“Murderer… Muslim… Immigrant”… The Deep Roots of Violence Against Muslims in Britain | Politics

The killer of the three little girls in the northwestern English city of Southport, a Muslim immigrant named Ali, is neither Muslim nor immigrant, nor is he named Ali. The killer was born in England, his name is Axel, and his parents attend church regularly. The final image of the killer, as presented by the authorities, has failed to curb populist violence against Muslims as individuals and institutions. It is as if Muslims are getting what they deserve because of moral flaws in their DNA, even if this time they were not the perpetrators.

The story began on the X platform via an account called “Europe Invasion.” Within hours, the post, which talked about “murderer, Muslim, immigrant,” had been viewed six million times. It appeared on other platforms, and British society quickly responded to the message. Dozens of mosques and a number of refugee camps, including hotels housing illegal immigrants, were seen on fire.

What is more serious and dangerous than the burning of property and places of worship is the fear and panic that has swept through the Muslim community, especially women who have received a torrent of threats of rape and other things.

The government, through its Prime Minister, has blamed the far right. The wave of violence has been directed exclusively at Muslims, both individuals and institutions, and has affected almost all of England and Northern Ireland. It is clearly much more than “right-wing thuggery” in the words of Starmer, the British Prime Minister, and its deep roots are what is fuelling the wave.

A study by the UK Home Office has revealed a dramatic rise in hate crime in the UK over the past decade. From around 4,000 in 2012, the number of “hate crimes” has risen to 110,000 in 2022. The study defined hate crime as an act of aggression that is primarily motivated by race or religion. According to the study, nearly half of these crimes were directed against Muslims and Arabs.

Anti-Arab and anti-Islam sentiment in Britain runs deep and wide. It can be traced across the discourse produced there, across culture, media and politics. The London-based Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) recently conducted a survey of “British media coverage of Islam 2018-2020”. The survey included 48,000 articles and 5,500 clips that dealt with the subject of Muslims.

Analyzing this massive amount of data provided some very interesting insights. The analysis revealed that 60% of online articles and 47% of television clips linked Islam/Muslims to bad behavior, including criminal tendencies. According to the data, one in five articles about Islam put terrorism as the starting point for the discussion. When it comes to coverage of Islam, the right and the left differ only in degree, not in kind.

In 2018, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote an article in The Telegraph describing Muslim women’s veils as “letterboxes.” The description sparked a storm of response and debate, and drew some condemnation. Johnson was pandering to the radical right, as the head of the Muslim Council of Britain put it. In fact, he was expressing a trend he knows well.

Political hypocrisy and pandering to extremists are part of the political tactics of centrist parties. In Berlin, Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats and a potential German chancellor, says his country will not accept refugees from Gaza because it has enough anti-Semitism.

Merz rode the tiger’s back knowing that anti-Semitism is a matter for the German far right, the German whites. That’s what the Interior Ministry’s annual data provides, leaving no room for give and take. The far right accounted for 83 percent of anti-Semitic crimes in 2022, according to the Interior Ministry’s report on politically motivated crimes for the same year.

The war on Gaza has been a season of political outbidding and incitement, the issue of Muslims has become intertwined with the issue of immigration, and the club of anti-Semitism has covered up the crime of anti-Islam, which increased in Britain by 365% during the year 2023. Muslims are subjected to campaigns of quiet and sustained intimidation, and violence takes on noisy forms, as is currently happening in Britain. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The British government had previously set up a committee to combat Islamophobia in 2011, but the committee has not held a single meeting since 2020, despite the growing wave of Islamophobia. At the expense of Muslims, politicians are offering populist bribes and competing to win the approval of the masses, who they know well hold, on the whole, a negative view of Islam.

Only 9% of Britons over the age of 55 said they had a very favourable impression of Islam, and one in four said they would be concerned if a family member married a Muslim, according to a survey by the research group More in Common. The committee tasked with combating Islamophobia has not met for four years, perhaps fearing a public mood that sees such bodies as the devil’s advocate.

Since October 7, the European and British media have been promoting a narrative that Hamas fighters have raped Israeli women and beheaded children. The beheading story has found a ready-made niche in the European imagination: the Arab is a man who “if he doesn’t like your face he’ll cut yours off,” as the theme song to the first version of Walt Disney’s Aladdin, 1993, went, before the song was changed for diplomatic reasons.

To measure the extent of media bias in coverage of the war on Gaza, the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) collected around 180,000 video clips from seven British and three international radio stations, as well as around 26,000 news articles from 28 British websites. It found 361 TV clips that described children being beheaded.

The videos presented the story of the children’s heads as fact, and broadcasters rarely noted the story’s lack of corroboration from a neutral source. The story resonated with a Western imagination ready to believe any brutal story about Arabs and Muslims. The story of beheading children evolved into mothers’ bellies being ripped open, fetuses being killed, fetuses being hung on clotheslines, and children being burned in ovens. Active accounts jumped on the bandwagon to share the videos, such as Ben Shapiro’s account, which has nearly seven million followers.

The story is still circulating on social media, despite all the damage it has done. When an extremist account tweets that the three girls in Southport were murdered by a Muslim immigrant, we have no reason to doubt its veracity. Arab-Muslims have done it again, after all, they cut off a man’s head if they don’t like the way his face looks.

Elon Musk has mocked the events in Britain, saying that civil war there is inevitable, a comment that has prompted a British response at the highest levels. The government has, with all its tools, contributed to a narrative about Palestinians beheading children, and it should have known that such propaganda is extremely dangerous, especially for a continent with a population of some fifty million Muslims.

Reports from Britain indicate that the advocates of revenge against Muslims there did not stop inciting and repeating lies even after the government revealed the real information regarding the murder incident. The populists believed the story because it fed their imagination and anger, especially in a country that has been stuck in the dilemma of immigration and identity for more than a decade. The truth is no longer part of the ongoing debate in Britain. Everyone is looking for an excuse, and the information provided by the authorities is intended – the radical right repeats – to absorb anger, not to tell the truth.

Cultural Orientalism, in all its variations, has fed the European imagination, always eager to see the Arab in his savage image. The most dangerous of its forms, in my opinion, is cinematic Orientalism. For a century, since the film The Sheik, 1922, the Western screen has been presenting the Arab monster to the Western audience. A relatively recent study reveals the existence of more than 950 Hollywood films, during the second half of the last century, that presented the Arab in a savage, barbaric, and irrational image.

In The Sheik (1922), the Arab monster is fascinated by a white girl, the heroine, and captures her. When she tries to escape, he grabs her by the waist and drags her forcefully into the tent, declaring that he is not used to people breaking his word. Because she is white, and because he is so foolish, she will eventually escape. The film ends its profound discourse by reinforcing an image of a race of people who are brutal and untrustworthy, an image that pre-state Zionist cinema would reinforce through a series of sound and silent films.

The Arab, or Muslim, monster maintains its place on the Western screen to this day. The 2016 film London Has Fallen tells the story of Middle Eastern terrorists who plot to assassinate Western political figures in Europe. They do so in response to drone strikes on terrorist hideouts in their home countries. Arab Muslims in Europe are a security risk, the film’s implicit message goes. And so the hero yells at them to “Go back to Fuckheadistan or wherever you came from.”

If the Arab-Muslim remains in Europe and refuses to return to his country, his bad nature may sooner or later expose him to the punishment he deserves, as is currently happening in Britain.