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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In Norway, survivors mark the 10th anniversary of Anders Behring Breivik’s anti-Muslim attack, which was Norway’s worst peacetime slaughter, while in Canada the National Council of Canadian Muslims issue 61 recommendations to tackle Islamophobia, including the development of a federal anti-Islamophobia strategy by the end of the year and funding to help support victims of hate-motivated crimes, and in India a spate of new laws in states ruled by PM Narendra Modi’s BJP are seeking to banish interfaith unions. Our recommended read of the day is by Andrew MacFarlane for 1 News Australia on the results of a survey of the Australian Muslim community which found that 79% of them felt more afraid for their community as a direct result of the Christchurch attacks. This and more below:
Australia
Many Australian Muslims felt afraid after Christchurch terrorist attack — survey
More than 1000 Muslims were surveyed across Australia, with the report finding 79 per cent of them felt more afraid for their community as a direct result of the attack. "I was emotionally distressed for weeks on. I had unfortunately and accidentally come across the online video of the shooting after it was posted on social media and I had watched it. I couldn’t stop crying and my panic attacks were at an all-time peak," said one female survey participant. "We are afraid while standing for Friday prayer that it could be our last prayer," said one male survey participant. "I felt like a target with my hijab. I didn’t want my family to go out. I just didn’t know how to keep anyone safe but at the same time felt too scared to not do anything," said another female survey participant. Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan said the Christchurch terrorist attack was "doubly horrific", as the shooter was "one of our own". "The stories shared by Australian Muslim community members for this project have brought home to me that the undercurrents of religious discrimination, vilification and hate that manifested so horribly in the Christchurch attack, are not an aberration," Tan said. "They are consistent with the experiences of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate that is routinely experienced in Australia." The report concludes by saying the Australian Government and the Australian community need to take a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of discrimination, hatred and Islamophobia. read the complete article
Australian Muslim communities are a lot more diverse than you may have thought
In this year's Australia Talks National Survey, 80 per cent of the 60,000 Australians surveyed by the ABC said they believed discrimination to be a problem for Australia generally, while just over a quarter consider discrimination a problem for them personally. People with non-European ancestry were more likely to experience racial profiling and racial slurs, and 79 per cent said they faced subtle forms of discrimination, like the stereotyping Dr Amath and many other Muslim women face. "It is a little bit frustrating when people just assume things of you because identifiably you fit a stereotype that is orientalised or fetishised in mainstream political or media discourses," she said. While almost two-thirds of the world's Muslims come from Asia, Dr Amath said Islam was often misrepresented as "monolithic" or a Middle Eastern religion. In Australia, Muslim communities come from all around the world, with many different ethnicities, cultures, languages and beliefs. That diversity includes two main branches of Islam — Sunni and Shia — and within both there are a variety of different practices and traditions. There are also those who are born into traditional Muslim families and those who convert to Islam as a personal choice. read the complete article
Canada
Canada: Muslim group sets recommendations to tackle Islamophobia
A leading Muslim advocacy group has issued dozens of recommendations to tackle Islamophobia in Canada in the aftermath of deadly attacks and hate incidents targeting members of the Muslim community in recent years. The National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) issued 61 recommendations on Monday, including the development of a federal anti-Islamophobia strategy by the end of the year and funding to help support victims of hate-motivated crimes. “While we have heard many words from politicians condemning Islamophobia and standing in solidarity with Muslims in Canada, action to tackle Islamophobia has been slow and piecemeal,” the group said in its report. The group also urged Canadian provinces to ensure their anti-racism directorates are well resourced and for municipalities to fund community-based efforts to tackle Islamophobia. The recommendations come just days before a summit on Islamophobia that Canadian parliamentarians unanimously voted to hold in the aftermath of a deadly attack in London, Ontario, that killed four members of a Muslim family. read the complete article
Canada is Holding an Emergency Summit to Take Action Against Islamophobia. Here’s What’s at Stake for Canadian Muslims.
