The Law of Selective Enforcement
Who Britain’s hate-speech laws protect, and who they don’t.
TWO SENTENCES. One was shouted on a street in Edinburgh by a bare-chested man carrying a machete. The other was posted on X, from a verified account, and seen forty-six thousand times. They say the same thing.
The man in Edinburgh, held face-down on the ground, shouted at the officers arresting him: “I’m protecting the country from these fucking Muslim bastards raping our young daughters.”¹ The post said:
“Muslims don’t feel safe in the UK.” Well, neither do more than a quarter of a million girls who were raped in the UK, by Muslims. In other words, we don’t care — go home.²
That post — Exhibit A in what follows — went up at 08:41 on 22 June 2026, the morning Lewis Hawkes appeared in the dock. A blue tick beside the name. Monetised. Reported to the platform, and still live. Strip away the timestamp and you could not tell which sentence came from the man now charged with terrorism-aggravated attempted murder and which from an account that will face nothing at all.
The facts of the attack, before any argument arrives. On Friday 19 June, five men were injured across the west and north of Edinburgh; several were taken to hospital. Two were set upon after leaving prayers at their local mosque.³ Counter-terrorism officers took over the investigation. On Monday 22 June, Hawkes, 36, appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court charged with five counts of attempted murder, one of assault and robbery, two of breach of the peace and two of culpable and reckless conduct — every charge aggravated by a terrorist connection. He entered no plea and was remanded.⁴
The condemnation was immediate and it came from the top. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, wrote on X that the suspect appeared motivated by anti-Muslim hatred and would face “the full force of the law.”⁵ The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she was “horrified,” and that there is no place for hatred and violence against Muslims.⁶ Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, said there was no place for violence, racism or intolerance.⁷ Two days after that post, Starmer announced his resignation; but on 20 June he was the serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he called it what it was: anti-Muslim hatred.
So did the community, in real time. The Muslim Council of Britain criticised “political rhetoric that demonises entire communities.” A Muslim civil-society body urged police to treat the attack as Islamophobic, far-right terror. The Scottish Association of Mosques noted the aggressive rhetoric that had been circulating online in the preceding days.⁸ Nobody had to reach for the connection. They had watched it being built.
Here is the asymmetry the rest of this piece is about, visible in a single morning. The state denounced the physical act in the strongest terms available to it and charged the man who committed it as a terrorist. The post came after the attack, not before — and there it still sat, the morning Hawkes stood in the dock: one more in a stream that has never paused. The countless previous sentences that armed him — the same claim, the same demand that Muslims be got rid of — sit on verified influencer accounts devoted to this purpose, monetised accounts a few scrolls away from every other topic and pushed by an algorithm designed to stoke outrage, many reported and left untouched, gathering thousands or millions of views.
Hawkes didn’t invent his sentence. He absorbed it.
Hatred, not criticism
Start with the line itself, because everything that follows depends on knowing exactly where it runs.
You may say almost anything about Islam. You may call it false, archaic, dangerous. You may ridicule its Prophet, reject its scripture, and hold the entire religion in contempt, in print and at volume. British law protects every word of that. The statute that criminalises the stirring up of religious hatred says as much in its own text: nothing in it is to restrict discussion, criticism, ridicule, insult or abuse of a religion, or of the beliefs and practices of its followers.⁹ The offence it creates is narrow by design — it reaches only threatening words used with the intention of stirring up hatred. Scotland’s law draws the same line, with the same protection for criticism built into it.¹⁰
So the line does not fall between polite speech and rude speech, or between approval and disapproval. It falls between attacking a set of ideas and inciting hatred against a group of people. “Islam is a violent creed” is an argument; you may make it, and others may answer it. “Muslims rape our daughters — get rid of them” is not an argument about a creed. It is an incitement against people, and it is the thing the law was written to catch.
This is the same line the law draws around Jews, and nobody finds it confusing there. You may criticise Judaism, dispute its teachings, reject it outright. What you may not do is incite hatred against Jews as people — and when someone does, the machinery moves with lightning speed. The argument of this piece is not that Islam should be placed beyond criticism. It is the opposite: the line already exists, is already understood, and is already enforced for one community, and the question worth asking is why it is not enforced for another.
Hold that distinction in view, because every attempt to dismiss what follows will depend on blurring it.
Substitute the word
There is a test for all of this, and it costs one word. Take the post, or the sentence Hawkes shouted with a machete in his hand, and put “Jewish” where “Muslim” stands. You do not need me to finish it; you already flinched. Now ask the practical questions. How long does that version last on a verified account — weeks, gathering views, or minutes? Is it reported and left up, or gone within the hour with someone under investigation? You know the answer, and so does everyone. That gap — between the sentence that stays and the sentence that vanishes — is the whole subject of this article.
