Why Does a Suspected Anti-Muslim Attack Barely Make the News?
It is frankly an appalling and frightening scene. Video footage has been circulating on social media of a bare-chested man with a blade on the day he allegedly attacked five people in Edinburgh. “I’m protecting the country,” he is heard shouting in the video.
It reportedly began near a mosque on Friday evening, and the video footage shows him appearing to carry a weapon and battering the door of a pizzeria. The man has been arrested and charged, and counter-terrorism officers have joined Police Scotland’s investigation. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, posted on X that it “appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred” but that is pretty much all he has done. In total, 53 words have gone up on X from the Prime Minister, and the story, which has left the British Muslim community in shock, is barely being covered by the media in any prominent way.
It is a stark difference to what we saw less than two months ago, on April 29, when two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, London. An emergency Cobra meeting was convened that same day and the terror threat level was upgraded. The Prime Minister and King Charles visited the scene. The attack ran across nearly every front page in the country.
By the time Sir Keir delivered his statement from Downing Street, it was not just a tweet but an address: a list of promises — visible police presence, investment in Jewish security to the tune of £25 million — built on a passage of real moral force.
There has been no Cobra meeting. There has been a short post on X from the Prime Minister. As of this weekend, not a single newspaper outside Scotland has carried the Edinburgh attacks on its front page. The government machinery that can move within a few hours has remained largely stationary.
Why Does a Suspected Anti-Muslim Attack Barely Make the News?
The political and media reaction to a knife-wielding man allegedly attacking Muslims in Edinburgh raises uncomfortable questions about whose safety Britain takes seriously.Shehab Khan (Zeteo UK)
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geneva_convenience
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Corporal_Punishment
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •I'd have thought the answer was obvious.
Our 2-tier society is real, just not in the way the gammon think it is.
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Peter Brown
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •Scots law takes a dim view of contempt.
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geneva_convenience
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Peter Brown
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •the Jews got stabbed in England under English law which is much more relaxed about what you can publish pre-trial.
I’m talking about Scots law which is extremely strict, to avoid a “trial-by-media”
And rightly so, as it protects the integrity of the court hearing.
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geneva_convenience
in reply to HM King Charles III DG FD • • •This is just in: social media isnt mainstream news.
The Jewish man who got stabbed made frontpage multiple days in a row and it was directly called a terror attack.
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HM King Charles III DG FD
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •DrCake likes this.
geneva_convenience
in reply to HM King Charles III DG FD • • •That's crazy the BBC completely removed any mention of Muslims or Islam from their headline.
And I'm not sure where that article is placed, but it's not on my BBC page
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Tenebris Nox
in reply to HM King Charles III DG FD • • •Compare how the Golders Green attack and this one were reported by BBC and other media outlets. Golders Green insisted it was "terrorism" and he was a "terrorist". It was definite and insistent.
Count how many times this BBC report uses "allegedly" and "appearing"/ "appears". Far more moderate and tentative. This is what happens with these type of attacks: if you're brown or black it's certainly "terrorism" and if you're white British then it's possibly an "incident" of some sort.
Two-tier reporting.
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geneva_convenience
in reply to HM King Charles III DG FD • • •Someone made a detailed analysis showing the events side by side lemmy.ml/post/49123177
geneva_convenience
2026-06-23 08:43:32
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Tenebris Nox
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •100%.
Just look at the little noise made about neo-nazi, Alina Burn, in Bristol who attempted to behead someone with an axe she accused of being muslim.
Or the lack of noise about the firebombings of mosques, rapes of muslim girls and women, deliberate knocking down of black and brown people and the list if hate attacks goes on.
And yet a mentally ill Sudan-born British man is labelled a "terrorist" or someone who may (or not?) have driven car at a Manchester synagogue is called a "mass terrorist" attack even though police killed 50% of the victims (1 person).
It's Two-tier racist reporting (and it aint anti-white for sure).
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TWeaK
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •The article spends an awful lot of time talking about the government and pretty much glosses over the media.
The government responds to public interest, if there is more public interest on a topic the government will spend more time addressing it.
Public interest is by and large driven by the media (and even when it's not it often appears to be so).
The problem here is that the media is not covering this widely enough. This is perhaps understandable with privately owned media, who have their own vested interests, but I think the bigger question is why state-funded news organisations aren't better at picking this up. That is a root cause and political issue.
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AlHouthi4President
in reply to geneva_convenience • • •"Suspected" doing a lot of work in the headlines that I have seen.
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DFX4509B (Joshua Mason)
in reply to Malyca • •The right wing took our media when Fox News was created, so they've owned our media for decades, or at least our news media anyways.
Or at least that's true for the US.
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