By Maira Butt
As the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks approaches, the British Muslim community has found itself at a crossroads.
Support for Palestinians led to dismay at the politicians’ failure to call for a ceasefire, all of which has led to “a moment of reckoning and conflict between British foreign policy and their identity”, according to community leaders who spoke to the Religion Media Centre.
The Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU), which records hate crime, says taunts of “Palestinian” and “Muslim” go hand in hand. Name-calling and threats are so commonplace that the unit has given up recording Islamophobia online. Islamophobia is said to have been fuelled by extensive media coverage, with the intensity of the war captured in daily graphic media reports.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza since 7 October, the vast majority of whom are women and children, according to the United Nations.
The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, suggests the number of deaths could be as high as 186,000, or even higher with projections as large as 335,000 by the end of the year.
In the first four weeks, the Gaza Strip, a quarter the area of London, was hit with the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Israel vehemently denies any excess and insists it is defending itself after the Hamas attacks last year that killed 1,139 people, including 815 civilians.
The conflict has seeped into every facet of society, from Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech, Sally Rooney’s promotion for her new novel, Intermezzo, to the Eurovision Song Contest.
The rise in Islamophobic attacks was immediate. The IRU recorded a 300 per cent rise in hate crimes against Muslims in the weeks following 7 October. According to the unit’s chief executive, Majid Iqbal, the figures and case studies only scratch the surface.
Muslim protesters have been dubbed “terrorists”, as have children in schools. Muslim women have had their hijabs pulled from their heads, windows have been smashed, and others have been violently attacked.
“We don’t even bother recording online Islamophobia because it is so rampant, but we should,” Mr Iqbal told the Religion Media Centre. “I could go online now and find 15 instances of Islamophobic comments in the space of 10 minutes on Twitter/X.”
Reports escalated and then dropped slightly, until they rapidly increased again by about 400 per cent in the run-up to the Southport riots with “terrorist” and “Hamas” commonly being recorded as verbal abuse directed towards Muslims.
It has been particularly prevalent in schools and the workplace where Mr Iqbal says Muslims have been penalised for their political beliefs. Complaints leading to punishment have been as seemingly innocuous as wearing a Palestine badge or sharing a pro-Palestine social media post.
“Since October 2023, there has been a substantial increase in Palestine-related educational and employment cases. People have said they have been disciplined at work or even sacked for showing support for Palestine,” he said. The link, he says, between Islamophobia and support for Palestine has been well documented and can be seen in instances where teachers have made referrals to the counter-terrorism group Prevent when a child or young person has expressed support for the cause.
“We deal with cases where somebody has been targeted purely because they are Muslim,” he added. “Palestinian and Muslim often go hand in hand. For example, someone could be on a march and get called a ‘Muslim terrorist’ or get called ‘Hamas’.”
But for a community known for under-reporting incidents to the police, there is a more urgent and deeper dynamic at play: a moment of reckoning and conflict between British foreign policy and their identity. Early on, the issue led to a rebellion within Labour, as MPs and councillors resigned after the party did not vote for a ceasefire.
Afrasiab Anwar, leader of Burnley council, said he and others left the party because it no longer represented their values, namely “equality and the courage to stand up against injustice”. He said they had faced personal and professional attacks since they left, but added: “It is our moral responsibility to continue to speak up.”
“In the last year, the Muslim community has been left really, really shocked,” says Haniya Adam, a media consultant working closely with mosques including Green Lane Masjid and Muslim organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and MEND, across the UK.
“First, the lack of humanity,” Ms Adam said. “Political leaders not voting for a ceasefire really shocked us to our core. It brought home how inhumane and racist the treatment of Muslim people can be, that because Palestinians are brown and Muslim, there is no push to vote for a ceasefire. It doesn’t seem to affect anyone, watching kids get blown up.”
Ms Adam says the media and government reaction has had a visceral impact on the people she interacts with daily, affecting both their mental and physical health. “It’s causing anxiety and depression. It’s causing the youth to not know what to do with themselves to help the situation so that is a huge problem.”
“It’s got to the point where people feel sick. There is an epidemic among the community of disgust with the fact that our leaders did not vote for a ceasefire, that our country is not doing anything to help the people of Palestine, and it’s causing stress.”
With many of the British Muslim diaspora from former colonies including Pakistan, India, Somalia and others, the rights of Palestinians to self-determination feels close to home, she says. People have had their faith shaken, while others have felt galvanised. Conversions appear to have increased as some are inspired by the faith of those in Gaza who praise God even while holding the limp bodies of their loved ones.
For people who have taken part in decades-long protests for the self-determination of the Palestinian people, the issues did not begin on 7 October, but their cause has attracted new support over the year.
“It’s not a Muslim issue,” says Ms Adam, who recalls mostly Muslims protesting against the war in Gaza 16 years ago. “In 2008 there were mostly Muslims at the protests, now it’s 50-50. There are people from all walks of life. I think the world is waking up to how dehumanised we are.”
Muslims who used available avenues to express their dissent have felt that those pathways rendered effectively useless. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, called protests in support of Palestine “hate marches” and police were given new powers to police the demonstrations.
Mira Hammad, a human rights barrister, has represented pro-Palestinian protesters in court, but is also noted for her work on the Grenfell inquiry, Covid inquiry and Manchester Arena bombings inquiry. She says the lack of application of core legal principles has led to a pattern of undermining the rule of law itself.
She refers to the International Court of Justice’s interim ruling in January — after a case brought by South Africa — that there was a plausible risk of irreparable harm to the rights of Palestinians to be protected from genocide. The interpretation of the court’s preliminary statement is contested by Israel and its supporters. In July, the court further declared that the state’s occupation of the West Bank was unlawful.
Ms Hammad says that despite this, the British government continued to insist that Israel had a right to defend itself, while urging restraint.
“The last year has brought home to Palestinians and Muslims in the diaspora just how selective the rule of law is, both on the international stage and on the domestic stage,” she told the Religion Media Centre. “Palestinians have faced this for a long time. But it has never been so starkly apparent as in the last year.”
