Drawing on compiled research from 35 experts and scholars specialised in racism and human rights, the European Islamophobia Report covers 27 European countries and various Islamophobic events that occurred between January 2021 and December 2021.
The extensive 664-page report goes into great depth regarding various forms of Islamophobia found in politics, online spaces, social settings, labour markets, media, and education. There are certain countries, however, which appear to be the forerunners of prevailing discrimination against Muslims in their political and social policies.
“The Champions of Institutionalised Islamophobia”
In no particular order, these include:
Austria
The total population of Austria is around 9 million, with Muslims making up 7.9 per cent. This makes Islam the largest ethnic minority religion in the country.
Despite this, the country’s leadership still have the following perception of Islam:
“Islamism and terror do not start when they become violent, but much earlier. The point is that we remove the breeding ground for segregation and radicalism.” [1]
Susanne Raab, Austrian Minister of Integration
The far-right crackdown on Muslims was overtly manifested in 2018 when Minister of the Interior Herbert Kickl claimed that there should be more emphasis on the fight against “political Islam”.
In December 2020, Austrian Minister of Integration Susanne Raab organised a European conference on “extremism and political Islam” with Belgian, Danish, German, French, and Dutch politicians in attendance. [2] This is the same woman who made the hijab ban for school pupils up to the age of 14 her “top priority” and stated that “political Islam” was:
“…an ideological, extremist current that wants to infiltrate our society, democracy, the rule of law, and our constitutional values such as equality between men and women.” [3]
It was during a closed invite conference called the ‘Vienna Forum’ that Raab laid out her long-term strategy to tackle “political Islam” in alliance with her European counterparts. An example of her draconian policies is the facilitation of an ‘Islam map’ which identifies and tracks around 620 mosques, associations, officials, and their connections abroad, effectively placing the Muslim community under suspicion. [4]
Denmark
Sociologist and Islamophobia researcher Dr. Amani Hassani expressed how Denmark has worked to further ingrain Islamophobic policies in its institutions. This has, in part, been achieved through the development of a new statistical category introduced in 2020 called ‘MENAPT’ – an initialism for “Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey”. [2]
This category has the potential to marginalise and inherently discriminate against Muslim minorities in Denmark with regards to access to public services, housing, employment, education, as well as treatment within the judicial system.
Following the new citizenship restrictions in 2021, it was identified that MENAPT would be a separate category to ‘non-Westerners’ which is used for ethnic minorities, further indicating that the MENAPT category will be used to specifically target Muslims in society.
France
Within France’s 65 million population, Muslims make up around 6 per cent of this (5.7 million), making them the largest Muslim minority population in Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron describes Islam as a religion “which is experiencing a crisis today all over the world” and that “Islamic separatism” is an ideology which is “the enemy of the Republic”. [5]
In 2021, Macron implemented the ‘anti-separatism’ law to justify his securitisation, suppression, and institutional discrimination against French Muslims. Under the pretext of tackling ‘terrorism’ and ‘radical Islam’, Macron has enforced bans on religious symbols and practices, as well as legitimised the arbitrary closure of mosques and detention of those deemed to be opposed to the state’s republican values, which in reality criminalises ‘Muslimness’. [2]
Since the implementation of the “Systematic Obstruction” policy in 2018, over 24,000 Muslim organisations, institutions, and businesses have been placed on a secret blacklist under strict surveillance. 718 Muslim institutions including businesses, schools, mosques, and civil society organisations have been closed down, and a staggering €46,000,000 has been seized as of January 2022. [2]
Meanwhile, the government romanticises its so-called values of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ while at the same time targeting civil society groups which advocate against discriminative policies and the defence of the rights of Muslims.
United Kingdom
Professor Aristotle Kallis presented the UK segment of the event and described the country to have a “passive-aggressive attitude to Islamophobia” that often “attempts to belittle and dilute” the real issue.
Despite rising levels of hate crime – 45 per cent of which are under the category of ‘religiously aggravated’ towards Muslims – the government fails to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue. However, it is not only outward attacks that exemplify Islamophobia in the UK; the report describes how it is institutionally ingrained within our education, politics, and media.
On a daily basis, negative stereotypes and harmful tropes about Muslims are spewed within British media. Moreover, a strong bias is promoted against Muslims regarding geopolitics – this has been recently witnessed during the Qatar World Cup.
Within the education sphere, we have seen how Muslim students are further marginalised and silenced for their views. The example of students’ voices being suppressed when supporting Palestine against the violent Israeli regime, or the scrutiny held towards parents and students who protested against caricatures of the Prophet (ﷺ) being displayed by a teacher at Batley Grammar School, are just a few which indicate its presence in the education sphere.
Kallis further spoke about the presence of elected individuals who seek to implement policies that undermine the rights of Muslims; such elected officials are prevalent in both the Conservative and Labour parties.
An individual like Michael Gove – who described Islam as a “virus” – was appointed by the government to be the Intergovernmental Relations minister on 25 October 2022. In addition, the Labour party recently reinstated Trevor Phillips, who was originally suspended for his Islamophobic remarks. The UK government continues to repress the issue of Islamophobia and make a mockery of those working to defend the rights of Muslims by trivialising incidents and brushing them under the carpet.
Source: Islam21c
Notes
[1] https://www.vindobona.org/article/solidarity-against-political-islam
[2] https://islamophobiareport.com/islamophobiareport-2021.pdf
[3] https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-susanne-raab/
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/29/austrian-muslims-to-sue-government-over-islam-map
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/15/frances-controversial-separatism-bill-explained
