The Muslim victim who wasn’t there: Golders Green and the ‘ghost logic’ of Islamophobia

“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 […]