Islamophobia

[Bengal_Tiger]

Hallo,

You have a deep problem with Muslims and are probably a closet Islamophobe.

You do nothing but portray Muslims in a negative light.

Yes, there are bad Muslims but does that justify killing them?

All you do on this forum is post negative news about Muslims.


- Articles on ISIS
- Articles on the Taliban
- Islamic extremists here and there

Nothing positive, nothing good.

Though I criticize "Islamists" and "Muslim" regimes I also

- Post photos of Afghanistan
- News about the Pashto language.
- News about positive developments in Afghanistan.("Afghanistan Focus Thread")

You are angry with this thread because despite your agenda of vilifying Muslims and making us ashamed to be Muslims and then hiding behind the claim of being against "Islamists", not Muslims this thread - you are worried - is damaging your "hard work" of persistently vilifying Muslims.

On this thread, Muslims are shown as human beings.

On this thread it can be seen that Muslims too are victims and suffer.

You are thus angry and trying to sabotage this thread and make it a thread about vilifying Muslims by using your "anti-Islamist" tactic.

Anyone can see on this thread that I have been reasonable. I have stated:

- western countries are tolerant

- There are problems with Muslims

- Jews and Muslims should work together

- People should be free to have intellectual criticism of Islam

However despite this balanced approach, this is not enough for you and there is no acceptance on your part of the suffering of Muslims. You have now had another outburst and rant in very poor (difficult to understand) English.

We all know that you want to do nothing but to show Islam and Muslims are nothing but bad.



If Muslims were as bad as you claim, then why are you constantly hanging around them as we would believe if we swallowed all the "stories" you tell us about "this Muslim/Islamist, I knew did this and that."

We all know that you want us to be ashamed to be Muslims.

Sorry not going to work. I am a proud Muslim Alhamdulilah, and I am going to place you on ignore as I don't want to read your Islamophobic drivel.

Stop disrupting and sabotaging my threads, you have enough of your own "Muslim terrorist" threads to worry about.

[HalloIsBack]

How dare you Europeans complain?

Where was your conscience when Europeans enslaved and colonized entire continents of Africa and Asia and killed off millions of native Americans?

there were no conscience and its a still shame and black part of the european history. the native australian, american in south and norht america lving in camps, are drug addicted and alcohol addicted, they loose their culture and have no rights!

the same is now happening with europe, the natives loose their rights, in germany you see everywhere homeless people and they become more and more

[HalloIsBack]

Hallo,

You have a deep problem with Muslims and are probably a closet Islamophobe.

You do nothing but portray Muslims in a negative light.

Yes, there are bad Muslims but does that justify killing them?

All you do on this forum is post negative news about Muslims.


- Articles on ISIS
- Articles on the Taliban
- Islamic extremists here and there

Nothing positive, nothing good.

Though I criticize "Islamists" and "Muslim" regimes I also

- Post photos of Afghanistan
- News about the Pashto language.
- News about positive developments in Afghanistan.("Afghanistan Focus Thread")

You are angry with this thread because despite your agenda of vilifying Muslims and making us ashamed to be Muslims and then hiding behind the claim of being against "Islamists", not Muslims this thread - you are worried - is damaging your "hard work" of persistently vilifying Muslims.

On this thread, Muslims are shown as human beings.

On this thread it can be seen that Muslims too are victims and suffer.

You are thus angry and trying to sabotage this thread and make it a thread about vilifying Muslims by using your "anti-Islamist" tactic.

Anyone can see on this thread that I have been reasonable. I have stated:

- western countries are tolerant

- There are problems with Muslims

- Jews and Muslims should work together

- People should be free to have intellectual criticism of Islam

However despite this balanced approach, this is not enough for you and there is no acceptance on your part of the suffering of Muslims. You have now had another outburst and rant in very poor (difficult to understand) English.

We all know that you want to do nothing but to show Islam and Muslims are nothing but bad.



If Muslims were as bad as you claim, then why are you constantly hanging around them as we would believe if we swallowed all the "stories" you tell us about "this Muslim/Islamist, I knew did this and that."

