Muslims demand full legal protection from Islamophobia (UK)

Pressure builds on party leaders to recognise racism targeting ‘Muslimness’

Muslim organisations are urging Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and all other party leaders to adopt a newly proposed working definition of Islamophobia in an attempt to put pressure on a reluctant Home Office to follow suit.

The Muslim Council of Britain and other Islamic groups want the Conservatives and Labour to take the lead in the aftermath of a week marked by public outrage over the alleged racist bullying of a 15-year-old Syrian refugee in Huddersfield.

The definition was set out in a report published by a cross-party group of MPs last week and says: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Harun Khan, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his and other groups hoped political leaders would “all understand the importance of listening to communities” and make a “positive response” by adopting the definition.

However, a Home Office minister said earlier that the department had no intention of adopting a definition, in response to a question from one of the chairs of the cross-party group, the Conservative MP Anna Soubry. Victoria Atkins told the Commons in March that there were “many definitions of Islamophobia”, but added: “We do not accept the need for a definitive definition, but we know that Islamophobia is clearly recognised and that we have very effective monitoring systems of all race-hate crimes.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE GUARDIAN (UK)

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Conservative Christians: Think Twice Before Claiming ‘Islam Is Not a Religion’

The assertion that “Islam isn’t a religion” should be a cause for concern among conservative Christians as it can so easily and destructively be turned on Christian minorities in other parts of the world.

In her recent New York Times opinion piece, Asma T. Uddin rightly criticizes the “disturbing trend … [of] state lawmakers, lawyers, and influential social commentators,” like Oklahoma Republican state Rep. John Bennett, who claim that Muslims in the United States don’t deserve religious freedoms granted to adherents of other religions because “Islam is not even a religion; it is a political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.”

The claim has been floating around for several years, but it’s nonsensical for a host of reasons. No reasonable observer would contend that Muslims are the only religious people who try to advance their interests through concerted and coordinated political action, as should be clear from the Moral Majority, the Christian pro-life movement, and the opposition of many conservative Christians to the Johnson Amendment. The fact that the most obvious examples in the United States derive from conservative Christianity is only because conservative Christians have been more intentional, vocal, strategic, and successful in their religious politicking. However, it’s clear enough that liberal forms of Christianity also espouse their own brands of politics.

The obvious national and international political aspirations of Western Christians make their criticisms of the entanglement of Islam and politics particularly bewildering. Such criticisms, therefore, could only emanate either from a stunning lack of self-consciousness or a quite conscious, knowing, and cynically self-serving denial of the nature of things.

FULL ARTICLE FROM REWIRE NEWS 

What happens when Muslims and Islamophobes both win

(CNN)The nation watched on Tuesday night as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two Muslim-American women, made history alongside many other trailblazers. At the same time, the nation also saw a striking number of Islamophobes get voted into public office. Witnessing two of our country’s most polar opposites collide — those who support American Muslims and those who fear or hate us — was for many alternately inspiring and scary.

On one hand, the significance of Tlaib and Omar’s achievements in becoming America’s first Muslim women in Congress is undeniable. For believers of a religion that has been demonized and scapegoated fiercely for nearly two decades and with renewed vigor during the last two years, the moment two Muslim women were announced as projected winners in their respective states was one that we will recall for our grandchildren.

Tlaib, the child of working-class Muslim Palestinian immigrants who celebrated her win wrapped in a Palestinian flag, and Omar, a former refugee and Somali-American who wears hijab and danced to Somali music upon winning, showcase not only the American Muslim community’s diversity but also its strong spirit. Tlaib and Omar embody the determination to rise above years of unjust treatment at airports, of false representation in the media, and of discriminatory policies. Instead of accepting the assault on our liberty and civil rights by the people and government, Muslim-Americans demanded a seat at the table.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN 

Young Evangelicals Are Rejecting the Islamophobia of Their Elders

By Kevin Singer, Chris Stackaruk 11-07-2018

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Barna Research Group recently reported that evangelical Christians are less likely than most to have friends of other religious beliefs. A whopping 91 percent of evangelicals said that their current friends are “mostly similar” to them when it comes to religious beliefs. However, this statistic wasn’t broken down by age or generation, which is critical to understanding how American evangelicals are changing.

Pew Research found that the younger an evangelical is, the more progressive they will likely be on a number of issues. Public Religion Research Institute discovered that younger white evangelicals (ages 18-39) are far more likely to say that American Muslims are an important part of the religious community in the U.S., and that they are comfortable with public displays of Muslim culture and religious expression, than those ages 40 and up.

