Salafist influencers dominate French social media, according to an investigation by BFM TV, France’s most watched news channel. They cite examples of social media imams claiming that women become “prey” if they leave the house, and calling song and dance “haram” or forbidden. Another says that women can wear trousers, but only so long as they do so under a long abaya or dress. Yet another, that men and women shouldn’t even look one another in the eye, unless it is a religious matter or business transaction.
It might be tempting to think that France has an especially bad problem but that would be a mistake. The same sort of thing can be found on this side of the Channel. Take Smile 2 Jannah (Paradise), a successful Islamic YouTube channel with 1.06 million subscribers and over 300 million views, which is described as an “infusion of faith and current affairs laced with humour”. In an interview, the presenter of the channel revealed himself as Zeeshan Ali, a British South Asian. He created the channel in order to do “dawah”, or preach, to young Muslims.
At first glance you might think this was a very modern approach to Islam. After all, he does trailer reviews for Marvel movies. When you look closer however, something much more sectarian is revealed. There are videos with titles like “Indian Urinates on Low Caste Hindu” (56,000 views), while others refer to “Zi0ni$ts” and a “Jewi$h Woman”. Many video titles refer to Ahmadiyya Muslims as “Qadiyani”, which is widely recognised as a religious slur.
The channel was also supportive of Andrew Tate, posting a rambling conspiracy that argued that Tate’s troubles were somehow linked to Western intelligence. That might seem surprising, considering the moral panic over the Netflix drama Adolescence, which tacitly blamed white working-class boys for the rise in misogyny. However, “incel” males appear to be disproportionately drawn from some ethnic minorities. It is well known that Andrew Tate is mixed-race, with an African-American father, but it is less commonly known that he converted to Islam. Smile 2 Jannah may now have fallen out with Tate, after he criticised Muslims, but the apparent rise in misogyny has a strong connection to mass immigration, however difficult it is for our media Establishment to admit it.
Conspiracy theories occupy a surprisingly large part of the worldview pushed by the channel. One video, from 2020, claims that the USA and UK provided assistance to ISIS, while a 2019 video claimed there was a possibility that the London Bridge attack that year by an Islamist terrorist could have been a false flag attack. Zeeshan Ali also runs a podcast, called Declassified. Among the episodes are one that discusses “mind control” and the CIA, and another on the music industry’s links to the occult.
It would be a mistake to see this as merely kooky, however. On the same podcast are interviews with Moazzem Begg and Asim Qureshi of CAGE, the organisation which was heavily criticised after Qureshi called ISIS executioner Jihadi John a “beautiful young man”. On S2J News, which Zeeshan Ali also runs, there are articles praising the success of the new Syrian government under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the al-Nusra front, which was al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. Strangely the positive articles about al-Sharaa on S2J News don’t mention that bit of context.
Similarly, when Elon Musk helped put the grooming gang scandal back on the front pages earlier this year, Smile 2 Jannah was there to attack the narrative. Drawing heavily on the work of the controversial Dr Ella Cockbain, it presents a distorted analysis which ignores the inquiries held in Rotherham, Greater Manchester, or Telford. Instead, it blames “Rupert Murdoch’s Times” for breaking the story and then claims the grooming gang issue really got going with a report by the Quilliam Foundation. The problem with that? The Quilliam report came out in 2017, years after the Jay and Casey reports in Rotherham had established that industrial-scale rape had happened and it was associated with ethnicity. Later academic work has confirmed that.
France isn’t alone — Britain has a problem with sectarian media too
The video then discusses revenge attacks by those upset about grooming gangs, including the far-right terror attack in Christchurch, the Finsbury Park attack, and the murder of an elderly man in Rotherham. But it makes no time to discuss the detail of the grooming gang cases, let alone the murders associated with them, such as the burning to death of 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, her unborn child, her disabled sister, and her mother, by Azhar Ali Mehmood, who had been abusing her since she was 14.
British politics is changing. The election of five “Gaza Independent” MPs showed that Islamic sectarian politics is now with us. Pollsters failed to predict these results, in no small part because they have a poor grasp of what people in these areas think. In many cases, that’s because they aren’t getting their news from the BBC or the daily newspapers but instead from sites like 5 Pillars and channels like Smile 2 Jannah. If the mainstream media paid attention to these news sources they would find that France isn’t alone — Britain has a problem with sectarian media too.