We all know that you want us to be ashamed to be Muslims.

Sorry not going to work. I am a proud Muslim Alhamdulilah, and I am going to place you on ignore as I don't want to read your Islamophobic drivel.

Stop disrupting and sabotaging my threads, you have enough of your own "Muslim terrorist" threads to worry about.

my last anti-islam thread

http://www.pashtunforums.com/showthread.php?t=45893

i already posted some of my so called anti-islam threads shoudl i post more of them

if you dont liek wehn i post in your threads then jsut say it that's all

i odnt have any problesm with muslems and jsut read it again i say so called muslems, i always dsistinguish

if you have problem with my english just ask! don't worry i dont bite!

[HalloIsBack]

Hallo,

You have a deep problem with Muslims and are probably a closet Islamophobe.

ehm no! i dont have any problem with moslem also not with you you are one of my favourite users on pf and i hope it will stay int his way

You do nothing but portray Muslims in a negative light.

i portray only islamsit in their true face and always mention their conenctions to the west and the double face of the west
do you need some of the links?

Yes, there are bad Muslims but does that justify killing them?

no it doesnt! just show me one post that i say i justify the killing of them!

All you do on this forum is post negative news about Muslims.
nope! negative only about islamists, just show me one thread i portray muslems as bad!


- Articles on ISIS
- Articles on the Taliban
- Islamic extremists here and there

i post also other things and i do lots of jokes but maybe you dont read them, should i colelct ehm and send to you?

Nothing positive, nothing good.

hmm maybe i'am a depressive person but i post also good things and make jokes, i'm a person who prefer to live int he reality!

Though I criticize "Islamists" and "Muslim" regimes I also

- Post photos of Afghanistan
- News about the Pashto language.
- News about positive developments in Afghanistan.("Afghanistan Focus Thread")

thanks as you have probably seeni liked soem of the pics!

You are angry with this thread because despite your agenda of vilifying Muslims and making us ashamed to be Muslims and then hiding behind the claim of being against "Islamists", not Muslims this thread - you are worried - is damaging your "hard work" of persistently vilifying Muslims.

On this thread, Muslims are shown as human beings.

On this thread it can be seen that Muslims too are victims and suffer.

You are thus angry and trying to sabotage this thread and make it a thread about vilifying Muslims by using your "anti-Islamist" tactic.

Anyone can see on this thread that I have been reasonable. I have stated:

- western countries are tolerant

- There are problems with Muslims

- Jews and Muslims should work together

- People should be free to have intellectual criticism of Islam

However despite this balanced approach, this is not enough for you and there is no acceptance on your part of the suffering of Muslims. You have now had another outburst and rant in very poor (difficult to understand) English.


We all know that you want to do nothing but to show Islam and Muslims are nothing but bad.



If Muslims were as bad as you claim, then why are you constantly hanging around them as we would believe if we swallowed all the "stories" you tell us about "this Muslim/Islamist, I knew did this and that."

We all know that you want us to be ashamed to be Muslims.

Sorry not going to work. I am a proud Muslim Alhamdulilah, and I am going to place you on ignore as I don't want to read your Islamophobic drivel.

Stop disrupting and sabotaging my threads, you have enough of your own "Muslim terrorist" threads to worry about.

http://www.pashtunforums.com/showthread.php?t=45893

please read my posts and thread i always critisize the double face of west

just show me one post i talk bad about moslems!

i contribute a lot to this forum: share books, attac centcom etc.

[Bengal_Tiger]

The purpose of this thread is to talk about Islamophobia.

That is to talk about how we can help those Muslims suffering from hate and not to promote and increase hatred of Muslims.

* * * * * *

Non-Muslims too must be respected including in Muslim lands where they must be protected from radical "Islamist" groups.

However it is clear that a certain Islamophobe on this forum is not interested in people knowing that Muslims too are human beings and suffer from hatred but only wants to vilify Muslims, using the "Islamist" card.

[MENTION=1068]gadoonwal[/MENTION]

Please could you monitor this thread and also delete all off-topic, insulting or Islamophobic content from here.

