Originally published under the title “Media, Police Pump up ‘Islamophobia’ Numbers, Ignore Higher Anti-Semitic Attacks.”
The mainstream media howled with outrage this morning, republishing the Metropolitan Police’s press release talking up the “rise” in “Islamophobic” attacks in Britain’s capital over the last year. The problems, however, are that the police won’t release details of the “Islamophobic” incidents, and for some reason they buried the greater rise in anti-Semitic attacks in London over the past year.
“Islamophobic crime in London ‘up by 70%'" screamed the BBC. “Hate crimes against Muslims soar in London,” roared the Guardian. “Islamophobic Britain: Where Muslim women are spat on, punched and covered in faeces,” exclaimed the Telegraph. And worse still, the Metropolitan Police themselves headlined their press release “Met’s response to rise in Islamophobic hate crime in London.”
This is odd, given that while “Islamophobia” apparently rose by 70.7 percent (478 reported offences in a 12-month period ending in June 2014, compared with 816 offences in a 12-month period ending in June 2015), the number of racist attacks against Jewish people was actually up by 93.4 percent (from 258 attacks to 499).
The increase in anti-Semitic incidents is steeper than the growth in “Islamophobic” incidents.
So while the numbers are lower, that sounds to me like the increase in anti-Semitic attacks is steeper than the increase in “Islamophobia.” Both, however, are a minute percentage of the total 13,007 hate crimes reported in the last year.
So why would the Metropolitan Police be so keen to promote the anti-Islamic attacks and squash the anti-Jewish ones? And why are mainstream journalists following the police in tow?
No, I don’t actually know. But it is worth noting that there are only around 300,000 Jewish people in the United Kingdom, while there are about 3 million Muslims here. This means that, in the span of a year, there was one anti-Semitic attack in London for every 601 Jewish people in the United Kingdom, while there was only one “Islamophobic” attack in London for every 3,676 Muslims.
This shouldn’t be a case of “my co-religionists are more under threat than yours,” but it should put this stuff in perspective a little bit. Our media and police should be ashamed of this counterfactual scaremongering.
Raheem Kassam is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and editor-in-chief of Breitbart London.
