UK Muslims face right-wing hate
On Monday, hundreds of people of all faiths attended a vigil outside Finsbury Park Mosque in a show of unity after a white man used a van to mow down Muslims that morning. But it belies the rise in Islamophobic incidents after terrorist attacks since Marc
It was, perhaps, too good to last. British Muslim communities have been increasingly on edge after the Westminster, Manchester and London Bridge attacks.
They feared a violent backlash against acts in which they played no part, and for which they felt only horror and revulsion.
When the backlash finally happened, just after midnight on Monday morning, politicians and pundits were quick to condemn the actions of the white van driver who mowed down worshippers outside the Finsbury Park Mosque as terrorism.
British prime minister Theresa May said the attack was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the atrocities in London and Manchester.
It took the police just eight minutes to declare the attack a terrorist incident, and Scotland Yard announced patrols would be sent to guard mosques across the capital.
British authorities are treading a fine line, anxious to be seen as taking the attack seriously, while also keen to stress that the perpetrator, 48, was a disturbed individual with mental health problems.
On Monday evening, hundreds of people of all faiths and none attended a vigil outside Finsbury Park Mosque.
Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists stood silently side by side. They carried banners with messages such as “Love will win, terror will lose” and “United against all terror”. The show of unity seemed intended to offer reassurance that, at the end of the day, all was well.
“An attack on the Muslim community is an attack on every single citizen in Great Britain,” Rabbi Herschel Gluck told the crowd. “We are one nation, under one god, living together, working together, cooperating together in this country.”
An attack on one faith, said Adrian Newman, bishop of Stepney, “is an attack on us all”. Standing alongside police chief Cressida Dick, Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the mosque, said it was the aim of “extremists to divide our communities, to spread hatred, fear and division” regardless of their creed or colour. “We will not let you do that,” he said.
But the vigil did not paint a true picture of the increasingly tense situation in which Muslims find themselves in Britain. On Monday, the Muslim Council of Great Britain – an umbrella body that represents more than 500 mosques, organisations, charities and schools – said that “over the past weeks and months, British Muslims had endured many incidents of Islamophobia”.
The van attack on the Finsbury Park worshippers, said Harun Khan, the council’s secretary-general, was merely “the most violent manifestation to date”.
Police said the daily number of reported anti- Muslim hate crimes in London surged after the London Bridge attack, rising to 20 immediately afterwards, up from an average of 3.5 a day.
Tell Mama, a project run by Faith Matters, a counter-extremism think tank, collates reports of Islamaphobia incidents in Britain. In the past few months, a bag of vomit was thrown at a woman in the Blackburn area; worshippers in Cambridge left their mosque to find bacon had been draped over their cars; and in Rotherham, a northern city with a large Asian population, Muslims were resigned to being “spat at, abused and intimidated”, said the local paper.
“I am very sensitive about promoting a sense of victimisation, but when I speak to Muslim communities and ask if anyone has come across examples of hate, virtually everyone’s hand will go up,” said Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters. “This is not acceptable. It is time to take seriously the extremist threat from the right.” Examples of harassment and worse are legion. Mr Mughal said he had spent four and a half years trying but failing to secure police help to deal with a man who was harassing him online.
The man was finally jailed – for just three months – but only after Mr Mughal brought a civil action against him.
“People look at a 61-year-old white guy and think ‘He can’t be an extremist’ even though he’s involved in some of the worst anti-Muslim sites we know and has crossed the criminal threshold for harassment,” said Mr Mughal. “‘He’s just a granddad, isn’t he?’ But they look at an Asian guy and say ‘He must be guilty’, and this is our reality.”
For a Muslim family in south London this month, that reality meant receiving hand-delivered hate mail, warning them to “Leave or you will be among the first to die”. Killing Muslims, the note said, “is no longer murder. It is pest control”.
In Salford, Naveed Yasin, a surgeon who had spent 48 hours saving the lives of the victims of the Manchester Arena bomb attack, was abused as he sat in traffic on his way back to work at the hospital.
Mr Mughal said it was right and proper that Sadiq Khan. London’s mayor, politicians and religious leaders had stood shoulder- to- shoulder in condemning the Finsbury mosque attack. But it would be “a big mistake” to pretend that Britain was one big, happy, multicultural family, he said.
Right- wing online networks “are creating exactly the same radicalisation triggers as Islamist extremist material”, he said. The Home Office “knows what the problem is but is scared to do anything”, a situation exacerbated by the weakness of Mrs May’s lame duck government, which is now more dependent than ever before on far-right voters.