Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport...
Last week I was listening to Eddie Nestor’s show on BBC London on my way back from a delivery run out to south Essex, and I heard him tell us he was going to...
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...
There is a video going round on Twitter of the American representative (from Hawaii) Tulsi Gabbard responding to a question about the Indian prime minister’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which hundreds...
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...
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...
There is a slogan used by racists throughout recent history: “nothing wrong with being white” (or some variation on that theme). Any celebration of Black or Asian culture is presented as a slur on...
Yesterday we saw a group of thugs in yellow vests, clearly acting in imitation of the fuel protesters in France, intimidate the political writer Owen Jones, the journalist Dawn Foster (who wrote about the...
This morning the Today programme on Radio 4 covered the story of Gerard Batten, the new leader of UKIP, hiring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former leader of the English Defence League, anti-Muslim agitator and self-styled...
Last Saturday, a racist gunman attacked a synagogue near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 worshippers, including four Holocaust survivors, a married couple and two disabled brothers in their fifties; also killed was a doctor...
‘Normalisation’ is the idea that if the media gives too much exposure to extreme views or those without any basis in fact or science, they become the political mainstream and will come to be...
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...
Yesterday (Friday), Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims after a night-time prayer (taraweeh) last Ramadan and killed a 51-year-old worshipper, Makram Ali (right), who had collapsed prior to the...
Last week I heard a conversation between Shelina Janmohammed, the author of Love in a Headscarf and Generation M and a columnist for The National, a Dubai-based newspaper, and the LBC presenter Sheila Fogerty,...
Readers of a certain age will remember the character of Barry Kent from Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series of books about a young man growing up in the Midlands (of England) in the 1980s...
Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that ‘large’ electronic items such as tablets and laptops were to be banned from US-bound flights on some airlines, all based in the Arab world or Turkey, from airports...
One of the signs that you’re getting older is that you start to become aware that there are adults who weren’t even born when you became an adult, or at least don’t remember the...
Last week Milo Yiannopoulos (AKA Milo Andreas Wagner), once the darling of the “alt-right” and of a sizeable chunk of the American Right, suddenly fell from grace as a result of someone drawing attention...
Today the Home Secretary announced that she intends to proscribe the Far Right group National Action, which she describes as “a racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic organisation”. An organisation can be proscribed if the home...
This week Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the erstwhile leader of the English Defence League, announced that he was leaving the organisation he helped found to start some kind of new anti-extremism organisation...