“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 Green: Shloime Rand, 34, and Moshe Shine, 76.

All three were allegedly victims of the same man, on the same day, in the same city. You would not know this from the coverage that followed.

The Metropolitan Police’s official post on X (formerly Twitter) made no mention of Hussein. Media outlets including SkyNews, Channel 5, Reuters and the BBC reported Suleiman’s court appearance as being for the attempted murder of two Jewish men.

Some observers took to social media to ask why police hadn’t mentioned the third Muslim victim. A fair question; nobody in authority rushed to answer it.

Tyrer and Sayyid offer a framework for understanding why this happens, and it goes beyond editorial carelessness. They argue that Islamophobia does not merely demonise Muslims. It does something more structurally damaging: it renders them ghostly.

Muslims exist in the western imagination as “either unreal or as a hyperreal interruption to our consciousness”. They are either invisible or monstrous; never simply human, never simply people who can be wronged in the way other people are wronged.