Islamophobia

[Bengal_Tiger]

Many non-Muslims are opposed to Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and racism.





A Jewish lady stands up to Islamophobia.

Jews have been the victims of massacres, discrimination and persecution for centuries in mainly Christian Europe. Jews are hated by Serb nationalists
who have sworn they will regain Kosovo and expel all Albanian Muslims from there.

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A Bosniak lady prays.

Any sign of practising Islam or any sign of Islam is seized upon by Serb nationalists to justify the murder and expulsion of Muslim Bosniaks as Serb nationalists believe that Europe is a continent for only one religion, Christianity.

Islam is for brown people, Arabs, Bangladeshis, Africans but not for whites, is the view of Serb nationalists and other Islamophobic hate-groups.



A picture from the facebook of IslamBosna.ba.

The EDL are an Islamophobic hate-group who promote hatred of Muslims.

Serb nationalists however did in 1992 what the EDL merely fantasize i.e. slaughter Muslims and destroy mosques.




A Muslim Bosnian woman mourns the dead from the Srebrenica massacre when thousands of thousands of Muslim men and boys were murdered in cold blood by Serb nationalists.

The biggest atrocity in Europe for the past 70 years.



Muslim women the victims of the Srebrenica massacre.

More than any other group of Muslims in the western world the Bosnians have suffered from Islamophobia and genocide and many in Bosnia to this day are fearful of their very survival in a hostile Christian continent which has a history of exterminating Jews and Muslims.

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Reactions to the slaughter of 3 innocent unarmed Muslims from some Islam-hating Americans.

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/06/community-mourns-somali-muslim-death-in-kansas-city-hate

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https://www.facebook.com/americans.against.islamophobia

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Deah Barakat, a victim of Islamophobia.

Barakat lost his life to a hate-filled Islamophobic murderer.

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Islamic Group Reports Racist Graffiti at Sandburg High School

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the graffiti was scrawled on bathroom stalls at the high school.
By Joseph Hosey (Patch Staff)

February 21, 2015 at 12:32am



Islamic Group Reports Racist Graffiti at Sandburg High School
The Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations claims racist graffiti was scrawled on bathroom stalls at Orland Park’s Carl Sandburg High School.

“CAIR-Chicago received multiple complaints from parents about Islamophobic and racist hate graffiti at Sandburg High School in District 230,” the organization said on its website.

“The threats were scrawled on the boys’ bathroom stalls,” according to CAIR-Chicago. “The school did not go on lockdown and parents were not notified.”

CAIR-Chicago said the graffiti included such threats as, “I’ll kill all the arab muslims and islam” and “All Islam will be killed in this school.”

Other messages said, “F--- the Arabs,” “Kill the Arabs,” and, “Death to the Islamic people,” according to CAIR-Chicago.

The organization said it first learned of the graffiti on Feb. 5 and the next day sent a letter to the school demanding a full investigation, as well as the implementation of safety measures, notification of parents, students and staff, and sensitivity training.

According to CAIR-Chicago, “this is at least the second incident involving hate graffiti at the school since January 2015.”

http://patch.com/illinois/tinleypark/islamic-group-reports-racist-graffiti-sandburg-high-school

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Islamophobia is just the latest in a history of US imperialism

Arun Kundnani

February 21, 2015 Updated: February 21, 2015 11:53 AM



Palestinians want role in probing ‘terrorist’ killings of Chapel Hill Muslims
Obama condemns ‘outrageous’ murders of Muslim students
The shooting of three American Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this month has focused attention on anti-Muslim hatred in the US.

There are strong reasons for thinking the suspect, Craig Stephen Hicks, was motivated by anti-Muslim animosity to murder Deah Barakat, 23, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19. The FBI is now investigating the case as a possible hate crime, although initial reports stated the murder may have been about a dispute over parking.

