No wonder just a quarter of British Muslims believe the October 7 attacks took place when so many hardliners are allowed to flourish here

SIx months after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel, blood continues to soak the Middle East.

In distant Gaza, the death toll is mounting, sectarian divisions are worsening and the destruction is nothing short of apocalyptic.

But the conflict has also had a sharp impact here in Britain. A new and aggressive form of intolerance has convulsed swathes of British Muslims, fuelling an ugly wave of anti-Semitism, as well as strengthening the cause of fundamentalism.

This week, a report from the Henry Jackson Society, the Transatlantic think tank that works to promote democratic liberal values, has laid bare the crisis.

It offers a wealth of evidence to show how fractured our society has become — and how extremist views have become commonplace in Britain’s growing Muslim community, which now numbers some four million.

Staggeringly, 46 per cent of UK Muslims now admit that they ‘ sympathise’ with Hamas, which is proscribed here as a terror organisation.

Sympathise

Barely a quarter accept that Hamas committed rape and murder in Israel on October 7, with 40 per cent wrongly claiming that the group did not carry out such atrocities, and a further 37 per cent saying they ‘don’t know’ whether or not it did.

Needless to say, the evidence that Hamas did commit these and other crimes, on a systematic scale, is overwhelming. The terrorists themselves gleefully livestreamed their carnage on the internet, boasting of their ‘kill count’ to their cheering families as they carried out the most sickening massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Yet most worrying still to me is that the new report revealed how younger, bettereducated British Muslims are now more likely to hold extremist views than their older counterparts who did not attend university.

When young British Muslims wilfully ignore the evidence of their own eyes, what tensions might this presage for the future?

I have been an imam for 20 years and still lead Friday prayers at my mosque in Oxford. Since October 7, young men in my congregation have spoken to me with undisguised relish about the slaughter of Israeli soldiers.

Blindly they listen to rabid clergy spewing hatred on social media — cruel and unthinking men stoking up enmity and hostility, encouraging Muslims to see Jews as less than human.

Having drunk such poison, thousands of young British Muslims no longer recognise the value inherent in all human life. After all, as it says in the Koran: ‘He who slays a soul shall be as if he had slain all mankind, and he who saves a life shall be as if he had given life to all mankind’.

But I face an uphill struggle to explain this simple truth to my worshippers: that, just as not all Germans were Nazis during World War II, not all Jews today are Zionists who harbour antipathy towards Muslims. Far from it, in fact.

I helped to start our progressive mosque in the aftermath of 9/11, when many Western Muslims were seeking to deny that their faith had played any part in that atrocity.

Two decades later, the same tendency towards conspiracist thinking persists among a large proportion of Britain’s Muslims. Some even peddle the nonsensical claim that Israel actually plotted the October 7 invasion in order to establish a pretext to commit ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

Worse still, this problem is growing: attitudes are hardening over time. Already, most British Muslims want a complete ban in law on any depiction of the Prophet Mohammed. Fully a third would like to see Sharia law implemented within our shores.

That would be the surefire route to separatism: a twotier society. We cannot have different laws for different faiths, nor should there be any return to blasphemy legislation to protect any group from feeling ‘offended’.

Since Magna Carta in 1215, English justice has upheld the principle of equal treatment for everyone before the law. Freedom of expression has been cemented as one of the keystones of British democracy, even if Scotland’s hapless First Minister Humza Yousaf is doing his best to undermine it with his ill-conceived new ‘hate crime’ law.

Radicalism

It should therefore be a statement of the obvious that hardliners — of any stripe — must never be allowed to bully others through intimidation. Yet I fear the bullies are winning.

Increasingly, radicalism is flourishing here. Almost every weekend, our cities ring to ugly and often racist protests by pro-Palestinian supporters. And if significant proportions of British Muslims refuse to believe that the Hamas assault truly occurred on October 7, then their faith — which I know from my own experience can be one of profound compassion — is utterly wanting.

Far from being ‘devout’, such extremism is in fact profoundly un-Islamic.

True Muslims should unite to condemn Hamas’s butchery. But in the outpouring of support for Palestine, terrorism is being celebrated, while anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus.

After all, the Henry Jackson survey also showed that 46 per cent of British Muslims — just under half — believe that Jews have too much power over government policy, while 41 per cent think that Jews are ‘too influential in the media’.

This divisive agenda has been set by an unholy alliance of Left-wingers — many of them former supporters of the ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — and authoritarian Muslims from the Right, whom I call the ‘fascists, fruitcakes and fundamentalists’. Sadly, these bigots now reign supreme in many Muslim communities. For one thing, their air of menace silences their more moderate opponents: for another, they are experts at cranking up pressure on public institutions by playing the race card, wallowing in victimhood and painting all criticism of their pernicious ideology as ‘Islamophobic’.

So what is to be done? Israel may not have started this war, but I must stress this: it has made serious mistakes in how it has conducted it. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its campaign of retaliation. This death toll, whatever military success it may reap, will nevertheless leave a legacy of burning hatred towards Israel among future generations — as Hamas surely intended.

Imagine if, during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the British government and military high command had decided to destroy the IRA’s capacity to wage war by carpet-bombing Derry and west Belfast, the two centres of mainly Catholic Republican support. There would have been howls of outrage across the world.

In fact, the British were far more subtle, patiently undermining the IRA by creating a network of informers within its security operations.

If only Israel had learned from this example.

Legacy

So yes, Israel is not without blame. It is perfectly legitimate to criticise its indiscriminate, even barbaric, conduct during this war.

The British Government, meanwhile, has to show that its backing for Israel is not unconditional. It needs to tell Israelis that they cannot create a peaceful state on colonised and conquered lands.

British Muslims are at a crossroads. They need to champion a return to a pristine, pluralistic, Koranic form of Islam — and reject hatefilled Sharia-driven bigotry.

And they have to recognise that Jewish lives matter, too.