Manana.

[Bengal_Tiger]

The murder of Ahmed Al-Jumaili in Texas should be a front-page story

Updated by Max Fisher on March 7, 2015, 2:54 p.m. ET @Max_Fisher max@vox.com


In the quiet moments before Ahmed Al-Jumaili died, he and his wife stepped out of her family's apartment, in a small complex in a suburb of Dallas, to photograph the first snowfall he'd ever seen.

Al-Jumaili had hesitated to leave his home in Iraq, but his wife had urged him to come to the US, where he'd be safer. She'd gone ahead to Dallas not long after their 2013 marriage, but he stayed in Iraq to work and save for their new life. Finally, last month, he followed her to Texas, where she had family, and left behind the chaos of Iraq.

On Thursday, the last night of his life, three and a half inches of snow fell on Dallas, the most since 1942. It was almost midnight when he and his wife stood outside to take photos of this new sight, in the country that was to be his new home. As they lingered, what residents would later describe to police as two to four men, moving on foot, entered the small complex. One or more of the men raised a rifle and shot Al-Jumaili. Police would later find bullets lodged in nearby cars as well. He died a few hours later at a nearby hospital; he was 36 years old and had been in the US for three weeks.

An echo of Chapel Hill's murders, and the silence that first greeted them



Neither police nor Al-Jumaili's family are yet claiming a motive, but focus has naturally fallen on the growing trend of violence against Muslims in the United States. Dallas Police Major Jeff Cotner said police considered hate crime a "possibility." A local Methodist pastor, as well as a representative from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have both said the local community already fears as much.

And yet Al-Jumaili's killing has received strikingly little attention, other than a few mostly brief media reports, and the statements of faith leaders in Dallas hinting at a climate of hostility toward Muslims there.

This is a silence that has accompanied the recent wave of hostility against Muslims in America. Just three weeks earlier, when a man in Chapel Hill gunned down three Muslim-American college students, it took a grassroots social media campaign — #MuslimLivesMatter — to compel coverage of murders that were initially treated as a "parking dispute," and of the growing fear that Muslims are made to feel in this country.

Yes, perhaps the murder will turn out to be unrelated to Al-Jumaili's faith or background. It could have been a random attack, or even, as police say they are considering, an accident. But it seems odd that Americans, who pride themselves on inclusiveness and tolerance, would be so blithe and so uninterested that, in a time of increasingly overt hatred toward a minority group, yet another member of that group has been murdered for no apparent reason, in his third week in this country, while photographing snow with his wife.



When Ahmed Al-Jumaili left Iraq for America, in February, his wife Zahara greeted him with a homemade sign: "I've waited 460 days, 11,040 hour, 662,440 minuts for this moment. Welcome home." The English that was to be their new language was imperfect, but the expression on Zahara's face universally recognizable.

Whether he knew it or not, Al-Jumaili was also arriving in Dallas at a moment when hatred of Muslims was spilling over. A few weeks earlier, in the nearby suburb of Dallas, thousands of local residents had gathered to protest a Muslim community conference held at a local event center. Meant to raise money to build a center dedicated to promoting tolerance, it was organized by the local school system and called "Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate."

Protesters waved anti-Muslim signs and American flags for hours, surrounding roads and sidewalks leading to the conference and forcing local Muslim families who attended to endure a gauntlet of hate. "Go home and take Obama with you," one sign read. Many referenced the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

"We don't want them here," a woman at the protests told a local TV reporter. One man explained, "We're here to stand up for the American way of life from a faction of people who are trying to destroy us."

What happened a few weeks later, when unknown men entered Al-Jumaili's apartment complex and killed him, might have had nothing to do with those protests. But the possibility that it wasn't a coincidence has received strangely little attention.

After the murder, a local Methodist pastor named Wes Magruder told the Los Angeles Times that he and others in his community feared a connection.

"There are more and more Iraqis coming here to Texas," Magruder told the newspaper.

A local representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Alia Salem, was more circumspect about suggesting a motive, but made what is in some ways the more salient point: that Muslims in the area, and in America, are increasingly made to live in fear of violence.