In 2011, I spent a year travelling around the US investigating anti-Muslim prejudice. In a suburban restaurant in Houston, I saw a poster that perfectly captured the nature of the problem. The restaurant owner had used a photograph of a lynching in the early 20th century, featuring a tree, a dead body hanging from a branch and a crowd of white people in the foreground looking jubilant. In place of the black victim of the original image, the face of a stereotypical Arab was superimposed with the caption: “Let’s play cowboys and Iranians.”

It was a disturbing sight. In the same neighbourhood, I had heard stories of teenagers beaten up at school simply for being Arab, of harassment of mosque congregations and of death threats against Muslims aired on local radio stations. It was also disturbing because racist imagery appeared to be a perfectly normal way to decorate a restaurant. But the image was also revealing because it shows anti-Muslim sentiment in the US is part of a longer racial history.

The poster’s caption played on the phrase “cowboys and Indians” and was an implicit celebration of the genocide of America’s indigenous peoples by European settlers, the first act in the racial history of the US and one that continues to haunt an American culture obsessed with enemies at its frontiers.



Likewise, the use of a photo of a lynching ties its meaning to the history of racial segregation after the abolition of slavery, and the ways that violence was used to maintain white supremacy.



Lynching of a black man by white Americans. The man was burnt, this was decades before the emergence of ISIS and their burning of a Jordanian pilot.

Anti-Muslim prejudice is the most recent layer in this history, a reworking and recycling of older logics of oppression. From this perspective, Islamophobia, like other forms of prejudice, should not be seen only as a problem of hate crimes committed by lone extremists. The acts of individual perpetrators can only be made sense of if they are seen as the product of a wider culture, in which glorifying racial violence is acceptable.

All empires require violence to sustain themselves, and the violence perpetrated overseas by imperial powers always flows back, in one form or another, to the “homeland.” In modern times, that violence also always takes on a racial character.

The British Empire relied upon racist ideology to maintain its authority, both domestically and in colonial settings, and particularly in the face of resistance to its rule. Blacks and Asians from the colonies who settled in Britain after the Second World War encountered the racism imperialism had fostered there, persisting long after the British Empire itself no longer existed.

Since the end of the Cold War, US foreign policy planners have regarded the Middle East as their most troublesome territory, where resistance seems to be especially strong against the US’s key regional ally, Israel. Large sections of the US political and cultural elite have turned to racial ways of explaining resistance to its authority. Rather than see the Palestinian movement, for example, as rooted in a struggle against military occupation and for human rights, it has been more convenient to think that Arabs are inherently fanatical. In other words, the problem is their culture, not our politics.

With the War on Terror, that rhetoric was generalised to Muslims as a whole: the religion somehow especially prone to terrorist violence. The US government’s own violence – torture, drone strikes, and military occupations, which result in many times more deaths than “jihadist” terrorism – can then be more easily defended.

Take, for example, the popular US writer Sam Harris, one of the so-called new atheists who seem to have influenced Craig Hicks in Chapel Hill. Harris has said that “Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas” and that “we are misled to think the fundamentalists are the fringe”. He claims human rights problems in what he reductively calls “the Muslim world” are caused by Islam, as if it is a monolith that mechanically drives followers to acts of barbarism.



Islamophobic ideologue, Sam Harris.


But beliefs reflect social and political conditions as much as they shape them. Global opinion polls suggest that whether one thinks that violence against civilians is legitimate, for example, has more to do with political context than religious belief. Such violence is considered more acceptable in the US and Europe than everywhere else in the world.

Indeed, Sam Harris himself has written in support of killing civilians for the beliefs they hold. In his book, The End of Faith, he says that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”. He maintains this is what the US attempted in Afghanistan.

“It is what we and other western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world,” he wrote. “We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”

In this argument, religious belief becomes a proxy for imminent threat in order to justify wars of aggression against a population defined by its religion.

His argument not only provides rhetorical support for wars that have led to the deaths of at least half a million people since the attacks of September 11, 2001, but also gives a rationale for acts of Islamophobic violence at home. Since 2001, dozens of people have been killed in the US by right-wing extremists who have absorbed the racist logic of American imperialism – more than by the “jihadists” regarded as the chief threat of terrorism.

