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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In Sri Lanka, a hardline Buddhist monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred, meanwhile in the UK, the top-tier members of the Conservative Party seem to be “scrambling to say the most anti-Muslim commentary they can get away with”, Naushabah Khan writes for LabourList, and in the United States, the New York Times has published a chronology by Carol Rosenberg on the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison facility in Cuba. Our recommended read of the day is by Imran Mullah for Middle East Eye on the facts and figures that prove the popular “grooming gang” narrative for what it is: far-right, anti-immigration propaganda. This and more below:
United Kingdom
UK: The facts that prove the far-right 'grooming gang' narrative wrong | Recommended Read
The "grooming gang" issue has become a national crisis, with Starmer and the opposition Conservative Party’s leader Kemi Badenoch clashing for nearly 20 minutes in parliament on Wednesday over whether there should be a new public inquiry over the abuses. Over the past two decades, many Asian-origin and Muslim men have been prosecuted for severe sexual crimes, including rape, in several high-profile group cases. This is typically referred to, including by the British government, as the “grooming gang” phenomenon. The topic has been widely covered on far-right media outlets, as well as by anti-Muslim influencers. As a result, innocent Muslims have been attacked, falsely imprisoned and even killed in the last several years over a narrative blaming Islam and Pakistani culture for the staggering child sexual abuse scandals. The narrative states that “grooming gangs” are overwhelmingly made up of Muslims and ethnic minorities, and that they target almost exclusively white English girls. It credits mass immigration, as well as the religion and culture of immigrants, for the crimes and says they were ignored and covered up by police forces and local authorities due to “political correctness” over fears of being called racist. Middle East Eye has examined the available data and found the narrative to be false. No ethnic minority, including Pakistanis, is disproportionately involved in sexual abuse, according to the available data, while abuse victims are not exclusively white girls. Fears of racism accusations and concern over “race relations” did sometimes contribute to police and political inaction but they were far from major factors. Yet the popular narrative is propagated not just by far-right activists, but becoming increasingly mainstream. read the complete article
Elon Musk is more interested in demonising Muslims than finding justice for victims of grooming
You would have thought that the victims of the horrific grooming gangs scandal have been through enough without being used as a political football to further the Islamophobic agenda of the far right. Yet, once again, this is what we are seeing. With grooming gangs back in the headlines, anti-Muslim sentiment is again dominating political discourse. It seems that justice for the victims – as well as preventing this from happening again – falls by the wayside when there are political points to be scored. I’ve lost count of the number of headlines and social media posts I’ve encountered this week referring to “Muslim grooming gangs”, peddling the damaging myth that the organised child sexual exploitation occurring in countless cities across the UK in the early 2000s was somehow tightly linked to a religion peacefully followed by a billion people around the world. Elon Musk has led this most recent wave of virulent Islamophobia, pushing disinformation on his X (Twitter) account about grooming gangs being a Muslim issue, a sign of failed multiculturalism and accusing Labour politicians like Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips of being “rape genocide apologists” and “complicit” in the “rape” of Britain. Musk’s language is hard to ignore here. To talk about Britain itself being “raped” perpetuates this idea of violent, perverted foreigners (read: Muslims) coming to Britain and attacking native Brits. It paints all Muslims and all migrants as the enemy of Britain, ignoring the fact that Muslims like me have been part of the fabric of Britain for centuries. When you consider Musk’s track record of peddling far-right, anti-migrant and Islamophobic narratives, like false reports claiming that the Southport attacker was Muslim last summer – which fuelled riots and widespread violence including hotels housing refugees being torched and mosques being attacked (as well as his ongoing support for the likes of Tommy Robinson who is known for his own anti-Muslim views) – it seems that this is less about securing justice for the victims of grooming and more about finding yet another way to demonise Muslims. read the complete article
Grooming gangs: ‘The Tory dead cat strategy is to weaponise Islamophobia’
What does an American billionaire, a convicted criminal and the Conservative Party all have in common? Muslims apparently. They can’t get enough. Wild claims from Elon Musk, who found his new champion in Tommy Robinson as he ditched his mate Nigel, sent UK politics in a tailspin. Now the top tier of the Conservative Party seem to be scrambling to say the most anti-Muslim commentary they can get away with, in what must be the most disgraceful game of political chicken in a long while. They could have stood up for their colleague and my friend Jess Phillips MP and called out Musk’s dangerous fixation on a woman in politics, who actually has a track record in tackling violence against women and girls. They chose to legitimise and give it a platform instead. Back when things were normal (remember those times?), Musk’s interference would have been called out from both sides of the political divide and decent Conservatives would have called it un-British. They would have understood how dangerous it is to pit communities against each other in this manner. But what does a political party that has nothing left to offer the country do? So devoid of ideas, a political project even, it resorts desperately to a dead cat strategy. read the complete article
United States
The '9/11 mastermind' wants to plead guilty. Why is the US trying to stop him?
