The Muslim victim who wasn’t there: Golders Green and the ‘ghost logic’ of Islamophobia
Police officers stand guard amid a demonstration outside the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool, England, on 2 August 2024
Ismail Patel writes in Middle East Eye on 6 May 2026 :
“As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.”
Scholars David Tyrer and Salman Sayyid open their 2012 essay on race and Islamophobia with this nursery rhyme about a haunting.
Reading the British media coverage of the Golders Green stabbings, it is impossible not to think of it again. Last Wednesday, a man named Essa Suleiman, a British national reportedly discharged from a psychiatric hospital days earlier, was accused of stabbing three people in London.
The first victim was Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man who appears to have been an acquaintance of the alleged attacker. Then two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green: Shloime Rand, 34, and Moshe Shine, 76.
All three were allegedly victims of the same man, on the same day, in the same city. You would not know this from the coverage that followed.
The Metropolitan Police’s official post on X (formerly Twitter) made no mention of Hussein. Media outlets including SkyNews, Channel 5, Reuters and the BBC reported Suleiman’s court appearance as being for the attempted murder of two Jewish men. Some observers took to social media to ask why police hadn’t mentioned the third Muslim victim. A fair question; nobody in authority rushed to answer it.
Into the open
Britain has always had an unofficial ranking system for victims; an unwritten hierarchy that determines whose suffering commands national attention – and whose quietly disappears. Most of the time, this hierarchy operates below the surface, plausibly deniable and, if highlighted, easily met with the charge of “playing the victim”. The Golders Green coverage brought it into the open with unusual clarity.
Two Jewish men were named, interviewed and photographed.