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Hate crimes against Muslims in Europe have “worsened, if not reached a tipping point,” according to a new report on Islamophobia in Europe released on Wednesday. The 886-page report titled European Islamophobia Report 2020 was co-edited by Enes Bayrakli, an International Relations Professor at Istanbul-based Turkish-German University, and Farid Hafez, a Political Scientist from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative.
“Looking back at the last six years, many observers will unanimously agree that the state of Islamophobia in Europe not only has not improved but has worsened, if not reached a tipping point,” they wrote in the annual report being published since 2015.
The pandemic resulted in relatively fewer physical attacks on Muslims and their places of worship, but that didn’t result in less hate speech. Instead, according to the authors, there was an increase in online hate speech, which has longer-term implications for how Islamophobia is tackled across the continent.
Enes Bayrakli, one of the report’s co-authors, described the increase of online abuse directed at Muslims as a “significant trend.” “This is worrying because online narratives don’t stay online and can create a climate for physical attacks to occur in the real world,” said Bayrakli speaking to TRT World.
French and Austrian Muslims have been left in the hands of brutal state violence that has been legitimized in the name of counterterrorism laws,” the editors said. The closure of the French monitoring body Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF, Collective Against Islamophobia in France), they said, sets an example of “how far state Islamophobia has developed”, according to AA.
According to this year’s report on Islamophobia, France’s systemic pressure on Muslims has resulted in unprecedented “increasing number of police searches, threats of eviction, as well as mosques and school closures, including the dissolution of a humanitarian NGO and a human rights organisation defending Muslims in France against racism and discrimination”, TRT World reported.
