RNA (UK) - The violence unleashed by an outfit that calls itself Islamic State was bound to trigger Islamophobic tendencies, British news outlets reported.
The Muslim community in the UK, whose citizen, David Haines, was beheaded by this Middle East group, bears the brunt of both right-wing and oblivious locals indiscriminately channeling their anger into mistreatment and abuse of local Muslims. In the wake of the Haines killing, English Defence League (EDL) attacked a mosque in Rotherham.
Are the people in the UK that naïve to believe that whatever crimes, in any part of the world, are committed by a group of so-called Muslims – or individuals – also condemns the British Umma for belonging to Islam. Mosques and other Islamic buildings have come under EDL attack. So are members of the British Muslim community, notably women in hijab, Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) Ml Ebrahim Mogra told Sabahul Khair. Muslim institutions – including schools – are continually put under the spotlight and scrutinised excessively by even government departments, he added.
“Sadly, that is the reality for many of us in what we might call the western part of the world, particularly in the UK,” said the Imam. “When a crime is committed, the religion of the perpetrator only becomes relevant if the perpetrator happens to be a Muslim. We don’t hear of Christian terrorists, or Jewish terrorists, or Hindu terrorist and the like.”
The religion of Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu, whose atrocities put them in the league of John Vorster and Belgium’s Leopold II, a colonist, is hardly of relevance when their crimes against humanity are discussed. Closer to the scene of the latest anti-Islam backlash, the EDL, now terrorising members of the Muslim community in Britain, is not identified as Christian or otherwise. That’s by design. The media’s unspoken demonisation of Islam, disguised as inconsistency or one-sidedness, is a tad hard to ignore.
In an interview with Cii this morning, the MCB spokesperson noted the tendency by journalists, including, sadly, mainstream outlets such as the BBC, to use “Islam and Muslim labeling”. This, he added, feeds into fascist and racist Islamophobic attitudes.
“Even when there’s a robbery or a burglary or any other kind of lesser crime, the criminal’s religious identity is only mentioned in the newspapers, in the media, when it happens to be a Muslim. So, that is one of the biggest challenges that we’re facing here in the United Kingdom,” the Imam said. To fight the media-driven stigma deriving from the unfailing singling out of Islam, in bad times, the MCB and others representing Umma, including the Ulama and Imams in that country’s Masjids, routinely distance Islam and its teachings from the criminal behavior of some Muslims.
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