Around the globe, From China and India to the U.K. and U.S., reports of hate crimes against Muslims are increasing. In the instance of Uighurs and Rohingya Muslims, there is evidence of ethnic cleansing.

Virtually one-half of adults in the U.Yard. believe that Islam is incompatible with British values and in the U.S, a survey institute that two in five Americans believe the same when information technology comes to American values.*

Donald Trump signed an executive guild dubbed a "Muslim ban" by critics, banning residents of six Muslim-bulk countries from inbound the U.Southward.. British Prime Government minister Boris Johnson in 2018 compared Muslim women who article of clothing the burka to letterboxes and bank robbers. What's driving the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment? Why is prejudice confronting Muslims and then widespread then socially adequate and what role, if any, take social media companies played in the normalization of Islamophobia?

"Islamophobia is one of the last standing bastions of acceptable discrimination," Khaled Beydoun, associate professor of law at the Academy of Arkansas and author of "American Islamophobia: The Roots and Rise of Fear" tells Newsweek. "In the political context, information technology actually is advantageous to be narrow-minded towards Muslims especially on the correct and even on the left because in that location'southward political incentive, there'due south a willing demographic among the electorate who want to hear anti-Muslim rhetoric."

Around the earth, crimes against Muslims take increased. In the U.K., detest crimes against Muslims increased by 593 per centum in the week following a terror assault at 2 New Zealand mosques by a white supremacist in 2019. Between 2018-2019, there was a 10 percent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales.

The India Spend Initiative has found that 90 pct of religious hate crimes since 2009 accept occurred later on India'southward governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to ability in 2014. In April, A BJP leader accused Muslim vendors of "infecting vegetables with saliva". In Canada, detest crimes against Muslims grew 253 percent from 2012 to 2015. In 2017 they increased past 50 percent. In Federal republic of germany, there 813 incidents involving attacks on Muslims or mosques in 2018, a drop from the previous yr's 950 incidents. However, the number of people being injured in the attacks increased from 32 to 54.*

Beydoun believes that the ascent of populism and populist politicians, who eddy downwards complex issues into simplistic solutions and blame minorities, has played a major office in increasing anti-Muslim hatred in recent years. He cites France, Britain, the U.S., India and Red china as examples, with the U.N. expressing alert over the detention of Uighurs, a Muslim minority, a million of whom it says are in Chinese detention camps. Chinese authorities deny these claims.

Social media has contributed to the normalization of anti-Muslim hatred online, Beydoun believes.

Muslim groups are calling on social media companies to clamp down on the spread of fake news during the coronavirus pandemic
Hate crimes and Islamophobia are rising against Muslims across the world Getty

A U.N. official looking into the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, where it found the minority group has suffered beatings, torture, rape and death in detention at the hands of the Burmese war machine, accused Facebook of playing a "determining office" in the violence.

Beydoun worries that companies like Facebook are reluctant to rock the boat with powerful governments such as India, where it has a huge market and where the visitor has in one case more than been accused of being too slow to act. It recently emerged that a elevation Facebook official in India, Ankhi Das, was reluctant to remove anti-Muslim posts equally she did not desire to upset the Modi authorities.*

"It's profits over the interests of Muslims," Beydoun says. "There'south so much corporate will, there'south so much governmental will, there's and then much political movement around coalescing and accepting the idea that blackness lives affair, for case, and getting backside that message. Simultaneously, we don't meet that existence the case with Muslims. I think a lot of that is down to the war on terror because people still believe deep in their heads, on the right especially and even in the centre and left, that Muslims are a suspicious demographic that is tied to terror.

"Since the war on terror there is a conflation of Islam and Muslim identity with terrorism, it enables governments like those in Beijing and Myanmar to effectively brand anybody who is resisting or opposing their authoritarian regime as terrorists."

While many associate Islamophobia with the far-right, Beydoun also says information technology's important to remember that many on the left have also failed to condemn Islamophobia as much as they do other forms of prejudice.

He said: "In that location's no political points, you're not going to garner political points on the left past being a staunch activist in Islamophobia."

A spokesperson for Twitter said that visitor takes an aggressive approach towards hatred and racism on its platform.

They said: "Our policies clearly state, you may not promote violence against or straight set on or threaten other people on the ground of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious amalgamation, historic period, disability, or serious illness. We also do non let accounts whose master purpose is inciting impairment towards others on the basis of these categories.

"We also introduced wide, expansive policies on dehumanization on the basis of religion in consultation with NGOs and the public."

Facebook has been contacted for annotate.

For Nathan Lean, writer of "Islamophobia Industry, How the Right Articles Fear of Muslims", Islamophobia is just driven by the fact that Muslims are unlike.

