The Muslim problem

November shall be remembered for unravelling the deep-seated hatred and contempt for Muslims, commonly known as Islamophobia, and the open endorsement that it has received from the top Western political elite. The phenomenon is now so common that it has lost its appeal to shock us.

In January 2011, when Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the then chair of the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, raised the alarm that Islamophobia had become socially acceptable, she was hauled over the coals by her own party. Recently, Warsi called to attention the pervading yet covert forms of Islamophobia that are “couched in the intellectual arguments espoused by think tanks, commentators and even politicians”.

The month ended with the dissemination of spiteful anti-Muslim videos by Donald Trump who retweeted them from a leader of the far right group, Britain First. One of them purportedly showed a group of Muslims pushing a boy off a roof, another claimed to show a Virgin Mary statue being destroyed and the third one supposedly showed a “Muslim immigrant hitting a Dutch boy on crutches”.

In a rare show of resentment – though a tame one – UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said that it was “wrong for the president to have done this”. Despite the compliant response, Trump issued a stern public rebuke, asking her to “focus on the destructive radical Islamic terrorism” within the UK.

One of Trump’s retweets about the “Dutch boy on crutches” was immediately proved to be false with the Dutch Embassy in the US, reminding the President that “facts do matter” – something that was lost on the US administration. In a display that showed widespread acceptance for anti-Muslim hatred, a White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders tried to justify it. “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” she said. In response to the UK’s reservations over the inflammatory retweets, Sanders declared that May “and other world leaders knew these are real threats that we have to talk about”.

In early November, Tell MAMA, a London-based hate crimes monitor, released a report that showed a whopping 47 percent increase in anti-Muslim attacks in the UK in 2016 as compared with 2017. More than half of the attacks were directed at Muslim women, with nearly 70 percent of the attackers being white men. Muslim women who wore headscarf or face veils, which easily identify them with Islam, were disproportionately targeted as the religion and its associated symbols are being increasingly targeted.

Iman Atta, the director of Tell MAMA, said social media platforms were “conveyor belts of hate” that potentially contributed to an increase in attacks on the street. With the US president disseminating and endorsing anti-Muslim hatred through his Twitter account, we could only imagine its impact both online and on the street.

In mid-November, the UK-based race equality think tank Runnymede Trust launched its new report on Islamophobia that claimed anti-Muslim hatred had become more pervasive and entrenched in the UK as compared with 20 years ago when the trust launched its ground-breaking report on anti-Muslim hatred and introduced the term ‘Islamophobia’ in the mainstream and policy circles.

It’s not uncanny that one of the main drivers of this hatred and subsequent violence against Muslims is the media. Two weeks back, in a public lecture, Lady Warsi accused British newspapers of propagating Islamophobia and hate speech and called for a parliamentary investigation into the issue. She gave examples from the leading newspapers – the Times, the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – to prove that the press had become a “plague”, with Muslims being the “principal target”. “The daily poisoning of the discourse around British Muslims has intensified… and informs the dialogue across the country, from parliament to the local pub.”

Anti-Muslim hatred across Europe and other Western nations – from America to Australia – has seen consistent growth with the scapegoating of Muslims for everything from immigration to the imagined loss of native culture becoming the salient discourse. Earlier in the week, in a move reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda prior to the mass murders of Jews, Martin Strid, a Swedish politician and member of the Sweden Democrats, said in a live TV debate that Muslims were not “fully human”.

On November 23, the UK’s press regulator dismissed a complaint against the Sun, the largest British tabloid for a column that referred to “the Muslim problem”. Trevor Kavanagh, a senior columnist, claimed that Britain had a “Muslim problem” and its effect will be acutely felt after Brexit. The regulator cleared the Sun for “it did not breach the Editor’s Code” though it did acknowledge that the language could be compared to the language used at the time of the Holocaust.

In a display of deliberate rebuke, the Sun claimed that Kavanagh “didn’t realise that his words could be compared to the phrase “the Jewish problem’”. Commenting on the hateful atmosphere, Frank Gelli, an Anglican priest and Princess Diana’s former spiritual adviser, told me that his Muslim friends often feel targeted and even “their children are under pressure in the classroom”. It’s no wonder the UK’s school authority, Ofsted, recently announced that Muslim primary school girls wearing headscarves will be questioned, creating a new frontier in the normalisation of anti-Muslim hate.

Postscript: In early 1911, when Muslims were lobbying for a mosque in London, The Church Times (January 13th, 1911) commented: “If this were merely a venture on the part of the followers of the Prophet [pbuh], there would be no need for us to make any remark… But we notice with regret and a sense of scandal that the committee for carrying out the scheme contains the name of some prominent politicians, some of them Churchmen. We would venture to point out that to a Christian the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ should be of more importance than the British Empire and the successors of those who gave their lives to wrest the Holy Places from the hands of the infidel, and to plat the Cross where the Crescent was placed, have singularly degenerated if they help to set up the Crescent in a Christian land”.

Twitter: @murtaza_shibli