However the online response to the Chapel Hill murders shows there is also another America – one that recently took to the streets to protest against police racism with the slogan #BlackLivesMatter. (This month, the slogan #MuslimLivesMatter also began to trend on Twitter.) For this other America to overcome the US’s long racial history, it will need to understand that Islamophobia is more than the hatred of a small number of individuals, but a system of violence and oppression, inherently connected to imperialism.

Arun Kundnani is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror and teaches at New York University

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/islamophobia-is-just-the-latest-in-a-history-of-us-imperialism#page2

- Islamophobia is a problem which needs to be tackled.

- Black people in the US had the civil rights movement, Jewish people too also had to deal with anti-Semitism, now it is the turn of Muslims in the US and in the rest of the world to deal with Islamophobia.

Suggestions

Here are some suggestions:

- An international anti-Islamophobia day and week.

- Exhibitions by Muslims on these days or week.

- The embassies of Muslim governments co-operating together e.g. Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt etc and taking part in these activities.

- Anti-Islamophobia leaflets and literature to be widely published.

- Anti-Islamophobia seminars and training days.

This is just for starters, much more needs to be done before we get another Bosnia style scenario in the west.

[Bengal_Tiger]

Fight against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia closely tied: Azoulay

Saturday 28 February 2015 - 12:17


Fight against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia closely tied: Azoulay

Bordeaux – The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the fight against Islamophobia, said, Thursday in Bordeaux, HM the King’s Adviser André Azoulay.

Speaking at a conference themed: “Learning to live together” organized by the “Association des 2 Rives” in collaboration with the French Jewish Institutions Representative Council, Azoulay underlined that it is unacceptable that a minority of extremists take Islam as a hostage and link it to violence.

He called for putting an end to the politicization of religion and its exploitation to justify terrorism and killings.

Azoulay also underscored the importance of collective attachment to shared citizenship, freedom and equality as part of mutual respect and adherence to the values of plurality, diversity and modernity.

These values allowing to coexist call for filling the gap between Europe and the Muslim world to share knowledge and culture, he added.

http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2015/02/152756/fight-anti-semitism-islamophobia-closely-tied-azoulay/

[Bengal_Tiger]

Muslim and Jewish women unite on International Women’s Day

North York celebration marks women’s achievements


Jewish and Muslim women will come together to celebrate International Women’s Day Sunday, March 8.

The event, which will be held at Borochov Cultural Centre, 272 Codsell Ave., is sponsored by Na’amat Canada Toronto, Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Women’s Intercultural Network (WIN) and Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims.

Concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Canada and worldwide, the education committee of Na’amat decided their annual International Women’s Day program was an opportune time to reach out to Muslim women, to celebrate women’s achievements together, and to get to know one another.

The event, which will run from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., will include ethnic foods, henna artistry and entertainment.

Awards will also be handed out to Senator Mobina Jaffer, who will be the event’s guest speaker, and to the women of Na’amat Canada Toronto for their volunteer service.

Admission is $10 in advance or $15 at the door, and $5 for students with identification.

http://www.insidetoronto.com/news-story/5458417-muslim-and-jewish-women-unite-on-international-women-s-day/

[Black Pakistani]

Islamophobia seems quite acceptable nowadays. Even people who wouldn't say anything otherwise racist now openly say things that are insulting to Muslims.

Like they say:

"Islam is an idea, you can't be racist to an idea"

But the stuff they say is clearly racist because it is aimed at all "Muslim-looking" (brown) people, if there was a White Muslim they wouldn't say anything.

So the problem is that all Muslims are brown and White people can never be Muslims.
This is the ignorance that maked White people think all Muslims are brown.

We need to get the whitest of the White Muslims and exhibit them publically for all to see that there can indeed be White Western Muslims who are not terrorists.

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