““Asian” is limey PC for muzzie. If these thugs were Chinese, they’d have said so.”
Nothing to do with PC and not a synonym for Muslim. Simply a common usage in the UK as a description of someone of Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi (mainly) descent.
For the simple reason that these were all part of the British empire and hence the earliest origin location for immigration from the continent of Asia into the UK. Thus, in a great number of areas, people’s first experience of a person from Asia would have been someone from one of these countries.
The usage predates any notion of Political Correctness being heard of in the UK.
I believe that the description ‘asian’ is also used in the US, but would be applied to a person of Korean descent, but not to a person of Indian descent? For, presumably, the same reasons that the opposite tends to be true in the UK.
In the U.S. Koreans would be called Asians because they come from the Asian contintent and Indians would not because they come from the Indian continent. But most press reports here wouldn’t use either they would identify the nation of origin. They would however do their best to avoid mentioning any connection to Islam like the British press.
They lost me when “oriental” became “asian” in the US. Why “oriental” is no longer PC escapes me, but formerly, in the good old days, a Japanese was an “oriental”, and an Arab was a “middle easterner”. Now they’re all “asians”, even though they have nothing in common that I know of.