Search
SearchToday in Islamophobia: The United Nations has appointed Miguel Angel Moratinos of Spain to be a special envoy to combat Islamophobia in a bid to fight anti-Muslim hatred around the world, meanwhile in India, Instagram users in the country trying to access posts from the handle @Muslim — a page with 6.7 million followers — were met with a message stating: “Account not available in India”, and in in the US, the Trump administration has blasted Germany after a 1,100-page report from the country’s intelligence agency found that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a racist and anti-Muslim organization, an organization that the Trump administration has long held favor with. Our recommended read of the day is by Adam Johnson for In These Times on how public attacks against Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib by fellow Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and others have been systematically minimized or outright omitted from mainstream news coverage. This and more below:
United States
Mainstream Media’s Anti-Palestinian Double Standard Is On Full Display | Recommended Read
Newly elected U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) has been launching unhinged racist attacks against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Muslim and Arab community writ large for years. But one would hardly be aware of this troubling reality by consuming mainstream U.S. media, which has decided it’s not worthy of reporting — much less condemnation or outrage. Fine has called Tlaib “a terrorist” who “shouldn’t be American.” (Tlaib was born in Detroit.) He said Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota “might consider leaving before I get [to Congress]. #BombsAway.” He has advocated running over and killing pro-Palestine protesters, called Palestinians “animals,” referred to Muslims as “rapists,” and — as of late — openly cheer-leads starving civilians in Gaza. In his most recent online tirade on Friday, Fine once again engaged in a racist attack on Rep. Tlaib, posting on X, in response to her condemning Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza, “Tell your fellow Muslim terrorists to release the hostages and surrender. Until then, #StarveAway.” The response from U.S. media has been to completely ignore it. Fine’s bigoted attack on a fellow Congressperson, to say nothing of his advocating mass starvation, wasn’t reported on at all by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, Axios, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News or ABC News. This amounted to a total mainstream media blackout on this clear-as-day act of racist incitement. read the complete article
US TV’s first lead cartoon hijabi: how I animated Muslim women to look real
I created the hijabi mom character in #1 Happy Family USA. How she wears it is part of her personality – so I knew I had to get it right If you’ve seen a hijab on a screen – animated or otherwise – it’s likely that this Islamic head covering was one specific style. Think Princess Jasmine in the 1992 movie Aladdin, Claire Danes in the series Homeland, or the Zamins in the animated show The Proud Family. In these fictional worlds, there’s typically a little hair poking out of a shawl that can be quickly slipped off. And people really do wear the hijab that way. But it exists in so many more iterations than this one particular style. There’s a whole world of choices between a niqab and nothing. The way that the hijab is depicted matters. Not just for the half a billion people in the world who wear them, but for all Muslims, because this head covering has been a target for Islamophobia from France to the US. And since the right tends to conflate religion, race and culture, the hijab has also become a target of growing anti-Arab sentiment too. When I was commissioned to create a hijabi character for Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady’s animated TV show #1 Happy Family USA, I thought a lot about how to draw it. This was the first time a main character in a US animated series would be shown wearing a headscarf and I wanted to get it right. read the complete article
Harvard talks free speech but silences Palestine
My sister was standing with a few other students under the dim glow of Harvard Yard’s old lampposts, casually smoking and chatting. “Oh, you’re Palestinian?” one of them asked as he leaned in to light his cigarette from hers. “My cousin is in the IDF [Israeli army].” Then he placed the cigarette in his mouth backwards, the lit end burning between his teeth. “This is how my cousin smoked while shooting Palestinians at the border,” he said. “So those idiots couldn’t see the flame.” That evening, shaken, my sister called our parents and later reported the incident to her resident tutor. She searched for a way to file a formal complaint but found none. Arabs weren’t considered a “protected class”. In the charged political climate of late 2001, hate speech like this wasn’t just tolerated – it was invisible. More than two decades later, little has changed. A report released in April 2025 by the Harvard Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias described a “deep-seated sense of fear” among Muslim and Arab students, faculty and staff. The campus climate, the report noted, was marked by “uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation”. Nearly half of Muslim students surveyed said they felt physically unsafe at Harvard while an overwhelming 92 percent of all Muslim students, faculty and staff revealed that they feared professional or academic consequences for expressing their personal or political views. Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters. However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom. read the complete article
The Terrible Duty of US Bishops to Condemn Anti-Arab Prejudice