The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year from going ahead. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often referred to as KSM, was due to deliver his pleas at a war court on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in south-eastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for almost two decades. Mohammed is Guantanamo's most notorious detainee and one of the last held at the base. But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening halted the scheduled proceedings to consider requests from the government to abandon the plea deals for Mohammed and two co-defendants, which it said would cause "irreparable" harm to both it and the public. A three-judge panel said the delay "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits", but was aimed at giving the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments "on an expedited basis". The delay means that the matter will now fall into the incoming Trump administration. read the complete article
Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it
Trotting out an ageing national security mandarin to reminisce about the “war on terror” was both tone deaf, and, like the Harris campaign in general, seemed like a huge misread of what voters wanted from prospective commanders-in-chief in 2024. As I watched Panetta walk out on to the stage, I was reminded of the 2016 Democratic convention, where Gen John Allen, who had headed US efforts in Afghanistan and later against Isis, was the featured national security validator. Apparently under orders to terrify everyone, Allen delivered a blistering speech about the US as the “indispensable and transformational power in the world” and assured the crowd that Hillary Clinton would use that power to defeat “the forces of chaos and darkness”. Like Clinton, Harris this year seemed far more interested in boasting about the US’s “lethal” military and campaigning alongside the torture advocate Liz Cheney (while also touting the endorsement of her father, the “war on terror” architect Dick Cheney) than in articulating a vision of peace and stability. Meanwhile, in the last few weeks before the election, the Trump campaign noticeably leaned into an anti-war message, with JD Vance making the rounds hailing the now president-elect as a “candidate of peace”. A brief review of Trump’s first administration should make clear how ridiculous such a claim was, as he brought the US to the brink of wars with North Korea and Iran, spurned efforts by Congress to reassert authority over military action, and arguably helped set the stage for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. His recent suggestion that the US could use force to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland should put permanently to bed the idea that he is “anti-war” or “anti-imperialist” in any sense. But it was even more baffling that Democrats had left the anti-war lane wide open for him by leaning into a tired, curdled militarism as a substitute for an actual foreign policy vision. In foreign policy as elsewhere, Democrats positioned themselves as defenders of a set of ideas and assumptions that most Americans no longer trust. As Trump takes office and Democrats prepare to enter the political wilderness, we need to reckon with how they got this so wrong. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, I never imagined I would write this, but by the end of his presidency he will have done more damage to the so-called “rules-based order” than Trump did. Fifteen months and counting of support for Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza has violated virtually every international norm on the protections of civilians in war and left America’s moral credibility in tatters. Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends. read the complete article
Guantánamo Bay Explained: The Costs, the Captives and Why It’s Still Open
The Pentagon’s detention operation at Guantánamo once held hundreds of men who were captured by U.S. forces and their allies in the war against terrorism. Now there are just 15 prisoners as the prison enters its 24th year. President George W. Bush opened and filled it. President Barack Obama tried to close it but couldn’t. President Donald J. Trump said he would load it up with “bad dudes” and didn’t. And President Biden said he wanted to finish the job Mr. Obama started but will not be able to do it. Unless Congress lifts a ban on the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners to U.S. soil, the costly offshore operation could go on for years, until the last detainee dies. The 15 remaining prisoners range in age from 45 to 63. They are from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. One is a stateless Rohingya, another is Palestinian. All but three were transferred to Guantánamo from the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network, where the Bush administration hid people it considered the “worst of the worst” until 2006. Is the C.I.A.’s Torture to Blame? It is a factor. If some of these prisoners had been taken directly to the United States soon after they were captured, they would have been in federal custody and potentially already put on trial in U.S. courts. Instead, 12 of the last 15 were held in overseas “black site” prisons run by the C.I.A. where they were held incommunicado and interrogated with waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation and years of isolation. Because of what was done to them, and where, the Bush administration government chose to have the men tried in a new national security court it created at Guantánamo Bay. The trials have been stuck in pretrial hearings, two for more than a decade, that have focused on the taint of their torture; how much the prisoners’ lawyers, and the public, could know about it; and efforts to have cases dismissed because of it. read the complete article
Sri Lanka
Controversial Buddhist monk jailed for insulting Islam
A hardline Sri Lankan monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred. Galagodaatte Gnanasara was convicted on Thursday for the remarks, which date back to 2016. Sri Lanka rarely convicts Buddhist monks, but this marks the second time that Gnanasara, who has repeatedly been accused of hate crimes and anti-Muslim violence, has been jailed. read the complete article