Reported Islamophobic attacks in Australia have surged dramatically, with Muslim women overwhelmingly targeted. The failure of political leaders and institutions to respond meaningfully is deepening fear, trauma and exclusion.

Muslims in Australia and especially Muslim women are facing violence, prejudice, discrimination and exclusion.

Since 7 October 2023, and throughout the years of the Gaza genocide, the Islamophobia Register has documented a 619 per cent increase in reported incidents of Islamophobia with women being disproportionately targeted, making up 75 per cent of all reports submitted.

The report notes that “these in-person incidents included physical assaults that caused hospitalisations, a genuine bomb being left at a home, an arson attack, graffiti attacks calling for the killing of Muslims, vandalism including the desecration of a mosque, hate mail, Muslim women having their hijabs pulled off and being spat on, school children being targeted, and nearly 200 hundred instances of Islamophobic verbal abuse, including threats of murder and rape.”

At the same time there has been little political focus on this issue, and indeed it has become worse with limited public awareness and at the very best a minimal national coordination to address anti-Muslim hatred. The Federal government has appointed an Islamophobia Envoy but the media nor the political leadership has given his report little coverage.

The actions of the NSW police on the evening of 9 February, during a peaceful rally protesting the Gaza genocide and the visit of the Israeli Premier, when police brutally violated a brief, peaceful act of worship shocked and horrified many in the Australian community but those feelings were amplified a thousand times causing much trauma and distress in the Muslim community. While not caught on camera Muslim women were among the first to be assaulted while at that same prayer.

One of the Muslim women I interviewed said: “on the Tuesday morning after the evening rally I was actually crying, because neither the Minister or the police had come out and apologised (for brutalising Muslims at prayer) but what was worse was that the Premier Minns just dug deep and blamed the protesters. How much more can you dismiss us and our presence in society? I just felt there is nothing that we can do that’s going to make people understand and that we will never be part of this society.”

The subsequent failure and language of both the NSW Premier and the Prime Minister – the latter telling us to “cool the temperature down” – and their failure to condemn this police brutality and violation only exasperated this trauma and reinforced a growing feeling that Australian Muslims and Muslim women in particular are being treated as second-class citizens in their own country.

Australia’s violation of its own criminal code, its immigration laws and its signatory to the Genocide Convention and multiple other international law and conventions were blatantly violated again by inviting and then hosting an Israeli leader, named by the ICJ. This is during a continuing genocide in Palestine, at a time when even the Israeli government admitted to murdering 70,000 or many more innocent civilians, the majority women and children.

The pain of that sickening horror has been made much worse by the lack of acknowledgement of that pain of the Muslim community by our political leaders.

“The idea of being silenced, of not being able to express our voice in a society that apparently values free speech is confusing, more so when people who do speak out are vilified. I feel that there is an invisible weight being placed on us. Any trust I had has been eroded and how can I feel safe when the lives of people who look like me don’t matter,” another women commented.

The tragic and shocking massacre of Jewish people that took place in Bondi on 14 December resulted in a genuine outpouring of grief and support for a grieving community by people across Australia, the Muslim community included. The Islamophobia Register Australia has recorded a 740% increase in reports since then with increased incidents of individuals receiving abusive and threatening calls, mosques and Islamic centres reporting vandalism, a Muslim cemetery being desecrated, physical attacks and a wave of online hate. The majority of these reports were from women who reported being spat at, abused, attacked and threatened, with fear for themselves and their children heightened.

As one Muslim women explained, “I’m sure there is a rise in antisemitism after October 2023 even well before the tragic events on 14 December. At the same time, at the political and public media levels, the exclusivity around antisemitism in the public sphere has silenced the acceleration of anti-Muslim sentiment in the Australian community and as such has diminished the experiences, the grief, the pain of other communities. It’s as if they can’t all exist at the same time. While not diminishing the suffering of the Jewish community or engaging in competitive victimhood it has been confronting and painful, to have to experienced a time in which people are saying that our words and our positions are making them unsafe when all we are doing is trying to live by the very same principles that everyone has always said are core to liberal democratic states.”

As one Muslim woman expressed her situation: “I think I will always be fighting for my place in this society. That’s the truth. That’s very painful and very hard, but to think otherwise is going to cause me more disappointment and more pain. You think that nothing will get worse in this political landscape and then it just does.”

One of the woman I interviewed noted: “We are not asking for accommodation this time, or for any extra benefits for the Muslim community or the Arab community, or the Palestinian community. Actually, we’re asking just to go back to those principles that Australian politicians and media have always lectured Arab and Muslim states about. We want politicians to demonstrate that you are actually care about those core liberal democratic principals. When those principals have been eroded, by Australia’s failure to call out Genocide in Gaza, when the institutions have been undermined through the silencing of dissenters, when police brutalise and injure protesters what are you left with in society? What protections do people have? What kind of society do you want all of us to live in? Where is social cohesion and safety for all Australian communities? ”

Muslim women interviewed have not been named due to concerns about discrimination.