False neutrality
Last week the European Court of Justice ruled that employers have the right not to allow employees to wear ‘religious’ clothing (in this case, as is usual, the hijab or headscarf worn by Muslim...
Category: Islamophobia
‘Free speech’ irrelevant to Batley cartoon row
This week a teacher at a school in Batley, Yorkshire was suspended after showing his year 9 (aged 13-14) pupils, some of them Muslims, a cartoon originating with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting...
How should Muslims react to Holocaust education?
Someone on Facebook shared an article from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, on how immigrant (or immigrant-descended) Muslims in Germany react to Holocaust education efforts such as trips to concentration camps. The article notes that...
Don’t Tell MAMA, she’ll go crazy
Recently I’ve been hearing on Twitter about Freedom of Information Act requests in the UK being refused on very obviously spurious grounds (this being a particularly egregious example), leading to speculation that there is...
Not our brothers’ keepers
Last week a young woman named Ellie Williams (right) from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, posted a long message on Facebook describing having been kidnapped by a group of local Pakistani men and taken to an address...
What? Trevor Phillips was in the Labour party?
Yesterday it was announced that Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the body set up under the Labour government to monitor all aspects of equal opportunities (there had...
Expel Keith Vaz
Today the Labour MP Keith Vaz was suspended from the House of Commons for six months for offering to buy cocaine for male prostitutes in August 2016 in an encounter at his flat recorded...
How the myth of ‘Eurabia’ went mainstream
The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream by Andrew Brown A “long read” in today’s Guardian, about the far-right myth of “Eurabia”, that Europe’s leaders have caved in to Muslims...
Review: The Left Behind
The Left Behind is an hour-long BBC Three drama in which a young man who is facing homelessness as a result of his family’s eviction and gets very rapidly groomed into racist violence, leading...
We can’t blame ‘Wahhabis’ for everything
In response to Boris Johnson’s article from 2007 on what he regarded as being ‘wrong’ with the Muslim world, and how Islam itself was to blame for it, the Guardian printed an article yesterday...
The sickening prospect of Boris Johnson as PM
Like many people following the Tory party leadership contest, I’ve been filled with a sense of dread that we are looking at Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and the man who, as...
Dear Muslims, stop cringing
Ramadan starts next week, and for the first time in a long while, the fasting days will be getting longer as the month progresses; most of the days will be long, starting (depending on...
More than one kind of hate
Last Wednesday there was a joint article by Mehdi Hasan and Jonathan Freedland, both well-known journalists and columnist (the latter a Guardian regular), on the “common enemy” Jews and Muslims both have in white...
And he wasn’t even Muslim
Last month a film-making group called “Error in Terror”, founded by a group of “highly-skilled film-makers” after the Westminster and Borough Market terrorist attacks in London to “create content which aims to tackle all...
Christchurch: Reckoning for the Right
Last Friday, in the early hours of the morning UK time but in the early afternoon local time, a far-right terrorist entered two mosques in Christchurch, South Island, New Zealand, with automatic rifles emblazoned...
Good manners won’t save us from hate
Yesterday a Muslim YouTuber who goes by the Scottish Revert Teacher published a video saying that Muslims really were not really doing enough to improve the image of Islam in terms of the way...
Prayer mats on the caravan trail?
So says the most powerful man in the world, the self-styled Very Stable Genius, the president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. The fact is this: Muslims do not go round...
Where in Europe is the best place to be Muslim?
Recently a graphic has been doing the rounds on Muslim Twitter: a map compiled by the Pew Research Foundation, showing the results of a poll conducted throughout Europe asking people various questions about their...
Why Muslims should protest public insults to the Prophet
Geert Wilders (or Geert Hitlers as I call him), a far-right Dutch opposition politician, has cancelled an event he had been planning (or claimed to have been planning) this coming November, a contest for...
Who wears the burqa?
In an earlier entry I discussed the unhelpful ‘defence’ of niqaab that only a few thousand women wear the garment. However, a side argument is that only a few hundred wear the burqa, the...