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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In the United States, the Harvard Educational Review (HER) has decided to cancel a special issue of its journal, which was dedicated to the subject of Palestine, meanwhile in India, 70 members of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) have been acquitted by a Delhi court of charges for waging “corona jihad”, putting an end to a debate that ignited a lot of hate and backlash for Muslims in the country, and in the United Kingdom, the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a “terrorist organization” is the “logical endpoint of decades-long expansion of UK counter-terror legislation.” Our recommended read of the day is by Snigdhendu Bhattacharya for The Diplomat on how India’s “citizenship screening drive” has disproportionately targeted Bengali-speaking Muslims, leading to thousands being detained, displaced, and even deported without legal process. This and more below:
India
Indian Citizens, Mostly Muslims, Are Bearing Brunt of Its Citizenship Screening Drive | Recommended Read
The video was shot at some undisclosed location in Bangladesh, where the women, the minors, and the men are now living a life without citizenship, trying not to get caught by the security forces in Bangladesh, which could see them detained for illegal entry. This is not the first time that a video shot in Bangladesh showed people in tears claiming to be Indians who have been forcefully pushed over the Indian border. In May, a video shared by a Bangladeshi journalist on social media showed 14 Indian nationals from the northeast Indian state of Assam stranded in the “no-man’s land” between India and Bangladesh after India’s BSF pushed them out and Border Guard Bangladesh refused to let them in. After families of these pushed-out people approached the high court in Assam, the state police brought at least 65 people back from Bangladesh, including women homemakers, government schoolteachers, and the elderly. None of these people had been formally “deported,” using diplomatic channels and bilateral procedure, nor were they “brought back” on record. None had an opportunity to be heard in any Indian court. All these victims of arbitrary deportations are Bengali-speaking Muslims, a major ethno-religious group with over 30 million population in India’s eastern and northeastern states and about 150 million in Bangladesh. Bengali speakers are the world’s second largest ethnic group among Muslims after Arabs. While India’s northeastern states also had a Bengali-speaking population for a few centuries, allegations of illegal migration of Bangladeshis have frequently triggered tension and conflict in Northeast India, especially Assam, where political parties express concerns over demographic change due to migration of both Hindus and Muslims from Bangladesh. However, Modi’s 11 years of Hindu nationalist rule has tried to cement the argument that the Hindu migrants need to be accommodated in India, the homeland of all Hindus, while Muslims must be expelled. read the complete article
Tablighi Jamaat gets clean chit by India court on 'corona jihad' allegations
Over five years later, 70 members of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) in India have been acquitted by a Delhi court of charges for waging “corona jihad”, putting an end to a debate that ignited a lot of hate and backlash for Muslims in the country. The Delhi High Court has quashed 16 FIRs, or first information reports, pertaining to 70 TJ members allegedly accommodating foreign nationals in mosques and their homes during the coronavirus pandemic. The Jamaat members were facing accusations of aggravating the health emergency by organising an international congregation in violation of the pandemic-linked nationwide lockdown. But on Thursday, the Delhi High Court’s Justice Neena Bansal Krishna formally quashed the criminal proceedings, marking the closure of a long-drawn legal chapter in the aftermath of the early days of Covid-19 in India. Under the Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian Muslims have been on the receiving end of hate, often being portrayed as anti-nationals, and face stricter scrutiny under the law. read the complete article
United Kingdom
Meet the homophobic conspiracy theorist and the Tommy Robinson fan standing for Reform UK
On 31 July, council by-elections will be held for the Barnstaple with Westacott ward in North Devon and the Thames View ward in Barking and Dagenham. While Reform UK is trying to present itself as a respectable and professional party, such an image is rather undermined by the candidates it has chosen to fight these by-elections. David Jarvis – Reform’s candidate in Barnstaple with Westacott – is a homophobic conspiracy theorist, who has even indulged the notion of a flat earth, while Lewis Holmes – the party’s candidate in Thames View – has used offensive slurs and promoted far-right content on social media. Marking yet another failure for Reform’s vetting process, here are the details of the two candidates. read the complete article
The Government Has Been Expanding the Definition of Terrorism for Years. Here’s How A
The government’s proscription of Palestine Action earlier this month was widely seen as a dramatic break with history: never before had the UK banned a non-violent direct action group for being a terrorist organisation. Palestine Action now sits on a list alongside 81 organisations that include Isis, al-Qaida and the neo-Nazi Sonnenkrieg Division. But while the group’s proscription has been described by Amnesty as “unprecedented legal overreach”, it is also the logical endpoint of decades-long expansion of UK counter-terror legislation. Ever since the first counter-terror laws were passed half a century ago, governments have taken an additive approach to counter-terror, targeting real, perceived and, at times, entirely hallucinated threats to the British public with increasingly – and by its own admission – draconian legislation. Counter-terror law in the UK, as in most of the rest of the world, is largely developed reactively in response to specific incidents. Lee Jarvis is a professor of international politics at Loughborough University and co-edits the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. He told Novara Media: “An atrocity would happen, and the British government would introduce a law to try and respond to that, to prevent it [from happening again]. And then those powers, introduced on a temporary basis, would become institutionalised.” The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) is a prime example of this. Labour passed the act just three months after the 9/11 bombings in New York in 2001. The act’s main innovation was the indefinite detention of foreign terrorist suspects – a provision intended to expire in 2006, but instead made permanent in the watered-down form of non-custodial “control orders” in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2006. read the complete article
United States
Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication
In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US. A little more than a year later, the scale of destruction in Gaza was exponentially larger. The special issue, which was slated to be published this summer, was just about ready – contracts with most authors were finalized and articles were edited. They covered topics from the annihilation of Gaza’s schools to the challenges of teaching about Israel and Palestine in the US. But on 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programs home to scholarship about Palestine. read the complete article
Mamdani’s Rise and the Resurgence of Islamophobic Politics
As Zohran Mamdani surges in the polls in his campaign for mayor of New York City, Islamophobia is also on the rise. A recent report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), which analyzed online hate before and after New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, documented a sharp increase in digital hate speech and Islamophobia on social media in the wake of Mamdani’s primary win. The study found that in the lead-up to the primary, between June 13 to June 23, 2025, there were between 56 and 264 hateful posts per day. On June 24, 2025 — primary day — that number jumped to 899 posts. The day after the primary, CSOH documented 2,173 hate posts. According to CSOH, four key themes dominated the online discourse: Islamophobia, anti-communist red-baiting, nativism, and Hindu nationalism. Explicit Islamophobic language was the most prominent theme of online hate toward Mamdani. Of the 1,933 posts reviewed by CSOH, 39.4% were categorized as Islamophobic. The study concluded that Mamdani’s Muslim identity was the primary reason for delegitimizing his campaign. “We found a huge spike in online hate and fear-mongering targeting Muslims in the aftermath of Mamdani’s primary win, blending racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, red-baiting, and anti-immigrant sentiment into one dangerous narrative,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director of CSOH, in a statement to Documented. “Muslims were portrayed as threats to national security, incompatible with democracy, or as agents of an imagined foreign agenda.” read the complete article