Muslims in Europe U.K. regulators to investigate political broadcast critical of Turkey, Muslims

OFCOM, the U.K. communication regulator, said it was considering more than thirty complaints about a political broadcast by UKIP, the Euro-skeptic, anti-immigration populist party. OFCOM said that UKIP’s Wednesday night broadcast on ITV and the BBC may have crossed the line in giving racial offense, promoting Islamophobia, and engendering bias toward Turkey.

OFCOM said it was looking at whether to launch an investigation into the 4-minute broadcast on Wednesday night, which urged British voters to vote to exit the EU in the coming referendum on the issue. The arguments for existing Europe are made by others, but the UKIP broadcast argued that Britain should leave the EU because Turkey might join the organization. The broadcast highlighted Turkey’s Muslim population and claimed that if Turkey joined the EU, up to fifteen million Turkish citizens could move to live and work in other EU states – including the United Kingdom if it was still an EU member.

The International Business Times reports that one of the first complaints against the broadcast came from the Lib Dems, who accused UKIP of inciting racial and religious hatred as well as making factual inaccuracies.

In a letter to OFCOM and the BBC Trust, the Lib Dems said: “The presentation and tone of the piece is focused on provoking on negative, hostile reaction towards Turkey and the people living there, as well as Turkish people in the UK and elsewhere.

“It has been deliberately constructed to be offensive and breaches the code in that it ‘incites racial or religious hatred’ whilst using an array of questionable and in some cases entirely misleading assertions to advance this ‘case’.

“The piece is offensive and set on pitching community against community. It is attempting to masquerade as an anti-EU film, but its main subjects of attack and clearly Turkey and Islam.”

Meral Hussein-Ece, a Lib Dem peer, equalities spokeswoman and the only British parliamentarian of Turkish descent, said it was “stomach-turning, dog-whistle politics demonising an entire country and all its people”.

She said: “The large Turkish community in the UK has made an enormous economic and social contribution over many decades. They play a vital and vibrant role in our society and shouldn’t be subject to Nigel Farage’s nasty politics.”

OFCOM has received twenty-one complaints about the broadcast on BBC1 and ten about the broadcast on ITV. OFCOM said: “We will assess these complaints before deciding whether to investigate or not.”

The broadcast warned about the number of “Islamic imam schools” in Turkey, highlighted the shrinking number of Christians, and showed a succession of images of minarets and women wearing headscarves.

It also offered a list of statistics about women suffering physical violence, and how a quarter of all marriages in Turkey involved women before the age of 18. The broadcast offered these facts to support its argument that the country should not be allowed to join the EU.