The US and UK have shunned the growing concerns of Muslim communities, opening the door to a far-right surge

Hatred against Muslims is going through the roof. In the US, public prejudice against Muslims is highest among all religious groups, according to a new Brookings Institution poll.

In the UK, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they felt less safe living in Britain after the recent riots, and one in six had personally experienced an Islamophobic or racist incident in the week after the Southport stabbings.

The drop in positive attitudes towards Muslims in the US is especially prominent among Democrats, voters who would naturally identify themselves as progressive.

The Brookings poll found that after years of improvement, favourable views of Muslims decreased overall to 64 percent from 78 percent two years earlier, but the drop was more pronounced among Democrats.

Brookings identified a number of factors in this, including a generational change, a gap between public perceptions of Judaism and Islam, race, and college education - but the most eye-catching was evidence that opinion towards Islam was being affected by the statements and positions of public leaders.

Whereas former US President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting people from seven Muslim-majority countries increased public sympathy with Muslims, President Joe Biden’s statements on Gaza appear to have had the opposite effect.

“President Joe Biden’s statements, coming at a time when there was high national attention on the war in Israel and Gaza, and especially the president’s tone, which some have criticized as insensitive to Muslim and Arab civilian casualties, raised the prospect that his stance may be dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims,” noted Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow with Brookings.

In the two polls conducted since the start of the Gaza war, Telhami said favourable views of Muslims dropped, especially among Democrats. The role of Biden’s stance as a possible factor in this trend would need “further exploration”, he said ominously.

Rejecting Palestinian voices

What, then, has been the response of political parties in the US and UK, which lay claim to presenting progressive opinions? How have the Democrats in the US and the Labour government in Britain reacted to this surge of racism against Muslims?

Earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s response was to reject a call to have a Palestinian speaker on the main stage of its convention.

This was not a question of insisting that a high-profile Palestinian American like Rashida Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th congressional district, take the stage. She did not even go to her party’s convention.

Rather, the speaker rejected by the DNC was an ordinary party representative who had been proposed by the Uncommitted movement, an influential group that includes many Arab Americans. They could make the difference between Trump or presidential nominee Kamala Harris winning Michigan, a key swing state.

The DNC had no hesitation, however, in offering its platform to the family of an Israeli hostage. Yet while it hosted a panel on Palestinian human rights and provided credentials for Uncommitted leaders to attend the convention, the DNC could not bring itself to allow a Palestinian speaker even a token space on its platform - even at the risk of incurring electoral costs in a close election.

Why did the party do this? The Washington Post reported that Democratic leaders were concerned that a convention speech addressing the war in Gaza would “threaten the unity” that had been present throughout the event.

They wanted a love fest. So they kept Gaza out of the party’s celebrations.

“I was just told that I don’t have a voice here in this party,” Layla Elabed, co-founder of the Uncommitted movement, told reporters on Wednesday.

Far-right riots

Is the same true in Britain?

Unfortunately, even more so. Keir Starmer’s premiership was shaken this summer by the worst race riots Britain had experienced in a century, sparked by a false rumour that the killer of three young girls at a dance class in Southport was Muslim.

Starmer visited a mosque in Solihull, where he was greeted by protesters, but he has done nothing publicly to meet representatives of the Muslim or Palestinian communities since, nor has any member of his government.

During the riots, Starmer ignored communications from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the country’s largest body representing British Muslims.

Whether Starmer likes it or not, the MCB represents more than 500 members - mosques, schools, local councils, professional networks, and advocacy groups. No other Muslim group has this reach.

Since the riots, Starmer has ignored calls from 80 Muslim organisations to take concrete steps to tackle Islamophobia and to launch an independent review.

But this shunning of the Muslim community, the principal victim of the riots, does not mean the government has been inactive. It has been highly responsive to representatives of the Jewish community.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently met the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. They talked about Britain’s foreign policy. Could you imagine the fuss if a British imam demanded to see the foreign secretary to discuss the country’s foreign policy?

But Lammy was unabashed. “We discussed the imminent and vast threats facing Israel across the Middle East, UK Government decisions relating to the conflict, the urgent importance of freeing the hostages, achieving long term peace, and the deep impact of the war in this country,” Mirvis wrote on X, alongside a photo of him with the foreign secretary.

