British newspaper: Why does the Western media not call the extremist right's armed attacks terrorism?

An article in the Guardian newspaper has criticized British media coverage of the attack on a migrant reception center in Dover, UK, last week.

The article pointed out that the British counter-terrorism police recently confirmed that the attack on the center was a terrorist act, and that the perpetrator was a right-wing extremist, but the media coverage of the event for a whole week did not suggest that.

The author of the article, Miqdad Farsi - a member of the Muslim Council of Britain - said that although the attacker publicly expressed his hatred of Muslims, and tweeted an hour before its execution that he was planning to "exterminate Muslim children", the media dealt with the attack silently.

Newspapers and websites did not publish analyzes of counter-terrorism theorists talking about the motives for this terrorist attack, and there was no round-the-clock media coverage that talks about the society to which the perpetrator belongs, and tries to answer the question: Why do they hate us so much?

Which is often raised in attacks carried out by Muslims.

He pointed out that most British newspapers did not feature the attack on their front pages the day after it occurred, and the Home Secretary did her best to ensure that the authorities were not treating the attack as an act of terrorism.

“Could it be that the reason for the relatively silent reaction to this despicable act of terrorism is that the perpetrator is not a foreigner, but rather a Briton who hates immigration, which agrees with the opinion of many right-wing media and the British government?” asked Miqdad Farsi.

analysis

He said the Media Monitoring Center of the Muslim Council of Britain analyzed media coverage of 16 terrorist attacks that took place in Britain between 2015 and 2020.

The analysis revealed a wide variation in the use of the term "terrorism" and related terms by the media, and revealed that describing attacks as "terrorist" was less common in those perpetrated by the extreme right.

The article pointed out that the analysis touched on many examples of terrorist attacks perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and the media did not rush to link them to terrorism.

Among those examples is the massacre committed by a right-wing white supremacist in El Paso, Texas, this year, in which he shot shoppers and workers in a store in the city, killing 20 people, but the media was initially unwilling to describe the bloody incident as an attack. terrorist.

At the conclusion of his article, the writer asked: "If our media and political institutions are unable to highlight far-right terrorism and research its causes after a terrorist attack on a migrant center, when will they be able to do that?"