China, under growing global pressure over its treatment of a Muslim minority in its far west, is mounting an unprecedented and aggressive campaign to push back, including explicit attacks on women who have made claims of abuse. As allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang mount, with a growing number …
Read More »Professors at Bristol University defend academic freedom against anti-Semiticism charge
Academics at the University of Bristol have urged it to abide by academic freedom and resist firing one of its lecturers, David Miller, who has been accused of anti-Semitism. A professor of political sociology, Miller said Israel wants to “impose its will all over the world,” and it is “fundamental …
Read More »Israel finally agrees to compensate Yemeni Jews for their stolen babies
Israel said Monday it will compensate families whose children were taken from their parents in the early years after the state was founded, in a major development in the so-called “stolen babies” affair. Activists and family members have for decades charged that up to several thousand babies were taken in …
Read More »BBC Radio falls afoul of Islamophobic practices
The BBC said on Friday the corporation will “reflect” on a radio interview with the first female secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, after concerns were raised about its tone. The response came after 200 people, including politicians, journalists and academics, this week signed an open letter to the …
Read More »Australia continues war with facebook, Canada joins fight
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison vowed on Friday to press ahead with laws to force Facebook Inc to pay news outlets for content, saying he had received support from world leaders after the social media giant blacked out all media. Facebook stripped the pages of domestic and foreign news outlets …
Read More »English football becomes latest victim of social media hate wave
Death threats. Racist abuse. Sexist slurs. And social media accounts allowed to stay active even after spreading bile. English football has reached breaking point with players, coaches, referees and officials aghast at the ongoing proliferation of hate aimed at them on Instagram and Twitter. A week that began with the …
Read More »Social media double-standards stretch from US to France to India
Facebook Inc. said on Wednesday it would temporarily reduce political content appearing on New Feeds for some users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week and in the United States within the coming weeks. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in January that he wanted to “turn down the temperature” …
Read More »US Navy worried about increased incidence of racism
The U.S. Navy’s top admiral on Tuesday condemned two new racist incidents involving hate symbols on warships, which sources said included a noose that was left on a Black sailor’s bed. The incidents, which occurred in recent weeks, underscore deep concerns about racism in the ranks. The cases come as …
Read More »Florida lawyers accuse social media of censorship of conservatives
Florida lawmakers, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, intensified their battle with Facebook, Twitter and Silicon Valley when they announced new proposals Tuesday aimed at reigning in platforms they accuse of squelching the free speech of conservatives. “Over the years, these platforms have changed from neutral platforms that provide Americans with the …
Read More »Israel continues to demolish Bedouin camps in West Bank
Israel has begun demolishing a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank for the second time in three months, in what a rights group called an attempt to displace an entire Palestinian community from the area. Israeli authorities said the village of Khirbet Humsah, in the northern West Bank’s Jordan …
Read More »Biden to extend Temporary Protected Status to thousands of Syrians
The administration of President Joe Biden on Friday extended deportation relief for several thousand Syrian immigrants living in the United States, an early move that aligns with his broader pro-immigrant platform. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that acting Secretary David Pekoske would extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for …
Read More »YouTube bans Trump, resticts Giuliani from making money
YouTube has suspended Donald Trump indefinitely from the platform and said it will also prevent the former president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani from being able to monetize his clips, US media reported. It comes a week after the social media giant confirmed it would extend a ban on Trump’s channel — …
Read More »Biden planning to overturn Trump’s ‘draconian’ immigration policies
The United States plans to reverse the Trump administration’s “draconian” immigration approach while working on policies addressing the causes of migration, President Joe Biden told his Mexican counterpart, the White House said on Saturday. In a Friday call with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Biden outlined his plan to …
Read More »UK Muslim food bank to combat poverty, hunger on homefront
A leading figure in the UK’s Muslim community has been appointed to chair one of the country’s largest independent food banks, vowing to confront the poverty that has spiked in his community since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. British-Pakistani Londoner Muddassar Ahmed rose to prominence by heading one of …
Read More »Rohingya refugee camps on fire, thousands stranded
A huge fire swept through the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh in the early hours of Thursday, the United Nations said, destroying homes belonging to thousands of people. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said more than 550 shelters home to around 3,500 people were either totally or partially destroyed …
