How Muslim news site 5Pillars spreads conspiracy theories and far-right views

Introducing his latest guest to the 5Pillars podcast earlier this year, Dilly Hussain described her as, “an iconic figure of the British far right.” Jayda Fransen, he went on to say, had achieved infamy by invading mosques and launching Christian patrols.

The former leader of Britain First, a far right party, was not an obvious interviewee for an Islamic news outlet that claims to represent the British Muslim community. Hussain, the deputy editor of 5Pillars, had invited her on, he told viewers, after discovering, to his surprise, that she opposed Israel.

Speaking on the podcast, Fransen began to rail against a supposed conspiracy established by Jews to undermine Western nations.

“The agenda is a Zionist agenda, in that it’s not just Jews, but if you look at who is behind all of it, if you look at, as I said, who owns the largest, that I know of, porn platform Pornhub – a rabbi,” she said.

“Who's behind the abortion industry? Who's funding it? Jews. Who's pushing the LGBTQPZ plus agenda? All of this is attributed to the Zionists, they're not all Jews but it's irrefutable that there is a disproportionate number of Jews occupying positions of authority here in the United Kingdom as in government and we see the same in other parts of the West.”

In November, the alternative press regulator Impress ruled that the interview had “encouraged abuse or hatred against a group” after the Community Security Trust brought a complaint.

It came after another, separate ruling in May in which the body ordered 5Pillars to alter or remove a podcast interview with Mark Collett, the leader of Britain's largest far-right group, Patriotic Alternative.

The episode, Impress said, encouraged “hatred and abuse” towards Jewish and LGBT people.

In another interview, Hussain spoke to former BNP leader Nick Griffin.

While 5Pillars have insisted that as Muslims they oppose racial discrimination against Jews, Impress said they had failed to rebut Fransen and Colletts’s arguments.

“The committee considered that the lack of challenge by the interviewer to the claims enabled the interviewee to encourage hatred or abuse of Jews,” the regulator wrote in reference to the interview with Fransen.

Last week, 5Pillars announced that they had quit Impress in response. In a piece for their website, editor Roshan Muhammed Salih said its liberal values did not align with Islam, and that a Muslim body should be established to regulate Muslim news outlets.

Impress’s verdict that 5Pillars had discriminated against Jews is just the latest incident in a long history of extremism, however.

The outlet was first launched in 2013 as a response to the lack of a British “quality Muslim community media platform” that was both independent and professional, according to its website.

“We see ourselves more as a forum for debate and a reflection of the Ummah [Muslim community] as it is in the UK and abroad, rather than a propaganda organ,” they have said.

5Pillars now boasts over 40,000 Instagram followers, nearly 175,000 X followers and over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. They also communicate directly with 8,500 people on their Telegram channel and around 80,000 users on their site monthly according to SimilarWeb. 

Roshan Muhammed Salih, who also owns 5Pillars, previously worked as a secondary school teacher, a reporter for Al Jazeera and an editor at the Islam Channel before becoming 5Pillars’ founding editor.

From 2007 to 2012, he also served as head of news at the Iranian-regime-backed Press TV in London and was responsible for its coverage from Britain.

In 2008, the Press TV website published an article written by former UCL academic and Shoah denier Nicholas Kollerstrom which claimed that Nazi Germany’s slaughter of Jewish people during the Holocaust was "scientifically impossible".

In 2011, Ofcom ruled that the channel had broken UK broadcasting rules by airing an interview with an Iranian-Canadian journalist, Maziar Bahari, that had been obtained under duress after he was imprisoned by the Islamic regime.

The next year, Press TV's license to broadcast in the UK was revoked by Ofcom.

In 2021, 5Pillars was given an emergency £3,000 grant from the Public Interest News Foundation (Pinf) to help it to survive during the Covid pandemic.

Three days after the money was paid, however, Quilliam – a now-defunct counter-extremism organisation founded by former Islamist Maajid Nawaz – published a dossier of articles published by 5Pillars.

In 2013, they revealed that the Muslim news outlet had suggested that the murderer of British soldier Lee Rigby, who was killed in London by extremists, could have been working for the British security services.

Salih wrote: "Did Michael Adebolajo and his friend hack that British soldier to death on the orders of MI5 because they had some leverage over them and they were compelled to do it? Did MI5 set the whole thing up to demonise Muslims and Islam?"

A 2014 article, meanwhile, asked whether the murder of James Foley, an American journalist who was beheaded by Isis, had been staged by Western intelligence agencies.

5Pillars was, Quilliam claimed, “a fake news site with a track record of peddling conspiracy theories about terrorist attacks.”

Following the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan three years ago, 5Pillars has covered the Islamist movement’s return to power closely.

In one recent video filmed in Kabul, Hussain spoke to the city’s deputy mayor Amir Zamrak to discuss the Taliban’s success at developing infrastructure.

"To date, they have completed in Kabul alone 272 road projects in the space of three years which is fascinating given the limited resources they have," he said.

In another video filmed earlier this year, Hussain asked Khalid Zadran, the spokesman for Kabul's police force, how much crime had dropped under the Taliban's rule and how their government was attempting to avoid the mistakes made by previous regimes.

Writing on X, Salih has accused the mainstream media of launching a "full-blown crusade to provoke an uprising against the Taliban".

"These people don't care about Afghanistan, they just want to get revenge for the Western defeat," he wrote in 2021.

He also wrote: "Whatever you think of the Taliban their seemingly imminent victory is a historic defeat of colonialism and imperialism.

“This should be the main narrative of media around the world, rather than the red herrings about women's rights etc that we are being sold.”

Other articles published by 5Pillars have featured calls for the creation of a Muslim caliphate.

In one, written by Abdul Wahid, the chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain until its proscription in the UK, argued that Arab and Pakistani governments had betrayed Muslims.

"It is only armies of a state that can liberate a state-level military occupation,” he wrote.

“That is what the people of Palestine cry out for today – and that all of this can only come with the re-establishment of the Khilafah [caliphate], on the method of Prophethood.”

In another video created by 5Pillars titled, “The people of Sodom, Prophet Lut and the LGBT movement”, Hussain meanwhile described being gay as “a gross crime against Allah”.

In 2021, Impress ruled that the use of the word “crime” had a “clear and persuasive meaning” that was likely “to encourage or legitimise a real-world threat”.

Writing this month, Salih said that decision had led 5Pillars to think "long and hard" about quitting the regulator.

The video, they claimed, had contained "normative Islamic views which were expressed without hatred or incitement."

"We live in a secular society in the UK where communities should not attempt to impose their values on each other,” they added.

5Pillars and Dilly Hussain have been contacted for comment.