Considering that little changed following the first such massacre of Muslims over four years ago at the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, when six men were gunned down and many more were permanently injured and traumatized, thousands of people wrote to the federal government demanding concrete action. The federal government acquiesced and announced it would hold a National Summit on Islamophobia. It’s slated for July 22. Hundreds of community members have since been gathering through online consultations to hash out ideas and outline expectations. The National Council of Canadian Muslims has summarized the demands and put forward 61 recommendations. Other groups and individuals, including the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group with legal scholar Azeezah Kanji, have also put forward their analysis and recommendations. The National Summit is a major opportunity for community advocates and allies to call for policy change at all levels of government, ranging from broader anti-racist and Islamophobia education, to stricter online legislation, to bylaws against street harassment, to targeted funding for the arts emerging from Muslim communities. Even before 9/11, author and academic Karim H. Karim described much of the media framing of Islam and Muslims as constructing “an Islamic Peril.” After 9/11 and the subsequent rise of Daesh, this trend only continued. For years, Muslims were often portrayed as a fifth column, the “other” to be feared. read the complete article
International
European Union Court OKs Bans on Religious Dress at Work
Protection of religious freedom – for Muslim women in particular – was dented last week by the European Union’s highest court’s ruling that permits employers to discriminate against people who wear religious dress. “Neutrality” has previously been used to justify similar public sector bans and this extends that logic to the private sector, opening the door to widespread employment discrimination. The court’s reasoning that allowing religious dress could harm a business’ ability to operate rests on the flawed logic that a client’s objections to employees wearing religious dress can legitimately trump employees’ rights. Bans on religious clothing and symbols for teachers and other civil servants in Germany led some Muslim women to give up teaching careers. A ban on face coverings in France, upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, led to fines for nearly 600 Muslim women in less than three years and France’s 2004 law banning the wearing of headscarves in schools kept some Muslim girls from finishing school. For any women forced to wear a headscarf or veil, such prohibitions do not address root causes of oppression but risk in practice further curtailing their engagement with society, increasing their isolation. Rather than helping dismantle patriarchal norms that underpin control of women’s bodies and behavior, such prohibitions can feed them. European states are exerting increasing control over women’s decisions and bodies, from face veil bans in Denmark and Switzerland to a near-ban on legal abortion in Poland. The court’s decision could feed this disturbing trend, legitimizing both public and private efforts to restrict women’s dress. Muslim women shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their jobs. read the complete article
Condemning Islam, glorifying the West
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book cannot be considered a work of non-fiction. So what is it that she’s written? Her footnotes, at least, are without reproach. They stretch to fifty pages at the back of Prey, including references to Samuel Huntington, Alice Schwarzer and Kamel Daoud. Ali makes frequent reference to her own speeches. She has taken great pains; the subject is clearly important to her. She now lives in the United States. She is subject to police protection and is still concerned above all with one issue: the danger posed to the West by Islam or, more precisely, the danger posed to Western women by Muslim men. Prey is an update following the influx of refugees in 2015. Put bluntly, Ali’s thesis is "everything that was bad has grown worse since 2015". Much that you might recognise from similar titles can be found in this book: lamenting the dangerous naivety of the West, an attitude of concerned admonishment, the advantage of knowledge as a Muslim insider, and, of course, statistics. But page-long notes do not guarantee scientific validity, just as statistics carry little weight when sloppily applied. For Ali, that’s all there is to say. The influx of "unmonitored" Muslim immigrants – "uninhibited young men" – endangers the West’s accomplishments for women, Ali claims, such as equal rights, social mobility and visibility in the public sphere. read the complete article
Religion and the state: unintended effects of anti-radicalisation policies
In most European countries, violent radicalisation is usually understood as a consequence of religious radicalisation. Consequently, policies for countering or preventing radicalism assume that the key is to regulate the practice of Islam, in particular, either by promoting moderate or liberal interpretations of it or by pushing for secularisation in order to reduce faith to the private sphere. The issue I would like to raise here is not so much whether such a policy stigmatises Muslims, rather whether such a policy is relevant. First, from a purely statistical point of view, the link between religious and violent radicalisation is very weak. There have been some hundreds of terrorists in Western Europe in the last 25 years, while we can conclude that the number of believers in ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim schools of thought are in the hundreds of thousands if we consider the percentage of mosques defined as ‘Salafist’ or ‘Tablighi’ by the authorities (in France fewer than 300 out of a total of more than 2,000). Moreover, if we look at the profile of the actual terrorists (people who committed deadly attacks in Europe during