On 19 June, Tell MAMA (‘Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks’) launched a Manifesto Against Hate ahead of the UK general elections on 4 July. They urged political candidates to address the increase in hate crimes across the country and to promote social cohesion.
Founded in 2012 with government support, Tell MAMA is a national service supporting victims of anti-Muslim hate through casework, counselling, advocacy, legal and signposting support.
Tell MAMA models itself on the Community Support Trust (CST), which does something similar for the British Jewish community as well as giving political support to Israel.
According to the then head of the CST, Richard Benson, the founder of Tell MAMA, Fiyaz Mughal, approached him and the CST asking for help to ‘replicate what the CST is doing around recording hate crimes and supporting victims.’
Fiyaz Mughal later asked Benson to be the co-chair and then president of Tell MAMA, a role he filled for seven years, until January 2023.
According to Tell MAMA, since the 7 October Hamas-led attack and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, there has been a sharp increase in anti-Muslim hate crime and a significant break-down in Jewish-Muslim community relations.
Between 7 October and 7 February, Tell MAMA recorded 2,010 Islamophobic incidents, mainly targeting Muslim women and on social media platforms, an increase from 600 incidents during the same period the previous year.
The second page of the Manifesto Against Hate is headed ‘October the 7th 2023: An Earthquake That Has Shaken us All’: ‘It is an undeniable fact that the October 7th attack on Israel and subsequent war has led to a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents against Britain’s Jewish communities.... We believe that we must take responsibility for our joint safeties... we strongly urge politicians to... stop trying to “play off” communities against each other.’
Further along, the Tell MAMA ‘Pathway for Change’ starts by acknowledging: ‘It is a fact that October 7th has fractured Muslim and Jewish relations’.
Tell MAMA then calls on the government to set up ‘local, regional and a national set of boards... where leaders from Muslim and Jewish communities can start to come together and have resource support to plan joint activities which support joint cohesion.’
As well as demanding a social cohesion strategy that includes tackling hate crime, the Tell MAMA manifesto also calls for a new five-year fund for civil society groups tackling hate, to which social media groups such as Meta (owner of Facebook) and X (formerly Twitter) would be legally required to contribute, and a government ‘hate crime tsar’.
