Jameel Muhktar and his cousin Resham Khan will never forget what happened at 9.15am on June 21. They were victims of a horrific acid attack by a white male in east London. Jameel went into an induced coma and Resham’s career as an aspiring model is now over. The pair firmly believe this was an Islamophobic hate crime.

As shocking as the attack was, most mainstream media has either failed to cover it or at best relegated it to a minor story. One can’t help but feel that if Jameel and Resham were James and Rebecca, and white rather than Asian, then their images would have made headline news for at least a day.

This is not the first time tragedy befalling British Muslims has been treated differently from non-Muslims. Cast your mind back to the brutal murders of Mohammed Saleem and Mushin Ahmed, who were knifed and kicked to death respectively. Compare and contrast the coverage of their murders to the rightful attention received by Jo Cox’s vicious murder and fusilier Lee Rigby’s. The latter names are now rightly permanently etched into our minds, whereas Mohamed Saleem and Muhsin Ahmed are virtually unknown outside the Muslim community.

The lack of reporting is not the only problem; a dual reluctance to brand attacks against Muslims as “terrorism”, while attacks by white men are reported as anything but terror, just smacks of sheer media double-standards in the eyes of British Muslims. When Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing terrorist, The Sun preferred to report it as “mental illness of a loner” while the Daily Mail was fiercely criticised for not even reporting the guilty verdict against Thomas Mair on its front page. No surprise then that in the immediate aftermath of the Finsbury Park tragedy, Ashish Joshi of Sky News was hounded by Muslims filled with rage outside the mosque who demanded that the mowing down of Muslims be called out for what it is: a “terrorist attack”.

Jeremy Corbyn highlights link between foreign wars and 'terrorism at home'

The simple, underlying, and inconvenient truth is that Islamophobia is now institutionalised within parts of our society. This week I wrote an open letter to the Home Secretary challenging her to come good on the “full protection” she promised British Muslims and revealing some troubling statistics. Figures show there are nearly 7,000 anti-Muslim hate crimes a year. Between March 2016 and March 2017, there were 143,920 anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic Tweets sent from the UK – this amounts to 393 a day.

The National Equality Panel found Muslims are paid 13-21 per cent less than others with equal qualifications. BBC research showed Muslim job applicants were three times less likely to be offered an interview.

For every one occasion a positive or neutral reference is used to describe Muslims in the print press, there are no fewer than twenty-one occasions of negative or extremist references. ChildLine showed that Muslim children seem to be bearing the brunt of a 69 per cent increase in playground racism with “bomber” and “terrorist” being used all too frequently.

The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 10: Greece Greek Presidential Guards, or Evzones, take their place for a review by US President Barack Obama and his Greek counterpart Prokopis Pavlopoulos in Athens, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016. President Barack Obama arrived in Greece Monday morning on the first stop of his final foreign tour as president, the first visit to Greece by a sitting U.S. president since Bill Clinton in 1999 trip. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) AP The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 9: Denmark Shutterstock The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 8: Austalia The incident allegedly took place in a primary school in Sydney Getty Images The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 7: Sweden Ola Ericson/imagebank.sweden.se The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 6: Mexico People talk to relatives at a section of the wall separating Mexico and the United States, as photographed from Playas Tijuana, in Tijuana, Mexico, November 6, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. Reuters The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 5: Germany Afghan asylum seeker Shakira Sarwari, 27, and her two children, Mohammed, 17 months, and Setayesh, 7, are taken off a Munich-bound train in Salzburg, Austria, by German police Anthony Faiola/The Washington Post The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 4: Israel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attends the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016. (Ronen Zvulun, Pool via AP) AP The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 3: US US police have shot 698 people in 2016 so far. Four times more black than white people have been shot Getty The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 2: France French policemen and security officers stand guard at the entrance of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on November 12, 2016, a few hours before the reopening concert by British musician Sting to mark the first anniversary of the November 13 Paris attacks. Rock star Sting reopens the Bataclan on November 12, the revered Paris concert hall where jihadists massacred 90 people, with a hugely symbolic show to mark the first anniversary of France's bloodiest terror attacks. Scores of survivors of the Bataclan assault -- the worst of the gun and suicide attacks across the city that night which left 130 dead -- will attend the concert, the dominant event in a weekend of otherwise low-key commemorations. / AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPE LOPEZPHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images Getty The 10 developed countries suffering the most deaths from terrorism 1: Turkey AP

To add insult to injury, since 2010 successive Tory governments which could have tackled Islamophobic hate crimes have effectively boycotted mainstream Muslim organisations and instead dealt with a tiny number of government stooges lacking any credibility in the Muslim community. Worse still, if media reports are to be believed then Mak Chishty, the former Met officer roundly criticised by over 100 Muslim organisations may well land the job of the new countering extremism commission – more evidence that the Government is just not listening.