Ealaf was shopping when a stranger allegedly assaulted her. She’s not alone

Ealaf Al-Easawi was minding her own business, shopping on her lunch break, when from out of nowhere a woman allegedly smacked her on the left cheek. The earring she wore behind her hijab fell out. Before the childcare worker could comprehend what just happened, she was allegedly shoved to the ground.

“I didn’t even get a chance to defend myself,” Al-Easawi said. “It was so quick. At that time I could barely breathe, I was crying so hard, shaking, shocked, traumatised. I’ve never had something like that happen to me in my life.”

Ealaf Al-Easawi hasn’t left her home alone for a month, after she and another Muslim woman were randomly attacked at a Melbourne shopping centre.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

It’s been one month since the alleged attack on Al-Easawi and another Muslim woman at a Melbourne shopping plaza. But she hasn’t left the house alone since, fearful something might happen again. “I’m an independent woman ... being at home in these four walls waiting for someone to take me out feels disgusting,” she said.

“But since the attack, I’m not feeling ok, to be honest. I’m scared to go by myself outside. I am having lots of flashbacks, I dream about it lots ... I need groceries for the kids’ lunch boxes but when we go out, I’m looking at people, looking behind me, turning around.”

Al-Easawi’s experience last month is symptomatic of a surge in Islamophobia in Australia, although hers was rare in garnering national headlines. While the precise extent of Islamophobia is hard to quantify, the organisation Islamophobia Register Australia has been inviting people to report their experiences since 2014, with its small team contacting individuals to verify incidents.

Its latest report, from 2023 and 2024, indicates in-person incidents have more than doubled over the last two years. It verified 309 in-person incidents of Islamophobia, and 366 online – the highest tally since the organisation was created 10 years ago. This included 139 in-person incidents in NSW and 79 in Victoria.

The most common type of in-person incident was verbal intimidation or harassment, which accounted for 61 per cent of reports. This was followed by discrimination (9 per cent), physical assault (9 per cent), property damage (8 per cent), non-verbal harassment such as offensive gestures (7 per cent) and written intimidation such as hate mail (6 per cent).

“Beyond mere numbers, 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,” the report said.

They included Muslim women having their hijabs pulled off and being spat on, school children being targeted, and nearly 200 examples of verbal abuse, including threats of murder and rape.

Muslim women and girls were the overwhelming victims, accounting for 75 per cent of reports.

“I was walking with my children in Westfield when a man and his friend walked right up to me and spat on me then continued walking,” one woman said, in testimony supplied to the register. “I asked him why he spat on me, and he said, ‘Because you are Muslim’.”

The surge reported by the Islamophobia Register is corroborated by other evidence about social attitudes in Australia since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza.

The social cohesion index by the non-profit Scanlon Foundation Research Institute – which surveys more than 8000 Australians using the same template each year – last year found a year-on-year spike in anti-Muslim sentiment.

More than a third of people – 34 per cent – said they had a negative attitude towards Muslims in July 2024, up 7 percentage points from the previous year. There was also an increase in negative attitudes towards Jewish people, albeit from a smaller base, from 9 per cent to 13 per cent.

But the politics of Islamophobia have also become more complex. In the aftermath of October 7, Labor politicians made a habit of condemning antisemitism and Islamophobia simultaneously. They later scaled that back, as the opposition criticised the government for a weak response to antisemitism after a spate of high-profile antisemitic incidents were reported, later found to be spurred on by organised crime.

“Any time any senior [Labor] minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on,” Liberal Senator Dave Sharma said on Sky News in December. He has since said he accepts Islamophobia exists and did not seek to discount the experience of people suffering from it.

But the report said this political rhetoric had been deeply confusing and alienating for Australian Muslims, who felt the “quantifiable, documented hate crimes they experience are dismissed as imaginary or insignificant for a seemingly partisan agenda”.

“Rejecting the grim reality because it is politically inconvenient does not make the problem go away; it facilitates it [and] may then influence public sentiment.”

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