"Because of recent incidents targeting American Muslims, including the murder of three young Muslims in North Carolina, we urge law enforcement authorities to address community concerns about a motive in this case," she said.

Salem has set up a crowd-funding page to raise money for Zahara, who had planned to rely on her husband for financial support. What else can they do?

A wave of hatred is becoming a wave of violence


Alia Salem's concern, that the murder will deepen fear among American Muslims for their safety, even if it was not a hate crime, makes more sense if you consider the broader context.

The rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and attendant media coverage, has coincided with Islamophobia's growing acceptance in mainstream American discourse.

Media outlets, particularly on TV, are increasingly promoting overt bigotry against Muslims, stating over and over that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that peaceful Muslims are somehow to blame for ISIS. Hateful stereotypes are treated as fair game; the question of whether Muslims are somehow lesser human beings is raised as a valid or even necessary debate.

The politics of Islamophobia are ascendent as well. These attitudes initially spiked after President Obama's election — a continuation of the dogwhistle politics that Obama is a secret Muslim, or at least suspiciously un-hostile toward Islam — but are now resurfacing. State legislatures are passing laws banning "sharia" or "foreign law," a barely-veiled expression of official legislative hostility to Islam and to Muslim-American communities.

Elements of the Republican party have been hijacked, at state and national levels, by a fringe group of anti-Muslim activists who see Islam itself as a threat. While some leading Republicans resist their agenda, others embrace it; former Louisiana Governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal has falsely claimed that Muslims in the UK have set up "no-go zones" that police refuse to enter and where sharia law prevails, and that Muslim immigrants coming to the US are an "invasion" and "colonization."

In January, Warner Brothers released American Sniper, an Iraq War film that portrays Iraqis as an undifferentiated mass of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers who can only be confronted with violence. In one scene, the film's protagonist and namesake shoots an Iraqi woman and child to death — an act the film tacitly approves by later showing them as having carried a grenade. The morality of killing Iraqi civilians is raised only so that the hero protagonist can shout down whoever has had the gall to question his decisions by explaining that those civilians were no innocents. The film went on to become one of the most successful war films in American history, to be nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, and to inspire a wave of death threats against Muslims and Arabs.

These sentiments are translating into physical violence. Thankfully, so far most of that violence has targeted Islamic buildings rather than people — a series of mosques and Islamic cemeteries have been vandalized — though even this is rightly perceived by Muslims as a threat of more deadly attacks.

In November, someone opened fire on a California mosque as several worshippers prayed inside. In December, a man in Kansas City wrote on his SUV that the Koran was a "disease worse than Ebola," then drove it into a 15-year-old Muslim boy in front of a local mosque, severing his legs and killing him. Then the Chapel Hill murders. And now this.

In late January, shortly before Al-Jumaili arrived in Dallas, a state legislator from a different part of Texas protested the state capital's Muslim Capitol Day, meant to promote tolerance, by demanding that any Muslim "publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws" before entering her office. "We will see how long they stay in my office," she said.

Her stunt likely seemed silly to many Americans — another far-flung legislator saying something outlandish — but it was surely not perceived as such by the 2.6 million Muslims in America, for whom such statements are neither isolated nor fringe at all, but rather part of a concerted and deliberate campaign to promote anti-Muslim fear and hatred that has coincided with anti-Muslim violence.

Ahmed Al-Jumaili's murder should concern all Americans. Why doesn't it?



While Muslim American circles are acutely aware of the growing hostility and even danger facing them and their families, this has received less attention in American media and politics than one might expect.

The absence of concern may be easier to see if you consider, briefly, how we might view these killings if the identities of the killers and their victims were reversed.

If Islam had been the religion of the shooter rather than the religion of the victim, if police suspected a motivation of Islamic extremism rather than a possible motivation of anti-Muslim extremism, the murder would have been enormous national news. But because the shooter was perhaps instead motivated by extremist Islamophobia (again, at this point an unconfirmed but widespread perception), and because it was the victim rather than the killer who was Muslim, it hardly caused a blip.

