Attacks against Muslims on the rise after Paris strikes

"Attacks against Muslims began the very same night of the Paris attacks," Yasser Louati of the Collectif Contre l'Islamophobie en France (CCIF) tells DW. The CCIF received several pictures of vandalized mosques and restaurants owned by Muslims in the morning following the terror strikes in Paris, when Islamist militants killed 127 people, Louati says.

Hate mongers in several European countries have been targeting Muslims after the Paris attacks. Experts say there is an urgent need to stop demonizing one religious community and develop strategies for reconciliation.

Louati has several examples of hate crimes against Muslims in the past few days. In Nanterre, a woman with a five-month-old baby was pushed and cursed by an old man. "In Marseille, in the south of France, a young girl was punched in the face and hit with a box-cutter blade on her chest," Louati tells DW. Most women victims were wearing a full-body veil at the time of the attack, making them easy targets, he adds, lamenting that the French government has not been as forthcoming this time in condemning attacks against Muslims.

Organizations like Tell MAMA, which maps hate crimes against Muslims say attacks against members have gone up by 300 percent in the UK since the Paris bombings. 115 incidents were registered in the week following November 13.

Things haven't been going smoothly in Germany either. Chief of the Central Council of Muslims (ZDM), Aiman A. Mazyek, explained how a mosque in the western city of Saarbrücken was vandalized shortly after the Paris attacks. "The vandals wrote 'murderers and pigs' at the entry of the mosque," he told DW.

A case of rising insecurity?.................

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