Research by the Henry Jackson Society has revealed only one in four British Muslims believe it is definitively true that Hamas perpetrated acts of murder and rape during their attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. British Muslims seem to be more sympathetic to Hamas the younger and better educated they are, with 40 percent of the university-educated and 47 percent of 18-24-year-olds dismissing the notion Hamas committed atrocities.
Forty-six percent of British Muslims declared outright sympathy with Hamas — with the same proportion saying Jews have too much power over government policy.
The survey also found that an alarming proportion of British Muslims hold Islamist views generally. Fifty-two percent believe displaying images of Mohammed, the Islamic prophet, should be criminalized, while 32 percent wish to see Sharia law implemented in the United Kingdom.
With the Muslim population of Britain officially numbering four million — greater than the total populations of Wales or Northern Ireland — the findings suggest the country has failed to integrate many hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
“What is probably going wrong is an unwillingness to tackle this kind of extremism for fear of being labeled Islamophobic or racist,” suggested Henry Jackson Society executive director Alan Mendoza.
Prevent, the official British counter-terrorism program has become increasingly obsessed with the “far right,” dealing with significantly more referrals for the “Extreme Right Wing” than for Islamism despite the vast majority of terror plots detected by the authorities being Islamist.