This is not a complaint that the protection around Jews is excessive. It is the opposite. That protection exists because Britain decided, correctly, that incitement against Jews is never idle — that it is the first stage of something, and that the something has to be stopped before it arrives. The Community Security Trust records it, shares it with police, and the state moves.¹¹ That judgement is right. This article asks only that the same judgement be made a second time, for a second community, on the same reasoning.
And the reasoning carries, because the words do. “You do not belong here. Go back where you came from.” That sentence was aimed at Jews for the better part of a thousand years — expelled from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492, from town after town in the centuries between, always cast as the alien presence a nation could not absorb.¹² The blood libel — the lie that Jews murdered Christian children — invents the event itself: no crime took place, so there was nothing to misread.¹³ The “Muslim rape gang” libel works the other way: it takes a real event, committed by specific men, and inflates it — stretching the perpetrators into a whole faith, a whole ethnicity. One manufactures the crime; the other seizes a real one and swells it past its perpetrators. They meet at the end: a whole people charged for what a few did, or for what no one did at all. This is not history that flatters Europe. The slander did not retire; it changed target. What was said of the Jew is now said of the Muslim, very nearly word for word.
We know where it leads, because for Muslims it has already led there. Quebec City, 2017: six men shot dead at evening prayers. Finsbury Park, the same year: a van driven into worshippers leaving Ramadan prayers, one man killed. Christchurch, 2019: fifty-one murdered across two mosques by a man whose ammunition was inscribed “For Rotherham” — the grooming-gang scandal, named on the bullets.¹⁴ Now Edinburgh. The incitement is not theoretical, and neither is the thing it builds toward. The precursor has a body count.
So when this article asks why the same words are prosecuted for one community and monetised for another, it is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the practical question, put to a state that already knows how to answer it — because it answers it, correctly, every time the target is Jewish.
The law already exists
The claim that there is no law for this is simply untrue. There is law, and a great deal of it.
Stirring up hatred against people because of their religion is a criminal offence across the United Kingdom. In England and Wales it lives in Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986, inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006: threatening words or behaviour, used with intent to stir up religious hatred, punishable by up to seven years.¹⁵ In Scotland — where Edinburgh sits — the same conduct is caught by the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, in force since April 2024.¹⁶ The offence exists in both jurisdictions. It is not aspirational. It carries a prison sentence.
Above it sits a layer that ignores borders entirely. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to send a grossly offensive or menacing message over a public electronic network — the provision under which people have been jailed for a single post.¹⁷ And above that sits the Online Safety Act 2023, fully in force since 2025, which moves the question from the poster to the platform. Stirring up religious hatred is named in the Act’s Schedule 7 as priority illegal content. Platforms carry a legal duty to build systems that limit its spread and to take it down once notified. The penalty for failure is a fine of up to ten per cent of global revenue or eighteen million pounds, whichever is larger — and Ofcom can seek court orders to block a defiant service in the UK altogether.¹⁸
Put the layers together and the picture is plain. The content this article opened with — the verified post, the influencer accounts that fed Hawkes — is not lawful-but-distasteful. It is illegal: under the religious-hatred law of whichever jurisdiction you read it in, under section 127, and under the platform duties of the Online Safety Act. It is unlawful in every part of the United Kingdom, and removed in none of them. The problem was never a missing law. It is a law without teeth, and a law without bite has the same outcome as no law.
And beneath the failure to enforce lies a second asymmetry, written into the statute before any officer or prosecutor lifts a finger. British law has always punished the stirring up of racial hatred on a wider threshold than religious hatred. The racial offence reaches words that are threatening, abusive or insulting, whether the speaker intended to stir up hatred or simply made it likely. The religious offence, added two decades later, was drawn deliberately narrow: only threatening words, only proven intent, and an express protection for criticism of the religion itself.¹⁹
Which door a community may use is not left to chance — and the line that assigns it does not bear much weight. Since Mandla v Dowell-Lee in 1983, the courts have treated Jews and Sikhs as racial groups, distinct peoples bound by a shared history, so incitement against Jews can be pursued through the broader racial-hatred provisions.²⁰
But Jews are no more a single ethnicity than Muslims are. A faith that has absorbed converts for millennia runs from Ashkenazi to Sephardi to Mizrahi to Ethiopian and far beyond; “Jewish” names a people one can join, not a race one is born into — and the same is true of Islam, drawn from every nation on earth. The law’s distinction is not biological; it cannot be. It is a classification: the courts recognised one community as a people and declined to recognise the other. Muslims are not a racial group in law, so incitement against them falls to the narrower religious provisions, and reaches the wider ones only where a prosecutor can tie it to ethnicity — which is neither automatic nor certain.²¹
The result is precise, and it is uncomfortable. The same words — the same threat, the same libel — are easier to prosecute when the target is Jewish than when the target is Muslim, not because the two peoples differ in kind, but because the law partitioned them. Before anyone decides whom to protect, the statute has already decided whom it protects more readily. The selective enforcement this article describes is built on a selectivity already written into the law.
