Thousands of people around the world joined together just a few days ago to commemorate British Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, who was murdered last week outside her constituency of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire. Cox would have been celebrating her 42nd birthday.
It has been released that Cox had been in contact with an organization that monitors anti-Muslim incidents, Tell Mama, and was planning to release a crucial report and video that showed the stats of Muslim attacks in the UK, according to the Tell Mama’s director, Fiyaz Mughal.
Cox had been focusing the prevention of Islamophobic attacks on Muslim women, reporting that there had been in increase of attacks this year than from the year before. Mughal has reported that a majority of attacks have been at street level, and Cox was planning to raise awareness to that.
Tell Mama has collected data from reports made to the organization and to the police, concluding that Islamophobic attacks in 2015 had increased by 80%, stating “Many of our young women don’t feel safe when they’re out on the streets.”
“She just wanted people to be happy and the world to be a better place,” her husband Brendan Cox told a crowd of about 9,000 in London’s Trafalgar Square. Family, friends and celebrities such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, actors Gillian Anderson and Bill Nighy, and singer Lily Allen, mourned along with Cox’s husband and children.
Brendan Cox believed his wife’s murder was political because of her beliefs and passions in protecting victims of war. “It was an act of terror designed to advance an agenda of hatred toward others. What a beautiful irony it is that an act designed to advance hatred has instead generated such an outpouring of love.”
Malala Yousafzai, referring to Cox as her ‘sister’ discussed their similarities. “One thing that you might not realize that I have in common with Jo that we both were very proud of is that we are small,” she said.”But she showed us all that you can be small and still be a giant and that is what Jo was – a giant.”
Yousafzai concludes her tribute stating “Once again, the extremists have failed,” and because of this tragedy, Cox’s voice of inspiration will be even more powerful and continue to live on.
