A few days ago, my cellphone blew up with messages and calls from friends checking up on me after news about a mass killing in the German city of Magdeburg made international headlines.
Being a resident of Germany as a doctoral student, I frequently travel to the country, where I am now spending the festive season buried in my books.
After confirming my safety, indicating that Magdeburg is in an entirely different state (our version of a province) to where I live in Niedersachsen, I reflected deeply on the incident and several others that have been happening across Europe.
The details of the attack are still a bit sketchy, made even more so by German privacy laws that prevent the media from reporting on certain aspects of a crime, including the full names of a suspect.
But what is known so far is that this past weekend, a car drove into the city’s Christmas market, killing five people and injuring more than 200. One of those killed was a child aged just 10.
The suspect, known only as Taleb A, is a Saudi national who moved to Germany in 2006 and was granted permanent residency.
Taleb A describes himself as an ex-Muslim and has expressed anti-Islamic views.
In many social media posts, he expressed support for the far-right anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which domestic intelligence in Germany has classified as an extremist organisation but which enjoys wide support both in Germany and across the European Union.
Despite this, a lot of the commentary has sought to attribute his actions to “Islamic terrorism”, with a lot of fake news circulating on the internet.
This includes false but widely circulated arguments that at the time of his arrest, he was heard shouting “Allahu akbar”.
This is not true, and various experts and witnesses have confirmed that no such words were uttered by the suspect.
The situation reminded me of one that took place in the UK a few months ago where a teenager was arrested for the murder of three women in northern England.
Following his arrest, large disturbances occurred across Britain, with attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.
The riots have been described as the worst in England in over a decade.
They were the result of social media posts claiming that the attacker was an immigrant. He wasn’t.
He had been born and raised in England. There have been other similar incidents where social media fanned the flames of Islamophobia by spreading fake news associating criminals, often acting on their own, with Islam.
I am a life-long atheist and have no feelings about any religion — Islam included.
But there’s something deeply disturbing about the rampant Islamophobia that is happening in the West — and finding expression even in Africa.
The collective identification of all Arabs not only as Muslims, but as terrorists, is something that should concern all of us.
It feeds into a stereotype about all Muslims, marking them out as inherently dangerous, despite there being over two-billion Muslims in the world who are peace-loving and law-abiding people.
The actions of some Islamic terrorists do not represent all Islamic people.
When a young white man commits mass murder in the US (something that happens on a frequent basis) or a white nationalist organisation commits acts of terrorism, no-one ever says white people are terrorists.
Why do we keep quiet when Muslims are collectively labelled terrorists, their religion reduced to an ideology of hate and murder?
This is an injustice that shouldn’t go unchallenged because it’s not victimless.
It puts all Muslims at risk, making the targets of institutional discrimination and bigotry. More than this, it puts all of humanity at risk.
HeraldLIVE
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