Sue Roberts
Press Complaints Commission
Dear Sirs,
We would like the Press Complaints Commission to urgently look into our
complaint below about an article written by the BBC1 presenter Robert
Kilroy-Silk for his weekly column in the Express on Sunday on January 4th
2004.
It is truly galling to see an Islamophobic hatemonger like Kilroy given a
platform to propagate his clearly racist views in a respected mainstream
newspaper.
Kilroy-Silk is – as you must know - a man who positively revels in airing
his anti-Arab and anti-Muslim views. We wonder what the Press Complaints
Commission would think if a mainstream newspaper proper were to give the
same kind of prominence to a columnist who was so openly anti-black or
anti-Jewish?
In last Sunday’s paper Kilroy surpassed all his previous efforts and
produced a gratuitous anti-Arab rant.
As you can see in the following extract (“We Owe Arabs Nothing”) from the
Express on Sunday, Kilroy-Silk appears unable (or unwilling) to distinguish
between the terrorists who perpetrated the Sept 11 atrocities and the
ordinary Arab peoples who constitute a population of over 200 million.
“We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really?… What do they think we feel
about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000
civilians on September 11… That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings
in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide
bombers, limb-amputators, women-repressors?”
Note that Kilroy doesn’t attack the actions of a particular few – but ‘the
Arabs’ as a whole. This seems to be a clear case of indiscriminate
generalisation and as such, blatantly racist. The Press Council upheld a
complaint against The Sun for publishing similar comments about ‘the Arabs’
in 1987.
The Muslim Council of Britain considers Kilroy’s remarks quoted above to be
ignorant, extremely derogatory and indisputably racist.
We now urge the Press Complaints Commission to take urgent and firm action
on this extremely serious matter to reassure the Muslim and Arab communities
in Britain and abroad that you will not in any way accept the demonisation
of entire peoples.
Certainly, if the word ‘Jews’ was substituted for ‘Arabs’ in the Kilroy
quotes above it seems to us that the PCC would not tolerate any delay before
it took substantive action against the Express on Sunday.
Please note that this is not the first time that Kilroy-Silk has made
similar remarks. On Monday 16th January 1995, Kilroy-Silk wrote the
following in the Daily Express:
“Moslems everywhere behave with equal savagery. They behead criminals,
stone to death female – only female – adulterers, throw acid in the faces of
women who refuse to wear the chadar, mutilate the genitals of young girls
and ritually abuse animals. Nor are non-Moslems immune to their depravity.
They conspired to kill the Pope, placed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie
for writing things they did not like, murdered several of his supporters,
threatened the life of a Moslem author who said, rightly, Islam treats women
as second-class citizens, and indiscriminately murdered Western
holiday-makers in Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere – just because they were
Westerners.”
Yours sincerely,
Mr Inayat Bunglawala,
Secretary,
Media Committee,
The Muslim Council of Britain,
Boardman House,
64 Broadway,
Stratford,
London E15 1NT
