By: World Bulletin/News Desk
Source: http://www.worldbulletin.net/
The rise of the ISIL has resulted in an increase in anti-Muslim hate crime in London, according to a monitoring group.
Fiyaz Mighal of Tell Mama, a charity which documents crimes or acts against Muslims in the U.K. based on religious, racial or ethnic hatred, told the Anadolu agency that Muslims were being abused both on and offline following the release of videos showing beheadings carried out by ISIL.
Mighal said: “Cases of verbal abuse against Muslims suggests that perceptions about ISIL motivate anti-Muslim hatred nationally and in London.
“We’ve had cases of women being abused on the way to the shops, with people shouting at them: ‘Why don’t we chop your head off?'”
In another case, he said perpetrators shouted at a Muslim woman: “Oh, your head will be much better on the floor.”
The organization also analyzed figures, obtained in a freedom of information request from the Metropolitan police, from 2012 to 2014 and found that there had been an overall increase.
Dramatic rise
Mughal said that, although the police were attempting to show that hate crimes were coming down following the murder of Lee Rigby, a British soldier who was hacked to death near his barracks in Woolwich, southeast London, in May last year leading to a dramatic rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, Tell Mama’s research showed they had increased overall.
Tell Mama said that, according to figures released by the Metropolitan police, there had been an average of 28 anti-Muslim hate crimes per month in the year before the killing, from April 2012 to April 2013.
But anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by 66 percent the year after, between March 2013 and March 2014.
Tell Mama said that, with the so-called Trojan Horse scandal in Birmingham (which revolved around allegations of a “jihadist plot” to take over education in U.K. schools), the Gaza-Israel conflict and the activities of ISIL in northern Iraq all being in the headlines, attacks against Muslims had risen.
The anti-Muslim discourse worsened in late 2014 following reports of child abuse in Rotherham, in which more than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a 16-year period by gangs of pedophiles after police and council bosses who turned a blind eye to the attacks through fear of being labelled racist, according to a report by Professor Alexis Jay, the former chief inspector of social work in Scotland.
‘Rampant’ hatred
Mughal said: “The issue very quickly was turned into a Muslim issue by the far-right and others seeking to capitalize on the events.
“It is clear that anti-Muslim hate did not simply taper off and fall back to a low level after 2014. Instead, it got worse,” he said.
The highest number of reports came from the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which has a large Muslim population and a Muslim mayor.
A report by Birmingham City University on online hatred towards Muslims after the murder of Lee Rigby, said in July the problem had become “rampant”.
A Teeside University investigation released the same month revealed Muslim women were increasingly becoming the targets of anti-Muslim hate crimes.
U.K. Muslims makes up 4.8 percent of the country’s population and number around 2.7 million.