Racist thugs on the rampage
Last week, following the murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside, who attacked a number of other girls and their teachers at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, gangs of racist hooligans have been...
Category: Islamophobia
It’s Islamophobia, thank you
Over the past week, some of the same politicians and think-tankers who couldn’t hide their resentment at George Galloway winning a by-election and were accusing anti-genocide demonstrators in London of being controlled by extremists...
Ask a loaded question …
Over the years, a frustrating phenomenon for anyone writing about the oppression of Palestinians and the upsurge in hostility to Muslims in the West following 9/11 was an established race relations industry that was...
Thanks Wes, but take a stand on Gaza!
Last week a Muslim primary school in Ilford and a mosque also in east London received threatening letters. The letter sent to the school is addressed “Dear pedophiles” (sic) and signed “your terrorist friend”;...
Mosque at the Trocadero is good for it and the community
It has been announced that a plan to convert part of the Trocadero in Piccadilly, London, into a mosque has been approved by the council. The mosque is being proposed and funded by the...
NUS and antisemitism on and off campus
Last Friday the BBC published a report by Hazel Shearing, its education correspondent (inexplicably filed under “Young Reporter” (a term normally used of student reporters, which she isn’t), about antisemitism in and around universities...
Hatred is not a phobia
The term Islamophobia was popularised, as I recall, in the 1990s to refer to hostility to Muslims in the European context. The logic behind it seems to be that people were hostile to Muslims...
Snow elephants versus democracy
On Tuesday it was announced on Twitter and via the Jewish Chronicle, before it was announced on the organisation’s own website, that the National Union of Students’ President, Shaima Dallali, who had been accused...
Starmer should not be parroting Hindu nationalist talking points
Last week the Labour leader Keir Starmer, who polls suggest is now likely to easily win any general election held in the next couple of years (and one is due no later than December...
Freedom of expression a British value? Really?
This weekend it was revealed that Qari Asim, an imam who had worked with the government as some sort of anti-extremism consultant since 2019 when Theresa May was still PM, had been sacked for...
Should Labour be chasing Hindu fascist votes?
In the most recent local elections in the UK, Labour gained a couple of flagship councils from the Tories but lost two councils it had held for some years to the Tories, namely Croydon in the south and Harrow in the north-west.
New Year Dishonour
On Saturday morning we awoke to the news that the former prime minister, Tony Blair, and the broadcaster and former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, had been awarded knighthoods,...
Azeem Rafiq, racism and redemption
Over the past few weeks the cricketer Azeem Rafiq revealed racist treatment he had received over many years when training and then playing at Yorkshire Cricket Club, a scandal which has resulted in the...
“Lone wolf” terrorists aren’t a myth
Last week, the anti-Muslim writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali (notorious for whipping up hatred towards Muslims in the Netherlands where she’d lived after making a false claim for asylum, before fleeing to the US where...
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...
‘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...