Nearly half of British Muslims would say they sympathise with Hamas while just one in four believe that the Palestinian Islamist terror group had committed murder and rape during the October 7th attacks on Israel, a survey says it has found.
The largest survey of UK-residing Muslims in the six months after Hamas slaughtered around 1,200 people and took hundreds more hostage from Israel has found that the minority group is noticably out of step with the rest of the country.
The poll, commissioned by the counter-extremism Henry Jackson Society think tank, found that 46 per cent of British Muslims are sympathetic towards Hamas, which is classified by the UK and U.S. governments as a terrorist organisation.
Additionally, just 24 per cent of British Muslims said they believed Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7th in Israel, compared to 62 per cent for the general public in the UK. Conversely, 39 per cent of Muslims in the UK said they did not think Hamas committed atrocities, while 37 per cent said they did not know.
Strikingly, the survey found that well-educated and younger British Muslims were the least likely to believe that Hamas committed rape or murder during the terror attack, with 40 per cent of those with a university degree and 47 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 denying wrongdoing on the part of the Palestinian terrorists.
Henry Jackson Society Executive Director Alan Mendoza told The Telegraph that the findings demonstrated the “failure of counter-extremism policy over the years”.
“What is probably going wrong is an unwillingness to tackle this kind of extremism for fear of being labelled Islamophobic or racist. There is a reluctance to call it out in the same way that people are very happy to call out far-Right extremists,” he said.
“The Government needs to find a way of supporting and strengthening the voice of moderate Muslims and drive the extremist narrative to the sidelines.”
Indeed, the government has been accused for years of placing a disproportionate amount of resources and energy focussing on the comparatively small threat posed by right-wing extremists, despite even Ken McCallum, the boss of the MI5 domestic intelligence service, admitting in 2020 that “[right-wing terror] threat is not, today, on the same scale as Islamist extremist terrorism… Islamist extremist terrorism… by volume remains our largest threat”.
Yet, just last month, following months of large-scale pro-Palestinian demonstrations featuring genocidal and antisemitic rhetoric on the streets of Britain and far-left George Galloway winning a seat in Parliament on the backs of a Muslim-focussed campaign, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declared in an address to the nation that the “far right” and Islamic extremists were attempting to destroy British democracy.
In response to the Henry Jackson report, a government spokesman said: “We have recently set out a series of measures which will promote social cohesion and counter religious hatred. Our plan will tackle division in our communities and ensure that we are protecting our democratic freedoms across the country.”
Further demonstrating how out of step the Muslim community is with the rest of British society, the survey also found that 46 per cent of British Muslims believe that Jews have too much influence over the UK government, compared to 16 per cent of the public as a whole.
52 per cent said that they thought that it should be illegal to show a picture of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Meanwhile, nearly a third of British Muslims, 32 per cent, said that they would wish to see Sharia law imposed in the UK.
Such beliefs have had real-world consequences in Britain, where a former religious studies teacher from the small West Yorkshire town of Batley is still in hiding with his family following Islamist threats after he showed his class a caricature of Mohammed during a 2021 class on blasphemy.
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