The “European Islamophobia Report 2023”, which examined anti-Muslim sentiment in 28 European countries, revealed that Israel’s ongoing military actions in Gaza have contributed to a significant rise in Islamophobia across Western Europe.

Edited by Enes Bayrakli of the Turkish-German University in Istanbul and Farid Hafez of William & Mary University in the U.S., the report highlights how the Gaza conflict intensified Islamophobic rhetoric. It notes that pro-Palestinian solidarity has increasingly been framed as extremism, prompting protest bans and restrictive measures in countries such as Germany, France, and Denmark.

“No other political development has shaped the life of Muslims in 2023 as much as the war in Palestine,” the report said. “With the rising voices against the genocide in Gaza also coming from Muslims in European countries, the political response by various governments has put Muslims into an even more securitized position.”

Key highlights of the 2023 report include:

• Neglect of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia: Apart from Spain, no European government recognized this UN-designated day in 2023.
• Mainstream and far-right media, along with social media platforms, amplified anti-Muslim narratives, dehumanising Muslims and fostering disinformation.
• Hate crimes against Muslims increased significantly, especially in Norway, Spain and Greece.
• Legal and educational systems perpetuated biases against Muslims, with France and Denmark enforcing controversial policies targeting Muslim communities.

The report also focused on Islamophobia in several European countries:

United Kingdom

Aristotle Kallis, a professor at Keele University, UK, said that the UK witnessed a significant increase in Islamophobia in 2023, with a 600% surge in reported cases following the Hamas attack on Israel in October.

Mainstream Islamophobia saw a surge with the government’s anti-radicalization program, Prevent, continuing to focus disproportionately on “Islamist extremism” despite evidence of more significant threats from far-right ideologies.

Muslims faced workplace discrimination, underrepresentation, and hostility. In education, there were issues with teacher recruitment, student discrimination, and the influence of Prevent on Muslim students. The justice system showed biases with higher Muslim incarceration rates.

Media portrayal often vilified Muslims, contributing to Islamophobia. The internet, especially post-conflict, saw a surge in anti-Muslim content, with platforms like X (formerly Twitter) under scrutiny for poor moderation.

Suella Braverman’s role as Home Secretary in 2023 is highlighted for promoting anti-Muslim sentiments through policy and rhetoric.

France

The report noted that in France, President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-Israel statements following the attacks in Gaza by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, have exacerbated institutional racism against Muslims.

Kawtar Najib, who authored the France section of the report, pointed out that the government’s ban on headscarves in schools has led to significant concern for Muslim students and their families. The move has been viewed as a sign of the institutionalization of anti-Muslim sentiment in France.

Najib referenced the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, in June 2023, and the subsequent lack of an immediate arrest of the officer involved, which fueled protests and fears for the Muslim community.

Germany

Fabian Goldmann, a journalist focused on improving media coverage of Islam and immigration, said that the war in Israel and Palestine marked a significant escalation in violence, discrimination, and hostility towards Muslims in Germany in 2023, reaching unprecedented levels in recent history.

Police records showed a 140% increase in Islamophobic crimes, totaling 1,464 incidents, the highest since records began. The Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency noted a record 10,772 consultation requests.

Migration policies became more restrictive, mirroring demands previously associated with far-right politics, with the AfD gaining significant support in polls.

German media coverage of Islam was predominantly negative, focusing on themes of violence, crime, and cultural clash. Notable outlets like Bild and Die Welt were highlighted for their role in shaping anti-Muslim discourse.

The AfD remained a key producer of Islamophobia, with individuals like Ahmad Mansour and Susanne Schröter influencing public discourse.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, researcher Nadia Lahdili found that increasing anti-immigrant sentiment has directly contributed to rising Islamophobia.

There were 1,058 Islamophobic incidents reported in 2023, including 876 involving racial discrimination and 62 instances of anti-Muslim attacks.

Lahdili noted that Muslim women, particularly those wearing headscarves, face significant discrimination in the workplace, where they are often blocked from career advancement.

The report also discussed the political exploitation of Islamic dress by politicians during election campaigns, which has contributed to increasing institutional Islamophobia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Hikmet Karcic from Sarajevo University highlighted the rise of radical anti-Muslim rhetoric in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly by Serbian nationalists.

