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SearchToday in Islamophobia: A wave of international recognitions of a Palestinian state has prompted bitter and almost unanimous condemnation across the political spectrum in Israel, meanwhile in Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint filed against the Hindu Council of Australia for alleged repeated instances of Islamophobia, and in France, a total of nine severed pig heads were scattered on the doorsteps of mosques across Paris and its nearby suburbs, in what authorities are investigating as an act of foreign interference. Our recommended read of the day is by Tazeen M. Ali for Religion Unplugged, who writes on how recent years have seen a rise in Muslim-led storytelling in Western media which, though still a minority in the industry, stands in contrast to the decades of misrepresentation and stereotype flooding the entertainment world. This and more below:
International
Muslims Redefine Representation On Screen: ‘Rejection Of Stereotypical Narratives’ | Recommended Read
For over a century, Hollywood has tended to portray Muslim men through a remarkably narrow lens: as terrorists, villains or dangerous outsiders. From shows such as “24” and “Homeland” to procedural dramas such as “Law and Order,” this portrayal has seldom allowed for complexity or relatability. Such depictions reinforce Orientalist stereotypes — a colonial worldview that treats cultures in the East as exotic, irrational or even dangerous. However, recent years have seen a noticeable increase in Muslim-led storytelling across platforms in the U.S. and U.K. While still a minority, these stories depart from decades of misrepresentation. As a scholar of Islam and gender who has conducted research on masculinity, sexuality and national belonging in Muslim entertainment media, I analyze a new wave of critically acclaimed shows where Muslim characters are at the center of the narrative. Hulu’s comedy drama series “Ramy” is a milestone in Muslim storytelling. Created by actor-comedian Ramy Youssef, the series, which debuted in 2019, follows a young Egyptian-American Muslim navigating family, faith and relationships in New Jersey. Ramy is devoid of storylines about national security. Instead, the show foregrounds its main character’s grappling with religiosity, dating and identity. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the protagonist’s religious devotion is never a punchline but a part of his everyday experience. read the complete article
Israeli politicians react bitterly to international recognitions of Palestinian state
A wave of international recognitions of a Palestinian state has prompted bitter and almost unanimous condemnation across the political spectrum in Israel, uniting political foes and, analysts said, potentially reinforcing the ruling coalition’s grip on power. The UK, Portugal, Australia and Canada formally recognised a state of Palestine on Sunday while France was expected to follow suit on Monday. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called the moves an “absurdity” on Sunday night, and a “reward for terrorism”, while Israel’s president said the “forces of darkness” would be emboldened. Netanyahu leads the most far-right government in Israel’s history and his coalition is in part dependent on the continuing support of extremist religious Zionist factions, which have a messianic vision of Israel’s destiny, and ultra-Orthodox religious parties. read the complete article
Starmer finally said it: ‘We recognise Palestine.’ But Gaza desperately needs action – where is that?
The emphatic gesture is a historical moment where the record is not written, but corrected. Palestinian statehood has always existed, and recognising that fact confers credibility on the recognisers, and not the Palestinian claim to their inalienable rights. As part of the shifting tide against Israel, even in the United States, recognition of a Palestinian state enshrines what the Israeli state seems committed to erasing once and for all – the legitimate claim of Palestinians to their own land. Naming and insisting on Palestinian statehood is vital. Such gestures are important, especially for a cause that is fundamentally about a people’s right to exist in sovereignty on their own land. Keeping that notion alive, even if Israel never reverses course, resists the Israeli government’s drive to have full and final dominion over Palestinians without condemnation or acknowledgment of the erasure of Palestinian rights, and confers status, respect and international treaty relations upon the Palestinian state. But the road to this recognition has been ignoble in action and flawed in rationale. As far as the British government is concerned, belatedness and timidity have been defining features of its response to the situation in Gaza over the past two years. But the failures are not only historical, they are current and, indeed, concurrent, with the recognition. The government that speaks of the intolerable urgency of the situation in Gaza is the same that received the Israeli president in Downing Street earlier this month, a man whose declaration that there is “an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the 7 October 2023 attacks has been cited by a United Nations commission as inciting genocide. It is also the same government that has deployed its full force on many hundreds of peaceful protesters objecting to the banning of Palestine Action. And despite the suspension of sales and licences for offensive weapons to Israel, British firms have still provided thousands of military items, including munitions that comprise bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines and missiles. read the complete article
Australia
Hindu Council of Australia accused of Islamophobia in complaint to Australian Human Rights Commission
The Australian Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint filed against the Hindu Council of Australia for alleged repeated instances of Islamophobia. The complaint alleges that the council, its president Sai Paravastu and head of media Neelima Paravastu, made Islamophobic posts on X and Instagram, and comments in public, between May 2024 and July 2025. The Alliance against Islamophobia complaint, seen by Guardian Australia, contains copies of the social media posts, which included sharing posts by Charlie Kirk and far-right UK figure Tommy Robinson. Other posts referenced in the complaint specifically impugned Indian, Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims, it is alleged. The imputations from several of the posts, the complaint alleges, were that Muslims were “inherently criminal, dangerous, violent or evil by nature”, “prey upon children, the aged and the vulnerable” and “homogeneously pose a powerful threat or menace”. The commission cannot comment on complaints it is investigating, but it is believed to have accepted the matter on 16 September. The council and the Paravastus were contacted for comment. read the complete article
Sky to ditch live broadcasts of Freya Fires Up after Islamophobic rant
