Faisal Bodi looks back at the case of Islmaophobic hate crime victim Mohammed Saleem, and asks why so little has changed since his murder.

On this day 11 years ago, Mohammed Saleem was brutally murdered as he walked home after Isha (evening) prayers at his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham.

It was a short walk that the devout grandfather of 22 had made countless times before.

But this was to be his last. As he shuffled home that fateful evening with the aid of his trusty walking stick, he was fatally stabbed three times in the back. The blows were so forceful that they penetrated the front of his body.

Less than a week earlier, a white supremacist by the name of Pavlo Lapshyn had arrived in the UK from Ukraine, seething with racist hate.

The 25 year-old student would later tell police that he murdered the frail pensioner because he hated “non-whites” and because Mr. Saleem “was a Muslim and there were no witnesses.” Police would also discover that Lapshyn had planted bombs near three West Midlands mosques.

During his trial the court heard that the self-confessed racist had started researching where he could buy chemicals in Birmingham whilst he was still in his home city of Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine and even before he had found out the results of the application. Police found 98 video files and 455 photographic files in his room showing chemicals, firearms, component parts of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and images of Lapshyn manufacturing and detonating IEDs.

Lapshyn’s presence in the UK raises serious concerns about the ease with which neo-Nazis and ethno-supremacists are being allowed to enter the country. While the right rages about the flow of refugees to our shores, little is being said in mainstream circles about the ease with which Ukrainian neo-Nazis, including those who have served in the armed forces (think Azov brigade), can take advantage of relaxed immigration rules to come and live in the UK.

It also raises wider concerns about the security of minority groups when militarily trained ethno-supremacists motivated by religious or ideological hatred can be allowed to live freely in our midst. Hundreds, if not thousands of Zionist Jews from Britain, have donned fatigues to go and help Israel wage its genocide in Gaza and returned to resume their lives in the UK without the authorities raising so much as an eyebrow about “radicalisation” or war crimes.

For the last 11 years, Mr. Saleem’s daughter, Maz, has waged a lonely battle to have the crime recognised as terrorism. Even though Lapshyn was found guilty of “engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts” his main conviction was for racially aggravated murder.

That has left a deep scar on Maz who has tirelessly called out the hypocrisy of the criminal justice system. While many Muslims and opponents of securitisation policies will see any resort to anti-terror laws as a double-edged sword for the fact that they exist primarily to repress Muslims, there is no escaping the double standards of a regime that seems reluctant to apply the terrorism label to hate crimes perpetrated by whites.

Maz’s campaigning has also exposed the glaring hole in equality left by the stubborn refusal of recent Conservative governments to institute an official definition of Islamophobia that would give it legal recognition and put Muslims on a par with Jews and Sikhs under race relations laws. While the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and Lib-Dems have adopted a definition of Islamophobia put forward by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, the Conservative Party remains stubbornly resistant.

The omission resurfaced last February when Lee Anderson’s comments about Sadiq Khan and London being under the control of “Islamists” led to the Ashfield MP being stripped of the Conservative whip. However, Rishi Sunak and other senior Tories refused to label them Islamophobic. Maz insists that her father was targeted because he was Muslim and that describing the motivation for his murder as anything else undermines the magnitude of the offence as well as the equality of Muslims in the UK.

The failure to prioritise Islamophobia as a motive for Mr. Saleem’s murder plagued the early investigation. West Midlands Police said there was “no evidence” to suggest Mr Saleem’s murder was racially motivated despite the family’s insistence that it appeared premeditated and racially driven. That reluctance also fed into the police failure to link the murder to the attempted bombings.

The police failure was compounded by the failure of the Muslim community to hold the state accountable. Two decades of securitisation and marginalisation appear to have eroded the will and capacity of the community to fight back against state abuse and overreach. Cast as a suspect community, an object of hate that is to be cynically exploited for electoral and ideological gain, Muslims have struggled to mount any kind of cohesive opposition, sliding quietly into the shadows of public life.

Maz Saleem is scathing of the community’s response. “The Muslim community is lazy and complacent. When it comes to Islamophobia they’d rather sweep it under the carpet unless it affects them personally. Instead of taking our politicians to task they would rather invite the likes of Boris Johnson to dinners even after he’s described Muslim women as bank robbers and letter boxes.”

Eleven years on and it seems little has been learned from this horrific crime.  If anything, the push against recognising Islamophobia as a form of racism in law has gained momentum.  Alongside it Islamophobic narratives about Muslims rage in political and media discourses, legal judgments and educational settings, not to mention the campaign for Palestinian rights, perpetuating societal Islamophobia.  This in turn fuels the street level violence so many Muslim face.  If the government of the day (and probably the government to come) do not care, it must be the community, led by Muslims that learns the lessons from this heartbreaking episode.  Anything less is cowardice and betrayal of the victims of hatred.