The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing War on Terror led to a sharp rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and profiling across the Western world—an issue that continues to deepen in British society amid Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza against Hamas.
Islamophobia in the United Kingdom has always been a looming threat for its vibrant Muslim community of approximately 4 million Brits, who make up 6% of the country’s population. However, incidents of Islamophobia in the UK have worsened to record levels over the last 14 years, due to the Israel-Gaza War between Hamas and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), according to Tell Mama UK, a monitoring group that records anti-Muslim incidents in the UK. On February 7th, 16 months after Hamas’s October 7th attack, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, deemed ‘genocidal’ by the UN and Amnesty International, continues. This raises concerns over the war’s impact on UK media, politics, and rising Islamophobia. It has been roughly half a year since the summer riots of 2024, in which false claims about a Muslim asylum seeker sparked national far-right riots, targeting Muslims and areas thought to be associated with them. Furthermore, these riots targeted asylum seekers, claiming the lives of three children.
Time has passed, but the implications of what modern British society is gearing towards grow stronger, with one in three supporting the riots, according to YouGov, leaving British Muslims feeling more vulnerable than ever. Attitudes towards minority groups like asylum seekers have also been combined with notions of Islamic doctrine being intrinsically linked to ‘radical Jihadism’ and violence. This has become a common narrative amongst white nationalist hate groups like the BNP and National Front, as well as the populist right-wing political party Reform UK. These efforts to legitimise Islamophobia serve to demonise and dehumanise British Muslims and even scapegoat Muslims over national issues like grooming and trafficking. Reform UK are currently second in YouGov opinion polls, and their far-right rhetoric weaponised hatred against people of Pakistani descent in the UK and singling them out in grooming gang incidents. This rhetoric became even more absurd especially given that most of the perpetrators are White British, according to ONS.
The 2024 riots and far-right rhetoric show that Islamophobia in the UK is not just lingering prejudice against Muslims but a crisis of British democratic principles. It is a crisis of identity and what it means to be British when a third of the public express sympathy for far-right violence, and parties which openly weaponise anti-Muslim sentiment surge in polls. The message to British Muslims is clear: they are increasingly seen as outsiders in their own country.
Photo by Usman Malik on Unsplash
Edited by Callum Lee