Sky News Australia will now pre-record its newest After Dark show, Freya Fires Up, rather than broadcast it live, after the network invited a guest promoting Islamophobic views wearing rashers of raw bacon on his chest onto its program on Sunday evening. The News Corp network had no senior editors or managers on hand to vet the show’s guest in advance on Sunday, leaving 22-year-old Freya Leach and her sole junior producer to allow the guest’s comments go to air live and unchecked, two sources with knowledge of the matter, but not authorised to speak publicly, said. Both Leach and her producer are expected to keep their roles. Leach issued a full apology during The Late Debate, a show she also co-hosts, on Monday evening. She said the guest, 33-year-old British citizen Ryan Williams, should not have appeared. “He was asked specifically for his reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination and its fallout, but instead used our platform to spread his harmful views,” Leach told viewers in a pre-recorded statement. But although he may not have responded directly to the question Leach had asked him, the night before his appearance on Sky, Williams had posted several videos of himself wearing two pieces of bacon on his bare chest on his public Instagram account, repeating the same Islamophobic rant. “I’m going on Sky News tomorrow! What would you like me to talk about and which message is crucial to get out there?” he asked followers in the caption of a video in which included several examples of Islamophobic language. read the complete article
United Kingdom
Britain Is Manifesting Nigel Farage as Its Next Prime Minister
Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party—the latest incarnation of the right-wing, anti-immigrant political movement that he has led for twenty years—has been atop the British polls for the past six months. It is currently polling at thirty per cent, ten points ahead of the Labour government. If there were a general election tomorrow, there is a plausible chance that Reform would win hundreds of seats in the House of Commons; that the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives, which has ruled British politics for a century, would be broken; and that Farage, once nicknamed Mr. Brexit by his friend Donald Trump, would be Prime Minister. The Party’s messaging isn’t subtle. In July, while Parliament was in recess, Farage had staged a Lawless Britain campaign, during which he claimed, variously, that people were afraid to walk the streets of London after 9 P.M.; that “droves of unvetted men,” a.k.a. asylum seekers, were loose in the country, posing a threat to women and girls; and that crimes such as shoplifting and cellphone theft now go unpunished by the police. Parts of the country, Farage warned, were facing “nothing short of societal collapse.” The following month, Farage announced Operation Restoring Justice, Reform’s plan for the deportation of six hundred thousand illegal migrants. Caught on their heels, neither Labour nor the Conservatives particularly objected to Farage’s diagnoses of Britain’s problems, just his methods for addressing them. One of Farage’s gifts as a politician is knowing what he does not have to say. While other right-wing populists, in Europe and elsewhere, get caught up in talk of race, or religion, or replacement theory, Farage’s language is always careful, always clubbable. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t like to shock or make himself out to be exceptional. He is an everyman, who remembers when it was fine to have a few drinks with lunch. “It’s as if our leaders have forgotten who we were,” he said in Birmingham, vaguely, before praising Operation Raise the Colours as a patriotic protest against a rotten establishment. “Let’s make Britain great again. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere else before,” he quipped. “But I agree with it.” read the complete article
The teachers bringing marginalised stories into schools
In history classes across the country, schoolchildren are told the stories of Henry VIII and his wives, the trenches of the first world war and the era of rationing when British forces fought the Nazis. A tidy chronological story of our nation with a beginning, a middle and an end. What they typically learn less about are the scholars of Baghdad, the merchants of the Indian Ocean or the Muslim soldiers who fought for Britain in both those wars. Those histories lie hidden in the margins of the syllabus. However, some teachers are trying to change that by making additions that teach students to see minority communities not as footnotes, but as inseparable from the more commonly received narratives. That work follows years of campaigning from activists and educators to diversify the syllabus for all ages, demands that are being addressed in the government’s current curriculum review. This year’s autumn term has opened against a backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment, a stark reminder that the histories children are exposed to — or denied — matter now. “Global histories are always essential,” says Afia Chaudhry, a teacher based in London. “To make clear that inclusion is not tokenism, we need to frame history carefully. It is important we continue to teach these stories now, not as a culture war gesture, but as accuracy.” This doesn’t mean straying from the curriculum. Her school has built “shared schemes that thread Islamic civilisations, the Indian Ocean world and postwar migration through key stage 3 [ages 11-14]. The method is plain: interrogate the curriculum map, find the hinge points where the wider world already meets the enquiry and teach the narrative there. Not as a favour, but because that is where the history sits.” read the complete article
France
French Muslims on alert after severed pig heads found at nine mosques
On an early September morning, a pig’s head, covered in blood, was discovered at the doorstep of the Javel mosque in the heart of Paris. On it, a name had been scrawled in blue ink: Macron. A couple of kilometres (about a mile) from the Eiffel Tower, the mosque is a place of worship for a diverse community of Muslims with Lebanese, Algerian, Iranian and other roots, which has long coexisted with neighbours in a leafy district of the French capital. “It’s the first time something like this has ever happened to us,” Najat Benali, the mosque’s rector, told Al Jazeera English. That Tuesday, September 9, worshippers heading in for the dawn prayer discovered the act of desecration. Muslims are forbidden from eating pork and consider pigs to be unclean. The worshippers called Benali, who rushed to the site. “They were in a state of shock,” Benali said. When something like that happens, “naturally, you check your surroundings.” In total, nine severed pig heads had been scattered on the doorsteps of mosques across Paris and its nearby suburbs, in what French authorities are investigating as an act of foreign interference. “The pig heads left in front of mosques in the Paris region were placed there by foreign nationals who immediately left the country, with the clear intention of causing unrest within the nation,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office wrote in a statement shared with Al Jazeera. “The aim is to unsettle our fellow citizens, ultimately raising questions about the country we live in, about their safety, and then, of course, creating divisions between communities,” Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said. read the complete article