"This is especially the instance in contexts where religious differences are accompanied past racial or ethnic markers, and and then whether in Western Europe, the United states, or China, we see communities reacting to the presence of Muslims in very similar means," he tells Newsweek.

His book, published in 2012, explores how Islamophobia is a multi-1000000 dollar manufacture, helping some organizations and individuals profit from pushing anti-Muslim narratives.

"The Islamophobia industry that I identified in 2012 has macerated somewhat," he says. "I do non see the same level of activity today amongst its more notorious fear merchants. That's non necessarily good news considering we exercise know that many of those individuals gained admission to power with the ballot of Trump and were influential in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies that, like the 'Muslim ban', touch many people.

"Within the past year, I think Islamophobia has get less of a flashpoint issue not considering it is any less pernicious, just simply because we have collectively turned our rage to other horrors that the world is enduring. Social media is a cesspool for Islamophobia. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have failed to crack down on posts that violate their own user policies, and which, in many cases, are false. As a result, purveyors of hate feel licensed to spread misinformation and posts that are intentionally inflammatory."

Lean condemns populist politicians who have cashed in on racism, sexism, and homophobia for years.

"Islamophobia today happens to be low-hanging fruit, and so information technology'south easy for politicians to take hold of it and feed it to their sheepish followers," he says. "The problem is that Islam as a organized religion has been tied to discourses of national security such that whatsoever mention of the former necessitates some discussion of the latter. Information technology's unfair, and even icky. But until we learn to cleave religion apart from our obsession with Homeland Security and the like, we will be stuck here."

Not everyone believes that Islamophobia is a real issue that deserves the world'south attention.

"Islamophobia is a fiction to shut down contend," British commentator Melanie Phillips wrote in The Times of London. She had appeared on a BBC program in 2018 saying that "any criticism of the Muslim community is considered Islamophobic".

She is not lone.

"The idea of Islamophobia has always been informed more past the swirling fantasies and panics of the political and media elites than past any existent, measurable levels of hate or violence confronting Muslims," right-wing British columnist Brendan O'Neill wrote in 2015.

Why does the idea of Islamophobia remain contested?

Lean says: "It has been politicized by people who parse its etymology and frame it as a liberal bludgeon. Those same people, of course, have no issue with the term homophobia or anti-Semitism, the latter of which is not etymologically perfect, either. Of grade, the fact that anti-Muslim prejudice is not widely recognized every bit a real threat is partly the reason some people resist the term."

"People feel they can go away with information technology because of a loophole that they believe allows them to bash people's religious identities as distinct from their overall personhood."

Lean also criticizes autocratic regimes in the Heart Due east, who despite having Muslim leaders, have failed to call out anti-Muslim racism.

"There is no doubt that some leaders in the Center Due east accept exacerbated fears of and prejudice towards Muslims," he says. "Kingdom of saudi arabia'due south refusal to condemn the situation in China is a glaring example. Beyond that, though, deportment carried out by some governments themselves fuel the idea that all Muslims are scary people, then the onus is on everyone - Muslims included - to be reasonable in action and in reaction."

Tariq Modood, professor of folklore, politics and public policy at the University of Bristol, says detest crimes against Muslims are increasing due to the way Muslims are portrayed by the media and who are so often blamed for society'southward ills.

"The way Muslims are treated in the media is very much informed by the view that one can arraign them and everyone will largely agree, largely see the bespeak," Prof. Modood told Newsweek.

He says that several negative generalizations nearly Muslims, from being culturally backward and illiberal to concerns over gender and sexuality rights in Islam have contributed to the normalization of prejudice against Muslims. While Prof. Modood thinks at that place is increasing sympathy and understanding when it comes to anti-black racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism, Muslims are rarely afforded the same sympathy.

"Compare Muslims to those groups, it is true that there's far less sense of commonality or sympathy or sense that Muslims are beingness picked upon that there's a racialization going on relative to the other groups. I call up attitudes towards Muslims in Britain, understanding Islamophobia as a form of racism, for case, are more developed than they are in most other countries, certainly French republic or Germany for case."

So why has Islamophobia increased in recent years?

An exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, bigotry, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life," analytics business firm Gallup wrote.

"Islamophobia existed in premise before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but it increased in frequency and notoriety during the past decade. The Runnymede Trust in the U.Thousand., for case, identified viii components of Islamophobia in a 1997 report, and then produced a follow-up report in 2004 afterwards nine/eleven and the initial years of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The second report found the aftermath of the terrorist attacks had made life more than difficult for British Muslims."

With the reported detention of well-nigh a one thousand thousand Uighur Muslims in camps in Mainland china, a precipitous increment in anti-Muslim hate crimes beyond Europe and the U.S. and protests about "reclaiming" countries like Australia from "Islamic barbarity" still happening, it is not going anywhere whatever time soon.