By design
X does not fail to remove this content now and then. It fails to remove it as a matter of system. When the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported samples of hateful posts using X’s own tools, the platform took no action on ninety-seven per cent of the anti-Muslim hate speech, and eighty-nine per cent of the anti-Jewish.²² That is not a moderation backlog; it is the absence of moderation. Exhibit A — reported, and still live the morning Hawkes stood in the dock — is one entry in that ninety-seven per cent.
The platform does not merely tolerate the content. It earns from it. Since Musk bought the company in October 2022, X has rebuilt itself around paid verification and a payments scheme that rewards engagement — and nothing engages like outrage. CCDH tracked ten of the most prominent anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim accounts on the platform: in the four months after 7 October 2023 they gained four million followers, against one million in the four months before. Most were paying X Premium subscribers, lifted up the algorithm by the platform itself; several earn directly through X’s subscription feature, on which X takes a share.²³ The hatred is not a cost the platform absorbs. It is a product line.
The direction is set from the top, and it needs no written policy. Musk’s own account — the most followed on earth, past 240 million — has repeatedly amplified anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives from figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (”Tommy Robinson”), carrying them to audiences they could never reach alone. When CCDH read the replies beneath a sample of those posts, it counted 3,930 calling for violence, 2,690 of them under Yaxley-Lennon.²⁴ Yaxley-Lennon is on the platform because Musk put him there: deactivated in 2018 for hateful conduct, he was reinstated in November 2023 — the same day as Katie Hopkins, banned in 2020, two of Britain’s best-known anti-Muslim agitators restored within hours of each other.²⁵ Weeks after the takeover, the body that had advised Twitter on exactly this kind of harm, its Trust and Safety Council, was dissolved.²⁶
So this is not a platform straining to meet its legal duties and falling short. It is one whose design — the verification model, the payment scheme, the algorithm, the owner’s own feed — runs in the opposite direction from everything the Online Safety Act requires of it. The Act demands systems that reduce illegal content and remove it on notice. X has built systems that surface it, spread it, and bank on it.
Foreign provocation
On 13 September 2025, the largest far-right rally Britain had seen in a generation filled central London — well over a hundred thousand people, gathered under the banner “Unite the Kingdom.” Onto a screen above them came Elon Musk, the American owner of X, by video link. He told the crowd that “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” and called for the dissolution of Parliament.²⁷
Read that against the law already set out. A grossly offensive or menacing message sent over a public electronic network is an offence under section 127. Threatening words intended to stir up hatred are an offence under the Public Order Act. The government’s own response conceded the character of what it had heard: it called Musk’s words dangerous and inflammatory.²⁸ And then it did nothing. No investigation, no sanction, no consequence — for a call to violence delivered to a hundred thousand people in the nation’s capital by the owner of the platform on which, as the last section showed, the same incitement runs every day. People have been jailed in this country for a single post. Musk addressed a crowd and walked away clean.
It is worth being clear about what that rally was, because the language from the stage is built to obscure it. This was not a debate about visa numbers. It was the largest gathering yet of Britain’s counter-jihad movement, in which “immigration” is the sayable surface and the Muslim is the meaning beneath. You do not have to take that on trust: it is there in their own platforms and their own speeches, where the boats, the grooming gangs and the “invasion” all resolve, every time, to the same target. The slogans — “remigration,” “protect our daughters” — stay on the lawful side of the line, naming a policy where they mean a people. That is what the euphemism is for: it lets a speaker incite against Muslims before a hundred thousand people without ever seeming to. Musk gave them the surface; the crowd heard the rest.
The rally was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s, and that matters, because he is not a grassroots eruption of native grievance. His counter-jihad movement has been underwritten for years by foreign think-tanks and donors; the dogma he sells — civilisation under siege, the Muslim as invader — is manufactured abroad and retailed by him, at scale, on X.²⁹ Follow the provocation back to its sources and almost nothing about it is domestic. Foreign money. A figurehead sponsored from abroad. A foreign billionaire on the screen. All of it producing incitement on British soil, against British Muslims, in breach of British law.
And the state is not powerless against any of it. At the second Unite the Kingdom rally, in May 2026, the Home Secretary barred eleven foreign speakers from entering the country — a clean demonstration that when the government decides a foreign provocateur is unwelcome, it has the tools to act.³⁰ It simply declines to use them where the provocation is profitable, popular, or merely convenient to ignore. The incitement this article describes is not confined to the dark corners of a platform. It runs in daylight, in the capital, broadcast from a screen — foreign in origin, illegal in substance, and met by the British state with a statement of concern and nothing more.
