Islamophobia can be defined as the fear, prejudice, discrimination, or hostility directed towards Islam and Muslims worldwide. Addressing Islamophobia requires promoting understanding, education, and communication skills among people of diverse faiths and backgrounds. According to the European Islamophobia Report 2021, Islamophobia has heightened anti-Muslim sentiment and continues to pose a growing threat across Europe.
According to this report, Anti-Muslim sentiment across the continent was a serious problem as it has been in years mostly in countries such as the UK and France had become hotbeds of anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobic incidents.
Furthermore, anti-Muslim campaigns by far-right parties states dominate discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities, which focused on 27 European countries and Developed in collaboration with 35 leading academics and experts in the field.
This report has warned the major powers to invest less in the fight against Islamophobia and more in normalizing Islamophobia as well as the normalization and institutionalization of Islamophobia by liberal democracies.
In addition to this report anti-Muslim incidents across Europe, Muslims face in all areas of life, from employment to healthcare, education, and the justice system. 1,061 anti-Muslim hate crimes were recorded in Austria. Most of the cases were online, came from politicians, and were in the public sphere. Furthermore, the majority of perpetrators were male and the victims were predominantly female. In another anti-racism watchdog, 1,977 racist and anti-Muslim acts were documented, mainly targeting women.
In this report, Women bear the brunt of anti-Muslim and racist attacks in Belgium, and of all the cases reported to the Collective for Inclusion and Against Islamophobia in Belgium, 89 were related to anti-Muslim sentiment against women.
A total of 852 hate crimes were recorded in 2020 and the majority of hate crimes were motivated by national ethnicity and religion.
In France 213 anti-Muslim incidents in 2021 were recorded and half of them 109 related to damage to Muslim places of worship, cultural centers, and cemeteries, and 22 percent related to attacks on people.
In 2021 France will be in a state of disarray in terms of language and attitudes or behavior.
A high level of violence was observed on both counts – a violence that highlights the secondary status accorded to French Muslims in the country.
In Germany, 732 anti-Muslim incidents were recorded the previous year which includes incidents of attacks on mosques targeting individuals.
Politics, religion, media, and the Internet remained the main four domains contributing to the rise of Islamophobia in the Greek public domain during 2021.
In Greece, Islamophobia is mainly associated with certain political parties and right-wing politicians, print and electronic media, and journalists, including their posts on social media.
In Spain, hate crimes have increased by 41% in the last five years. Between 2017 and 2021, there were 996 cases on religious grounds alone in Sweden, while the total number of hate crimes during this period was 14,710.
Muslim children are over-represented in statistics published by the Swedish Public Health Agency, with around 20 percent of non-European children experiencing maltreatment because of their ethno-religious background and more than 15 percent at school. I have faced discrimination.
In the UK there saw a steady increase in the overall number of reported cases, with authorities reporting a 9% increase from 2020 to 2021. At least 45 percent of all “religiously enhanced” hate crimes involved people of the Muslim faith and background.
