The European Union's race watchdog yesterday accused a wide range of British commentators, politicians and media of helping to foster an upsurge in anti-Islamic feeling after the terrorist attacks of September 11.
In its report, Islamophobia, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia said the biggest rise in violent attacks had taken place in Britain, Holland, Sweden, and most of all Denmark.
Women wearing the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, had been insulted, spat at, beaten and even raped in a wave of attacks across the EU, causing many to stop wearing the garment in public. In Britain, an Afghan taxi driver was paralysed from the necck down after being attacked with a bottle in a dispute over September 11.
The report said mosques had been firebombed in Edinburgh, Manchester and Bolton. The windows of Muslim homes had been smashed and dog excrement had been pushed through letterboxes. The report praised Tony Blair for helping to defuse the crisis last September by deploring insults against British Muslims as "despicable acts" that had "no proper place in our country".
The newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips was taken to task for writing in the Sunday Times that Muslims had become a "fifth column in our midst", an army of thousands of angry young Muslims "waiting to destroy the society that sustains them".
The report also focused on the Spectator for claiming that the Koran gives "scriptural cover for judicial brutality", and on William Oddie, for writing in The Telegraph that Britain's Muslims were an "alien wedge" and that it was not possible to separate "Islam" and "terrorism" in the British public mind.
