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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In the United States, the first U.S. military aircraft carrying detained migrants to the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba departed this week with satellite images showing activity ramping up at the base, while a former State Department official and Yale University law professor has said that the plan to use Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention facility is “almost certainly doomed to fail”, and lastly, Muslims groups and Arab American voters who rallied against Kamala Harris are grappling with President Donald Trump’s plan to take “ownership” of the Gaza strip and call for permanent resettlement of all Palestinians from the area. Our recommended read of the day is by Sue Obeidi for The Wrap on how for the first time ever, the first quarter of 2025 will see the premiere of three new television shows centering on the Muslim American community. This and more below:
United States
Muslims’ Pivotal Hollywood Moment: Trump, Karla Sofía Gascón and a TV Landscape Defying Invisibility | Recommended Read
I am still coming off the high caused by The Muslim House activation at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. It was an inspiring space for fostering inclusion and elevating creative voices from American-Muslims and other emerging communities. Despite President Donald Trump’s executive order around DEI programs, there is still momentum in what television audiences will soon witness. For the first time in American television history, three series that portray Muslim communities will premiere within the first three months of 2025, marking a pivotal moment in the continued evolution of Muslim portrayals in Hollywood. This marks a victory for Muslim creatives working to combat the lingering impact of the decades-old vilification, racism and harmful depictions of Muslims — and as we can see from deleted racist tweets by Karla Sofía Gascón supporting a ban of Islam in Europe despite being a member of a vulnerable community herself, there is still much work to do. As I told TheWrap in response to the “Emilía Perez” Oscar nominee’s controversy last week: “Muslims are part of every community, including the transgender community. ‘European values’? Does she mean the ones that led to the Holocaust? She needs to immerse herself in Islamic history. When Europe was in the dark age, Muslims were busy discovering math, science, and medical equipment. Learn, woman.” Yet in the face of such hatred, Muslim voices and creatives are still breaking through. While in the last decade there has only been one main U.S. television series with Muslim characters in leading roles (Hulu’s “Ramy” was the first to focus on its Muslim protagonist’s inner struggles and contradictions and the controversial topics within the Muslim community), audiences will now have three more series to enjoy. read the complete article
Migrant flights to Guantánamo Bay have begun. Satellite images show activity at naval base
The first U.S. military aircraft carrying detained migrants to Guantánamo Bay departed from Texas on Tuesday, U.S. officials said, as President Donald Trump's administration prepares to potentially house tens of thousands of migrants at the naval base in Cuba. The U.S. has "30,000 beds in Guantánamo Bay to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people," Trump said on Jan. 29. Trump issued his memo instructing the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare for the arrival of 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo Bay. The facility in Cuba was used to detain military prisoners, including some linked to the 9/11 attacks. Guantánamo Bay is primarily recognized as a military base for holding terror suspects and gained notoriety, following allegations of torture and mistreatment during the U.S. war on terrorism. On Jan. 6, according to the Defense Department, the Biden administration reduced operations at the facility, transferring 11 prisoners who were Yemeni nationals to the country of Oman. read the complete article
‘Frankly Insane’: Trump’s Plan to Ship Migrants to Guantanamo Could Quickly Collapse
President Donald Trump’s plan to send up to 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay has echoes of the past — but it’s also unlike anything ever done before. And it’s almost certainly doomed to fail. That’s according to Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale University law professor and former senior State Department official whose career has been deeply intertwined with Guantanamo. “It is a mirage, but it’s also insane,” Koh said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. The U.S. detained migrants at Guantanamo in the early 1990s under President George H.W. Bush, when thousands of Haitians fled violence in the wake of a military coup and were picked up at sea by the Coast Guard. The administration refused to accept their claims of political asylum and sent them to a makeshift detention camp on the base on the southeastern tip of Cuba. Koh led a team of Yale students and human rights lawyers who challenged the detention of the Haitians, ultimately winning the release of about 250 of them into the U.S. before losing the broader case when he argued before the Supreme Court. Trump is proposing something altogether different by sending people who have already been in the United States, including some legally. The move is also sure to invite new legal challenges — as well as some of the same problems that emerged under President George W. Bush in the post-9/11 era, when the U.S. turned the base into a military detention center for people suspected of links to al Qaeda and the Taliban. More than two decades later, that saga is ongoing, with 15 men still held there. read the complete article
Trump’s Guantánamo Bay detention plan is a disaster. Just look at history.
