When George Holmes, a professor of conservation at the University of Leeds, first read a commentary in the Royal Geographical Society's flagship journal, he told Times Higher Education that his first assumption was that the journal had been hacked. That is a reasonable reaction to a paper in a geography journal that explains the 2024 Southport riots by way of a "strategic consensus between Zionist groups and fascist groups" against Muslims, that declares white supremacy the core of the Zionist project, and that relays a claim that most anti-Muslim rhetoric in America is financed from "Zionist Israeli" sources.
The paper is Kawtar Najib's "The United Kingdom's first anti-Muslim pogroms in a context of genocidal Islamophobia in Gaza," published in The Geographical Journal in August 2025. Jewish News flagged it a year ago, noting that its sources for the Zionism material include such overtly biased sources as David Miller, Hatem Bazian, and Press TV. The RGS replied with a statement about academic freedom. Now, as the Telegraph reports, the row has reached the Society's own annual conference, with Holmes calling for the article's editor to step down and the RGS insisting the piece passed double-blind review by two referees and needed only a single factual correction.
Both sides are arguing about the wrong thing. Holmes says the paper is racist; the RGS says academic freedom protects it. Those positions can both be true, and neither one tells you whether the paper should have survived peer review. Peer review exists to ask a narrower question: does the evidence in this paper support the claims in this paper?
So I ran the article through TAMAR, the propaganda-analysis tool I built to check exactly that, and the answer is that the paper has a credible factual core wrapped in a structure of assertions that never touch it.
The core is real. Mosques were attacked after the Southport murders; false claims that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker spread through far-right channels and social media; British Muslims were frightened and targeted. A paper that stopped there would be unremarkable.
Of course, the paper does not stop there. It builds outward in layers, and each layer is treated as proven by the time the next one is laid on top of it. Targeted anti-Muslim violence becomes "pogroms," a word the author herself defines as requiring state support and organized intent to massacre, neither of which she then demonstrates. The pogroms are placed inside a "genocidal context" in Gaza. Gaza becomes evidence of a global "genocidal Islamophobia." Zionism and the far right are fused into one project, and by the end conservative parties and even the centre-left are said to be pursuing the same anti-Muslim enterprise with different methods. Each step borrows the credibility of the step before it, and none of them has independent support.
Take the Gaza claim, since it is in the title. What is the evidence that the war in Gaza motivated anyone in the Southport riots? The paper places the riots in a genocidal context and says the dehumanization of British Muslims "echoes" that of Gazans. That is the entire case. No rioter is quoted mentioning Gaza. No organizer is shown invoking it. None of the channels that mobilized the crowds is shown telling anyone to take to the streets over it. Meanwhile the actual drivers are unusually well documented: parliamentary evidence traces the sequence from the murders to the small-boat lie to amplification by far-right accounts, and reporters on the ground recorded the slogans, which were about immigration, "our country," and the grooming-gang scandals, a narrative the paper itself discusses at length. The paper has the well-evidenced causes and the unevidenced cause in front of it, and it makes the unevidenced one the organizing principle. Gaza is an interpretive backdrop that the author promoted to an explanation without ever passing through the stage of finding even a tenuous link.
The Zionism claim fails differently, and this is where the paper becomes something worse than sloppy. The author observes that some far-right activists admire Israel as a model of muscular nationalism, and from that she concludes that Zionism is part of the far right's war on Muslims. But that inference runs the wrong direction. If A admires B, that tells you something about A. It tells you nothing about B, and it certainly does not establish that B admires A back, shares A's ideology, or participates in A's projects. Tommy Robinson waving an Israeli flag is a fact about Tommy Robinson. To turn it into a fact about Zionism, you would need Zionist organizations cooperating with the far right toward anti-Muslim ends, and the paper offers nothing of the kind. It offers a Press TV report that the rioters' sympathy for Zionism was "open and enthusiastic," and it offers Hatem Bazian's number about Zionist financiers of Islamophobia. The Iranian state broadcaster and the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine are the evidentiary bridge between a British football hooligan and the Jewish national movement.
There is an awkward fact the paper never mentions. While the riots were still under way, the Community Security Trust warned that the forum used to instigate the first riot in Southport was co-run by a suspected neo-Nazi who was urging followers to target synagogues, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue's analysis of the riot-related Telegram channels found white nationalist channels accusing the riot organizers themselves of being paid by "Zionist" interests. The one place Gaza and Zionism did show up in the rioters' own ecosystem was as an antisemitic conspiracy theory aimed at the rioters. That does not disprove that pro-Israel sentiment exists on the British far right, but it makes a story in which the mob belonged to a coherent Zionist-fascist alliance very hard to tell with a straight face. The British far right contains pro-Israel nationalists, anti-Muslim agitators, and open antisemites, frequently in the same forum thread, and a scholar who collapses that into a single actor with a single ideology has stopped describing the far right and started using it.
Academic freedom protects a scholar's right to hold and argue an unpopular thesis. It has never meant that a journal must publish a thesis regardless of whether the argument for it works, and a journal that waves the phrase around to avoid saying whether the argument works has confused its own reputation with the author's rights. The RGS could have said the paper was reviewed, the reviewers erred, and the Society will publish the criticism alongside it. Instead it said the views are the author's own, which is the one thing nobody disputed.
Notice, too, what the paper does to the people it claims to defend. British Muslims were attacked because of a lie about an asylum seeker and a decade of politics about boats and grooming gangs. Those are British problems with British causes, and they can be addressed. A theory that relocates the cause to Tel Aviv, and that names Jews as the financiers behind the mobs, offers British Muslims nothing except a familiar enemy, and it hands the far right a gift by lettign them off the hook and blaming Zionists.
The author has told THE she is preparing a formal response. She will presumably defend her thesis, and she is entitled to. What she cannot supply in a response is the thing the paper lacked in the first place, which is a rioter who mentioned Gaza and a Zionist organization that coordinated with the mob. If those exist, they belong in the response, and the row will end. If they do not, then the referees were asked a simple question a year ago and got the answer wrong, and the only issue left for the Royal Geographical Society is whether it is prepared to say so.
By the way, the paper's author seems to fully support Hamas-style "resistance."
Friday, September 04, 2026
Elder of Ziyon.png)
.png)
Buy 
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
.png){kind=link}