UK Muslims feel the heat for supporting Palestinians

On October 28, 2023, an unidentified person riding a bicycle flung a red, empty petrol can into the parking lot of a mosque in Oxford, UK.

Police said there was a message written on the petrol can that “may be related to the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza.” But it didn’t disclose the exact words.

The letters IDF, an apparent reference to the Israeli Defence Forces, were also scrawled on the can.

Following the incident, the mosque administration released a statement on social media, linking the incident to the mosque’s support for Palestinians and the fact that it had displayed a Palestinian flag on its premises.

The incident shows the kind of hatred British Muslims endure for showing support for the Palestinian cause.

It can also be an indication of the racial violence that awaits Muslims in the UK.

A tide of anti-Muslim racism

Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Muslims in the UK have faced a wave of Islamophobia that includes being harassed on the streets, getting shouted at without any provocation, and in one case a head-scarf-wearing MP was even given death threats.

Muslims who have shown support for Palestinians or voiced concern against Israel’s deadly and disproportionate bombardment campaign have been branded as terrorists.

While mosques have been spray-painted and vandalised in recent weeks, this is nothing new in the UK, which has a long history of repressing support for Palestinians.

For instance, in 2016, Rahmaan Mohammadi, a secondary-school student was interrogated by the police because he wore a “Free Palestine” badge to school.

In 2021, the last time when Israel launched an attack on Gaza, the Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU), a charity, received 146 complaints of schools taking action against students for showing solidarity with Palestinians in less than a week.

At the time, the Palestinian flag was equated with support for terrorism and likened to a swastika . A 14-year-old boy was slapped by a deputy head teacher for carrying a placard with the message, “Palestinian Lives Matter.” And students were excluded from school for wearing the keffiyeh and hanging up flyers in schools bearing QR codes that send users to critical web resources on Israel-Palestine conflict.

Indeed, more recently, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman attempted to suppress support for Palestinians by calling the peaceful, pro-Palestine rallies “hate marches.” And in an article for The Times, Braverman expressed the opinion that pro-Palestinian protesters support Hamas.

By drawing a parallel between pro-Palestine rallies on one side and Hamas and antisemitism on the other, Braverman is indirectly encouraging street violence against those who advocate for the protection of Palestinian lives.

The mosque incident is also not the only act of anti-Muslim violence.

Since the war broke out in Gaza, there has been a 600 percent rise in verbal and physical assault targeting British Muslims and institutions.

One incident includes an attack on a hijab-wearing woman with a concrete slab, in another a pig’s head was dumped at the site of a proposed mosque, and alcohol was thrown on Muslim protestors as they prayed at a pro-Palestine event.

According to the Home Office data as of March 2023, 2 out of 5 acts of religiously motivated violence were directed at Muslims.

Put differently, 39 percent of violent acts affecting faith groups target Muslims, making them the most targeted religious minority.

This hatred towards Muslims can be traced back to the way the community has been depicted in the public imagination in film, television, news and radio.

UK Policies of the War on Terror, such as PREVENT, have long-embedded the view of Muslims as terrorists or potential terrorists.

This is an attempt to dehumanise Muslims as people who are barbaric and unworthy of legal protection.

The dehumanisation and the violence that British Muslims face today—vandalised community centres and places of worship, open aggression on the street, alarming animus in the halls of power, “random” stop and search by police —can be argued to be similar to the dehumanisation and violence that Jewish people faced in the 1930s.

The promise of violence

That empty and innocuous, red petrol can that was thrown at the mosque in Oxford was actually carrying something with it - it carried a threat of violence.

We need to pay attention to the threat of violence just as much as we pay attention to the actual violence directed at Muslims. After all, many British Muslims go about their lives anticipating the possibility of violence.

For practising British Muslims, particularly niqab or hijab-wearing women who are the preferred targets of Islamophobic attacks, the threat of violence forces them to avoid certain places and be vigilant when they go out.

British Muslims who are vocal about their support for the Palestinian cause constantly face the prospect of losing their jobs or being expelled from educational institutions.

Add to that the threat of violence and it stops British Muslims from exercising their right to freedom of speech and practice religion.

The replacement of Home Secretary Braverman with James Cleverly does not portend an easier future for British Muslims. For indeed, the government has confirmed that Braverman’s sacking was not due to her policies, but rather her divisive language. And prior to his appointment as Home Secretary, Cleverly expressed the view that Islamophobia cannot exist because Islam is not a race, an argument made by the far-right to deny the existence of anti-Muslim violence.