In February, when a man known for railing against religion murdered the three Muslim-American college students in Chapel Hill, Muslim-Americans asked on social media why the crime was not considered an act of terrorism. Had the killer been a Muslim who killed three non-Muslim with an apparent religious motivation, it would have been instantly labeled as terrorism - and there would surely be a beltway political controversy if President Obama failed to denounce it as such within hours. But because the religious identities were reversed in this case, it did not "count" as terrorism, and the press has shown very little interest in compelling a response from the White House.

In Dallas, the killer or killers' names are not yet known, and so there are no clues to motivation beyond the larger climate of anti-Muslim hate that has pervaded the US, including Dallas, and the absence of any evidence suggesting a different motivation. All the same, Muslim-Americans could not be blamed for asking the same questions they asked after Chapel Hill. Why do so many Americans seem so unconcerned by this? Would this wave of hate and violence be so ignored if it were targeting Christians or Jews, and if not then why do our lives matter less?

Those in America who truly hate Islam enough to use violence are a tiny fringe. Still, the problem of Islamophobia in America is larger than them, and it would be wrong to focus only on those most extreme voices. So too would it be wrong to focus only on those in more powerful positions, the Bill Mahers and Bobby Jindals who use their platforms to push an Islamophobia that is less extreme but still encourages those who take it a step further.

In many ways, the onus of responsibility lies with the larger mainstream that neither promotes nor resists Islamophobia, that immediately classifies the murder of three Muslim-American students as a "parking dispute" and doesn't bother to even acknowledge the dead-of-night murder of Al-Jumaili. The absence of concern for or even knowledge about the rising wave of anti-Muslim hatred, deliberately or not, enables it to proceed.

Americans have a national responsibility to protect their own. Even if it turns out that Al-Jumaili's death had nothing to do with his religion, it is at this point a very real possibility that he was another Muslim targeted in the United States for this faith, and the national shrug that has met this possibility — the fact that most Americans have no idea this man was shot to death on Thursday night while photographing his first snow — shows that we, as a country, are not fulfilling that responsibility.

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/7/8165583/ahmed-al-jumaili-killed-texas

[Bengal_Tiger]

Ku Klux Klan Fliers Promoting Islamophobia Found In Washington State Neighborhood

The Huffington Post | By Julia Craven
Email
Posted: 03/02/2015 2:50 pm EST Updated: 03/02/2015 2:59 pm EST

Ku Klux Klan fliers are rattling a city in Washington state, after residents found the anti-Muslim propaganda thrown in their driveways last month.

“You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake!” read the front of the fliers, while the back contained Islamophobic hate speech, according to the local NBC affiliate, KHQ-TV.

In January, around 65 fliers were discovered on residents' windshields in an apartment complex in Idaho, not far from Millwood. Local authorities said no one group was singled out on those fliers and that suspects could face charges that include placing propaganda on private property charges.


Klansmen throwing fliers containing racist language is not a new concept. The practice holds some historical significance and has been a means of terrorizing communities and recruiting new members.

Fliers similar to the ones found in Millwood were discovered in Pineville, Louisiana, last month; a Chicago suburb in 2013; St. Louis in 2014 and Rockledge, Florida -- a Latino neighborhood -- last year.

“It’s just shocking,” Deanna Cuevas, a longtime resident of Millwood, said of the most recent incident in an interview with KHQ-TV. “This has never happened in our neighborhood.”

Cuevas daughter, Teresa, went around the neighborhood trashing each flier she could find.

“I did that because I don't want them to feel the same upset and hurt that I felt,” she told KHQ 06. “We don't need children coming and seeing this. This is not okay. It's disgusting.”

This isn't the first action the KKK has taken against American Muslims.

In 2013, an anti-Muslim terrorism plot led by a reputed Klansman, Glendon Scott Crawford, was stopped by FBI agents. Crawford scouted mosques and Islamic centers as “viable targets” for a weapon he believed could kill Muslims via radiation poisoning, according to CAIR.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/02/kkk-fliers-washington_n_6785614.html

The KKK, a racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate organization.





