TAJ HARGEY: No wonder just a quarter of British Muslims believe the October 7 ... trends now
Six months after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel, blood continues to soak the Middle East.
In distant Gaza, the death toll is mounting, sectarian divisions are worsening and the destruction is nothing short of apocalyptic.
But the conflict has also had a sharp impact here in Britain. A new and aggressive form of intolerance has convulsed swathes of British Muslims, fuelling an ugly wave of anti-Semitism, as well as strengthening the cause of fundamentalism.
This week, a report from the Henry Jackson Society, the Transatlantic think tank that works to promote democratic liberal values, has laid bare the crisis.
It offers a wealth of evidence to show how fractured our society has become — and how extremist views have become commonplace in Britain’s growing Muslim community, which now numbers some four million.
Staggeringly, 46 per cent of UK Muslims now admit that they ‘sympathise’ with Hamas, which is proscribed here as a terror organisation.
Barely a quarter accept that Hamas committed rape and murder in Israel on October 7, with 40 per cent wrongly claiming that the group did not carry out such atrocities, and a further 37 per cent saying they ‘don’t know’ whether or not it did.
Relatives of the October 7 attack victims among pictures of their loved ones who were killed or kidnapped. However, only a quarter of British Muslims believe the atrocity even happened
Needless to say, the evidence that Hamas did commit these and other crimes, on a systematic scale, is overwhelming. The terrorists themselves gleefully live-streamed their carnage on the internet, boasting of their ‘kill count’ to their cheering families as they carried out the most sickening massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Yet most worrying still to me is that the new report revealed how younger, better-educated British Muslims are now more likely to hold extremist views than their older counterparts who did not attend university.
When young British Muslims wilfully ignore the evidence of their own eyes, what tensions might this presage for the future?
I have been an imam for 20 years and still lead Friday prayers at my mosque in Oxford. Since October 7, young men in my congregation have spoken to me with undisguised relish about the slaughter of Israeli soldiers.
Blindly they listen to rabid clergy spewing hatred on social media — cruel and unthinking men stoking up enmity and hostility, encouraging Muslims to see Jews as less than human.
Having drunk such poison, thousands of young British Muslims no longer recognise the value inherent in all human life. After all, as it says in the Koran: ‘He who slays a soul shall be as if he had slain all mankind, and he who saves a life shall be as if he had given life to all mankind’.
But I face an uphill struggle to explain this simple truth to my worshippers: that, just as not all Germans were Nazis during World War II, not all Jews today are Zionists who harbour antipathy towards Muslims. Far from it, in fact.
I helped to start our progressive mosque in the aftermath of 9/11, when many Western Muslims were seeking to deny that their faith had played any part in that atrocity.
Two decades later, the same tendency towards conspiracist thinking persists among a large proportion of Britain’s Muslims. Some even peddle the nonsensical claim that Israel actually plotted the October 7 invasion in order to establish a pretext to commit ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
Worse still, this problem is growing: attitudes are hardening over time. Already, most
