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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In the United States, the Executive Director of Amnesty International Paul O’Brien is calling on President Joe Biden to change policies on asylum, the death penalty, Gaza, and more before Trump takes office, meanwhile in the UK, British Muslim communities came together over the weekend to address the alarming rise in anti-Muslim hatred following the devastating Southport riots of Summer 2024, and in India, fear grips the city of Sambhal after deadly violence left four people dead and many others injured during an attempted state survey of the Shahi Jama mosque, a structure which some Hindu nationalist groups claim was built on the site of a former Hindu temple. Our recommended read of the day is by Mariya bint Rehan for The New Arab on the tropes Muslim women face and why seeking to challenge them won’t stop racism. This and more below:
International
Breaking stereotypes doesn't mean liberation for Muslim women | Recommended Read
Muslim women are tasked with proving ourselves against a figment of racist imagination; we must not be the submissive wife, the obedient daughter, or the self-sacrificing mum. All roles which were created by the West to justify military, cultural and imperial dominance – the literature, arts and media concerning Muslim women in Afghanistan pays testament to this. In this era of Islamophobia, we are expected to perform against these older racist labels, by embracing the newer, shinier ones; it’s not Racism, it’s Diet Racism. Muslim women in times of war and peace are encouraged to engage in a self-contorting insanity to create a circus whose sole purpose is to satisfy a secular gaze which is itself wrestling with its own conscience. We must be the skateboard wielding, independent, career-pursuing women. This expectation to succumb to another more current fruit of racist thinking, this time by eschewing the historical seeds that bore it, is nothing more than a waste of time and a distraction. The idea that Muslim women must performatively demonstrate they are ‘bold, ‘intelligent’, ‘independent’ or anything else on the list of benign adjectives, exposes the limitations of both mainstream assumptions of Muslim women and their impoverished perceptions of those very traits in themselves. read the complete article
United Kingdom
British Muslim Communities Unite to Develop Strategy Against Rising Islamophobia
British Muslim communities have come together on Saturday 23 November in an unprecedented gathering to address the alarming rise in anti-Muslim hatred following the devastating Post-Southport Attack Riots of Summer 2024. The violence we saw in Summer 2024, triggered by Islamophobic disinformation and resulting in targeted attacks on mosques, Muslim communities and others across 27 towns and cities, represent a watershed moment that demands immediate and decisive action. These events occurred against a backdrop of increasingly emboldened far-right rhetoric, fuelled by the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and the subsequent normalisation of anti-Muslim sentiment and racism more broadly in mainstream political discourse across the Western world. The landmark National Islamophobia Strategy Meeting, convened by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), brought together community activists, organisations, grassroots representatives and academics from across the country to develop a unified response. This critical initiative comes as Home Office statistics reveal nearly 40% of all religious hate crime being targeted at Muslims, in the year ending March 2024. read the complete article
Man who threatened to burn down mosque spared jail
A 19-year-old man has been given a suspended prison sentence after threatening to burn down a mosque in an online video and shouting Islamophobic abuse from the top of a phone box. Max Ritchings, of Haywards Heath in West Sussex, posted an Instagram story with a backdrop of news footage of unrest on 4 August, while swearing and making the threat. Later that evening, he stood on a phone box near Brighton pier, shouting abuse. At Lewes Crown Court earlier, Ritchings, who admitted inciting violence online and causing religiously aggravated harassment, was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. He was also ordered to complete 300 hours of unpaid work in the community and 18 sessions of rehabilitation activity. The court heard Ritchings recognised that he became “obsessed” with online personalities. read the complete article
United States
Amnesty: Before Trump’s Term, Biden Must Change Policies on Asylum, Gitmo, Death Penalty, Gaza & More
We continue our conversation with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien, who has written to President Joe Biden urging him for a number of policy changes before he leaves office in January. O’Brien’s letter calls for Biden to stop arms transfers to Israel and use U.S. leverage to end the war in Gaza; transfer detainees out of the Guantánamo Bay military prison and close the facility; commute the death sentences of people on federal and military death row; and restore asylum rights, which the administration severely curtailed this year. “He could do so much more,” O’Brien says of Biden’s last weeks in office. read the complete article
India
Fear grips Indian city after deadly weekend clashes
Two days after deadly violence in Sambhal left four people dead and many others injured, the city in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh remains gripped by tension. The violence broke out on Sunday during a court-ordered survey of the centuries-old Shahi Jama Masjid (mosque) that some Hindu groups claim was built at the site of a destroyed temple. Police said the protesters, most of them Muslims, pelted them with stones and that they fired teargas shells and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. They said 20 policemen were injured. But family members of the four Muslim men who died on Sunday alleged that they were shot dead by police - a charge the police have denied. Officials say the situation is now under control but a large number of police and paramilitaries are deployed around the mosque and the rest of the city. read the complete article
‘Education is survival’: parents of Rohingya refugee children fight for their right to go to school in India
For Rohingya refugee Hussain Ahmed, the hope that his children might receive a formal education to secure a better adulthood than his own was what “kept him going”. After fleeing to India from Myanmar in 2016, he began working as a construction worker in a country where he is not allowed to seek legal employment. Then he met with a new hurdle. “For the last few years, I have been running from pillar to post, trying to get a local government-run school to enrol my 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. I cannot afford the fees of privately run schools, so the government ones were my only hope. But all of them turned my children down,” says Ahmed, who lives in the Khajuri Khas area of Delhi with his wife and four children. Ahmed says he presented all the documents needed, including UNHCR cards and affidavits, according to what the authorities of five schools said they needed for enrolment of any refugee child. “But eventually all of them refused to accept my son and daughter as students, saying that they cannot enrol any Rohingya student in their schools,” he says. “I am very anxious about my children’s future.” The case of Ahmed’s children is not unique. In Khajuri Khas, where almost 40 Rohingya refugee families live in ramshackle tin-and-tarpaulin shanties, at least 18 children have been refused admission to local government schools in the past few years. Since Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party came to power in 2014, Rohingya refugees have faced an increasing number of obstacles in India. Although no police record has linked the refugees to any criminal activities, Hindu nationalist groups label the Rohingya as “terrorists” and “jihadists” and have for years demanded their expulsion from India. read the complete article
South Africa
Institute for Security Studies expert’s anti-Muslim fearmongering is unacceptable
The Institute for Security Studies appears to be either staying aloof or is unmoved by the uproar in South Africa’s Muslim community over the provocative Islamophobic claims made by one of its analysts, Willem Els. The allegations attributed to Els cast a shadow of suspicion upon Muslims and the thousands of institutions they manage across the country, from mosques and madressahs to Islamic schools and universities. Take his Islamophobic comments about South African children as young as 11 being indoctrinated and groomed to commit acts of terrorism. These are attributed to Els in a News24 report by Amanda Khoza, where he is cited as an expert in international relations and Islamic State in Syria. His alarmist warnings implicated unnamed Muslim organisations. “We see that they have programmes where they are indoctrinating children from as young as 11 years old and that programme has been sustained and is ongoing,” he says. He continues that unless this is dealt with in its early stages, “it might get out of hand”. In the current climate of xenophobia, sparked afresh by the tragic deaths of children arising from contaminated food being attributed to foreign-owned spaza shops, it is extremely disappointing that Els added fuel to fire. read the complete article