Mohammed Emwazi: hasty media assumptions damage debate

The Washington Post should be credited with a great scoop in naming the man known as Jihadi John as Mohammed Emwazi, a “well-to-do” 26-year-old from north Kensington in London, last Thursday.

Yet the adjective seems to have set off media reporting that considers anyone from west London to be wealthy.

The New York Post led with “Isis militant ‘Jihadi John’ unmasked as middle-class Brit”, describing Emwazi as “a pampered college grad who loved fancy clothes and grew up in middle-class London”.

Related: Is it wrong to publish this photograph of Mohammed Emwazi?

Reuters and Fox News repeated lines suggesting Emwazi came from a relatively well off family, while CNN used the story to criticise the Obama’s administration’s suggestion that economic deprivation can create extremism.

Tech blog-turned new media upstart Pando even built a whole article around the question of “Why, oh why, would a rich boy from a nice home go on to make snuff movies?”

Closer to home, the Daily Telegraph described Emwazi’s roots as “middle-class”, based in “a leafy and affluent suburb of west London”, that borders “David Cameron’s famously wealthy and influential “Notting Hill set”.

Unfortunately, the portrayals of Emwari’s background in all these reports are at best massive oversimplifications, and at worst show a complete failure to try to understand the place he came from. In the rush to get as much information about Emwazi, newspapers are as ever in danger of misleading rather than informing readers.

I grew up minutes away from the same areas Emwazi moved through as a child and young adult, and am only three years older.

The area, like much of London, is a patchwork of extreme wealth side by side with deprived housing estates and run-down streets.

It may contain some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, but the lives of those who occupy the multimillion-pound townhouses and studio apartments are worlds away from those of the un- or under-employed who occupy the council stock and housing benefit-funded flats round the corner.

I went to North Westminster Community School, which was attended by four of those named as part of the radicalised group of youths from north London with whom Emwazi associated, including Mohammed Sakr, who was killed in a drone strike in Somalia in 2012.

The inspection reports of the nearby schools Emwazi attended, St Mary Magdalene Primary and Quintin Kynaston secondary, show institutions trying to compensate for the disadvantages of large portions of their intake. Both had above-average levels of children from deprived areas.

The estate where Emwazi last lived in London, the Mozart, may have left behind its days as “crack city”, but few would describe life there now as “well-to-do”.

Knowing where Emwazi grew up and went to school doesn’t tell us for sure whether he was disadvantaged or not, but a quick look at house prices in those areas offers even less reason to conclude he was well off.

The Post says the “well to do” description was based on talking to Emwazi’s “friends and others”.

Meanwhile, other news outlets appear to have filled in the gaps using Google Maps, estate agent ads and the screenplay for Notting Hill.

It’s of course understandable that some aspects of London life got lost in translation between the UK and US.

Councils paying out to private landlords to allow families with little income to live in £800,000 apartments will come as a surprise to even well-educated and worldly Americans. High house prices in London neighbourhoods don’t mean all the area’s inhabitants are well off.

Emwazi made his way to Westminster University through a higher education system that does a lot more to ensure a lack of resources isn’t an insurmountable barrier to a degree.

Once it became apparent other outlets were on to Emwazi’s real name, the Post had to stop digging any further and publish fast. Reporters were unable to talk to his family, and didn’t for instance know that his absent father was a cab driver.

But whatever the reasons, the representation of Emwazi’s background could have a profound impact on the debate about how we stop more young men (and women) from the same places turning up on YouTube with blood on their hands. Portraying those places more accurately would be a good place to start.

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