Foreign Correspondent
LONDON // Incidents of anti-Muslim hatred in the UK increased by more than 300 per cent in 2015, according to a report by an organisation that monitors Islamophobia in collaboration with police.
The report comes less than a week after Britons voted by a narrow majority to leave the European Union following a Brexit campaign accused of stoking mistrust of immigrants and other minorities. Since the vote, there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes and incidents of racial abuse.
Muslims in Britain now find themselves in "uncharted territory", said Shahid Malik, chairman of the organisation Tell Mama (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), which supports victims of Islamophobic hatred.
The 2015 statistics paint "a profoundly bleak picture of the explosion of anti-Muslim hate [in the UK] ... both online and on our streets with visible Muslim women being disproportionately targeted by cowardly hate-mongers", said Mr Malik, a former Labour minister for race, faith and community cohesion.
Tell Mama — which documents incidents of Islamophobia across the UK by collating data independently and in collaboration with 15 police forces — recorded a 326 per cent increase in anti-Muslim incidents on the streets of Britain in 2015. In many cases, it said, victims reported that "they did not see bystanders challenging abusive perpetrators, which compounded the insecurity and alienation that they felt".
The organisation received direct reports of verbal and online harassment and abuse from more than 1,100 Muslims the same year, and collated details of a further 1,400 incidents recorded by the police.
Tell Mama fears the Brexit referendum result may have emboldened anti-Muslim bigots.
Jo Cox, the British MP who was stabbed and shot dead days before the Brexit vote, was working on the report before she was killed, according to British media. She was preparing to present the findings to parliament later this month.
"There are already post-Brexit cases coming to us, such as people saying to Muslim women 'We voted you out, you shouldn't be here'," Fiyaz Mughal, founder and director of Tell Mama, told The National.
Since Thursday's vote, the organisation has been alerted to 30 Brexit-related incidents of abuse and online harassments. In the first, which took place the day after the vote, a Muslim local councillor in Wales was told to pack her bags and leave.
Britain's National Police Chiefs' Council said there has been a 57 per cent increase in reported hate crimes in the four days following the vote compared to a month ago.
"If our society was already polarised, clearly it is going to be more so after Brexit. I think perpetrators will now feel far more emboldened to vocalise their prejudice after the vote, which has given a kind of credibility to their viewpoint," Mr Mughal said.
The most prolific abusers were young people between the ages of 13 and 18 years old, the report found, which was "worrying considering that many opinion polls demonstrate that those in this age group are less likely than older people to harbour racist, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim sentiments". The findings suggested that "some teenagers are being radicalised and are moving away from the mainstream views of their age group".
Tell Mama has called on social media providers and search engine services such as Google to do more to tackle the problem online, as 45 per cent of people responsible for anti-Muslim tirades on the internet were found to be "verifiably supportive of far right extremist groups". It said that "far right extremism, like Islamist extremism, is promoted using social media".
On Twitter, 88 per cent of recorded incidents featured abusive language or harassment, but a worrying 11 per cent also involved "violent threats either directed at an individual or institution, such as a mosque, or indirect threats to Islam and Muslims in general".
It was clear the police are under-resourced, untrained and completely overwhelmed by the complexity of online cases, said Mr Mughal. "Officers will turn up to victims and say 'What's Twitter? Can you tell me how it works?'."
The organisation, which was founded in 2012, has identified "a growing geography of anti-Muslim hatred" especially in London, with some hot spots — including Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street — popular with summer tourists from the Arab world.
The many tourists from the Gulf region who visit London during the summer months should not be deterred from doing so, said Mr Mughal.
"They should carry on coming to the UK," he said. "But they need to be aware that if something happens to them, they must report it to the police or to agencies like us, and not just accept it."
Tell Mama said the greatest impact of anti-Muslim hatred was being felt by women, "whose ability to travel and be free from fear and intimidation is being increasingly curtailed" as a result of responses to national and international events, such as terrorism.
Women were the targets of 61 per cent of all incidents recorded by the organisation, but while 55 per cent of all victims on the streets were visibly Muslim, 75 per cent of all female victims had been easily identifiable as Muslims by wearing the hijab or the niqab.
Mr Malik warned that against the backdrop of Brexit and the spike in racist incidents, the government "should be under no illusions that things could quickly become extremely unpleasant for Britain's minorities".
"Today, more than ever, we need our government, our political parties and of course our media to act with the utmost responsibility and help steer us towards a post-Brexit Britain where xenophobia and hatred are utterly rejected."
Failure to demonstrate "the necessary maturity in leadership at this delicate moment in our history" could have "significant and far-reaching consequences for us all", he warned.
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