On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed a 128-word memo calling for a 30,000-bed immigrant detention facility to be built at Guantánamo Bay for “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” The memo set in motion a project that, if fully realized, will be a financial disaster while posing a grave threat to immigrants and citizens alike, potentially for decades to come. Transporting tens of thousands of people from the U.S. mainland and detaining them at Guantánamo makes no sense financially. The U.S. government will need to construct a massive site for detention — along with medical facilities, food and sanitation services, staffing and security on a remote island with limited, aging infrastructure — with a likely, albeit as yet unknown, cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. While the operational feasibility of Trump’s plan is dubious, history suggests that such a move could enable the government to commit human rights abuses and inflict serious neglect on people detained there, far from lawyers, the media and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, that could also be the point. Our government held hundreds of men without charge at Guantánamo after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and made it a notorious site of torture and cruelty, falsely claiming that international and U.S. law did not apply to people with terrorism allegations. Perhaps less well-known is that Guantánamo also has a sordid history of quasi-hidden migrant detention. In the 1990s, the Coast Guard intercepted at sea tens of thousands of people from Haiti and Cuba fleeing violence and human rights violations. read the complete article
Muslim Groups Who Pushed Against Kamala Harris Respond to Trump's Gaza Plan
Muslim groups that pushed back against Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration over its support for Israel have responded to President Donald Trump's comments suggesting the U.S. will take "ownership" of Gaza and that displaced Palestinians will be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory. "Over the past 16 months, the Biden-Harris administration's full, unobstructed support for Israel's campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing has failed to remove the Palestinians of Gaza from their land," Hudhayfah Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Muslim-American led Abandon Harris campaign, said in a statement to Newsweek. "It is not Trump—just as it was not Biden or Harris—who decides what the Palestinians can or cannot do; that decision belongs solely to the people of Palestine." Ahmad, the spokesperson for the Abandon Harris campaign and a Palestinian activist, also said: "Despite the entire world being against them, Palestinians have proven that they will be victorious. They are returning to their homes and living among the rubble—people like that cannot be defeated. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a fact." Nihad Awad, the national executive director of Muslim civil rights and advocacy group CAIR, said in a statement: "Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, not the United States, and President Trump's call to displace Palestinians from their land either temporarily or permanently is an absolute nonstarter. Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the entire Muslim world have made it clear that this delusional idea is unacceptable." He added: "If President Trump wants to make history with some sort of grand peace deal, he must start by accepting that the way to make permanent peace is to end the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people." read the complete article
International
Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law – review
Can we understand terrorism today, and the state and international mechanisms created to counter it, through the insurgents of the past? Conor Gearty’s Homeland Insecurity starts with a little-remembered 1891 case involving Angelo Castioni who killed a Swiss State Council member and sought asylum in the UK. Swiss officials requested his extradition, but the judges denied it, stating his actions were “not sufficiently regrettable” to remove his protection from being extradited. The author notes how “hard [it is] to imagine a judge saying the same about a political killing today”. This emphasis on the radical shift in how such acts are viewed after 130 years sets the stage for a book that explores the global evolution of anti-terrorism legislation and its effects on individual freedoms and civil liberties. There is a substantial body of literature on the history and politics of counterterrorism, including discussions of related laws and their current state, for example Inside Terrorism by Bruce Hoffman (1998) the Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism edited by Andrew Silke (2019); and Marc Sageman’s Turning to Political Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism (2017). Gearty, a practicing lawyer and a Human Rights Law professor at the London School of Economics, focuses on the historical development of counterterrorism laws rather than their current specifics. Examining the forces and contexts that brought sweeping counterterrorism laws into force around the world, he argues that they “are here to stay, whether or not terrorist atrocity remains a central source of anxiety”. read the complete article