The childminder and the billionaire
The machinery for prosecuting online incitement is not rusted shut. It can move with real speed and real severity — as two people from Northampton can attest.
On 29 July 2024, hours after three little girls were murdered in Southport — and hours after a lie tore across X that their killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, which he was not — Lucy Connolly, a childminder with around ten thousand followers, posted that the hotels housing asylum seekers should be set alight, and called for mass deportation. She deleted it within hours. It did not matter. She was interviewed within days, charged within a fortnight, and jailed for thirty-one months for stirring up racial hatred; the judge told her she had intended to incite serious violence.³¹ Tyler Kay, who reshared her words, was jailed for thirty-eight.³² The immigration panic that jailed them began as a lie about a Muslim.
Hold those sentences in mind — thirty-one months, thirty-eight months, for single posts — and go back to the screen above the Unite the Kingdom crowd. Musk told a hundred thousand people that violence was coming and they should fight back or die. He has more than two hundred million followers. The leader of a national party wrote to the Prime Minister calling it incitement; the government itself called the words dangerous and inflammatory; the Metropolitan Police opened an investigation — into the protesters who threw punches, not into the man who broadcast the call.³³ No charge. No sanction. Nothing.
It is the same statute book, and in substance the same conduct the law exists to catch — words thrown at a crowd to stir up hatred and violence, named as incitement by the government itself. What differs is the defendant. A childminder with ten thousand followers is prosecuted and jailed; a billionaire with two hundred million, who said as much to a crowd a hundred thousand strong, faces not even the regulatory sanction the Online Safety Act holds over his own platform. And the verified influencers who industrialise the same incitement for profit, day after day, are troubled least of all.
The lesson the state has taught is exact, and everyone learning from it has understood it. Incitement is prosecuted at the bottom and tolerated at the top. The law reaches the childminder and stops at the billionaire — not because their words differ, and not because nothing could be done to him, but because one is powerless and the other is rich, foreign, and useful to leave alone. Enforcement, where it happens, runs downward.
The crime and the libel
The grooming-gang scandal was real. Groups of men, over years, targeted vulnerable girls — some as young as ten, many of them in care — and raped, trafficked and degraded them. The state and the institutions that should have protected those girls looked away, at times for fear of being called racist, and that dereliction was its own crime against the children it failed — a failure of the most basic duty a government owes, to protect its people from harm. Baroness Casey’s 2025 national audit confirmed what the bravest reporting had long maintained: in the areas it examined — Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire — men of Pakistani heritage were genuinely over-represented among the suspects, and the system had spent years refusing to look. In one case file, she found the word “Pakistani” tippexed out.³⁴ None of that is in dispute here, and none of it should be.
What follows is about what is done with that truth.
Between the crime and the slogan on Exhibit A — a quarter of a million girls raped by Muslims, go home — sits a laundering process, and it runs in identifiable stages.
The first is the swap of ethnicity for religion. Every official finding of over-representation — Casey’s, the Jay report’s — concerns ethnicity and national origin: Pakistani heritage, “Asian” suspects. None of it measures religion, because religion is not what the data records. “Pakistani-heritage men in three police-force areas” becomes “Muslims,” and in that single substitution a specific, evidenced finding about an ethnic group in parts of northern England is stretched over two billion people of every nationality on earth, the overwhelming majority of whom have never set foot in the country. The data never said “Muslim.” The libel cannot work without it.
The second is the swap of local for national. Casey was emphatic on exactly the point the slogan depends on: nationally, ethnicity goes unrecorded in two-thirds of cases, and the data is, by her own assessment, “not good enough” to support any claim about offenders’ ethnicity at the national level.³⁵ The over-representation is a real finding about particular places. That it describes the whole country is the one claim the official audit says cannot be made.
The third is the number. “A quarter of a million” is not a government figure, a police figure, or a Casey figure. It traces to a single extrapolation aired in the House of Lords in 2018, in which a peer took Rotherham’s estimate of roughly 1,400 victims of all forms of exploitation and multiplied it across the entire country to reach 250,000 — a method fact-checkers across the spectrum, and even unsympathetic commentators, have called unsupported. It was revived by a privately funded inquiry with no statutory standing, amplified by Musk to millions, and landed on the street as established fact.³⁶ No one counted a quarter of a million girls. Someone multiplied.
The fourth stage is the one the first three exist to enable: the move from perpetrators to a people. From “these men did this” to “Muslims do this” to “so they must go.” The individuals convicted in court become an entire faith; the faith becomes an enemy population; the enemy population is told to leave. That is the journey from a crime to a libel, and Exhibit A is the finished product.