It has led to tensions that mirror the situation in France and Switzerland, with hostile language used to weaken the multicultural fabric of Sarajevo.

The report noted that the closure of several mosques and the construction of hotels on land intended for mosques are part of efforts to erase the country’s cultural heritage and foster anti-Muslim sentiment.

Austria

Farid Hafez drew attention to Austria, where the United Arab Emirates has been implicated in funding anti-Muslim groups.

Anti-Muslim rhetoric surged after the outbreak of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and schools in Austria held workshops against radicalization, which, in some cases, propagated Islamophobic sentiments.

The report also highlighted how protests against the Gaza violence were suppressed by police, with Austria voting against a UN General Assembly resolution that urged a cease-fire.

To address these challenges, EIR 2023 calls for:

• Full recognition of Islamophobia as a systemic issue by European governments.
• Strengthened legal frameworks to combat discrimination and hate crimes.
• Increased efforts by civil society and international organizations to promote inclusivity and counter anti-Muslim narratives.
• Enhanced monitoring and accountability for media and social media platforms to prevent the spread of hate speech and disinformation.

Source: 5Pillars 

Describing the October 7 Hamas attacks as a “watershed moment,” Asim Ijaz Khwaja, the co-chair of Harvard’s task force on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, spoke on Monday evening with Aslı Ü. Bâli, a Yale scholar of international and human rights law and president of the Middle East Studies Association, about the profound consequences of the past 13 months on American college campuses and American Muslims. The two painted a sobering picture of renewed negative attention and harassment directed toward people of Middle Eastern descent. They also outlined what they saw as a worrying retreat by university administrators amid political attacks against their students and their mission.

The event was hosted by the Radcliffe Institute, as the second of a two-part discussion about this still-unfolding tumultuous period; earlier this month, Radcliffe dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin talked with Frankfurter professor of law Noah Feldman about his newly published book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

Hamas’s attack on Israel sparked a war in the Middle East and set off a massive wave of pro-Palestinian protests in the United States, perhaps most visibly by students on college campuses, including Harvard’s. Student activism provoked an intense and powerful backlash: donors at multiple universities, as at Harvard, have rescinded their donations or threatened to stop giving; students involved in protests across the country have been arrested and in some cases charged with crimes, and many have been doxed or seen employment offers withdrawn. Investigations into antisemitic incidents and charges of antisemitism on American campuses have included highly publicized Congressional hearings, with politicians interrogating prominent university presidents; some of those administrators, including former president Claudine Gay, have lost their jobs. In the wake of this backlash, many institutions, including Harvard, are rethinking campus policies regarding speech and protest, adopting new stances of neutrality on global events, and redoubling efforts to facilitate critical inquiry and open dialogue.

In addition to all these consequences, Khwaja, the Sumitomo-FASID professor of international finance and development at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted the heightened focus and suspicion that Muslims and people of Arab descent have faced during the past year. He also noted that it isn’t the first time that’s happened: 9/11 was a similar watershed moment, with monumental and lasting effects, and it is the backdrop, he and Bâli said, for everything that’s happened since October 7.

Bâli recalled how, in the days after 9/11, the U.S. government used selective enforcement of immigration laws to sweep up Muslim immigrant men in mass arrests. They were released only after they’d been cleared of suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attacks, “reversing the presumption of innocence.” Other steps soon followed: prohibitions on speech—including pro-Palestinian speech—and coercive re-registration requirements for visa-holders from the Middle East. “There was an exponential increase in mass surveillance,” she said, “with intense scrutiny on Muslim American communities in particular, and government racial profiling practices, which singled out Muslims and people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Arab descent,” and led to presumptions of disloyalty and increased criminal punishments. Hate crimes rose, and Muslims, who were now intensely policed, became a racialized community—although one that, ironically, was not entitled to formal protections against racial discrimination, Bâli noted. These events so stigmatized Muslims that in 2017, decades after 9/11, the Trump administration instituted a ban on Muslims entering the country, which was later declared constitutional, albeit in an altered form, by the Supreme Court.

