The murder of Mohammed Saleem twelve years ago today is a potent reminder of the spread of Islamophobia in the UK.

Eighty-two year old Mr Saleem was savagely stabbed to death by a white supremacist as he made the regular journey home from his Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham.

The attacker, Pavlo Lapshyn, was convicted of murder and also terrorism after he confessed to planting bombs near three mosques in the West Midlands.

It was a salutary warning that hate and violence against Muslims was spiralling out of control.

Yet despite the warning, the intervening years have seen an explosion of Islamophobia, whipped up by the mainstream media, politicians and enabled by online social media moguls.

The environment of hate has been fuelled by the failure of successive governments to protect Muslims with anti-Islamophobia legislation.

Sadly, the police and popular reaction to what happened to Mr. Saleem is not the exception but the norm. Despite largely being the victims of punitively defined terrorism, Muslims are routinely portrayed as its perpetrators. This image has become so deeply embedded in the public psyche that whenever an incident is declared by the authorities not to be terrorism related, people instantly assume that the attacker couldn’t have been Muslim.

This was exactly what happened in the aftermath of the murder of Mohammed Saleem when the dogmatic refusal of police and media to consider it as a potential terrorist killing hampered the investigation and allowed Lapshyn to embark on a mosque bombing campaign.

It was a striking contrast to the murder of Lee Rigby less than a month later by two Muslims, an outrage that was immediately described as a terrorist attack.

IHRC chair Massoud Shadjareh said: “The environment of hate has gone so far that certain terminologies are only reserved and understood within the Muslim context and even new terminologies like non-violent extremism are only used to demonise and exclude Muslims. Unless we cleanse society and politics from this type of toxic Islamophobia we are only inviting and legitimising further violence of the kind that Mohammed Saleem had to suffer.”

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