Unprecedented race hate against Jews and Muslims
As both antisemitism and Islamaphobia soar since Hamas terror attacks on 7th October, CST says an an unprecedented 900 new volunteers have signed up to help protect Jewish community
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
Racial hatred against Jews and Muslims in Britain is reaching previously unknown levels in the wake of the Hamas attacks on October 7. Both the Community Security Trust and Tell Mama are recording unprecedented numbers, which they expect to rise as the conflict continues.
Dave Rich, CST’s head of policy, said that between October 7 and Friday October 27, CST recorded “at least 805 antisemitic incidents across the UK”. This is the highest ever total reported to CST across a 21-day period.
Chief executive Mark Gardner told a community briefing on Sunday night that in three weeks, CST had recorded more antisemitic incidents than the 803 reported in the first six months in this year.
Dr Rich said he expected those figures to rise as weekend reports were being analysed.
Tell Mama, meanwhile, has documented a “six-fold increase in anti-Muslim cases between October 7 and October 24, compared to the same period in 2022”. Its website revealed: “From the cases sent to us between October 7 and October 24, we can disclose that from 191 offline cases, we captured 121 cases of abusive behaviour, 21 threats, 19 assaults, 11 acts of vandalism, nine cases of discrimination, seven acts of hate speech and three cases of anti-Muslim literature.
Four hundred Islamophobia cases in all have been recorded in the last three weeks. They have included “a man harassing a visibly Muslim woman [who] kept shouting ‘Hamas terrorist’ at her in the street, a Twitter/X post calling for the bombing of Muslims, and issues in schools concerning students and teachers – including a teacher who wears a headscarf and faced abuse from a group of students that linked her to terrorism”.
CST is tracking anti-Jewish racism, “wherein offenders are targeting Jewish people, communities and institutions for their Jewishness. In many cases, these hateful comments, threats to life and physical attacks are laced with the rhetoric and iconography of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel politics”.
Dr Rich said that CST and Tell Mama representatives frequently took part in the same meetings with police. “But aside from that, there are personal contacts. We are friends.”
CST has disclosed that 900 people have come forward nationally to volunteer to work with the organisation. “This is a fantastic response”, Dr Rich told Jewish News. “At the moment we have 2,500 trained volunteers nationwide, so this is going to make a massive difference to our work. It says a lot for our community that this was one of the first things that people did after October 7”.
He said that everyone was being interviewed and vetted, but that some people were already on training courses, run by CST. He expected that it would take a few weeks before every one of the new volunteers was processed and trained.
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