Klansmen, neo-Nazis in America now use euphemisms such as "white nationalist", "racial realist" and other phrases to disguise their white supremacist, anti-black agenda. They are anti-Islamic and consider any white person who is Muslim to be non-white e.g. Bosnians, Albanians.

[Bengal_Tiger]

[Bengal_Tiger]

[Bengal_Tiger]

#IStandWithMariam

[Bengal_Tiger]

#IstandwithMariam: Hate groups launch global attack on Muslim advocate after singlet protest

Lateline By John Stewart

Updated about 9 hours ago



PHOTO: Muslim lawyer and community advocate Mariam Veiszadeh has been the target of anti-Islam hate campaigns.


Overseas race hate groups are intensifying their attacks on a Muslim community advocate, five months after she protested against the sale of a "bigoted" singlet by Woolworths.

In October, Mariam Veiszadeh was one of many Twitter users to publicly object to the sale of the singlet, which displayed an Australian flag and the words "If you don't love it, leave".

At the time Ms Veiszadeh received hundreds of abusive social media comments, but after Woolworths removed the singlet from the Cairns store the story seemed to fizzle out.

However months later, she has received a barrage of death threats and racial abuse.

Race hate groups, led by the American blog site The Daily Stormer, are urging people around the world to use social media to attack Ms Veiszadeh.

The attacks include hundreds of tweets, Facebook messages and cropped images of Ms Veiszadeh holding a pig or buried in sand.

"The most recent abuse I have received was sparked by a neo-Nazi website based in the US who I believe has ties to groups here," she said.

"They published an incredibly vile article devoting a great deal of attention to me, urging their 5,000 followers to send me as many hateful, religiously motivated offensive tweets as possible."

"I went to Twitter and basically just tweeted that I felt outraged that Woolies were allegedly selling what seemed like a bigoted message on a singlet," Ms Veiszadeh said.

"The sentiments that I expressed that day on Twitter were expressed by thousands of other people, but it seemed that people took offence to what I said.

"I have unfortunately been on the receiving end of death threats that have come my way but I am determined to keep fighting against it."

Attacks prompt #IstandwithMariam movement

In the aftermath of the Sydney siege in December, Ms Veiszadeh was also part of the #Illridewithyou movement which prompted nearly 120,000 tweets in support of Muslim Australians.

Now the hashtag #IstandwithMariam has become the new rallying point for confronting anti-Islamic attacks on social media.

'If you don't love it, leave' singlet


PHOTO: The 'If you don't love it, leave' singlet was sold in a Woolworths store in Cairns in far north Queensland.

"The hashtag #IstandwithMariam was started by my friend Ruth and has taken off and has been trending across Australia," Ms Veiszadeh said.

"The support has been absolutely overwhelming. The outpouring of support and love that has come my way as a result has been extremely heartwarming."

Last year, Ms Veiszadeh created the Islamophobia Register Australia page on Facebook so attacks against Australian Muslims could be recorded.

The site records incidents involving social media, verbal and physical attacks against Muslim people, and challenges race hate groups in Australia and overseas.

Ms Veiszadeh said the attacks were wearing her down but she was determined not to be silenced.

"The months of ongoing cyber bullying has definitely taken a personal toll and I'd be lying if I suggested that it hadn't," she said.

"It has affected my physical and mental health, but in saying that it's also made me more determined than ever to continue to fight against it because their stated objective is to silence me and my stated objective is to do the opposite."

She said while she was determined to keep fighting online bigotry, she was also a realist.

"I must say that I can definitely see light at the end of the tunnel, but I'm not delusional and I know it's going to be a very long journey," she said.

"I think what makes this task even more difficult is when people in positions of power seek to peddle people's prejudices rather than challenge them.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-09/hate-groups-launch-global-attack-on-muslim-advocate/6284450

[Bengal_Tiger]

[Bengal_Tiger]

Rising Islamophobia ‘threat to UK tourism, investment’




Men with their faces covered attend a demonstration by supporters of the Pegida movement in Newcastle, northern England, Feb. 28, 2015. (Reuters)

By Ben Flanagan | Al Arabiya News, London

Wednesday, 11 March 2015

The rising tide of Islamophobia in the UK, stoked by the mainstream media, poses a direct threat to the country’s $190 billion tourism economy and Muslim investment in Britain, experts warn.