We launched our organization, Neighborly Faith, when we were graduate students at Wheaton College in 2015. We were there during the saga between Wheaton College administration and Dr. Larycia Hawkins, and when Wheaton students penned an open letter in the Washington Post, condemning Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims after the San Bernardino shootings. We saw a growing crop of evangelical college students who wanted to love their Muslim neighbors as themselves, but who were getting little guidance on how to do so from their elders.

Fortunately, in the last few years, we have discovered that there are in fact evangelical trailblazers who are modeling how to be a good neighbor to Muslims. Take Pastor Bob Roberts Jr., for example, who leads a Southern Baptist megachurch in Texas. For the last few years, he has devoted a significant portion of his time and energy to introducing evangelical pastors to Imams and encouraging them to build friendships.

We have also been inspired by the work of Fuller Theological Seminary professor Matthew Kaemingk, who has traveled to evangelical collegesacross the U.S. to encourage a posture of hospitality toward Muslim immigrants. There are also 2018 books like Islam in North America:Loving Our Muslim Neighbors by Micah Fries and Keith Whitfield and The Dignity Revolution by Daniel Darling, each authored by evangelical thought leaders who are active in the lives of college students.

FULL ARTICLE FROM SOJOURNERS MAGAZINE

How Muslims Became The Enemy

The new Islamophobia looks like the old McCarthyism.

These days, our global political alliances seem to shift with remarkable rapidity, as if we were actually living in George Orwell’s 1984. Are we at war this month with Oceania? Or is it Eastasia? In that novel, the Party is able to erase history, sending old newspaper articles down the Ministry of Truth’s “memory hole” and so ensuring that, in the public mind, the enemy of the moment was always the enemy. Today, there is one constant, though. The Trump administration has made Muslims our enemy of the first order and, in its Islamophobia, is reinforced by an ugly resurgence of fascism in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and other European countries.

It’s hard today even to imagine that, in the late 1980s, the rightwing Christian Voice Magazine published a “candidate’s biblical scoreboard,” urging its readers (and potential voters) to rate their politicians by how “biblically” they cast their ballots in Congress. One key measure of this: Did that legislator support the anti-Communist Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan, a cause warmly supported by evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign? Now, attempting to appeal to twenty-first-century evangelicals, President Trump has announced that “Islam hates us.”

 

The kaleidoscope of geopolitics and Islamophobia is now spinning so fast that it should make our heads spin, too. At times, it seems as if Donald Trump is the anti-Ronald Reagan of the twenty-first century, idolizing former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, but seeing former U.S. allies in the Muslim world like Pakistan as purveyors of “nothing but lies and deceit” ― until, that is, with bewildering rapidity, he suddenly gives us the “good” (that is, oil-rich) Muslims again, willingly performing a sword dance with the Saudi royals, seemingly entirely comfortable with the scimitar of the Saracen.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST 

European Muslims on identity, bereavement and loss

Muslims who lost relatives in attacks, stress the difference between their faith and the fighters.

Spaniards like Mohamed Azahaf remember the day, on March 11, 2004, that armed attacks came to Europe. That morning, during Madrid’s rush hour, 10 bombs ripped through four commuter trains. The simultaneous, coordinated blasts killed more than 190 people and wounded some 2,000 more.

Azahaf was employed as a social worker for the Madrid City Hall and had been called to counsel and provide assistance to families who were gathering to learn the fate of their loved ones.

Since then, attackers have killed civilians in London, Paris, Brussels, Manchester, Toulouse, Nice, Barcelona and Berlin. People have been assassinated in offices, shot in restaurants, bombed in nightclubs and run over on pedestrian thoroughfares. All of the attacks were committed in the name of Islam and have led to heightened racial and religious discrimination against European Muslims.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA

Shows like Bodyguard perpetuate Muslim stereotypes. We created the Riz Test to show how dire representation is

Films and television programmes are powerful mediums that are often taken for granted. They are major sources of entertainment and escapism, as well as often offering educational commentary on society, informing us about ideas and cultures we aren’t familiar with. We are often excited to watch the latest blockbuster summer releases, but if you are Muslim, that excitement also comes with a dose of apprehension.

Muslims see time and time again how carelessly or intentionally film and television makers bandy around stereotypes about Muslim communities. The ways in which Muslims are represented in films and in television are shocking. And this is why we need the Riz Test.

The Riz Test is defined by five criteria: If the film stars at least one character who is identifiably Muslim (by ethnicity, language or clothing) – is the character…

1. Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of Islamist terrorism?

2. Presented as irrationally angry?

3. Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?

4. Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?

5. If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? Or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts? If the answer for any of the above is yes, then the film/show fails the test. Simple.

It should be easy for most films to pass, right? Wrong.

FULL ARTICLE FROM METRO.CO.UK (UK)