Today in Islamophobia

In the United Kingdom, five Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists for breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire in protest of the bank’s financial connection to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, meanwhile in Israelis occupied Palestine, Israeli settlers launched a series of widespread attacks across the West Bank, setting on fire two mosques in Nablus and Tulkarm and damaging heavy equipment at an industrial facility near Ramallah, and lastly in Australia, former Labor senator Nova Peris has been accused of amplifying anti-Muslim and anti Palestinian content by sharing posts that claim Gaza is full of “savages” and “f*cking monsters”. Our recommended read of the day is by Jonah Valdez for The Intercept on how Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures in the lead-up to the state primary. This and more below:

United States

Abdul El-Sayed Faces Islamophobic Attacks From GOP and Democratic Establishment | Recommended Read

As Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary between El-Sayed and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens draws near, he has faced a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures. The two Senate hopefuls seem to embody the forked path facing the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle, with 43-year-old Stevens representing the old guard thanks to her backing by the party establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, and 41-year-old El-Sayed representing an insurgent movement skeptical of long-standing U.S. foreign policy interests and corporate capture of American politics. With the latter vision comes a form of fearmongering that’s been endemic to American politics for decades. Nancy Khalil, an anthropologist who researches Muslims in America at the University of Michigan, called Tapper’s interview “sloppy and offensive” and pointed out that the anchor’s questions implied an assumption that because El-Sayed is Muslim and Arab, “he needs to have an opinion on this, and the opinion needs to align with whatever the media wants it to be.” That assumption is “completely racist,” Khalil said. It was only one example in a deluge of attacks El-Sayed has faced in recent weeks that peddle in Islamophobic tropes. The pro-Israel doxxing account StopAntisemitism shared a post in June claiming that a hijabi woman arrested by the Trump administration for allegedly making pro-Palestine graffiti was a former staffer of El-Sayed’s, prompting right-wing agitator Laura Loomer to reply: “BAN Muslims from holding office in the United States.” Replies to El-Sayed’s campaign account often call him a “terrorist,” “radical,” or “jihadist,” and deploy racist memes, including one, likely AI-generated, showing El-Sayed and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing vests strapped with explosives and green headbands to signify Hamas. The Michigan GOP has called El-Sayed “a terrorist sympathizer,” emphasizing his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. read the complete article

John Esposito taught the West to see Islam on its own terms

On 15 July, Jean Esposito informed our team at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at Georgetown University that her husband, John, had died. He published 55 books, mainly with Oxford University Press, leaving aside the numerous articles, op-eds, testimonies and countless other contributions. Apart from his impact on institutions and his own institution-building - shaping not only the study of Islam and politics in the late 1970s, but the emerging field of Islamophobia studies in the early 2000s - John was a man of truth and courage. John signed thousands of petitions and statements calling for the release of political dissidents and fellow scholars, from the Arab world to the heart of Europe, and in defence of free speech. He donated to those causes. He was a committed Catholic who held Islam and its civilisation in great respect, as he did other religions. John was a decent human being, moved by faith and courage. read the complete article

Why is Cair urging US Muslims to seek security from DHS?

Applications for this year's round of security grants from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) closed on 24 July - and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) had been urging mosques, Islamic schools and Muslim nonprofits to apply before the deadline. Since May's mosque shooting in San Diego, which killed three people, Cair has aggressively pursued renewed Muslim community access to this source of government funding, presenting it as a means of protecting mosques from such violence. Cair has since also encouraged Muslims to build closer ties with the police - reviving a debate over policing that reflects a growing divide within the community, between those eager to collaborate with "law enforcement" and those who view it as an arm of an unjust social order. Cair has long walked an ambivalent line on this issue. As a self-described civil rights and advocacy nonprofit with nearly 30 chapters, it positions itself as Muslims' primary defence against "overly-broad" policing. Cair's encouragement suggests that Muslims and "law enforcement" are two groups separated by unfamiliarity or misunderstanding. However, the history between them is not one of insufficient contact. Muslims have come to know local and federal police agencies all too well through a history of hostile encounters: decades of FBI door knocks, entrapment cases, raids of Palestine encampments that local police have turned into prosecutions of Muslim students, harassment outside Zionist land sales and relentless attempts to conscript Muslims into disciplining their own communities. read the complete article

United Kingdom

Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists over bank damage

Five Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists for breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire. Brendon O’Hagan, 28; Amanda Kelly, 31; Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31; Mohammed Malik, 28; and Alma Yaniv, 70, were found guilty of causing £212,000 of damage during a direct action protest in Burnley in August 2024. They targeted the bank because it held shares in the Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems. After last month’s verdicts the judge, Philip Parry, told the prosecution and the defence he intended to consider a “terrorist connection” to the offending, despite neither the jury nor the defendants having previously been informed of the possibility. Four other Palestine Action activists last month became the first defendants convicted of property damage whose offending – during a raid on Elbit’s Filton factory near Bristol - was deemed by Mr Justice Johnson post-conviction to have a “terrorist connection”. read the complete article