One test exposes the whole construction. In April 2023, West Midlands Police closed their largest-ever child sexual abuse investigation: twenty-one people convicted, the roster overwhelmingly white, several of them women — the Evanses, the Bakers, the Wellingtons, the Webbs. It came the day after the Home Secretary told the country that grooming gangs were “almost all British-Pakistani.”³⁷ No one called the twenty-one a Christian grooming gang. No one demanded the white British be deported — there being, of course, nowhere to deport them to. No one went looking through their baptism records for a motive. The crime was treated as the crime of the people who committed it — which is exactly how it should be treated, and exactly how it ceases to be treated the moment the men are Muslim.
That asymmetry is the tell. When the same offence yields “jail the men who did it” for one group and “send the whole community home” for another, the second response was never really about the children or immigration. The crime is the occasion; the Muslim is the target. And a society that can prosecute the offence — that does prosecute it, courtroom after courtroom — does not need the libel to protect a single child. The libel is doing other work.
The regulator with teeth
It would be easier to excuse all of this if the law were unenforceable — if the Online Safety Act were a paper tiger no regulator could make bite. It is not, and Ofcom has spent the months since the Act’s duties came into force proving the opposite.
Since those duties landed in 2025, Ofcom has opened investigations into more than ninety platforms and issued six fines for non-compliance. It fined one pornography operator a million pounds — the first seven-figure penalty under the Act — for failing to keep children away from adult content; it fined others hundreds of thousands more; it fined a file-sharing site for ignoring its demands for information; it has put services on notice that it will go to court to have them blocked in the UK altogether.³⁸ The machinery works. When Ofcom decides a harm matters, the fines are real and the deadlines are short.
It has even reached X. In January 2026, Ofcom opened a formal investigation into the company — over Grok, its AI tool, which was being used to generate sexual deepfakes and child sexual abuse imagery.³⁹ That investigation is right, and the harm is grave.
Now set what Ofcom enforces against what it does not. The Act names stirring up religious hatred as priority illegal content — the same tier of harm Ofcom has fined and pursued elsewhere. That is the duty that reaches the ecosystem set out earlier: the ninety-seven per cent of reported anti-Muslim hate left standing, the monetised accounts, the amplified influencers. And against that duty, on that content, there has been no fine, no blocking order, no investigation at all.
Removing incitement is harder to weigh than checking an age, and the hate-content duties are newer than the rest. But difficulty does not explain a year of silence on this harm beside a year of seven-figure fines for others. The strongest thing Ofcom has produced on illegal hate is an announcement, in May 2026, that X had “committed” to introducing better protections.⁴⁰ A promise, where pornography sites got penalties.
So the pattern set by the police and the government repeats at the regulator. Ofcom has the power, and it has proven it will use it — it fines foreign companies, it threatens to block them, it moves in months. It has simply not turned any of that on the incitement this article is about. Age checks for pornography are enforced with seven-figure fines. The duty to remove anti-Muslim incitement is not enforced at all — it is answered with a press release. The harm left unaddressed is, once again, the same one.
And that duty is not abstract: it exists because incitement kills. Its proof is the Edinburgh street this article opened on, where a man with a machete wounded five men while shouting the very libel traced through these pages. Of every harm in this account, anti-Muslim incitement is the one that has already drawn blood — and it is the one the regulator has left entirely alone.
Whom the state protects
Step back from the particular failures — the unenforced law, the non-compliant platform, the idle regulator — and one fact organises all of them. None of these bodies lacks the power to act. Each has shown, in this very account, that it can move with speed and force the moment it decides a harm is worth stopping.
When a childminder posted a call to burn a hotel full of asylum seekers, she was charged within a fortnight and jailed within months. When eleven foreign speakers sought to address a rally, the Home Secretary barred them from the country before they arrived. When the grooming-gang scandal could no longer be contained, a government that had resisted an inquiry for a year reversed itself and produced a statutory inquiry, a national police operation and a raft of new law.⁴¹ The machinery, when the state wants it to move, moves fast.
Now hold that beside the harm at the centre of this article. The same statute that puts a poster in prison sits unused against an ecosystem inciting violence against Muslims for profit. The same incitement that, aimed at Jews, brings the full weight of the state — as it should — brings close to nothing when it is aimed at Muslims. A call to violence broadcast to a hundred thousand people drew a statement of concern. The libel that armed the man in Edinburgh has drawn no response at all. Not because nothing can be done, but because nothing has been chosen.
And the choice is not random; it follows the political weight. Where a community can command a response — where there is a constituency that will be heard, a danger the public already fears, a pressure the government feels on its own survival — the state moves. The victims of anti-Muslim incitement carry no such weight. There is no electoral price for ignoring them, and there is a political use in leaving the incitement alone: it feeds the immigration panic that wins seats, and the narrative has become too useful to too many to disturb. So it is left to run.
