EU officials aim to combat rising anti-Muslim sentiment by pushing for better policies to prevent incitement, a senior anti-discrimination official has told The National.
Both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hate crimes soared in EU countries following the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel in October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Marion Lalisse, the European Commission’s co-ordinator on combating anti-Muslim hatred, said on the sidelines of a conference in the Turkish resort of Antalya.
“We've had meetings with member states, crisis meetings with recommendations regarding media and media regulatory authorities to make sure that they prevent incitement to hatred against Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs and foreigners, or people perceived as such,” Ms Lalisse said.
EU member states are obliged by law to implement policies preventing incitement to online hatred, and put in place steps to track and prevent it. The obligation falls under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which aims to prevent illegal and harmful activities online, as well as the spread of disinformation.
EU countries are “slowly” taking the steps necessary, including appointing so-called, “trusted flaggers” – often civic society organisations, who scan the web and respond to user complaints on various social media or internet platforms. “That's very important, and it's mandatory,” Ms Lalisse said.
Appointed in February 2023, Ms Lalisse works alongside the commission’s co-ordinators on combating anti-Semitism and racism, Katharina von Schnurbein and Michaela Moua. They focus on countering intolerance in the EU, where far-right political parties have gained ground by fuelling and feeding on discrimination against perceived outsiders.
Figures from Germany reported to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an inter-governmental organisation, showed that anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to police rose from 610 in 2022 to 1,464 in 2023, the latest year for which figures are available. In Sweden, there was a 70 per cent increase in anti-Muslim hate crime in the second half of 2023, Ms Lalisse said.
In the UK, anti-Muslim hate crime monitor Tell Mama in February recorded its highest number of reports since it was founded in 2011.
EU officials have also observed a rise in hatred against people who are not Muslim but are sometimes mistakenly perceived as such, including Sikhs and Arab Christian communities. Online content has also become more extreme following the October 7 attacks, according to an EU report commissioned in its wake.
“Looking at pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli content, we see also a trend that, according to that report, pro-Israeli content was more and more anti-Muslim, unfortunately,” she said.
The shrinking of civil space since October 7 – including civil society groups being forced to close, or being sidelined or defunded, and freedom of association and demonstration curtailed in some EU states – is a result of the incorrect conflation of Islam with terrorism, Ms Lalisse said. October 7 prompted a shift towards, “a conflation of Islam with Hamas”, she added.
“We've seen a lot of alliances broken between Jews and Muslims, and between anti-racism activists and people working on anti-Semitism,” she told The National.
A former EU diplomat in countries including Yemen, Mauritania and Morocco, Ms Lalisse is calling EU states out over “discrepancies” in rulings on discrimination cases, following the publication in January of a report on the legal framework around combating anti-Muslim hatred.
There were “discrepancies, even within a member state like Belgium, of the same case which would be ruled differently from one court to the other, and this is not acceptable,” she said.
Because litigation is “ruling against the rights of Muslims”, Ms Lalisse is focusing on other forms of fighting discrimination, and what she calls “soft measures”. They include working with companies on diversity charters and with groups across the continent who monitor forms of discrimination across cities, for example.
“We work with the European Coalition of Cities against Racism – they are doing studies, testing, even when you look for housing, if an estate agent will not give you visits because you are called Mohammed or Aisha and you are wearing the hijab,” Ms Lalisse explained.
Female Muslims are among the largest victim groups, which Ms Lalisse attributes to the visibility of garments such as the hijab. Although the commission has funded projects on gendered anti-Muslim hatred and is trying to raise awareness, they cannot dictate individual EU countries' laws.
“Obviously we have a limited competence when it comes to the legislation of member states,” she said.
The EU has not yet specified a single definition of anti-Muslim hatred because of differences in views between member states and civil society organisations over what it should encompass. “But now the time is the right one to work on it,” she said.
Some EU countries have working definitions, and she hopes that this will become more concrete in the near future with more serious conversations involving “experts agreeing on a working definition, a very simple one, with examples, and to have member states discussing it and inputting and validating [it],” she said.
Despite the damage done to Jewish-Muslim ties in the past 18 months, community relations are slowly on the mend, Ms Lalisse believes.
“There were alliances between, for instance, religious leaders that were broken but are slowly being rebuilt, and we are confident it's progressing,” she said.
In Muslim-majority countries outside the EU, people often want more from Ms Lalisse, she acknowledges, especially on certain issues such as incidents of burning religious books. In 2024, Swedish prosecutors charged three people with inciting ethnic hatred over protests involving the burning of the Quran. Earlier this year, five people were arrested in Sweden after an Iraqi refugee who repeatedly burnt the holy book in public was shot dead.
“Obviously burning of the Quran is horrible and it can be an incitement to hatred and can be prosecuted, as happened in Sweden,” she said. But she is more focused on individuals’ rights than religion as a whole. “In the EU there is a certain degree of freedom of expression on religion, to be able to criticise it,” she said.
She is encouraging members of the Muslim community in Europe to speak up for themselves in opportunities for public input on future EU anti-discrimination policies. The bloc is currently asking the public for its opinions for a 2026-2030 anti-racism strategy, which aims to “contribute to a society free from racial discrimination”, according to an open call online.
“I’m telling them, you have to express your views,” Ms Lalisse said. “If it only comes from me, it's not enough.”