The United Kingdom is currently one of the most popular global destinations for Muslim travellers, while Gulf investors have lavished billions of dollars on prime London real estate and stakes in key British businesses.

But some warn that the UK stands to lose this favored status due to a rise in Islamophobic sentiment, public support for anti-Muslim right-wing groups, soaring hate crime figures and antagonistic media coverage.

One U.S.-based academic, who studies Muslim communities in the West and spent his childhood in the UK, said that Islamophobia in the UK is no longer confined to extreme neo-fascist groups – and was actually becoming part of the ‘establishment.’

Saeed Khan – lecturer in the Department of Near East & Asian Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches Islamic and Middle East History, Islamic Civilizations and History of Islamic Political Thought – said this stands to impact tourism and investment.

“Islamophobia is no longer confined to just these fringe elements. We find politicians, opinion-makers and journalists who are not simply doing the bidding of these fringe groups, but in many ways are championing their rhetoric in demonizing Muslims,” Khan told Al Arabiya News. “That’s deeply disturbing and it will have an impact.”

He said a recent article in The Telegraph was “redolent of the screed advanced by some politicians and public voices in the U.S., that the governments of each respective country are infiltrated by Muslim extremists.”

The article, he said, “cast a rather wide net across a whole cadre of British Muslims actively engaged with the UK government but implying that they are either disloyal or have some hidden agenda that might facilitate extremism.”

Similarly, he said, a recent article in The Times “placed an unreasonable onus on Muslims to "flush out" killers and extremists, suggesting they have some capability that the UK government does not possess or worse, that they are purposely avoiding doing so because they are somehow sympathetic to the extremist agenda.”

Khan said there has “always been a latent Islamophobia” in the UK, but said economic concerns, fears over the future of Europe, as well as the rise of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris have all contributed to the recent upsurge.

Rising Islamophobia poses a threat even to investment from Gulf states such as Qatar, which has bought up several prime areas of London and high-profile buildings such as The Shard skyscraper, Khan added.

“Those kinds of investments are going to be at risk if people feel as though England is now becoming a hostile environment,” said Khan.

“The Gulf Arabs have always felt a natural affinity toward the British… But we’re no longer in 1971 and as that generation is starting to wane, new generations are coming up who don’t have that sense of cultural affinity or natural bond. So for them the issues of investment and affinity are much more negotiable.”


‘Unprecedented’ Islamophobia

Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a London-based advocacy group, agreed that both tourism and investment are at risk.

“People don’t normally want to go somewhere they are not wanted,” he said.

Shadjareh said hate crime against Muslims is at “unprecedented” levels in the UK, with what gets reported to the authorities representing just the “tip of the iceberg”.

“It’s not just Islamophobia that is coming from the extreme right, it’s Islamophobia coming from the media,” he told Al Arabiya News.

That could see a dip in both investment and tourism from the Muslim world, Shadjareh warned.

Individuals and smaller investors in property could be particularly affected by the negative sentiment in the country, he said.

“People make investments when they feel secure,” he said. “When you see these abuses, it’s going to have an impact on your decision.”


Muslims under attack

The UK has seen soaring levels of hate crimes across categories including race, religion and sexual orientation. In England and Wales there were a total of 46,919 hate-crime offences in the 12 months to April 2014, compared to 43,927 the preceding year.

An anti-Islamic mood has been spreading across Europe, with Muslim communities particularly wary following the attack in January on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

The far-right Germany group Pegida – which is against the so-called “Islamisation of the West” – held its first UK demonstration in February, although the reported 375 supporters were far outnumbered by the 2,000 to 3,000 who assembled to oppose the group.

An estimated 1.3 million Muslim travellers visited the UK in 2014, making the country the third most popular among the non-Organisation of Islamic Cooperation states, according to the MasterCard-CrescentRating Global Muslim Travel Index 2015, published earlier this month.