This is the failure beneath all the others, and it is neither regulatory nor procedural. It is political, and it is a failure of the duty that comes before every other — the duty of a state to protect its people from harm. In practice, some citizens of this country are denied the protection from harm the law extends to everyone else — tilted against them in the statute, as we saw, and then rationed away from them by every official who declines to act. It is a two-tier system, and the tier you fall into is set by whether your protection is found convenient. Right now, the citizens on the wrong tier are Muslims.
What can be done
The failure described here is a choice, and choices can be forced. The same Act that sits unenforced also handed the public levers the state would rather it did not notice — and none of them is a lawsuit or needs a lawyer. They need people willing to pull them.
The sharpest is the super-complaint. Since January 2026, the Online Safety Act has let an eligible organisation — a charity, a campaign, a representative body — bring a systemic complaint to Ofcom, which is then obliged to consider it and publish a response within ninety days.⁴² Individuals cannot bring one; organisations can. And the bodies already engaged with the mechanism are telling: the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews are among them.⁴³ There is no reason a Muslim representative body — alone or in coalition — cannot do the same, and bring a super-complaint on the anti-Muslim incitement that X hosts and earns from. That is how the enforcement weight this article has shown Muslims to lack gets built: not by waiting to be protected, but by forcing the regulator onto the record, on a clock. And these bodies are not staffed by strangers — most run on volunteers, members and small donations. They cannot build that evidence without the public that feeds it. Join them, fund them, report to them; the super-complaint is only as strong as the casework behind it, and the casework is built by people.
Individuals are not powerless either, though here the power is collective rather than singular. Ofcom will not act on a lone report, and says so plainly — but it does use what is reported to build its picture of where harm sits. Report the post to the platform first, which puts its removal duty to the test; then report it to Ofcom’s portal. One report changes nothing. Ten thousand become the evidence base that turns “there is no data” into a pattern the regulator has to weigh. Every report is a mark against the ninety-seven per cent.
Count it where counting matters. Part of the reason antisemitic incitement draws a fast response is that a body exists to record it, year on year, and put the data in front of police and government. Anti-Muslim hate needs its equivalent supported and fed, so that the pattern is undeniable and already on the record when the next attack comes.
And make it cost something politically. The inaction has held because it has been free. Ask your MP and your candidates, in writing and in public, why the law against stirring up religious hatred is enforced for some and suspended for anti-Muslim incitement — and why the platform duties that fine pornographers go unused against incitement that has put men in hospital. The silence is a wager that no one is keeping score. Keep score.
What is being built
Return to Edinburgh, where this began. A man walked down a street with a machete and left five men wounded, shouting as he did the precise libel this article has followed from end to end — that Muslims rape British daughters. He did not compose that sentence. He received it. It was written for him by an influencer ecosystem that earns from it, carried by a platform built to spread it, licensed by a foreign provocation the government called dangerous and then ignored, and left in place by a law nobody enforced, a regulator that looked elsewhere, and a state that had decided the ecosystem’s targets, the ones he was inspired to attack, were not worth protecting. Hawkes swung the blade.
That is what a pipeline is. Incitement does not become violence by accident, in a single deranged leap. It is built, stage by stage, and at every stage there is a valve the state holds and chooses not to close: the post that should have been removed, the account that should never have been monetised, the broadcast that should have drawn a charge, the duty that should have been enforced. Each open valve is a decision. Edinburgh is what comes out of the end of the pipe.
Gather them, then — the people this article has set side by side. The girls a state abandoned for decades because confronting their abusers was inconvenient. The childminder it jailed in weeks for a single post. The billionaire it would not touch for a call to violence heard by a hundred thousand. The men left bleeding on an Edinburgh pavement. One thread runs through all of them: a state that protects some of its people and not others, and rations the difference by what it finds convenient. The girls and the men on that pavement were failed by the same instinct — the judgement that their safety could wait.
We know where this leads, because the stages are not new. Mass violence is never spontaneous; it is assembled, in the open, out of exactly these parts — a libel, a medium, a permission, an averted official gaze. We recognise the machinery because we have watched it run before, against other people, in other decades. What has changed is not the method. It is the target. This time it is being built against Muslims, in plain sight, with the tools that could dismantle it lying unused beside it.
This should trouble more than the community it targets. A state that hands out protection by the measure of convenience has made it conditional for everyone — it has only yet to find the rest of us inconvenient. The duty withheld from Muslims today is the one every citizen is owed, and withholding it is a precedent, not an exception.
One test remains, the one this article opened with. Take the sentence that left five men bleeding, and the post still earning beneath it, and change a single word: for “Muslim,” read “Jewish.” Ask whether any of it — the tolerance, the monetisation, the silence, the shrug — would survive a single day. You know that it would not. So the only question left is the one the whole machine is built to keep you from asking. Why does it survive now?
