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In September 2001 terrorists linked to the Islamist group Al Qaeda flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. In response, the US government, backed by the UK, launched an attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

In 2003 the UK supported a US invasion of Iraq, claiming that its government had ‘weapons of mass destruction’, however it later emerged that this was not the case. Two years later in July 2005, suicide bombers exploded their devices in underground trains and a bus in London. In video messages, the bombers claimed the invasion of Iraq to be the reason for their actions. In the years that followed, western involvement in Middle East and North African conflicts continued and terrorist actions across the world became increasingly common. In 2011, the ‘Arab Spring’ of people’s movements degenerated into wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria.

These conflicts, as well as continuing crises in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Eritrea and the effects of climate change on some of the poorest people on earth, caused mass migration of asylum seekers towards Europe. Some came by boat across the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, while others travelled overland through Eastern Europe. Migrants wanting to reach the UK camped outside Calais, first at Sangatte until 2001 and then in a camp known as ‘the Jungle’.

One dangerous effect of the combination of terrorism, western involvement in the Middle East and the flow of migrants was a rise in anti-Semitism and a steep rise in anti-Muslim feeling, or Islamophobia, across Europe and the USA.