Those reverberations can be seen, Bâli argued, in the current upheavals over Israel and Palestine. Bâli noted the numerous armed conflicts, many with direct U.S. involvement, that have erupted in the broader Middle East in the years since 9/11—in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria—and the “waves of grief and trauma” for the Muslim diaspora watching from abroad, who experience their connection to the region as a source of their own insecurity. “I think part of what explains what’s happening on our campuses is that there’s a growing awareness among Americans of all backgrounds of some of the things that have been truly unjust consequences” of these wars and their effects on American Muslims. “So what we saw in the last year is the broadest, widest mobilization ever in support of Palestinian rights in the United States. And that occurred…because non-Arab, non-Muslim students were making common cause very broadly in solidarity with a community they don’t identify with on any ethnic basis.” It’s important to remember, she added, that today’s students grew up almost entirely in the shadow of 9/11, watching its effects unfold. “There is really a reckoning with the long-term relationship that the United States has had to many of the destabilizing events in these regions, and an understanding that there is some responsibility.”

The punitive response against the Muslim community after the latest watershed moment, when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel, raped women, and took more than 200 others, including children, hostage, alarmed Bâli in its vehemence. She compared the repression of dissent and protest on American college campuses, which has at times included violent arrests, to “the extreme authoritarian excesses” in the Middle East and North Africa, including in Turkey, her home country. She noted the appearance of “sudden, ad hoc policies that are selectively enforced and viewpoint-specific,” using ostensibly neutral criteria such as trespass laws to exclusively disallow pro-Palestinian protest, as well as harsh disciplinary sanctions for “disfavored political views.” She also decried the “inquisitional” Congressional hearings like the one that toppled Gay’s presidency, and pressure from donors and political actors on universities to crack down on students. Some of the neutrality statements adopted by administrators on numerous campuses strike Bâli as “misguided in the particulars of what they’re going to be neutral about,” and new restrictions on how and where students can assemble now make it nearly impossible, she said, “to engage in meaningful protests in ways that can be heard by one’s fellow campus members.”

Months of these kinds of measures, Bâli worried, have succeeded in shutting down viewpoints and “teaching the lesson that…you are better off being silent or finding ways to accommodate power, because power will crush you—even in campus communities that are designed to be laboratories in which students are supposed to be able to experiment with free inquiry and free expression and association.”

In response, Kwaja asked the question he saw lurking in Bâli’s depiction: “You raise a deeply troubling view of the world,” he said. “Is there a buyer for free discourse? Is there a market where people really value free speech and academic freedom?…Every campus now has a ‘candid conversation something-or-other’”—at Harvard it is the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which Brown-Nagin co-chairs—“but I don’t understand where this demand is to come from. And if it doesn’t, then it worries me even more.”

Bâli answered that producing that market for free speech is the business of universities—including not just wealthy private ones like Harvard, but all institutions of higher learning, many of which are deeply embedded in their communities. She called on administrators and academics to defend democracy, and to defend themselves. “Universities have a role, not just to their internal communities, but also as spokespeople in our democracy.” This has to be true, she said, even when an institution faces financial and reputational risk. “As public intellectuals, we have an obligation to offer that defense constantly.” Importantly, she added, “We have to push back by persuading our fellow citizens. I don’t think there’s a way to imagine out-lawyering, or out-financing…or that we’re going to conquer some group. No, I think we have to persuade.”

She blamed much of the difficulty in maintaining this kind of institutional fortitude and independence on decades of government disinvestment from higher education, which has left universities increasingly beholden to individual donors.

She emphasized the necessity of strengthening universities’ ties to their communities and to their alumni. And she pushed back on the sharp criticism of universities that has consumed the national discussion during the past year. “We should be wary,” she said, of falling for “populist narratives about universities,” which she described as inaccurate and disingenuous. “The notion that we’re just made up of elites in fancy quarters having jargonized conversations with one another…is pretty far from the reality of what the work of higher education is in this country,” she said. “And that work has been the engine of one of the most powerful economies in the world, and has been producing not only leaders among our own citizenry, but globally, [and] has made the last three quarters of a century possible as a period of human flourishing.”

Khwaja asked Bâli where she saw reason for hope, both for free inquiry in institutions, and for the future of the American Muslim community. In students, she answered. “There are real problems” she said, of anti-democratic harassment and repression and even violence, “but the fact is that this debate [over free speech and public policies affecting Muslim life] has become such a much broader set of questions.