It is jarring to read the recent letters Palestinian Christian leaders have sent directly to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pleading with them to stand in solidarity with the suffering Church in Gaza and the West Bank. “Homes, churches, and hospitals have been destroyed,” they wrote in a letter just this month. In an earlier letter, dated March 25, the same coalition of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christian leaders in the Holy Land called out the USCCB’s collaboration with the American Jewish Committee to promulgate a “Translate Hate” document that the Palestinian Christians said rendered them “invisible and nonexistent in a discourse that directly impacts our lives and communities.” What’s jarring about the language in these letters is just how foreign the pleas sound to our American ears—despite the fact that they amount to a timely lesson in Christianity 101: a call for a modicum of that love between Christians by which Christ said “all people will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35). When I honestly reflected on it last year, I came to the conclusion that, despite my Catholic faith, I’m as prone to anti-Arab (and in particular anti-Palestinian) bigotry as any other American. But upon further reflection, I truly believe that speaking against this deeply-held prejudice is an even greater and more terrible duty now than it ever has been before. It takes no courage for me to speak up about it, and I’m sure doing so will cost me nothing—at least nothing of value to me. No, the terrible duty belongs to our bishops. And I pray that my little effort here will help them find the courage to execute a great effort—the task of roundly, decisively, and publicly renouncing anti-Arab prejudice. Our brothers and sisters in Gaza deserve the effort. And whatever it may cost our bishops, I believe Our Lord will make it up to them a hundredfold. read the complete article
International
UN appoints special envoy to combat Islamophobia
The UN has appointed a special envoy to combat Islamophobia in a bid to fight anti-Muslim hatred around the world. The new position will be filled by Miguel Angel Moratinos of Spain, who also serves as high representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative to combat extremism. Moratinos previously served in the Spanish government and worked closely with the UN during his time as foreign minister from 2004 to 2010. He also served as EU special representative for the Middle East peace process from 1996 to 2003 .He also served as Spanish ambassador to Israel in 1996. This year on March 15, Moratinos spoke out against the “bigotry and dehumanizing rhetoric” that Muslims “have to quite often face in many parts of the world.” “Hate speech drives wedge between communities, sparks fear and anger and may often lead to violence which threatens peace and stability in societies,” he said. read the complete article
Trump Defends Far Right AfD Party After German Intelligence Calls It “Extremist”
Last week, Trump administration officials blasted Germany after a 1,100-page report from that country’s intelligence agency found that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a racist and anti-Muslim organization, labelling it “a proven right-wing extremist organization.” The report was compiled by experts and was years in the making. Among its key findings is that the AfD poses a threat to Germany’s constitution by propagating xenophobia, Islamophobia and an “ethnicity-and-ancestry-based conception of the people.” The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution submitted the report to the interior ministry in the final days of the outgoing center-left government, prompting the AfD to claim that the move was political in nature and to file a lawsuit against the agency. But the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, whose mission is to safeguard the German constitution, had long held suspicions that the AfD and its youth organization were engaged in right-wing extremist activities and now feels convinced that the confidential report has justified its suspicions; hence the agency’s designation of Alternative for Germany as “a proven right-wing extremist organization.” The Trump administration, however, is actively defending the extremist party. read the complete article
Why Trump 2.0 is unlikely to end the “Forever War” on terrorism
Since 2001, the US has been involved in what some have called a “Forever War” against global terrorist groups. Rubrick Biegon looks at Donald Trump’s previous record on counterterrorism and his administration’s likely approach during his second term. He writes that while the US public has grown sceptical of the US’ war on terror, Trump’s tendency to infuse the terrorism issue into other policy concerns makes an end to the “Forever War” unlikely in the next few years. The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term have been a veritable whirlwind on the foreign policy front. Compared to his first term, when he was limited by his own inexperience and hemmed in by the bipartisan establishment (the so-called ‘adults in the room’), Trump 2.0 appears unrestrained, and American foreign policy feels fluid and chaotic as a result. What might this mean for the United States’ decades-long global war against terrorism? read the complete article
India
Meta blocks access to Muslim news page in India
Instagram users in India trying to access posts from the handle @Muslim -- a page with 6.7 million followers -- were met with a message stating: "Account not available in India. This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content." There was no immediate reaction from the Indian government on the ban, which comes after access was blocked to the social media accounts of Pakistani actors and cricketers. "Meta has blocked the @Muslim account by legal request of the Indian government. This is censorship." Meta declined to comment. A spokesman for the tech giant directed AFP to a company webpage outlining its policy for restricting content when governments believe material on its platforms goes "against local law." The development, first reported by the US tech journalist Taylor Lorenz' outlet User Magazine, comes in the wake of the worst violence between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in two decades. read the complete article