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Former S*n editor Kelvin MacKenzie sparked more than 800 complaints to press regulator Ipso after criticising Fatima Manji for wearing a Hijab on Channel Four News while reporting on the Nice attack.

Writing exclusively for the ECHO, Fatima sets out exactly why he was so wrong

It would be easy to dismiss Kelvin MacKenzie as an embarrassing, and serially embarrassed, relic of a bygone era in British journalism.

After all, this is the man who slurred survivors of one of our most tragic national atrocities of recent decades. It took him 23 years to apologise and four more to claim he was “caught up” in a government conspiracy to tarnish Hillsborough victims, only after being confronted by brave campaigners and responsible journalists, including my Channel 4 News colleague Alex Thomson and the tireless team at the Liverpool Echo.

So I’m not expecting an apology from him any time soon.

The Sun, you will recall, is the newspaper that appears at ease with its columnists describing refugees dying at sea as “cockroaches”.

But it’s dangerous to regard Mr MacKenzie and those who echo his Islamophobic sentiments as mere pantomime villains. Their soapbox allows them to spread their ill-informed, irresponsible and malevolent invective to millions of readers. Racist and Islamophobic rhetoric has real consequences – lives have been lost and shattered in our own country.

I was grief-stricken by the massacre in Nice, particularly by the haunting image of a little girl’s corpse laying next to the doll that was once her companion.

Mr MacKenzie seemed to find my appearance on his screen equally horrific: ‘The scenes from Nice shocked audiences around the world, but did the C4 hosts (sic) headress (sic)?’

Widespread campaign

Mr MacKenzie’s article was but one wild screed in a long-running and widespread campaign to intimidate Muslims out of public life. Young men and women of all backgrounds regularly ask me for advice on how to forge a career in journalism. Mr MacKenzie’s monologue will frighten many of them into believing that they will be on the end of tabloid attacks merely for daring to do their jobs.

‘Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male-dominated and clearly violent religion?’

Kelvin MacKenzie has attempted to smear 1.6 billion Muslims in suggesting they are inherently violent. He has attempted to smear half of them further by suggesting they are helpless slaves. And he has attempted to smear me by suggesting I would sympathise with a terrorist.

In response to this, I have received kind messages from friends, colleagues, acquaintances and even those I have never met, expressing solidarity and anger at his words.

However, others took Mr MacKenzie’s column as licence to manufacture a debate on whether someone like me even belongs on screen. Among them was the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, who chose to cite the views of his ‘woman friend’ to give Mr MacKenzie’s jackbooted variety of Islamophobia some liberal credence. Meanwhile, other outlets have taken to discussing whether or not I am a 'token'.

The truth is I always pride myself on journalistic integrity regardless of who I’m interviewing or what story I’m covering.

That is my mission at Channel 4 News. I will not be deterred in this mission by the efforts of those who find the presence of Muslims in British cultural life offensive.

THE TRUTH? I confess. I pi**ed on Kelvin MacKenzie’s apparent ambitions to force anyone who looks a little different off our screens, and I’ll keep doing it.