In addition, Science Secretary Peter Kyle recently met several Jewish groups, including the Community Security Trust, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Holocaust Educational Trust, to discuss measures to combat antisemitism online.

It is right that such a meeting takes place. But how on earth can it be right that Kyle does not also meet representatives of the Muslim community to discuss the tidal wave of Islamophobic abuse on social media?

Two-tiered value system

How can any government, let alone a supposedly left-leaning, internationalist one, get away with boycotting such a significant community weeks after it was explicitly targeted by fascists and thugs?

And why is it that Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is following in the footsteps of far-right Suella Braverman, in continuing the government’s appeal against a high court ruling over a law that has seen hundreds of people arrested and convicted for peacefully protesting?

Racist abuse against British Muslims has become a massive and ugly problem across the country. No Muslim in Britain feels safe after the riots.

All racist abuse against any British citizen should be dealt with equally, but this is patently not the case under Starmer’s two-tiered system of values. Why is it that racism against Jewish citizens seems to be given so much more weight by this government than racism against British Muslims?

The anti-Muslim bias of this government is so deeply rooted that it overcomes even the patent instinct politicians have for their own survival.

Labour lost four seats over its policy in Gaza in the last elections and narrowly scraped through in a fifth. The Muslim community is a massive voting bloc. Why shun it? Why behave as if it does not exist?

Is it racism? Is it the fear of being labelled antisemitic if the government meets relatives of Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza by the Israeli army? Or is the need to support Israel, no matter what war crimes it commits, that figures most in Starmer’s mind?

Whatever the case, this issue is not about foreign policy or Israel. It’s about how the British government deals with British citizens, particularly ones targeted by racist mobs. It’s about the equality of political rights in the US.

Mosques need more than physical protection. An event of the magnitude and geographical scope of the UK riots - one big enough to stop Starmer from taking his summer holiday - needs a commission of inquiry. Why is he resisting pressure to set one up? Is Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, frightened at what it could find?

Global battle

Muslims are not a minority. There are more than 1.8 billion of them, or about one-quarter of the world’s population.

Starmer and Biden’s shunning of Muslims over the paramount need to have Israel’s back is extensively and exhaustively covered in the Arab media daily. This coverage is further evidence for Arab communities that the West does not care that nothing has changed since colonial days.

Just imagine the effect it would have if either Britain or the US reversed course and listened to a Muslim voice, even if they did not like what was said.

Hug the minorities in Britain and the US, and they become your most effective advocates and messengers. If these nations dealt with Muslims as they do with Jews, these communities would become their best ambassadors to the Muslim world - and the whole discourse across the region towards and against the West as an empty shell would change.

But stay on the current course of travel, and Starmer and Harris will only find themselves opening the gates of power to their nemeses.

The far right has only one idea, which grows in intensity and popularity each month. It is that the western world is in an existential civilisational fight, in which the Judeo-Christian world is fighting barbarism.

Israel is the front line of this global battle. If it loses, we all lose, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told both houses of Congress - by which he means, all whites lose.

Anti-Muslim agenda

The centre left does nothing to fight this discourse. Quite the opposite- they embrace it, too. They, too, court Israel. They, too, are petrified of being branded antisemitic simply for upholding the human rights of Palestinians.

They, too, treat American and British Muslims in a radically different way from how they treat members of other faiths. And as the polling in each country shows only too clearly, this is having an effect on public attitudes, particularly among uneducated segments of the population.

By shunning Muslims, Starmer is accommodating the anti-Muslim agenda. He is doing far-right leader Nigel Farage’s work for him.

Starmer is making mainstream Farage’s views on Muslims as a potential fifth column in Britain, exactly as French President Emmanuel Macron did before him - and look what happened in France.

Nor will Starmer’s Britain be able to extricate itself from the fatal embrace of a far-right American president if Trump wins.

Robert O’Brien, one of the key security voices in Trump’s team, said Britain would risk “a serious rift” in its special relationship with the US if it goes ahead with a ban on arms sales to Israel. Starmer has already got the message.

By his actions, Starmer is inviting the far right onto the political stage - and when they get there, and Starmer is banished to the political shadows, all progressives, not least the Jewish citizens among them, will be the first to feel it.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

This article was originally published at MEE. To access the article click here.