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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In the United States, CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, released its 2024 civil rights report noting a record number of complaints of discrimination and Islamophobic attacks, while the White House is defending it’s arrest of pro-Palestinian protest leader and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, saying the Department of Homeland Security plans to arrest more protesters moving forward. Our recommended read of the day is by Imran Mulla for Middle East Eye on why Tell MAMA, an organization founded in 2012 to document Islamophobia cases in the UK, is losing its funding following accusations of severely under-reporting hate crimes. This and more below:
United Kingdom
Baroness Warsi endorses government pulling funding from Islamophobia monitor | Recommended Read
Former Conservative chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has endorsed the Labour government's decision to pull funding from an Islamophobia reporting service accused of severely under-reporting hate crimes. Tell Mama, which is funded by the communities ministry, was founded in 2012. The Guardian reported on Saturday that no grant will be provided to the organisation from the end of March, leaving it facing closure. "I support this decision by the government and its decision to re think how it funds the monitoring of anti Muslim hate," Warsi said on social media platform X on Tuesday. Warsi, who is widely considered a leading figure on Islamophobia in Britain, was one of the early advocates for Tell Mama to be funded by the government as a minister in David Cameron's cabinet. Last March, the previous Conservative government halted plans to appoint Tell Mama's founder, Fiyaz Mughal OBE, as its independent adviser on anti-Muslim hatred. That decision came after it received notice of a Byline Times investigation which revealed Mughal had suppressed a Tell Mama-funded report on the Conservative Party's ties to Islamophobic and antisemitic political parties. In July 2024, Byline Times reported that Tell Mama under-reported anti-Muslim hate crimes by more than 90 percent between 2017 to 2022. Its published figures were "consistently lower than anti-Muslim hate crime statistics published by the Home Office based on police data". Police data itself was found to systematically underestimate hate crimes. In response, Tell Mama insisted "it is impossible to record all hate crimes and particularly difficult given the scale, nature, geographical location and nationality of British Muslims from over 50 Muslim-majority countries". read the complete article
United States
We are All Mahmoud Khalil
The arrest of legal permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil, 29, by Department of Homeland Security agents for thought crimes is a shot across the bow of the American Constitution. All Fascist governments despise free speech, and the Trumpist regime is no exception. Khalil is only a test case. The Trumpists are coming for you. Mahmoud Khalil helped lead a movement of college students at Columbia University demanding a cease fire in Gaza. Not only was this demand a perfectly reasonable exercise of his first amendment rights, it was the position of the US government in June 2024 when it presented a ceasefire resolution to the UN Security Council, which was passed. Advocating something in February 2024 that the US government actually did in June 2024 is not “aligning with Hamas” as the odious Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the even more odious Donald Trump alleged. There is no evidence that Khalil, born in Algeria but of Palestinian heritage, committed any crime, as opposed to decrying the total war inflicted on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, which the International Court of Justice found was plausibly a genocide, on the basis of which it issued a preliminary injunction (“provisional measures”) against Israel. Nor is decrying the actions of an extremist Israeli government “antisemitism,” as the DHS agents apparently alleged. People who condemn the far right government of Giorgia Meloni are not “anti-Italian.” Not only is Khalil being targeted for constitutionally protected speech, but he is implicitly being punished for engaging in peaceable assembly in the form of nonviolent student protests on American university campuses, a right that university administrators are attempting to withdraw by the ruse of declaring such protests “trespassing,” which is in states like Michigan a felony. read the complete article
Anti-Muslim discrimination reached record high in 2024, report finds
The nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization received a record number of complaints of discrimination and Islamophobic attacks amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to a report released Tuesday. The Council on American-Islamic Relations received more than 8,650 complaints in 2024, the highest number since the organization began publishing its annual civil rights report in 1996. Complaints rose more than 7%, breaking the previous record set in 2023. Encounters with law enforcement rose 71.5% as universities and colleges cracked down on campus protests, according to the report. Complaints related to immigration/asylum, education discrimination and hate crimes were among the most reported. But employment discrimination was the top issue reported to CAIR for the first time as companies began to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies. "Usually, what we're documenting is people being targeted because of their faith either being Muslim or being perceived as being Muslim," said Corey Saylor, the director of research and advocacy at CAIR. "Last year, what we saw is people being targeted for their viewpoint, primarily anti-apartheid, anti-genocide viewpoints." read the complete article
How Hollywood embraced torture scenes post-9/11
The 60 Minutes II segment on Abu Ghraib included an interview with General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, who appeared on the broadcast to deliver the Army’s official response. Asked about the photograph of the dead man packed in ice, the first thing Kimmitt said was, “It’s reprehensible that anybody’d be taking a picture of that situation.” Dan Rather pounced: “Reprehensible that anybody would take a picture of that situation? What about the situation itself?” Rather’s response suggested he thought that Kimmitt was being evasive, or that he felt worse about documentation of the crimes than he did about the fact that crimes had occurred. To some extent, this was a fair suggestion; Kimmitt was playing the role of the public relations crisis manager, and he spent much of the segment trying to insulate the military from the blowback that was obviously coming, insisting repeatedly that the abuses did not reflect the Army’s “values.” But Kimmitt’s reaction to the photographs shouldn’t be understood only as a PR maneuver. The photographs were not just documents of a crime—the camera was one of the weapons with which the crime had been committed. Nothing communicated the viciousness and ghastly inventiveness of the American guards at Abu Ghraib more effectively than the fact that they wanted to photograph what they were doing. The content of the photographs showed the kinds of abuse that were meted out, but the existence of the photographs showed that at least some of the soldiers were proud of what they were doing and had fun while doing it. At the very least, it showed that they were willing to stand by and not intervene. Back home, Americans became obsessed with looking at scenes of torture. Torture became more common in action films and TV shows, and the violence depicted therein also became more explicit, as though producers and directors were trying to figure out exactly how much their audiences were willing to take. Before September 11, prime-time television showed its viewers fewer than four scenes of torture each year, on average. After September 11, that number began to increase, and three years after Abu Ghraib there were more than a hundred torture scenes broadcast during prime time each year. Understanding that viewers would identify with different characters at different moments—the hero, his woman, the villain, the captive—writers and directors considered torture from many different angles. What would it be like to torture someone? What would it be like to watch someone else torture someone? What if you loved the person being tortured? What if you hated them? What if it was yourself? Under what circumstances would it be justified? read the complete article
White House says immigration officials are seeking more pro-Palestinian protesters
The White House is defending the arrest of pro-Palestinian protest leader and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, and says the Department of Homeland Security plans to arrest more protesters moving forward. On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the decision to arrest Khalil, a green card holder who is of Palestinian descent, fell in line with President Trump's recent executive order aimed at cracking down on antisemitism on U.S. campuses. The order allows the administration to revoke visas and deport international students if they're determined to be "pro-jihadist" or "Hamas sympathizers." "Since the President signed that executive order, and since Secretary [Kristi] Noem has taken the oath at DHS, they have been using intelligence to identify individuals on our nation's colleges and universities, on our college campuses, who have engaged in such behavior and activity, and especially illegal activity," Leavitt said. While Leavitt did not offer an estimate of how many additional arrests could be coming, she said she knew that "DHS is actively working on it." Leavitt noted that Columbia had been given names of other individuals on campus "who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity," but said the school has refused to help DHS. Leavitt's comments echoed remarks by President Trump, who on Monday said his administration "will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again." read the complete article