For 24 hours last week, London held its breath in a mixture of horror, shock and fear. An off-duty soldier had been hacked to death on a London street. Two attackers, wielding knives and meat cleavers, committed the murder in broad daylight.
Members of the far right English Defence League grabbed the moment to claim "enough was enough" and took to the streets, terrifying an already fearful population with their threats of violence and rhetoric of hatred.
In the days after the Woolwich killing, British Muslims have been suffering terrible reprisals. Nearly 170 attacks on Muslims have been reported, from hijab and niqab pulling, verbal and physical assaults to a triple petrol bombing on a mosque.
There have been heated debates about whether the media was right to label the incident so immediately as "terrorism", before any facts had been established. Were these two lone wolves, just like Anders Breivik of Norway was described, or was this part of the death throes of Al Qaeda's reach into Europe?
Front page reporting and rolling news coverage has also been challenged. Was this a high profile incident only because Muslims were involved? Just a few weeks earlier in Birmingham, the UK's second largest city, a 75-year-old Muslim man was stabbed to death on his way home from mosque in an alleged hate crime. It barely made the news.
Muslims were quick to condemn the killing, explaining nothing in Islam could justify such an horrific attack. The unequivocal and immediate rejection of the murder helped to soothe a terrified British nation.
With the Woolwich murder still playing on television screens and with the hate-filled words of the far right echoing across the country, a tough approach to routing extremism is clearly necessary. Muslim groups have been discussing ways to fight extremism. The overwhelming majority of Muslims stand against such atrocities, but there is always more that can be done.
The swift response by the government was to announce setting up a task force to tackle extremism. But, strangely, there was hardly a mention of anything but Muslim communities. Despite the rise of UK far right parties, including the many and growing number of attacks on Muslims, this kind of extremism features low on the government agenda. Cynics would argue that the rising popularity of right wing parties means that the need to be seen to be acting fast and acting tough is what is driving the agenda.
Instead of targetting extremism, irrespective of ideological origin, these government policies appear to be turning Muslims into bogeymen. And it is a short step from bogeyman to hatred and, much worse, when authorities are pandering to the far right. It's the same story across Europe, and it's Europe more than anywhere that should learn from its own history. After the Woolwich killing, the risks were hugely evident with tweets such as: "Hitler killed the wrong people, it should have been Muslims".
Nations all around the world are facing the rise of extremism. But those in power must be wary of conflating dangerous extremists with those who legitimately oppose state's policies, or demonising certain groups to win votes.
Identifying dangerous extremists is an extremely pressing question. Knee jerk reactions and conjuring up collective bogeymen are no kind of answer. If anything, they will simply make the situation worse.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk
