How Does The Metropolitan Police Classify An 'Islamophobic'Hate Crime?

In the wake of any mass Islamist terror attack on mostly non-Muslims, it doesn’t take long before the ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ narrative takes centre stage, namely that good regular Muslims are under siege, or being ‘lynched’ en masse at the hands of non-Muslims.

Now, there is no doubt that Muslims do face anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.K. and one instance of it is one too many. It’s also true that these instances increase after Islamist terror atrocities. I simply wonder whether they are as significant as the media coverage would have you believe, and what the criteria is for classifying something as ‘Islamophobic’.

The BBC reported  that ‘Anti-Islam hate crimes triple in London after Paris attacks’ earlier this week. I’ve been forever suspicious of accepting statistics of this kind at face value since the organisation Tell Mama were found to be inflating their figures by equating what amounted to online insults to ‘violent attacks’. Some of which didn’t even originate from Britain.

With this in mind, I’ve been trying to find some solid criteria as to how the Metropolitan Police classify an instance of ‘Islamophobia’ in these latest figures reported in the BBC article. From the Met’s website, it seems they define ‘Islamophobic Crime’ as (emphasis mine):

‘An Islamophobic Offence is any offence which is perceived to be Islamophobic by the victim or any other person, that is intended to impact upon those known or perceived to be Muslim’.

Unless I’m interpreting this incorrectly, it appears that so long as someone says they are experiencing ‘Islamophobia’, or says that they have witnessed someone else experience it, it is recorded as such. It also seems you don’t even need to be a Muslim to be a victim of ‘Islamophobic Crime’.

It would also be interesting to see what percentage of these instances end in convictions. I’ll be reaching out to the Met to see if they also include online incidents within their data too.

Also, from the BBC article, it’s confirmed that the majority of ‘attacks’ relate to ‘harassment’. Whilst harassment is entirely unacceptable, the use of the word ‘attacked’ in their opening paragraph does tend to convey a sense of physical violence:

‘The number of Muslims attacked each week in London has more than tripled since the Paris attacks, figures show.’

Needless to say, anyone who has the merest vocal disagreements with the contents of Islamic scripture will come to know how freely the term ‘Islamophobia’ flows in their direction.

I’m often told it’s actually anti-Semitism that is a larger issue, and from the very same figures on the Metropolitan page, it confirms that anti-Semitic crime is up 61% compared to the 41% increase in ‘Islamophobic’ crimes. I don’t recall this making waves in the media to the same extent. I also don’t recall seeing hours of Rabbis, commentators and community leaders on our TV’s warning us about it.

Any civil society has a duty to protect its minority citizens from hate-crime and prosecute those guilty of it. Fortunately, the U.K does this quite well for the most part. The Metropolitan Police have even confirmed they will be providing extra patrols to combat hate crime and have 900 officers investigating incidents of it. No Muslim should have to experience a moments harassment, intimidation or violence based on their Muslim identity.

Thankfully, Muslims in the U.K enjoy better protection and freedoms than they would in most Muslim majority countries on the planet. There is certainly no ‘backlash’ against Muslims that is comparable to the Islamist slaughter that is said to inspire it.

At any moment, the U.K population could rise up, torch every Mosque and drive out Muslim communities. Are we biding our time then? Are we waiting for that really, really bad Islamist terror attack? Of course not. We simply just don’t want to behave in this abhorrent way towards our Muslim citizens.

Unfortunately, mass slaughter and attacks on Muslims are on the increase. It’s just that they are carried out predominantly by Muslim fanatics. 

Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here.