Youth worker claims anti-Muslim hate crimes in Rotherham increasing
Categories: Latest News
Tuesday September 23 2014
BBC Newsbeat’s front page last week featured an interview with a youth worker from Rotherham who claimed there had been an increase in anti-Muslim hate crime in the town following recent events.
Muhbeen Hussain, founder of the Rotherham Muslim Youth group, said “I have seen Muslim hate crime rise.”
He observed that a window was broken at a mosque in Rotherham last Wednesday night after a far right protest. A mosque was also vandalised on Wednesday last week.
In addition, the Rotherham Advertiser reported last week that a local mosque on Chapel Walk was burgled in the early hours of the morning last Tuesday. The mosque’s offices were ransacked, money was stolen from a collection box, and microphone equipment was further damaged. Copies of the Qur’an were also thrown on the floor.
However, a police spokesman confirmed that “there is no indication at this stage that this is a racially motivated incident, but rather connected to a series of burglaries within the town centre.”
Hussain further added “We’ve seen assaults on children. We’ve seen women frightened to go into the town centre. And yeah, hate crime has risen.”
Although he stated 100 individuals from the Muslim community signed a letter condemning the actions of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), he questioned, “How are people able to come out if they are too fearful to come out?
“If you don’t want to come to a demonstration because you are too scared you might have reprisals, as we are seeing, then how are people meant to speak out?”
A far right backlash against British Muslim communities has also gained momentum following the publication of the Jay report into the child sex abuse scandal in Rotherham.
Hussain further claimed that he himself had been targeted by far right extremists when during an interview with a news reporter, someone drove past and called him a ‘Muslim groomer’.
He added, “That has not happened to me once, it has happened on a number of occasions.”
The rise in hate crimes in recent years has been consistently documented in official records including in a Home Office publication last year on hate crimes in England and Wales and in figures disclosed by police forces. Moreover, a study by researchers at the University of Leicester has found that the ‘epidemic of hate crime’ goes largely unreported in the UK.