Read More »Mexican president promises not to intervene in internal dispute in US
Mexico’s president on Thursday said conflicts should be resolved peacefully in response to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday by hundreds of supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump seeking to overturn his election defeat. Speaking at a regular news briefing, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his government …
Read More »Rouhani laments the state of Western democracy
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday that the chaos unleashed on the US Capitol by US counterpart Donald Trump’s supporters exposed the fragility of Western democracy. “What we saw in the United States yesterday (Wednesday) evening and today shows above all how fragile and vulnerable Western democracy is,” Rouhani said …
Read More »Israel condemns BBC for admitting Jesus (PBUH) was Palestinian
Israeli media have lashed out at BBC for airing a program on Jesus in which it claimed he was a Palestinian. The BBC World Service radio program Heart and Soul aired a program on December 18 in which presenter Robert Beckford noted that artistic depictions of Jesus as blonde and …
Read More »President Macron goes from Islamophobia to anti-Semitism
French President Emmanuel Macron was criticized on Monday due to comments on Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s Nazi collaborationist wartime leader during the German Occupation, suggesting that one must separate his heroism during World War I from his acts during the Second World War, as reported by Algemeiner. In reaction to …
Read More »Fines, prison sentences face hate speech offenders in UAE
The UAE Prosecution has released a video explaining the penalty for possession and distribution of documents, publications and recordings for provoking hate speech. In a tweet by barq, the video explains that provoking hate speech is a crime punishable by law. According to Article 12 of the Federal Decree Law …
Read More »German rightwingers arming themselves, warn Austrian police
Austrian police seized a huge cache of automatic weapons, explosives and hand grenades intended to arm right-wing extremist groups in Germany, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said on Saturday. Five people were arrested following a series of house searches, Nehammer told a press conference in Vienna. “We have struck a massive …
Read More »Pakistani movie explores social media hate crimes
The creator of an animated film on blasphemy in Pakistan is hoping it will prompt discussion on tolerance at a time that rights advocates say hate speech on social media is increasingly triggering violence. The short film “Swipe” is about a boy obsessed with a hypothetical smartphone app that allows …
Read More »New Zealand security services admit they ignored Islmophobic threats
New Zealand security agencies were “almost exclusively” focused on the perceived threat of Islamist terrorism before a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers last year, a report into the country’s worst massacre found. The Royal Commission of Inquiry also criticised police for failing to enforce proper checks when granting …
Read More »Trump administration ordered to reinstate Dreamers protections
In a rebuke to President Donald Trump’s administration, a judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to reopen to first-time applicants a program that protects from deportation and grants work permits to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who live in the United States unlawfully after arriving as children. The action …
Read More »Gender Benders: A Follow-Up on Mackenzie Davis and the Remakings of the Female Other – PART I
By Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, “My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, …
Read More »Afghan immigrant exposes French police brutality
Murtaza Khademi left his home in Afghanistan and smuggled himself into France because he thought he would be safe, but this week he encountered a different side of Europe: a police operation in which, he says, he was beaten with a truncheon. “The police forces had no mercy. We thought …
Read More »Poll reveals mistrust over Islamophobia in UK Labour Party
More than half of Muslim members of the UK’s main opposition Labour Party question its leaders’ ability to tackle Islamophobia, a new survey has found. The study, conducted by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN), revealed that 55 percent of Muslim members said they do not “trust the leadership to tackle …
Read More »Saudi embassy in Netherlands fired at
A gun attack on the Saudi Embassy in the Netherlands was on Thursday condemned by Islamic organizations and the international community. Shots were fired at the Kingdom’s diplomatic mission in The Hague, a day after a bomb attack at a World War I remembrance service in Jeddah injured at least …
Read More »Outside the Pale: Science Fiction and Sexual Politics beyond the American Quarter
By Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD I advise you to throw out altogether § 3—the “demand (women’s) for freedom of love”. That is not really a proletarian but a bourgeois demand. — Vladimir Lenin, in a letter to Inessa Armand, dated 17 January 1915 For once I’m …
Read More »American convicted of burning black churchs in racist upsurge
A young white man was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison by a federal court in Lafayette, Louisiana after he pleaded guilty to setting three historically Black churches on fire. Federal District Judge Robert Summerhays sentenced Holden Matthews to 25 years but gave him 18 months credit for …
