This week, violent racist mobs terrorized British streets from Liverpool to Bristol to Portsmouth, with cars set alight, buildings looted and police attacked. Dozens more are planned across the country.
It all started with the murder of three young girls at a yoga workshop in the northern town of Southport, England. Misinformation on social media rapidly spread, falsely blaming the knife attack on a Muslim immigrant. The name “Ali al-Shakati” went viral online — it had no basis whatsoever but was posted and shared by known far-right Islamophobic figures.
Just days later, it was revealed that the attacker was a British-born Christian teen from Cardiff. But the violence had already begun.
With the riots spreading across the U.K., the government is considering banning far-right nationalist groups like the English Defence League. But it may be too little, too late.
For too long, Muslims and “Islamism” have been deemed to be major threats to British society, while white supremacy and neo-Nazism have been allowed to fester just beneath the surface of what is largely a tolerant and multicultural society.
Extremist acts perpetrated by Muslims, however rare, are given wall-to-wall coverage in the media and swiftly labeled as terrorism, while similar acts by neo-Nazis or the far right fail to be labeled as such. Mainstream rhetoric constantly blames Islam for every problem in our country.
Meanwhile, a dangerous and extremist far-right movement has been allowed to quietly build and take root in British society — and it, not Muslims, represents the real threat to our peace and security.
Take the case of Darren Osborne. The 48-year-old father of four was radicalized within just one month through mainstream platforms in 2018. He had read online material from Tommy Robinson, one of the founders of the EDL and perhaps the biggest instigator of the current riots. Soon after, Osborne drove a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, killing a man and injuring 12 people.
Neil Basu, the U.K.’s former head of counterterrorism policing, told Sky News that during his time in office from 2018 to 2021, far-right extremism was the “fastest-growing” threat but was overlooked.
“We did have a problem that we did not see the potential threat of a rising far right which is tipping into extreme right-wing terrorism,” he said.
For too long, Muslims and “Islamism” have been deemed major threats to British society, while white supremacy and neo-Nazism have been allowed to fester just beneath the surface.
Today, former EDL leader Tommy Robinson sits in his all-inclusive five-star Cyprus hotel as he laments the “fall” of British values — all the while pouring more fuel on the fire of the venomous hatred of the rioters from the comfort of his sun lounger.
“Our daughters are being raped and pillaged across the country by Muslim invaders,” he falsely claimed on CNN-News 18. “I’m against Islamic immigration into our country.”
In 2021, 19 out of 20 children aged under 18 who were arrested for terrorism were linked to an extreme rightwing ideology, according to London’s Assistant Police Commissioner Matt Jukes.
The youngest person to be convicted of a terror offense the same year was not a Muslim or an “Islamist” — it was a white supremacist neo-Nazi from Cornwall who wanted to “gas” Jews and genocide non-whites.
The Reform Party, which typically stands on an extreme anti-immigration agenda, captured five seats in Parliament for the first time at the UK General Election in July, giving xenophobic views legitimacy on a national stage.
Young Muslims are “totally against our values,” claimed U.K. Reform leader Nigel Farage on Sky News just a few months ago. He ignored the violent rioters radicalized by his rhetoric and the teenage home-grown neo-Nazi terrorists convicted in the last few years.
What we’re seeing play out on the streets today is a “deliberate” demonization of Muslims and migrants, according to Baroness Warsi, a member of the House of Lords and a veteran parliamentarian.
“The poisoning of the public discourse on Muslims, migrants and refugees has been consistent and deliberate,” she tweeted. “An anti-Muslim agenda has been pursued by some in politics, the media and some think tanks and we have to be brave enough to call it out.”
Whether it was the Telegraph in 2018 publishing a column by Boris Johnson calling hijab-wearing Muslim women letterboxes (Islamophobic incidents rose 375% in the aftermath), or the Sun publishing Katie Hopkins’ article calling migrants “cockroaches,” the normalization of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in the mainstream conversation has fueled these riots.
Alan Moses, the former chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, said in 2019: “I have a suspicion that [Muslims] are from time to time written about in a way that [newspapers] would simply not write about Jews or Roman Catholics.”
That was a massive understatement. An analysis of almost 48,000 articles and 5,500 broadcast clips between October 2018 and September 2019 showed that nearly 60% portray Islam with negative connotations, often of that of terrorism and extremism.
In the time since, we have witnessed a sharp rise in Islamophobia. There was a 335% increase in anti-Muslim incidents between October 2023 and February 2024 as compared to the same period the previous year.
The list of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in our mainstream goes on and on. By pandering to the far right, our politicians sowed the seeds of these riots. Indeed, the very slogan these far-right mobs are chanting as they loot and set fire to buildings was the slogan of the previous right-wing Conservative government: “Stop the boats.”
As former First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousuf says, “From anti-immigrant rhetoric to indulging in Islamophobia, far too many politicians from across the political spectrum have normalized and increasingly adopted the language of the far right.”
It’s time we take the threat of far-right nationalistic extremism seriously. The threats to this country are not from Muslims or immigrants.
We have countless examples of this language. “We have allowed our streets to be intimidated by ‘Islamist’ extremists,” former immigration minister Robert Jenrick told Parliament in February without any evidence. Even now the British parliamentarian calls for people using the Arabic slogan in praise of God, “Allahu Akbar” or “God is great,” to be arrested. He’s also running to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Previous Home Secretary Suella Braverman wasn’t shy about stating her anti-immigrant views. She said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda — a policy immediately discarded by the new Labour government.
“When politicians have presided over economic decline, it has been easier for many of them to blame migrants,” Yousuf says.
While ruthlessly cutting funding of public services, Conservative MPs trotted the usual lines of ‘Islamists’ taking over our streets, as did far-right personalities who are still given a platform on right-wing news outlets like GB News and the tabloids.
“They have created the climate that we now see play out in our towns and cities and they are as much to blame as the thugs on the street,” Warsi says.
Even peaceful Gaza protests, which included Jewish groups, were not spared. They were labeled “hate marches,” “extremist” and “antisemitic” — all without a shred of evidence.
It’s time we take the threat of far-right nationalistic extremism seriously. The threats to this country are not from Muslims or immigrants. As today’s riots show, the call is coming from inside the house.