But other commentators said tourism numbers may be hit due to news of rising Islamophobia and hate crimes in the UK.

Rafi-uddin Shikoh, the New York-based chief executive and managing director of DinarStandard, a research and advisory firm that covers Muslim tourism and Islamic finance, made a parallel with the decline in Muslim tourism to the United States after 9/11.

While the UK, and especially London remains a popular destination among Muslim travelers, perceptions of negative sentiment against Islam and hate crimes could have an impact, said Shikoh.

“It certainly weighs into their decision, thinking whether their wives and daughters will be harassed,” he said. “If these stories of hate crimes are sustained... I believe it will have an impact on tourism.”

Visit Britain, the UK’s national tourism agency, did not respond to a request for comment on the issue. But Anas Kasak, chief marketing officer at CrescentRating – a specialist in ‘halal travel’ – said he expects the UK to remain a very popular destination. “The Muslim travel sector will continue to grow as long as the economy continues to grow,” he told Al Arabiya News.



Infographic: The Muslim travel boom. (Design by Farwa Rizwan/ Al Arabiya News)



Media fuelling the fire

Talha Ahmad, chair of the membership committee at the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), said that rising Islamophobia would certainly not help attract tourists to the UK, but he does not see it having a big impact.

“Although Islamophobia is on the rise, I’m proud to be British and I feel very safe here,” he said. “There is a growing number of affluent Muslims in Britain. And the Muslim community certainly gives Britain an advantage in terms of attracting investment and tourism.”

That is despite the often negative UK media coverage concerning Muslims, he added.

“There is a whole body of evidence to suggest that Islamophobia is on the rise, and that the media is feeding that,” Ahmad said.

He pointed to the recent scandals involving ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, in which groups of men in areas such as Rotherham, Derby, Bristol and Oxfordshire were accused of raping thousands of children.

Mr Ahmad said that linking such a story to the Muslim faith was not fair. “I don’t see how the perpetrators’ religious faith is relevant, unless they were using their faith as a cover,” he said.

However, in some instances religion did come into the story, given that some politicians blamed “institutionalized political correctness” – a reluctance held by authorities to challenge those in ethnic communities – as being one factor behind why the horrific child abuse in Rotherham was not exposed earlier.

Shikoh agreed that the press has played a part in perpetrating negative perceptions about Islam. He pointed to the mainstream media’s widespread use of the phrase “Islamic State” to describe the extremist rebel group, which he said panders to their cause.

“That is a prime example of the unfairness. When everyone’s screaming, ‘they are not Islamic, they don’t represent Muslims’… why call them the Islamic State?,” he told Al Arabiya News.

“If a pedophile says ‘call me a good child Samaritan’, you’re not going to. You’d call them a criminal. So if someone is doing horrific things and says ‘please call us the noble people of the Islamic State’, why would you do that?”

Last Update: Wednesday, 11 March 2015

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/analysis/2015/03/11/Rising-Islamophobia-threat-to-UK-tourism-investment-.html

[MENTION=1753]Manzareh[/MENTION] [MENTION=5723]Kushan Prince[/MENTION]

[Brown Skinned Savage]

It is Islamismphobia not Islamophobia.

Terrorism is not war. wars are fought by professional armies not by these hooligans killing always innocent non combatant people. Fear of the west is justified. These tugs want to implement 7th century desert law, culture and society in 21st century in the developed world.

That's not really true though; before the 20th century the concept of "professional army" was very murky. Many wars used peasants and conscripts or rural volunteers. This is especially true among Pashtuns and Pashtun leaders who employed Tribal Lashkars.

Also Islamism, Islam, this is splitting hairs; everyone knows they're identical, the attempt to represent "Islamism" as some political form of Islam is just to pacify a worldwide Muslim backlash. Islam is an intrinsically political ideology. The evidence from Early Islamic history is evidence of this.

[Black Pakistani]

There is no future for us here in the UK.
I believe that its time we should go back to our ancestral countries.