There is an understandable temptation to simply ignore frankly absurd allegations such as the claim that Gems Education is somehow channelling money to both radical jihadists and the Clintons. Trying to correct the distortions, one theory goes, would merely give the original report the oxygen of publicity.
However, there are grounds to believe that the long-term effect of this turn-the-other-cheek policy can be seen in the rising number of Islamophobic incidents in everyday life in the West. To quote just a few examples from the last few months, Muslim airline passengers in the United States and the United Kingdom have been ordered off flights for speaking Arabic, for reading an art book written in Arabic script, for sweating or simply because their presence made fellow passengers nervous.
This is bigotry, pure and simple. But every time a major news network – in the Gems Education example, this was Fox Business Network, a sister channel to Fox News, quoting an allegation that originally featured in a right-wing US news and politics website, The Daily Caller – it adds to the tide of misinformation about a religion practised by one quarter of the world’s population.
Parents who have children at Gems schools in the UAE mostly laughed off the allegations. They knew the “religious tax” cited ominously in the report is likely to be nothing more sinister than zakat, one of the five tenets of the faith and similar to tithing, the practice in both Christianity and Judaism to allocate part of one’s income for charitable purposes.
But in places with low levels of correct knowledge about Islam and a flood of misinformation, this kind of distortion can spread – and could have unintended consequences for both students and employees. The reality is that even if this kind of report is challenged rather than ignored, some people will still believe the worst about Islam. The oxygen-of-publicity argument is also valid, because seeking to use facts to discredit the original report is likely to cause it to be read even more widely.
However, failing to try to instil facts into this debate also comes at a cost because it allows the lies to flourish. With the US presidential race becoming more heated, we ought to expect more examples of this kind of allegation. Even if many of these Islamophobic incidents that follow are relatively mundane and low-level, they point undeniably to a disturbing trend that we need to address.