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
Feature image by Towfiqu barbhuiya / Pexels
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ The suspect’s words at the point of arrest, captured in footage circulated online and reported by Middle East Eye; quoted in full in the official statement of Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), 19 June 2026, which described the shout not as “one man’s outburst” but as the “Muslim rape gang” libel pushed daily by online agitators. [House-style decision for Jim: reproduce the expletive verbatim, or asterisk it for Fireline.]
² Exhibit A: post by the verified account @BROKENBRITAIN0, X, 08:41, 22 June 2026; 46,000 views; reported by the author and live at time of writing. [FLAG: confirm still live before publication; the fabricated “quarter of a million” figure is examined later.]
³ Police Scotland statement, 20 June 2026; Scottish Association of Mosques; Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND).
⁴ Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service; Edinburgh Sheriff Court, 22 June 2026.
⁵ Keir Starmer, post on X, 20 June 2026.
⁶ Shabana Mahmood, Home Secretary, statement, 20 June 2026.
⁷ John Swinney, First Minister of Scotland, post on X, 20 June 2026.
⁸ Muslim Council of Britain; MEND; Scottish Association of Mosques, statements, 20–21 June 2026.
⁹ Public Order Act 1986, Part 3A (inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006), section 29J, which protects freedom of expression; the offence under section 29B requires threatening words or behaviour together with intent to stir up religious hatred. England and Wales.
¹⁰ Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, stirring-up-hatred offences in respect of religion: threatening or abusive behaviour intended to stir up hatred, subject to a statutory protection for discussion and criticism and a defence of reasonableness. In force 1 April 2024.
¹¹ Community Security Trust, which records antisemitic incidents and shares its data with police; see its annual Antisemitic Incidents Report.
¹² Edict of Expulsion, England, 1290 (Edward I); Alhambra Decree, Spain, 1492 (Ferdinand and Isabella); expulsions also from France (1306 and 1394) and numerous other jurisdictions across the medieval period.
¹³ The blood libel: the medieval and early-modern accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes — a recurring pretext for massacre and expulsion.
¹⁴ Quebec City mosque shooting, 29 January 2017 (six killed); Finsbury Park van attack, 19 June 2017 (Makram Ali killed); Christchurch mosque shootings, 15 March 2019 (fifty-one killed). On the “For Rotherham” inscription on the perpetrator’s ammunition, see the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point analysis of the Christchurch attacks.
¹⁵ Public Order Act 1986, Part 3A, section 29B (inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006); maximum seven years’ imprisonment. England and Wales.
¹⁶ Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, stirring up hatred in respect of religion; in force 1 April 2024.
¹⁷ Communications Act 2003, section 127.
¹⁸ Online Safety Act 2023: Schedule 7 lists stirring up religious hatred under the Public Order Act 1986 as priority illegal content; the illegal-content safety duties require proportionate systems to limit and remove it; Ofcom may impose penalties up to £18 million or ten per cent of qualifying worldwide revenue and may seek business-disruption (including service-blocking) orders.
¹⁹ Public Order Act 1986: racial-hatred offences (Part 3, especially section 18) reach “threatening, abusive or insulting” words where hatred is intended or likely; religious-hatred offences (Part 3A, section 29B) reach only “threatening” words where hatred is intended, subject to the section 29J protection for criticism of religion.
²⁰ Mandla v Dowell-Lee [1983] 2 AC 548 (House of Lords), establishing the broad “ethnic group” test under the Race Relations Act 1976; Jews recognised as a racial or ethnic group on the same reasoning (cf. King-Ansell v Police [1979] 2 NZLR 531).
²¹ Muslims have been held not to constitute a racial group under UK law (Nyazi v Rymans Ltd, EAT, 1988), Islam spanning many ethnicities and nationalities; anti-Muslim conduct attracts the racial-hatred or racially-aggravated provisions only where it is also tied to a racial or ethnic group (cf. J H Walker Ltd v Hussain [1996] ICR 291).
²² Center for Countering Digital Hate: reporting hateful posts through X’s own tools, the platform failed to act on 97 per cent of the anti-Muslim and 89 per cent of the anti-Jewish hate speech sampled (2023). X Corp. sued CCDH over related research; the suit was dismissed in March 2024 under California’s anti-SLAPP law.
²³ Center for Countering Digital Hate, “Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim actors grow 4x as quickly on X” (11 April 2024): ten tracked accounts gained roughly four million followers in the four months after 7 October 2023, against about one million in the four months before; accounts monetised through X Premium subscriptions, with the platform taking a share of subscriber revenue, while brand advertising was served beside the content.
²⁴ Center for Countering Digital Hate, analysis of anti-migrant amplification on X (2025–2026): Elon Musk amplified narratives from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (”Tommy Robinson”) and Rupert Lowe; 3,930 replies contained calls for violence, including 2,690 in replies to Yaxley-Lennon.
