Anti-Muslim Tropes of Criminality and Submission in Belgian Public Radio
Harmful stereotypes of submissive Muslim women and criminal Muslim youth can be reproduced even without explicitly hateful statements. Asking insinuating questions and not challenging false and discriminatory remarks all add up to create a misleading image of the Muslim community.
Twice this month, Fabrice Grosfilley, a journalist at BX1+, a local public radio station in Brussels, reinforced anti-Muslim stereotypes during the programme he was hosting. He did so once when asking prejudiced questions that reinforced negative perceptions of the Muslim headscarf, and again when he failed to challenge a racist statement by a police officer he was interviewing.
The first incident happened on 7th September, when the topic of the programme was on the recent motion that passed in Molenbeek, Brussels, allowing public administration employees to wear religious symbols. When interviewing the guests, programme host Grosfilley asked a series of bigoted questions to Imane Nachat, member of the “Collectif des 100 diplômées”, a collective combatting discrimination against women who wear the headscarf.
First, the journalist asked Nachat to confirm that some Muslim women wear the headscarf as an act of submission: “there is no one way to wear the headscarf”, he said. “There are indeed people who do it for conviction, others who do it for reaction and those who do it a little bit for submission.”
In doing so, the journalist shifted the focus of the discussion to something that is not relevant to the motion passed in Molenbeek. He thereby delegitimised the requests for freedom of religion within the public administration that come from Muslim women themselves.
Later on, Grosfilley asked Nachat a second tendentious question. He postulated that there is the “danger” that, by wearing the headscarf, a woman could “introduce a kind of connivance” with other Muslims who would then call her “my sister”. In doing so, he is hinting that veiled Muslim women working in public administration would unprofessionally favour people with the same faith and background, as opposed to those Muslim women who do not wear the headscarf.
Would the journalist have asked the same question about two catholic people wearing necklaces with a cross? And what image of Muslim women does he offer to his listeners – one that recognises their struggle for rights or the one the reproduces old stereotypes of submission? Through insinuating questions, the radio host expressed his own opinion on Muslim women who wear the headscarf without checking his own prejudices.
The Western construction of Muslim women as “oppressed” by a “backward” and “uncivilised” religion and culture, says a lot about the society that has produced this stereotype. As the academic Edward Said illustrated in his book ‘Orientalism’, this stereotypical representation of Arabs and Islam is created by the West to reinforce its self-perception as a “free”, “modern” and “civilised” society.
The following day, on 8th September, Grossfilley hosted an episode which focused on racism within the Belgian police. When discussing the lack of diversity among Belgian police officers, and especially the under-representation of Black people and Muslim people, one of the guests, chief of police Jurgen De Landsheer, denied the issue of structural racism, and instead blamed the communities that are under-represented.
He said: “there are a lot of young people in the neighbourhoods who got a bit out of hand during their youth, which means that they no longer have the possibility of being candidates for the police”. In other words, he accused Muslims and Black people of having more criminal records than white people, which prevents them from being police officers, thus causing the imbalance in the police.
The radio host could have clarified that De Landsheer’s statement is false, that it conveys an inaccurate and stereotypical image of Muslims and Black people. He could have challenged him to provide data to support his assertion. Instead, he confirmed that “yeah, it's a question of having been convicted”.
Of course, there are Muslim and Black people who cannot enter the police forces because they have criminal records, especially in underprivileged neighbourhoods. But considering that the lack of diversity in the police is a long-standing issue in Belgium, and in Europe widely, is this really the main reason for the lack of diversity among the police? Or is it rather a combination of different factors, including lack of confidence in the institutions – especially an institution that has contributed to the persecution and marginalisation of minority groups.
As reported by Reuters, “[Belgian] police say they struggle most with surveillance of communities like Molenbeek, where the mostly white force is viewed with suspicion by a largely immigrant population, wary of being labelled as potential terrorists.” International organisations such as the Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced how counterterrorism policies that criminalise Muslims and the areas where they live have further degraded the relationship between police and minority communities.
The duty of a journalist is to challenge false and discriminatory statements, not reinforce harmful stereotypes that perpetuate discriminatory attitudes and actions. If Grossfilley mentioned other barriers in diversity hiring, the listeners would have had quite a different picture of the issue.