Source: Harvard Magazine

Islamophobia has become “brutally divisive” in the UK and failure to challenge its root causes will lead to more racist riots, the head of the UK’s leading race equality thinktank has said.

Shabna Begum, who became the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust earlier this year, said the country was entering a new phase in how it talks about Muslims.

“Sayeeda Warsi coined the term ‘the dinner table test’, but I think we’ve got even beyond that,” she said. “The way politicians talk about Muslims now is so derogatory, it’s in the most brutally divisive terms.”

She said that unless something changed in political rhetoric and policy, last summer’s riots would not be a one-off. “I think they will come back. That [the riots] was the ugliest representation of the years of racism that have been manufactured through the political media conversation. And if we don’t do something differently, that won’t be a one-off, and that ugliness will become just a regular feature of our politics.”

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian amid the launch of the Runnymede Trust’s report on Islamophobia, Begum said the devastating war in Gaza and the response to the ceasefire protests in the UK meant the issue had become “inescapable” and had to be confronted.

While she did not name specific MPs, Begum said Labour and the Conservatives had both been guilty of feeding a hostile climate for British Muslims that is “bleak and dystopian”.

She pointed to the reaction to the summer’s racist riots as particularly worrying, saying there was “a real reluctance to use the term Islamophobia during that period because no one wants to be seen to defend Muslims”.

She added: “Politicians are engaging in a popularity contest and that popularity contest is measured by how far they are willing to bully and demonize Muslims. And that has become not just an acceptable kind of currency, but a way in which to earn your political stripes.”

The report, backed by Lady Warsi, Amnesty International UK and the Muslim Council for Britain, explores the way Islamophobia is “intensifying” in different areas.

It notes in the four months to February 2024, the national project Tell Mama, which measures anti-Muslim attacks, recorded a 335% increase in hate incidents against Muslims compared with the previous year, most of them against women.

In the past year, 38% of all religious hate crimes recorded by the police were against Muslim people. There was a 13% increase in hate crimes against Muslims.

Almost two in five religious hate crimes are targeted against Muslims – the largest of any other religious community. Muslim people are disproportionately victims of assault (without injury), and of stalking or harassment.

According to the statistical bulletin, last year there were the highest recorded number of anti-religious hate crimes since records began. The police note this increase coincided with the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Much of this increase was driven by antisemitic incidents, which accounted for a third (33%) of all religious hate crimes. British Jews were more likely to be victims of criminal damage and arson, and malicious communication.

Begum said the issue went much further than violent, racist attacks. “We often focus on those more spectacular incidents of violence, which are real and inflict a deep and long-lasting harm on individuals and communities, but that can ignore the state-sponsored Islamophobia that rests within our legislation, our policies, and within our narratives,” she said.

Begum criticized what she described as a double standard for Muslims, who she said were criticised as failing to integrate if they did not participate in public life, but also criticized when they did. “Whether it’s through being governors at schools, as we see through the Trojan horse affair … we are seen trying to take over and hijack local schools. Or when we go on protest marches, along with many other people, we are described as hate marchers and Islamist extremists. And when we use our vote to express our political preferences, we’re described as sectarian and divisive.”

For Begum, politics has always felt deeply personal. Born in the 1970s to parents who migrated from Bangladesh, she spent her early years in Tower Hamlets in London as part of the large, vibrant Bangladeshi community there. “My parents ended up as accidental squatters because of the housing crisis and racism that was there at the time,” she said. She became a teacher in east London, where she thought intensively about what an anti-racist education looked like.

She changed careers after more than 20 years to do a PhD in the sociopolitical history of squatting. That put her in the orbit of Runnymede, where a six-month research contract led to her working her way to becoming chief executive.

While she welcomed the government announcement of a £15m community recovery fund to address the deeper roots of the riots, she called for substantial funding to tackle the deprivations caused by austerity and structural racism.

“Everyone wants communities to be cohesive and we’re not objecting to that. What we’re objecting to is a dispersal of insecure funds to community groups and not accepting that mainstream state infrastructures need to be provided, and challenging the broader story of who we are. There’s no point saying all Muslims are all bad, but go and have a cup of tea with them in your local community.”

Source: The Guardian