Julie Burchill abused me for being Muslim – yet she was cast as the victim
Last December, I was referred to as an Islamist and a paedophile worshipper. I read multiple tweets speculating about whether I’m any good in bed, and insults about me supposedly having a moustache. Strange poems popped up portraying lurid sexual fantasies about having a threesome with me and the French farright leader Marine Le Pen. I saw posts being liked on Facebook that told me to “kill myself for shame” and suggested that I had been a victim of female genital mutilation. None of these were the actions of an anonymous troll – they were the work of Sunday Telegraph columnist Julie Burchill.
This morning Burchill published a lengthy apology for these defamatory statements. She acknowledged that some of them “play into Islamophobic tropes”, and admitted that she was wrong to make “racist and misogynist comments” regarding my appearance and sex life. Burchill has apologised “unreservedly and unconditionally” for the “hurtful and unacceptable statements”, and undertakes not to contact me directly again or “engage in any course of action amounting to harassment”. She has also had to pay substantial damages for the distress caused and my legal costs.
These untrue and deeply upsetting comments had been made following me tweeting criticism of Burchill’s friend Rod Liddle for an article he had written nine years ago, in which he said the one reason why he’s not a teacher is that he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids”.
I happen to be Muslim (if I’m honest, not a particularly pious one) and Burchill used that to single me out on social media. She had some form in this regard, having previously tweeted me asking whether I had got rid of a bawdy joke in my Twitter bio because of being threatened by my “co-religionists”.
When I replied objecting to her response, which implied that Muslims were tacit supporters of child abuse, I was met with the accusation of “[worshipping] a paedophile”. On Burchill’s Facebook page, she encouraged her followers to “wade in” on social media, and referred to me as an Islamist and a nonce. For weeks afterwards, Burchill continued to publish posts on social media both to and about me.
What followed was a barrage of abuse on social media and by email. People speculated about whether I was really a woman, and really a Muslim – and I was subjected to rape threats and threats of physical violence. I received direct messages on Instagram calling me a “dirty brown whore”, and fantasising about me being raped in “an all white gangbang”. The intensity of the abuse, along with Burchill’s continuing derogatory posts about me, severely affected my mental health. I couldn’t sleep, and had bouts of trembling and heart palpitations. For the first time in my life, I was prescribed anti-anxiety medication.
At the same time, a media storm was brewing. In response to her conduct on social media, the publisher Little, Brown terminated Burchill’s book contract for Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics. In her apology, Burchill states that she wishes to “to make clear that I accept that Ms Sarkar did not call for my publisher to break ties with me and bears no responsibility for this”. But despite the fact I had never asked for this to happen, media outlets framed the matter as cancel culture gone mad. Burchill’s defamatory statements were reported as merely “[making] a comment on Twitter to Muslim ‘libertarian communist’ journalist Ash Sarkar about the age of one of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives.” The Times wrote that “Welcome to the Woke Trials, billed as … [an] indictment of the ‘outrage mob’ and its impact on freedom of speech”, had itself “become a casualty of the very forces it was describing”. It felt like much of the media’s reporting of the issue played down the defamation, racism and harassment in favour of framing me as part of the woke mob – and Burchill as its victim.
Last week, the Society of Editors was embroiled in a row after its thenexecutive director, Ian Murray, claimed that the UK media “is most certainly not racist” in response to Meghan’s criticism of how she’d been treated by the press. But what my experience with Burchill shows is that not only is there racism from journalists themselves, there’s also a lack of accountability more broadly within the industry.
The unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, the only thing that separates an anonymous troll and a journalist is a byline. Some of the worst abuse I’ve received is either from journalists or the direct consequence of their actions in spreading misinformation about me. Those at the top of our industry have persistently drawn a veil of silence around the bullying tactics that drum black and brown women out of public life. We cannot claim to have a truly free press as long as those who tacitly encourage and facilitate the harassment of women of colour remain sheltered within the media.
Ash Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media, and lectures in political theory at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam
There are bad movies, the kind of third-rate filmmaking we see all the time, and then there are transcendentally bad movies that can only result from deep, fanatical attachment to the material. Director, writer and producer Chris Sanders here achieves something on a par with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. His Nest of Vampires is a little-England horror-thriller with a plot as overlarded as an Elvis sandwich, uniformly appalling acting, and the same almost beatific earnestness as those two legendary films.
MI5 agent Kit Valentine (Tom Fairfoot) leaves his London stamping ground to shake down some unnamed
English town for a human trafficking ring that – after his wife is murdered – has abducted his daughter. He needs to get a move on, because the network sells off the girls to moneyed clients to butcher in satanic rituals. Not racy enough? Some of the criminals are also vampires who like a “nibble” on the customers. And Valentine is further up against it when his bosses reveal they are in cahoots. Tied to a chair, though, he has news for them: “You’re not the only secret society that operates within MI5.” Then his own canines turn extrapointy.
For a film so full of brain-freezing exposition, it takes inhuman effort to piece that plot description together. It’s actually a nest of non sequiturs, randomness the only governing principle in a sinkhole of characters, factions, ideas and twists. A prologue refers to lapis lazuli as a means by which vampires can withstand daylight, but this is barely mentioned again. One apparently Italian miscreant – implied to be a vampire, before he isn’t – sounds like the Dolmio Man when he resorts to English: “Good-a point-a!” If criminal networks really were this confusing, the police would have a collective nervous breakdown.
Hidden in the aimless scenes and slack direction is the odd nugget of dialogue with a noirish gleam. But mostly it’s pure panto: “I’m about to do a spot of decorating. I was thinking dark red would suit this room.” It may be remiss to dump on a film that cost £30,000, but it seems to be only this type of film-making that can hit a