Andy Burnham should not cave to right-wing attacks on Ali Milani

The Starmer faction targeted the traditional Labour left, but reserved special venom for British Muslims. They enjoyed a unique place in Starmer’s political universe. If politically inert, British Muslims were treated with "benign neglect", the policy regarding race relations proposed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a 1970 memo to late US President Richard Nixon. If active, they were automatic objects of suspicion. They were spied on, smeared and in many cases driven out of the party altogether. In a troubling and shameful documentary released in 2022, Al Jazeera exposed Labour’s "hierarchy of racism" towards black, Asian and Muslim voters. This strategy took Labour into ugly places. Starmer’s Labour stood down loyal and hard-working Muslim candidates such as Faiza Shaheen ahead of the 2024 election. Starmer’s divisive method may have reassured certain elements of right wing media, although there is no serious evidence that it won over Reform voters. For many Labour supporters, this amounted to an outright rejection of progressive values - and one important reason for welcoming a new Labour leader dedicated to ending the discord of the Starmer leadership. One small sign that the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham may play a unifying role was the presence of Ali Milani, a Labour party member and political commentator, in his campaign team during the Makerfield by-election which returned him to parliament last month. read the complete article

UK’s largest Muslim event goes ahead with added security as hate crime rises

Security has been increased by several hundred additional staff at the UK’s largest Muslim convention, Jalsa Salana, alongside enhanced coordination with police, emergency services and local authorities, against a backdrop of growing anti-Muslim sentiment. Last month, another big Islamic gathering was forced to close early after 12 people were arrested, including three on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, over a suspected far-right threat. Hayat says the community has weathered hostility before. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has been in Britain for more than a century, having established itself in 1913, and built one of London’s first purpose-built mosques in 1926. “I personally have been in London since 1967, so I have been through all of the various rightwing movements: from skinheads, to the ‘rivers of blood’ speech by Enoch Powell to the British National party. We have seen it all,” Hayat said. read the complete article

Elon Musk reiterates claim that UK is on verge of 'reckoning' due to Muslim immigration

Billionaire and far-right influencer Elon Musk has claimed that Muslim immigration to the UK means there will be a "reckoning" in the near future, implying a threat of civil war in the country. Speaking to the Economist magazine's editor-in-chief, Musk was asked whether he was "anti-Muslim". “If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that,” he said in response. “I’m against rape and murder, I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West. I think it’s a crying shame that the traditional media don’t recognise this.” When pushed by Zanny Minton Beddoes on past comments suggesting "civil war" was "inevitable" in the UK, Musk said that it was "on the current trend". "That is nonsense. The numbers also disprove what you say. London is a much safer city than any city in the US," said Beddoes in response. "You have painted Europe and the UK as overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants, there's rape on every corner, there's civilisational destruction." read the complete article

Australia

Former Labor senator Nova Peris accused of ‘amplifying’ anti-Muslim social media posts

Former Labor senator Nova Peris has been accused of amplifying anti-Muslim and anti Palestinian content by sharing posts that claim Gaza is full of “savages” and “fucking monsters”. The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (Aman) has identified dozens of what it describes as dehumanising posts seen on Peris’s verified X account between April 2024 and March 2026. Peris, a patron of the Labor Friends of Israel group who did not author the posts but instead shared them on her account, did not respond to a request for comment. Aman said the material had been assessed against its own 12-category framework for identifying dehumanising speech, developed for use in legal proceedings, and alleged the posts fell across every category in the framework. Peris, an Olympic gold medallist, former senator and recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia, is the patron of Labor Friends of Israel alongside former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. Among the posts identified by the organisation are those which describing Palestinians as “savages”, “fucking monsters” and the claim that Gaza’s entire population consists of two million terrorists. read the complete article

Australian right-wing leader Pauline Hanson loses appeal in racial discrimination case

An Australian court on Monday rejected an appeal from right-wing leader Pauline Hanson to overturn a ruling that she ‌racially discriminated against a Muslim senator by telling her to "piss off back to Pakistan". The three-judge panel of the Full Federal Court of Australia unanimously upheld a 2024 ruling that the comment, addressed to Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi on social media, was unlawful and unprotected by free speech defences. read the complete article

International

Waves of settler attacks target mosques, homes and businesses across West Bank

Israeli settlers on Sunday launched a series of widespread attacks across the West Bank, setting on fire two mosques in Nablus and Tulkarm and damaging heavy equipment at an industrial facility near Ramallah. Eyewitnesses told Middle East Eye that settlers also raided several towns and villages, attacked homes, destroyed vehicles and fired live ammunition to terrorise residents. The attacks targeted communities in the governorates of Nablus, Tulkarm, Ramallah, Hebron, Salfit, Qalqilya, Jericho and Jerusalem, according to Palestinian officials who said settlers were acting under the protection of Israeli forces. In the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, Israeli settlers burned large parts of the al-Rahma mosque and spray-painted racist slogans in Hebrew on its walls. Wadi said that slogans such as "Israel will be established with blood" and "Mosques will not frighten us" were written on the walls, in addition to messages that indicated that the arson was in revenge for the settlers killed in Tell. “Neighbours of the mosque saw the settlers leaving the area before the residents arrived to extinguish the fire. We also found three slogans they had written on the outer walls," the activist said. read the complete article

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