In the latest sign of Covid-19-related racism, Muslims are being blamed for England’s coronavirus outbreaks

“The timing … it focused people’s minds [on Muslims],” Rabnawaz Akbar, a Labour Party councilor in Manchester, advised CNN.

The authorities “have done it on the eve of Eid,” main individuals to assume “it must be the Muslim community’s fault,” Akbar stated. “You see how people would have come to the assumption. [The government] have done it without thinking but of course, they’re highlighting a particular demographic. And people are angry and now that anger is focused on a particular community.”

A Downing Street spokesperson stated in an announcement to CNN: “Decisions on lockdowns are based solely on scientific advice and the latest data. Where there are local outbreaks, our priority will remain taking whatever steps are necessary to protect people.”

Akbar additionally criticized Craig Whittaker, a Conservative MP who steered that England’s ethnic minorities weren’t adhering to pandemic pointers.

“What I have seen in my constituency is that we have areas of our community … that are just not taking the pandemic seriously enough,” Whittaker stated Friday, when requested about the native lockdowns throughout an interview with LBC radio.

When requested if he was speaking about the Muslim inhabitants, Whittaker replied: “Of course.”

“If you look at the areas where we’ve seen rises and cases the vast majority — not, by any stretch of the imagination, all areas — but it is the BAME [Black, Asian, and minority ethnic] communities that are not taking it seriously enough,” he added.

Whittaker’s feedback have been met with an outcry and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was requested about them at a press briefing on Friday.

The British chief didn’t condemn the MP, and stated: “Well, I think it’s up to all of us in government to make sure that the message is being heard loud and clear by everybody across the country, and to make sure that everybody is complying with the guidance.”

This week, the Downing Street spokesperson advised CNN: “At Friday’s press conference the Prime Minister apologized to all those who could not celebrate Eid in the way they had wished, and thanked the work of mosques and imams in getting the message out about the importance of following safety guidance.

“And he set out in his Eid message that he’s vastly grateful to the Muslim neighborhood for their efforts and sacrifices all through this pandemic.”

“To single out one neighborhood this fashion is wholly unsuitable, stigmatizing and unbecoming of an MP,” the group said in a statement.

Following the controversy, Whittaker said his evidence was based on data from local officials at Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire.

“In an age the place authenticity is a behaviour scarcely exhibited by public figures, I’m glad that I’ve chosen open, trustworthy and frank dialogue over political expediency and … I make no apology for my feedback,” he added.

Tell MAMA director Iman Atta told CNN that far-right extremists had been blaming Muslims for the pandemic since the beginning of the UK’s lockdown in March.

“In March, April, May, we noticed loads of conspiracy theories floating round,” she said. “The far proper have been sharing pictures of Muslims congregating and flouting the guidelines at mosques which have been, in actuality, shut down and never functioning. The pictures have been from final 12 months,” she said.

“And they’ve unfold rumors on-line about how BAME communities are the ones spreading the virus, so [people] shouldn’t be interacting with them.”

Atta’s findings are echoed by those of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which represents several UK mosques and Muslim organizations.

Earlier in the lockdown “there have been theories spreading that Muslims would collect secretly throughout Ramadan, that mosques have been secretly open — none of that was true and there was no proof,” Zainab Gulamali, a spokesperson for the organization, told CNN.

Gulamali added that she was disappointed that Johnson and his Conservative Party colleagues had failed to condemn Whittaker’s comments on BAME people.

Johnson himself has repeatedly been accused of Islamophobia. He drew sharp rebukes from Muslim communities in 2018 over an article he wrote about Muslim women wearing burqas. The politician said women who wore the veil resembled “letter packing containers” and “financial institution robbers.”

He later offered a partial apology, saying: “In as far as my phrases have given offense over the final twenty or thirty years when I’ve been a journalist and other people have taken these phrases out of my articles and escalated them, of course, I’m sorry for the offense they’ve brought on.”

Crime figures suggest that the UK has become a more hostile place for Muslims in recent years. Despite accounting for less than 5% of the UK’s 66 million-strong population, 52% of religious hate crime offenses committed in England and Wales between 2017 and 2018 targeted Muslims.

Much of the recent blame placed on Muslims appears to be driven by the fact that Covid-19 has hit the country’s ethnic minorities hard.

“There is in depth racist commentary on social media,” the researchers wrote. “Videos have additionally been circulated on social media displaying the South Asian neighborhood flouting social distancing in an try to stir battle.”

“We do not need to sweep beneath the carpet the points that [Muslim communities] do face,” Rabnawaz Akbar said.

“Loads of individuals stay in densely-populated terraced housing,” he said, explaining that many Muslims “stay with their mother and father or their grandparents, so you may have multigenerational households. Loads of individuals work in low earnings and frontline jobs — they’re taxi drivers or well being care [workers] … they’re inevitably going to be in danger of catching the virus.”

“But reasonably than blame them, the answer is that native and central authorities ought to work with the communities to take additional precautions,” he said.

Muslims are far from alone in shouldering increased racial resentment during the Covid-19 crisis.

For many minorities the new menace of the pandemic has solely intensified the age-old hazard of bigotry.