the last 25 years), few of them have belonged to a fundamentalist faith community or regularly attended a mosque considered fundamentalist. More specifically, if we take into consideration the terrorist attacks perpetrated since the Bataclan attack in 2015 in Paris, we are confronted with lone wolves who have never been part of a fundamentalist network. That is not to say that these radicals have nothing to do with Islam: they consider themselves Muslims; they hope to become martyrs and go to paradise; they claim to avenge the sufferings of the Muslim Ummah. But they have almost never been trained for years in a fundamentalist theological school. Nevertheless, in all countries involved in counter radicalisation efforts, the dominant doctrine has been to target religious practices, and, as I will demonstrate, this is not confined to Islam.In most European countries, violent radicalisation is usually understood as a consequence of religious radicalisation. Consequently, policies for countering or preventing radicalism assume that the key is to regulate the practice of Islam, in particular, either by promoting moderate or liberal interpretations of it or by pushing for secularisation in order to reduce faith to the private sphere. The issue I would like to raise here is not so much whether such a policy stigmatises Muslims, rather whether such a policy is relevant. First, from a purely statistical point of view, the link between religious and violent radicalisation is very weak. There have been some hundreds of terrorists in Western Europe in the last 25 years, while we can conclude that the number of believers in ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim schools of thought are in the hundreds of thousands if we consider the percentage of mosques defined as ‘Salafist’ or ‘Tablighi’ by the authorities (in France fewer than 300 out of a total of more than 2,000). Moreover, if we look at the profile of the actual terrorists (people who committed deadly attacks in Europe during the last 25 years), few of them have belonged to a fundamentalist faith community or regularly attended a mosque considered fundamentalist. More specifically, if we take into consideration the terrorist attacks perpetrated since the Bataclan attack in 2015 in Paris, we are confronted with lone wolves who have never been part of a fundamentalist network. That is not to say that these radicals have nothing to do with Islam: they consider themselves Muslims; they hope to become martyrs and go to paradise; they claim to avenge the sufferings of the Muslim Ummah. But they have almost never been trained for years in a fundamentalist theological school. Nevertheless, in all countries involved in counter radicalisation efforts, the dominant doctrine has been to target religious practices, and, as I will demonstrate, this is not confined to Islam. read the complete article
India
She Said She Married for Love. Her Parents Called It Coercion.
A Sikh by birth, Ms. Bali converted to Islam to marry a Muslim man. Her parents objected to a marriage outside their community and filed a police complaint against her new husband. In court last month, she testified that she had married for love, not because she was coerced, according to a copy of her statement reviewed by The New York Times. Days later, she ended up in India’s capital of New Delhi, married to a Sikh man. Religious diversity has defined India for centuries, recognized and protected in the country’s Constitution. But interfaith unions remain rare, taboo and increasingly illegal. A spate of new laws across India, in states ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., are seeking to banish such unions altogether. While the rules apply broadly, right-wing supporters in the party portray such laws as necessary to curb “love jihad,” the idea that Muslim men marry women of other faiths to spread Islam. Critics contend that such laws fan anti-Muslim sentiment under a government promoting a Hindu nationalist agenda. bLast year, lawmakers in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh passed legislation that makes religious conversion by marriage an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. So far, 162 people there have been arrested under the new law, although few have been convicted. read the complete article
Norway
Norway marks 10th anniversary of anti-Islamic massacre
On the 10th anniversary of Norway’s worst peacetime slaughter, survivors of Anders Behring Breivik’s assault worry that the racism which nurtured the anti-Islamic mass murderer is re-emerging in a nation known for its progressive politics. Most of Breivik’s 77 victims on July 22, 2011, were teen members of the Labor Party – idealists enjoying their annual camping trip on the tranquil, wooded island of Utoya, in a lake northwest of Oslo, the capital. Today many survivors are battling to keep their vision for their country alive. “I thought that Norway would positively change forever after the attacks. Ten years later, that hasn’t happened. And in many ways, the hate we see online and the threats against people in the Labor movement have increased,” said Aasmund Aukrust, then-deputy leader of the Labor Youth Wing who helped organize the camp. Today he’s a national lawmaker campaigning for a nationwide inquiry into the right-wing ideology that inspired the killer. Aukrust ran from the bullets flying through the forest then lay hidden for three terrifying hours while he saw friends murdered nearby. A vocal proponent of properly reckoning with the racism and xenophobia in Norway, Aukrust has been the target of online abuse, including receiving the message that “we wish Breivik had done his job.” The victims of the Utoya massacre came from towns and villages throughout Norway, turning a personal tragedy into a collective trauma for many of the country’s 5.3 million inhabitants. Survivors were joined by a shaken population who were determined to show that Norway would become more – not less – tolerant and reject the worldview that motivated the killer. read the complete article