A working group was set up by the British government in February to define “anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia,” and it was due to finish its task by the end of August. Conservative MP Nick Timothy and a number of like-minded individuals launched a campaign against any such definition over the summer, contending that it would stymie free speech for those who want to criticize Islam.
The government has since been forced to slam and delay. The BBC reported last week that a report suggested that the definition would not use the word “Islamophobia” but instead would focus on “anti-Muslim hostility.”
This is incorrect because racism against Muslims is rooted in a hatred of Islam. Muslims are in an unprecedented level of danger, even though the British state doesn’t even mention Islamophobia. The British government’s inability to identify and combat Islamophobia is a scandal that the mainstream media hardly notices.
Prior to the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, there were already 3,432 reported attacks on Muslims in England and Wales. It increased by 13 percent in the year to March 2024, and by that time, by 19%. Due to changes in the Metropolitan Police’s crime recording, the increase is likely higher than these most recent figures, which exclude London.
Without London, according to the most recent data, 44 percent of religious hate crimes were committed against Muslims, and 24 percent of them were committed without London. Additionally, Muslims are consistently more likely to experience harassment, stalking, and assault.
It is a bit miraculous that no one has been killed in UK islamophobic attacks over the past two years. Following the murder of three girls by a non-Muslim attacker in Southport in the summer of 2024, mosques were the focus of the mosque attack. Numerous mosque attacks this year, including arson, have occurred. In December, police in the Republic of Ireland detained a number of members of the so-called “Irish Defence Army” in connection with a plot to attack a mosque and migrant housing in Galway.
The UK government continues to fight against anti-Semitism despite the rise in hate crime, as it should, but does not devote nearly as much political resources to protecting Muslims. This disparity is made abundantly clear by the state’s definition of both racism and its definitions.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which connotes anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, became highly content in the UK in December 2016. In contrast, any attempt to define Islamophobia has been thwarted by the UK government.
The BBC’s draft definition, which does not mention Islamophobia, is utterly insufficient and dangerous because it gives those who want to attack Islam a blank check. This lack of protection was unavoidable. The government insisted on “the unchanging right of British citizens… to criticize, express dislike of, or insult religions and/or the beliefs and practices of adherents” in the working group’s terms of reference.
Imagine for a moment that the government made the demand that people be able to insult Judaism. Jewish hostility to Jews and Judaism has existed for a long time, according to even a cursory historical understanding of anti-Semitism.
From medieval times until the present, Muslim persecution in the West has an intrinsic connection with and been motivated by opposition to Islam. Westerners and political figures frequently saw Islam as an inherently imperialist and violent religion dedicated to world dominance, whether through holy war or conspiratorial tactics, whether during the Reformation of the 16th century in Europe or the colonialization of North Africa and Asia in the 19th century.
German theologian Martin Luther referred to both Jews and Muslims as “fanatics,” or violent revolutionaries who were inspired by religion in the 16th century. The French philosopher Alexandre Deleyre wrote in the 18th century that fanaticism “directs itself chiefly outwards and makes this people an enemy of humanity” when “government is completely founded upon religion, as among the Muslims, as among the Muslims.”
The idea that Islam had an inherent potential for revolutionary violence that had to be protected by surveillance, censorship, and a “moderational” politics predominated among the French and British empires.
The West’s continued influence on this view of Islam as a source of violent conspiracies dates back as far back as the 20th and 21st centuries, most evidently since the beginning of the “war on terror” in the early 2000s. These ideas have been at the heart of the UK’s migration panics since 2015, when Middle Eastern refugees fled from the Middle East as a result of conflict and the rise of ISIL (ISIS).
A panoply of Islamophobic ideas are at the heart of a panoply of them: that they are all potential terrorists, oppressors of women, sex predators, and obsessive theocrats, which has been supported by centuries of Western thought about Islam as an existential threat to Christian civilization.
In this context, making claims that Islam is not the site of hateful vitriol actually encourages racism. It appoints those who use a ferocious hostility to attack Islam, which encourages verbal and physical violence against Muslims. It glorifies hatred to celebrate such “free speech” attacks as the expression of it.
