I am angry, and have been for days. This time the reason was not the catastrophic, bleeding injustice of what is happening day after day to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the Middle East. They will understandably sigh at our domestic plight, given their immense pain, suffering and the world’s criminal indifference to their survival. But this is not to undermine the global seriousness of the state of the Ummah; rather, it is a recognition that the very same malice that is destroying Palestine and its people is being allowed to fester unchecked on the streets of Europe.
Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, warned explicitly against reckless anger, famously stating in a narration found in Sahih al-Bukhari that, “The strong man is not the one who can wrestle, but the one who can control himself when he is angry.” So, I have stepped away from my laptop several times since Friday evening while I seek to master my temper. Now, I feel ready to speak with a clear mind and a righteous anger driven purely to seek justice and truth, and to defend the oppressed.
Let us strip away the polite political euphemisms and confront the ugly, bleeding truth: across Europe and the West, Muslim lives are treated as cheap, disposable, second-class currency. The evidence is not subtle. It is written in blood on our streets, in the charred remains of our places of worship, and in the deafening, complicit silence of our state institutions and media networks.
It will no doubt come as news to some of you that, on Friday night, in Edinburgh, a white supremacist went on the rampage with a multi-site stabbing spree, hunting down and plunging blades into five people while screaming anti-Muslim slurs.
There were no ministerial photo ops and wall-to-wall media coverage; no calls for revenge; and definitely no anti-white riots of the kind we saw in Belfast recently against foreigners.
This was nothing new. Does anyone recall the incident at the Manchester Central Mosque on 24 February this year, when a man armed with an axe and a cache of weapons entered the building with the intention of slaughtering people in prayer. Serious casualties were only averted because volunteers in the mosque and an off-duty special constable intercepted the suspect as soon as he crossed the threshold.
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Furthermore, in South-East London in March, a Muslim woman wearing a hijab was mowed down by a car. High-definition CCTV footage showed how the car was driven deliberately at her at high speed, hitting her with such force that she was thrown over the bonnet of the vehicle. The driver fled from the scene without stopping.
Earlier this month, the home of Imam Hassan Patel, the principal of Islamic education at the Taiyabah Masjid in Bolton, Greater Manchester was attacked by a fire bomber dressed in black and wearing a helmet and a face covering as he approached his home.
CCTV showed the attacker pouring flammable liquid on a cloth, lighting it, smashing the living room window and hurling the firebomb inside.
He then squirted more accelerant through the broken window, triggering a blinding fireball. This attack on the Bolton imam’s family home was a calculated act. The arsonist meant to burn the imam’s family alive. This has to be viewed alongside a relentless, terrifying wave of projectiles, graffiti and terror threats targeting mosques across the continent.
Do not mistake this as a uniquely British failure to protect minorities. This is a rotten, pan-European disease, and the scale of this crisis is laid bare by the hard data. Independent monitoring groups like Tell MAMA have documented an unprecedented surge in anti-Muslim hatred, recording more than 6,000 verified hate incidents in a single year, marking a staggering 165 per cent increase in cases compared with recent baselines.
This spike in raw, physical violence directly mirrors the terrifying electoral rise of the far-right across Europe. From the halls of the Bundestag to parliaments in France, Austria and the Netherlands, right-wing extremists are sweeping into power.
This is not a coincidence; it is a calculated cause and effect. Academic research proves that radical-right electoral gains offer a degree of faux legitimacy to public hostility, turning toxic political rhetoric into a green light for violence on our streets.
From the state-sponsored targeting of mainstream Muslim organisations in Austria, to the rise of far-right political rhetoric across Germany and France, Europe is normalising a toxic climate where Muslims are systematically dehumanised. We are locked in an existential war for hearts and minds. We are viewed not as citizens to be protected, but as an internal threat to be managed, while the mainstream political establishment plays an opportunistic game.
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Politicians routinely come running to our communities and begging for our votes during election cycles, only to abandon us the second that the ballots are counted. We must become far more politically savvy. We can no longer afford to reward empty promises with our political loyalty. Our political engagement must be strictly transactional, demanding concrete institutional protections rather than accepting superficial platitudes. When violence erupts from this mainstreamed far-right rhetoric, European governments look the other way.
The double standards are jaw-dropping.
When the horrific Bondi Beach massacre took place in Australia, the world was rightfully shocked. Rigorous coroner’s inquiries were triggered, as was a Royal Commission, along with sweeping institutional reviews into security responses, and high-level political accountability. That is how a civilised state responds when it values the lives of its citizens. It stops everything, investigates systemic failures, and demands answers.
Yet, when a coordinated, multi-city wave of terror explicitly targets European Muslims, the response from the Establishment and mainstream media is a shrug of the shoulders. “So what?” is the clear message that this sends.
I’ll tell you “what”, though.
Where is our public inquiry? Where is the systemic outrage? Where is the emergency COBRA meeting after the Edinburgh incident? No dedicated police protection has been deployed to our mosques, and no national strategy has been launched to confront the radicalisation of the far-right.
Instead, the Muslim community is handed a few limp, character-limited tweets from politicians ticking a public relations box.
This is the racism of institutional indifference. This is a media landscape so thoroughly broken, so deeply invested in the normalisation of Islamophobia, that a stabbing and arson spree against Muslims is relegated to a few column inches in the middle pages. Let’s not pretend that the media are neutral; they’re not. They are openly dismissive, racist and complicit in our dehumanisation.
The message from governments and mainstream media is crystal clear: Muslim citizens do not matter; our blood does not trigger emergencies; we do not warrant protection.
To the politicians, the editors and the silent public looking the other way across Europe I say this: you are not neutral either. Your apathy signals your consent to the demonisation and violence against Muslims. You have nurtured and normalised this far-right hatred for a generation, and now you stand by fiddling while the consequences play out on our streets.
However, do not doubt for one second that we see your double standards; that we see your hypocrisy. The time has come when organisations like the European Muslim League stand firm and no longer allow you to hide behind empty words and godless prayers while our community is hunted down and attacked, as Muslims were on Friday in the streets of the Scottish capital. The matrix of indifference towards your Muslim citizens will no longer go unchallenged.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