²⁵ Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as “Tommy Robinson” (account deactivated 2018), and Katie Hopkins (banned 2020), reinstated by Elon Musk on 5 November 2023.
²⁶ Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was dissolved in December 2022, weeks after Musk completed his acquisition.
²⁷ “Unite the Kingdom” rally, London, 13 September 2025; crowd widely estimated at well over 100,000. Elon Musk addressed the rally by video link, telling the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die” and calling for the dissolution of Parliament.
²⁸ UK government and Downing Street response describing Musk’s remarks as dangerous and inflammatory, September 2025.
²⁹ On the foreign funding of Yaxley-Lennon’s activism, see The Guardian’s 2018 investigation and subsequent reporting (naming, among others, the Middle East Forum and the donor Robert Shillman). [Body keeps this to “foreign think-tanks and donors”; the ideological character of that funding is reserved for separate treatment. Strip the named organisations here if you would rather park them entirely.]
³⁰ “Unite the Kingdom” rally, 16 May 2026; ahead of the event the Home Secretary barred eleven foreign nationals from entering the United Kingdom.
³¹ Lucy Connolly, 41, of Northampton: posted on X on 29 July 2024 calling for asylum-seeker hotels to be set alight and for mass deportation; pleaded guilty to publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred and was jailed for 31 months at Birmingham Crown Court (the case transferred from Northampton); the sentencing judge found she had intended to incite serious violence.
³² Tyler Kay, 26, of Northampton: jailed for 38 months on 9 August 2024 for resharing Connolly’s post, having admitted publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred.
³³ On Musk’s “Unite the Kingdom” remarks: Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey wrote to the Prime Minister alleging Musk had sought to incite violence; the government described the remarks as dangerous and inflammatory; the Metropolitan Police’s post-event investigation concerned the disorder and assaults on officers at the demonstration, not Musk’s address. No charge or sanction against Musk followed.
³⁴ National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (the “Casey audit”), 16 June 2025: local data from Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire showed clear over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects; the audit documented institutional avoidance of the ethnicity question, including for fear of appearing racist, and a case file in which the word “Pakistani” had been removed with correction fluid.
³⁵ Casey audit: ethnicity was not recorded for around two-thirds of grooming-gang perpetrators, and the national data is, in Baroness Casey’s terms, not good enough to support any statement about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level.
³⁶ The “250,000” figure is not a government, police or Casey statistic. It originates in a 2018 House of Lords extrapolation by Lord Pearson of Rannoch from the Jay Report’s conservative estimate of roughly 1,400 victims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013); fact-checkers (including Full Fact and others) have found the national figure unsupported. It was revived by the privately funded, non-statutory “Rape Gang Inquiry” associated with Rupert Lowe MP, and amplified by Elon Musk on X.
³⁷ West Midlands Police “Operation Satchel”: 21 individuals convicted on 5 April 2023 in the force’s largest child sexual abuse investigation, with a predominantly white roster including several women; sentences ranged from life to non-custodial. The convictions came the day after Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote that grooming-gang members were “almost all British-Pakistani.”
³⁸ Ofcom enforcement under the Online Safety Act, 2025–2026: more than ninety platforms investigated and six fines issued since the duties came into force, including a £1 million penalty against AVS Group (the first seven-figure OSA fine) and further penalties against Kick (£800,000), 8579 LLC (£1.35 million) and others, chiefly for age-assurance failures and for failing to respond to statutory information requests. Ofcom has also placed services on notice of potential court applications for business-disruption (blocking) measures.
³⁹ Ofcom opened a formal investigation into X (X Internet Unlimited Company) on 12 January 2026 over the use of its Grok AI tool to generate non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material, under the illegal-content risk-assessment and safety duties of the Online Safety Act.
⁴⁰ On 15 May 2026, Ofcom announced that X had committed to introducing stronger protections against illegal hate and terror content — a voluntary undertaking rather than a penalty or enforcement decision.
⁴¹ Following the Casey audit, the government — having resisted a national inquiry for much of the preceding year — announced a statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs (Home Secretary’s statement, 9 December 2025, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield), alongside a national policing operation reviewing previously closed cases and new measures including better recording of suspects’ ethnicity and reform of the law on child rape.
⁴² The Online Safety Act’s super-complaints regime came into force on 1 January 2026, with Ofcom’s final guidance published on 10 February 2026. Eligible organisations — bodies that represent UK users or the public and act independently of regulated services — may bring a super-complaint about systemic risks of significant online harm; Ofcom must consider an admissible complaint and publish its response within 90 days. Individuals cannot bring super-complaints.
⁴³ Organisations engaged with Ofcom’s super-complaints process as of February 2026 include the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, among others.