(RNS) — Elon Musk claims to be a defender of free speech and truth, a man unafraid to challenge prevailing narratives. Yet, when I and multiple other Muslims publicly invited him to an honest conversation about the disinformation he is spreading about British Muslims, he refused to engage. Instead, he has chosen to continue to amplify the long-debunked conspiracy theory that “Muslim grooming gangs” are uniquely responsible for child exploitation in the U.K.
Let’s talk about the timing of his convenient Islamophobic pivot.
Just over a week ago, Musk angered his MAGA fanbase by defending H-1B visas and foreign workers in the U.S. tech industry. That didn’t sit well with the white nationalist segment of his audience. The man who was quickly gaining traction with the MAGA crowd suddenly found himself losing favor among his most devoted followers because God forbid more brown people come to America to make it better.
So what did he do? He pivoted and ironically attacked another group of brown people.
And just like that, the very same far-right voices that were furious with him last week suddenly welcomed him back with open arms. Because in their world, hating Muslims is the ultimate loyalty test.
This isn’t a coincidence. This is political opportunism at its ugliest.
The falsehood he’s peddling is neither new nor original. It is part of a well-documented strategy: Cherry-pick a few high-profile cases, inflate them into a trend, and use them to justify sweeping Islamophobic narratives. We have seen this playbook before. The same statistically flawed arguments once used to falsely portray Muslims as disproportionately responsible for terrorism are now being repackaged into the grooming gang debate.
I wrote about this tactic in The Dallas Morning News in 2019, when I challenged the profiling of Muslims as the primary threat to global security. The data simply didn’t support it. Studies showed that right-wing extremists had killed more people in the U.S. than Muslim extremists since 9/11, and that in Europe, separatist and right-wing groups carried out more attacks than so-called Islamist extremists. Yet, media coverage painted a vastly different picture. A Georgia State University study found that attacks by Muslims received 357% more media coverage than those by non-Muslims, creating the false impression that Muslims were uniquely responsible for violence.
Now, the same distortion is being used to push the grooming gang narrative. High-profile cases involving Muslims are amplified, while the broader reality of child exploitation in the U.K. — where the vast majority of offenders are white — goes largely ignored.
The U.K. government itself has debunked the claim that grooming gangs are a uniquely Muslim problem. A 2020 Home Office report found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders “come from diverse backgrounds” and that “it is not possible to make generalizations about their ethnicities or cultural backgrounds.” The report explicitly warned that public perceptions are often shaped more by media coverage than by actual prevalence data.
Despite this, the myth persists. In 2013, the U.K.’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre analyzed 57 major child exploitation cases and also found the vast majority of recorded offenders were white men. Yet, no broad racial or religious narrative was created around this fact. There were no discussions about the “crisis of white grooming gangs.” There were no policies demanding surveillance or mass deportations of white men. Instead, the focus remained on the crimes themselves, as it should have.
This statistical manipulation is part of a pattern. When crimes are committed by members of the racial or religious majority, they are treated as isolated incidents. When they are committed by Muslims, they are framed as indicative of a deeper, cultural pathology.
The focus on the Rotherham and Rochdale cases — where Pakistani-origin men were involved — reflects this double standard. While those cases were horrific and should never be minimized, they were also statistical outliers. Yet, they have been used to smear an entire community. The same Home Office report that debunked the idea of a racial or religious link to grooming gangs also warned against “the potential for bias in how investigations are conducted and reported.”
Child exploitation is a deeply entrenched issue, and it is not one that can be solved by scapegoating one ethnic or religious group. Studies consistently show abusers seek out victims based on access, opportunity and vulnerability — not race or religion. Imran Mulla of Middle East Eye has demonstrated this thoroughly in his latest article analyzing the said statistics.
The people who claim to care about child protection should be the most outraged by this. Fixating on a manufactured crisis about Muslim grooming gangs means that actual solutions to child exploitation are being ignored. Experts have long called for stronger safeguarding policies, increased funding for child services and improved support for victims. But instead of addressing these systemic failures, the conversation keeps circling back to Islamophobic scapegoating.
And that too is dangerous. In the U.K., hate crimes against Muslims surged by 593% after media coverage of grooming gangs in 2018. Far-right groups have repeatedly used this narrative to justify protests outside mosques and violent attacks on innocent Muslims. When someone with the platform and influence of Elon Musk amplifies these lies, the consequences are not just digital. They spill into real-world violence.
If Musk were truly interested in justice, he would challenge the real enablers of child exploitation — the institutions that failed victims, the lack of funding for social services and the systemic vulnerabilities that allow abuse to persist. Instead, he has chosen to fuel a moral panic that serves no agenda but one of hate.
And let’s be clear that his shift didn’t start with U.K. grooming gangs. His transformation into a full-blown, far-right Islamophobe happened right after his red-carpet tour with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
Before that trip, Musk’s politics were erratic — one day anti-war, the next day cozying up to MAGA. But the moment Netanyahu took him on a propaganda tour of occupied Palestinian territories, Musk came back sounding like a far-right Israeli spokesperson.
He immediately started to bizarrely parrot Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric, completely ignoring the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians who days before he had suggested needed help.
The supposed free speech champion then oversaw the systematic silencing of Palestinian voices on X, while allowing Israeli government accounts to spread disinformation unchecked with a pretty obvious boost in the algorithm.
He rebranded himself as an “anti-antisemitism crusader” — but only when it served Israeli interests. When actual neo-Nazis praised him on X, he laughed it off.
This is a man who gets wined and dined by war criminals and then comes home to do their bidding.
This is a man whose Tesla factories have been linked to Uyghur forced labor in China — a point I called out long ago.
His descent into open Islamophobia during the most dangerous of times would be disturbing enough on its own, but what makes it worse is that he owns X, the most powerful disinformation machine in the world.
Musk isn’t just spreading hate — he is engineering the infrastructure that allows it to thrive.
And we need to stop pretending Musk is just a billionaire with bad opinions. He is one of the most powerful enablers of hate in the world today. And while more of us may now pass on a Tesla purchase, perhaps we can also avoid buying the lies that have harmed us for decades and are only becoming more flammable due to platforms like X.