Read More »In free speech hypocrisy, Syrians persecuted in Germany over Macron satire
German police are investigating a Syrian satirist who filmed a video in a Berlin street in which, dressed in an Arab robe and turban, he flogged a handcuffed man wearing a mask depicting French President Emmanuel Macron. The video also showed Fayez Kanfash dragging the Macron character on a leash …
Read More »Israelis continue to burn Palestinian olive trees
For many West Bank Palestinians, the olive tree is both a revered cultural emblem and an economic necessity – but it has also become a focal point of a struggle between them and Israeli settlers for a land they both claim. More than 1,000 trees owned by Palestinian farmers have …
Read More »Imran Khan charges Facebook, Macron with Islamophobic campaigning
Pakistan’s prime minister has appealed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to ban Islamophobic content on the site, warning of an increase in radicalisation amongst Muslims, the government said on Sunday. In a letter, which the Pakistani government posted on Twitter, Imran Khan said that “growing Islamophobia” was encouraging extremism and …
Read More »US claims racist Trump campaign product of Iranian fake news
Government analysts and private sector investigators were able to rapidly attribute to Iranian hackers a wave of thousands of threatening emails aimed at U.S. voters because of mistakes made in a video attached to some of the messages, according to four people familiar with the matter. Those failures provided a …
Read More »Pop art representation of Muslims still falls short of expectations
In 2017, Emmy-winning actor and activist Riz Ahmed gave a speech in Parliament about diversity on screen. “Representation is not an added thrill [because] what people are looking for is a message that they belong,” he said. Soon after, the Riz test – the equivalent of the Bechdel test for the representation of Muslims in …
Read More »Trump militia supports indicted in plot against woman governor
Thirteen men, seven of them associated with an anti-government militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen, have been arrested on charges of conspiring to kidnap the Michigan governor, attack the state legislature and threaten law enforcement, prosecutors said on Thursday. The suspects had plotted to abduct Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat …
Read More »Prince Bandar continds offensive against Palestinian rights
Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief and ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, said the kingdom must focus on its own interests and security while supporting the Palestinian cause. In the final episode of a three-part interview with Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television aired on Wednesday, Prince …
Read More »Palestinians to use video surveillance to prove settlers are attacking them
Palestinians are installing a video surveillance system in a remote village in the occupied West Bank to keep an eye on nearby Israeli settlers who they accuse of frequent attacks. The project’s founders hope the closed-circuit television cameras around Kisan, which lies in an area under complete Israeli military control, …
Read More »Columbia College refuses to acknowledge student vote to divest Israel
Two days ago Columbia College undergraduates voted overwhelmingly to divest from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts towards Palestinians under “apartheid” law. The university’s president Lee Bollinger promptly repudiated the vote saying it was a “complex” issue on which no campus consensus exists. Speaking to the …
Read More »Trump finally condemns his white supremacist supporters
President Donald Trump said on Thursday he condemned all white supremacists including the “Proud Boys,” an organization identified as a hate group, further walking back comments he made this week that were viewed as emboldening the group. “I condemn all white supremacists, I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know …
Read More »Syria charges US with strow George Floyd-like strangulation sanctions
Syria’s foreign minister accused U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday of attempting to suffocate Syrians with sanctions “just like George Floyd and others were cruelly suffocated in the United States.” New U.S. sanctions that took effect in June under the so-called Caesar Act have further crippled the war-torn country’s …
Read More »Netflix falls afoul of its libertine tendencies with Islamophobic child sex movie
A campaign waged against Netflix over “Cuties” and the film’s sexualized portrayal of children produced a surge in U.S. subscription cancellations over the weekend, according to research company YipitData. Netflix subscriber churn rates began to rise Sept. 10, the day after the release of “Cuties” on Netflix, when the hashtag …
Read More »The Unruly ‘Tenet’ in the House: Christopher Nolan on Art after-before-after the Empire
I’ve been struggling to write a review of this little sci-fi action masterpiece Tenet (2020) for quite some time now if only because it’s such a hard movie to understand. And I’m saying this as a sci-fi buff whose watched and read his fair share of reverse flow time travel …
Read More »Arab-American victory against Trump racist census policies
Arab American organizations have welcomed a federal court ruling that prevents President Donald Trump from excluding undocumented immigrants from 2020 US Census counts. In particular, he wanted to remove them from population counts that will be used next year to reallocate the number of seats each state gets in the …
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