It is truly saddening and disheartening to see how different today’s Britain views and treats immigrants from the Britain my wife and I moved to in 1992. It reflects a broader Western phenomenon, however.
Britain always had a small minority of Eurosceptic politicians, particularly in the Conservative Party, who were hostile to the European Union. This hostility started to grow faster as more countries joined the EU and, consequently, more migrants started to arrive from the new EU member states.
Anti-EU rhetoric continued to increase in the late 1990s and into the new century. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) gradually became the main voice of hostility towards the European Union, with the Eurosceptics of the Conservative Party playing catch-up. Bombarded with relentless misinformation and a delusional, inflated image of the status of Britain relative to the EU and the new international order, many Britons were converted to the cause. The escalating situation led to a referendum in 2016 on Britain’s membership of the EU. By then, xenophobia in Britain was in full swing. Campaigning on a platform of fear of migration from the EU, anti-Europe politicians got what they wanted as Britain voted, albeit by a small margin, to leave the EU.
Of course, the evidently absurd promise to stem migration was not fulfilled. Migrants continued to arrive, one way or another. They continued to face hostility in all kinds of new ways. But with Britain now out of the EU, the institution that was depicted as responsible for migration was no more, so the raw, primordial anger at migration was now even more insatiable.
Xenophobia, like any other form of intolerance and prejudice, is a slippery slope. Supremacism and racism, therefore, also spread far and wide across the land. But nothing captured all those moral, spiritual, and societal ailments in Britain like Islamophobia. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are migrants or descendants of migrants, so they are a natural target of xenophobia. They often look different and have a distinct way of life, which is what racists look for. Finally, they are often from countries that were once colonised by Great Britain, so they are ideal to be at the receiving end of supremacist treatment.
The fact that Muslims feel that they are as British as anyone with the same legal status of citizenship and right to live on this beautiful island further enrages Islamophobes. If that were not bad enough, racists and supremacists feel there are too many of the Muslim type of “others.” This is why those who have been administering the venomous admixture of xenophobia, racism, and supremacism in British society have continued to up their game. Britain thus caught up with the new evil that had already spread in Europe and other parts of the world. Islamophobia is now an international language, spoken by numerous people; the new Esperanto.
Islamophobia gradually moved from being seen as an abhorrent form of “othering” and racism—just like discrimination against people of colour and Antisemitism—to being a completely legitimate point of view. Both the racist and the subject of racism, it is argued, should be given equal rights to explain their perspectives. This is part of a general, increasingly popular mindset and propaganda in which the offender and the powerful play the victim of the offended and the weak. Right is wrong and wrong is right.
Then something even worse, much worse, happened. The Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 led to an unimaginably brutal response from Israel, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, obliterating whole families, starving the population of Gaza to death, ethnically cleansing them, destroying their land and livelihood completely, not to mention what it did to the thousands and thousands of people it kidnapped and put in prison without trial, access to legal counsel, and so on. Its relentless crimes have been recorded by video and image and shared with the whole world. Hundreds of millions of people across the world have seen horrors that they had only read about in the history books or had seen in movies. No crimes against humanity have been documented this extensively before. Contrary to the response of the international public, which is the real international community, the figures of power, authority, and money in the US and Europe increased their longstanding support of Israel’s occupation and apartheid. Israel’s new phase of extreme aggression has also become the main fuel of Islamophobia.
Over almost eight decades of extreme terror, Israel targeted the native Arab population of Palestine, regardless of their religion. Christians and Muslims both had their land stolen, were made destitute, were treated as subhumans, and were depicted as enemies of the growing Jewish state. I come from an Iraqi Arab Christian family, and I recall as a small child in June 1967, in the Six-Day War, seeing my father glued to our old radio, eagerly hoping to hear good news of a victory for the occupier over the occupier. My parents, relatives, and all Christians I knew never saw that war or any other wars that supported the Palestinians against Israel as being in support of Muslims or liberating Muslim land. Israel has always been fair in equally victimising all non-Jewish populations of Palestine, both Muslims and Christians, those who lived on land it had already stolen and those living on land it is in the process of stealing. Israel is equally racist when it comes to non-Jews. Because it is founded on a supremacist ideology, it does not discriminate between its Muslim and Christian victims. It is fairly racist, one may say.
Fast-forward, Israel’s war on the truth and the oppressed entered a new phase. Given that Hamas identifies as an “Islamic” resistance movement and that most of the Arab populations still living in Palestine are Muslims, Israel and its allies have blamed Muslims for being at least partly responsible for the oppressed Palestinians’ refusal to give in to Israel, and at the same time, they extended the evil of Islamophobia to target the Palestinians. This conflation of Islam and the Palestinian cause was made easier by the absence of a Muslim equivalent of the evil of Christian Zionism. Muslims, like all decent humans, can only be anti-Zionist. The other twin of this deliberate deception is to equate opposing Israel’s supremacist policies and crimes against humanity with Antisemitism. Muslims are subjected to Islamophobia and accused of Antisemitism at the same time. Non-Muslim opponents of Zionist Israel cannot be targeted by Islamophobia, so Antisemitism comes in handy.
Zionists—Jewish, Christian, and secular—supremacists, racists, and xenophobes have become a major force driving Islamophobia across the world, but in particular in the West. This is not bad news only for a quarter of the population of the planet, i.e. Muslims. It is also dangerous to the rest of the world population, regardless of their faith, ethnicity, and nationality. The poisonous mix of Zionism, supremacism, racism, and xenophobia is an extremely serious threat to humanity.
