
What’s in a word, though? What does revert even mean?
One of the central conceits of Islam is that everyone is born Muslim. It’s the natural state of being: only wicked interference by our parents and culture squelches the innate goodness of our Islamic selves. So, no one ‘converts’ to Islam: they ‘revert’.
So, what’s the BBC’s game?
There are, in my view, a variety of explanations for why the BBC does this kind of thing. Partially, it’s a tendency among some of their staff to pass off esoteric vocabulary or neologisms as a form of signalling. It’s the same impulse that makes them occasionally switch to spelling the country ‘Brasil’ during football tournaments.
Partially it is down to the preoccupation, occasionally bordering on the morbid, that the BBC holds for the minutiae of the lives of Muslims in Britain. Previously this usually centred around apparently spontaneous gestures of intercommunity altruism by Muslim groups, until the status of the Ahmediyyah community, who were inevitably at the centre of such stories and whom most mainstream Muslims regard as heretics, made this too awkward.
The BBC invariably frames stories about Muslims in terms of the supposed ‘difficulties’ Muslims experience in Britain. Rather than the more obvious fact of the difficulties everyone else in Britain experience from having Muslims in their midst.
This article also demonstrates the apparent editorial reticence to look too closely at anything connected to Islam, in the way that the BBC certainly would for other faith groups. There is nothing inherently sketchy about the concept of fitra, but it has been used by fundamentalist and extremist Islamic groups to undermine the legitimacy of other religions and to justify violence against non-Muslims. If an organisation for Christian converts used a term suggesting that we had an innate tendency toward monotheism, the BBC would rightly cast a critical eye over anything else it said. But like many institutions in modern Britain that are outwardly very keen on multiculturalism, they lack the cultural awareness to make the link between that and using a term like ‘revert’.
If only it was just the BBC. Supposedly the most English of institutions, the Church of England, is rife with such idiocy. Consider the moronic, tilty-headed Anglican clergy who simpered while a Muslim preacher marked the feast of the Epiphany, which marks the Magi’s recognition of Jesus’ divinity, by reading from the Koran passages that specifically deny it.
Try to imagine just how long you’d last if you took to the minbar of your local mosque and loudly denied Muhammad’s status as a prophet.
