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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In Australia, New South Wales police are investigating a potential hate crime after Islamophobic graffiti was painted on a busy underpass in Sydney’s west, with the premier labelling it “disgusting”, meanwhile, streaming giant Netflix faces calls for a boycott after it removed its “Palestinian Stories” collection this October, an assortment of approximately 24 films, with many saying this is silencing Palestinian narratives, and in the US, the Biden administration has released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. Our recommended read of the day is by Neyaz Farooquee & Nikita Yadav for BBC News on a decades-old law in India designed to preserve the character and identity of religious places as they were at the time of the country’s independence and the petitions by Hindu nationalists to overturn it. This and more below:
India
Explained: India's controversial Places of Worship law | Recommended Read
India's top court is hearing a number of petitions challenging a decades-old law that preserves the character and identity of religious places as they existed at the time of the country's independence in 1947. The law, introduced in 1991, prohibits converting or altering the character of any place of worship and prevents courts from entertaining disputes over its status, with the exception of the Babri Masjid case, which was explicitly exempted. The Babri Masjid, a 16th-Century mosque, was at the heart of a long-standing dispute, culminating in its demolition by a Hindu mob in 1992. A court verdict in 2019 awarded the site to Hindus for the construction of a temple, reigniting debates over India's religious and secular fault lines. The current petitions, including one from a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), argue that the 1991 law infringes on religious freedom and constitutional secularism. The hearing comes against the backdrop of Hindu groups filing cases to challenge the status of many mosques, claiming they were built over demolished Hindu temples. read the complete article
How India's Hindu-Muslim conflict plays out in mosques
In India, historic mosques are becoming flashpoints for religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Hindu nationalist groups claim that these mosques were built on destroyed Hindu temples during centuries of Muslim rule. read the complete article
United States
Biden launches belated effort to combat Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate
US President Joe Biden has unveiled a long-awaited strategy to counter Islamophobia and hate against Muslims and Arab Americans, made more acute since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. Detailing more than 100 calls to action across all sections of society, the White House said it was its first ever national strategy to counter hate against Muslims and Arabs. “Over the past year, this initiative has become even more important as threats against American Muslim and Arab communities have spiked,” the White House said in a statement announcing the initiative late on Thursday. The White House cited the killing of six-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume in October last year. He was stabbed to death by his landlord in his home in Chicago and his mother was critically injured because they were Palestinian American. Mr Biden's Islamophobia initiative drew criticism from Arab Americans who say his unequivocal support for Israel in its war on Gaza is the main driver of anti-Arab sentiment in the US. In November 2023, three Palestinian university students speaking in Arabic and wearing keffiyehs were shot in Vermont. One of three, Hisham Awartani was paralysed from the waist down. “The Biden administration at large fails to realise that there's a connection between the proliferation of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism with its horrific policies,” said Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, a Palestinian American writer and political analyst. read the complete article
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” read the complete article
How did American Muslims help shape US history?
Centuries after the first Muslims stepped foot in America, the United States is home to nearly 4 million Muslim Americans. In ‘American Muslims: A History Revealed,’ a six-part PBS docuseries that premiered in October, journalists and historians uncover the stories of American Muslims spanning over 200 years from past to present. read the complete article
Australia
Chris Minns condemns ‘disgusting’ Islamophobic graffiti in Sydney’s west as police investigate
New South Wales police are investigating a potential hate crime after Islamophobic graffiti was painted on a busy underpass in Sydney’s west, with the premier labelling it “disgusting”. The graffiti was spotted on Hector Street in Chester Hill overnight. Police cordoned off the road and launched an investigation on Sunday morning. “Fuck Islam” was graffitied on each side of the underpass, with the word “Islam” highlighted in yellow. “Cancel Islam” was also painted on to an ad in the underpass. NSW police said if someone was arrested they would “likely” be charged with a hate crime. Chester Hill has one of the largest Muslim populations in the state, with nearly 40% of residents identifying as Muslim, according to census figures. The graffiti was near a busy shopping area that includes numerous halal restaurants and grocers. The NSW premier, Chris Minns, called the graffiti “disgusting”. “Vandalism like this that is aimed at particular religions is designed to incite hatred and is completely abhorrent,” he said. “This racism and Islamophobia is disgusting and corrosive to the very fabric of the successful multicultural state that we have built here in NSW.” The federal minister for home affairs, Tony Burke, labelled the graffiti an act of “hatred” and “bigotry”. “Like other forms of dehumanising abuse, Islamophobia has no place in Australia,” the minister said. read the complete article
Islamophobia ignites security concerns at schools, mosques
As Australia responds to an increase in anti-Semitic attacks, reports of Islamophobia have skyrocketed too. Some women say they're afraid to leave home, and there are fears for the safety of children in school. "We saw a 1300 per cent increase in three weeks right after the 7th of October. Now, we're 62 weeks post 7th of October, and we're seeing an average of about 530 per cent increase." That's Dr Nora Amath, Executive Director of the Islamophobia Register, which tracks reports of abuse and assaults towards Australian Muslims. She says the register recorded more incidences of Islamophobia in a single year - following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 -- than in the entire eight years before. Women have been a particular target. "So, incidents could be that they're just going about their everyday business and where they're shopping with their children in their pram and getting verbally and physically assaulted while the child is in the pram. So, we've had cases like that in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, as well as Brisbane. So that is probably the very common incident that's reported to us as well as attempts to remove the headscarf from them. We've seen a lot of graffiti as well." read the complete article
International
Reel resistance: Netflix’s removal of Palestinian films adds to the erasure of Palestine
Netflix faces calls for a boycott after it removed its “Palestinian Stories” collection this October. This includes approximately 24 films. Netflix cited the expiration of three-year licences as the reason for pulling the films from the collection. Nonetheless, some viewers were outraged and almost 12,000 people signed a CodePink petition calling on Netflix to reinstate the films. At a time when Palestinians are facing what scholars, United Nations experts and Amnesty International are calling a genocide, Netflix’s move could be seen as a silencing of Palestinian narratives. The disappearance of these films from Netflix in this moment has deeper implications. The removal of almost all films in this category represents a significant act of cultural erasure and anti-Palestinian racism. There is a long history of the erasure of Palestine. Since the Nakba of 1948, Zionist militias have systematically ethnically cleansed Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of cities, towns and villages, while also targeting Palestinian culture. This plundering of Palestinian cultural institutions, archives and libraries resulted in the loss of invaluable cultural materials, including visual archives. read the complete article