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Despite being full of provable lies, the so-called documentary is receiving uncritical media coverage.

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The spooky comedy franchise may seem an unlikely place to find an ethnicity and faith adviser, but productions are increasingly aware of a duty to make sure communities are truthfully represented

The “sensitivity reader” is a well-established, if controversial, figure in the publishing world, offering advice on whether a book’s content might cause offence. The film and TV industry has also been forced to confront similar issues, with “intimacy coordinators” now widely employed to ensure that filmed sex scenes neither harm the actors nor outrage audiences. Perhaps less well-known, but now gaining ground in film and TV, is the role of a “cultural consultant” – advisers taken on by productions to help them navigate the choppy waters of sensitivities around ethnicity and faith.

Sajid Varda, founder and CEO of media charity UK Muslim Film and director of the UK’s inaugural Muslim international film festival, recently completed an assignment on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the latest instalment of the popular and long-running series of supernatural comedies. Varda says the key to such roles is “authenticity”; it is, he says “not just saying what is wrong with this, but how can we make it better and improve it?”

Continue reading...

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by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

May 2, 2024

UCLA Students and Faculty Horrified at Extent of Violence

The campaign against pro-Palestine protests on American campuses took another unsavory shift this week in Los Angeles when an encampment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was stormed by armed Zionist thugs, who set about attacking the protesters with practical impunity and with no response from either police or campus security. The assault continued for hours in the night, leaving both students and faculty horrified at the extent of the violence and its indulgence by security who are meant to protect the university community.

UCLA pro-Palestine encampment

Overwhelmingly nonviolent protests have spread across the United States in recent weeks, as students protest for universities to divest from companies that profit off the internationally illegal, but liberally indulged, occupation of the West Bank and Palestine. Although the United States has long claimed brokerage between Israelis and Palestinians, in actual fact, it has indulged Israel’s occupation under the pretext of security, and much of the American political and business class has engaged with and invested in an internationally illegal occupation.

Cowardly Leaders Fail to Protect Students

Pro-Israeli thugs attack protesters

In a typical diversion, Zionist organizations and their sympathizers in the corridors of power, as high as Joseph Biden himself, have attempted to paint the opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an episode of antisemitism, notwithstanding the hundreds of Jewish protesters and the mounting disapproval for Israeli policies among even a traditionally sympathetic Jewish-American populace. Thus the White House’s only response to events at New York’s Columbia University, whose British-Arab president Minouche Shafik caved into political pressure and ordered the police on her own students a fortnight ago and where students occupied a historic hall in solidarity with Palestine, was to condemn antisemitism and paint the Arabic term intifada, commonly used in various uprising-related contexts around the world, as an antisemitic slur.

At the other, western end of the United States, leadership has been similarly craven. In an interview with Ian Masters, professor and director of the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy Ananya Roy described the university’s failure in protecting its students, whose “calm, contained, peaceful encampment” was repeatedly menaced by Zionist agitators. This failure, Roy says, led directly to the “unchecked violence”, dumbly watched by passive security forces as students and faculty who tried to protect them were assaulted. The administration, according to Roy, “resolutely refused to recognize the safety and well-being of our very own students who are in that encampment and really have the right to protest at university.”

Campus Administration Negligence

Pro-Zionist thugs attacked protesters

Not only did the university administration fail to have the attackers arrested, but their statements and messaging “downplayed the need for safety and well-being for the students in the encampment”. It was in this context that some two hundred Zionist thugs launched an armed night attack on the encampment, savagely laying about the students and chanting genocidal slogans such as the call for a second “Nakba”, referring to the original expulsion of Palestinians from their land at the foundation of the Israeli ethnostate in the late 1940s.

Though UCLA chancellor Gene Block has since responded to the assault with a condemnation, Roy describes the administration as having been negligent in the days leading up to it. Complaints about the behavior of a Zionist counterprotest over the weekend – a counterprotest funded in part by the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld – were ignored.

Belying widespread attempts to portray the protests as antisemitic because of their criticism of Israel, Roy noted that many of the students and, indeed, faculty who opposed Israel’s policy were Jews, who were nonetheless endangered by violence in the name of the “Jewish state”. She described how one Jewish student on whom she checked after the violence replied, “I’m okay – but the university was really trying to kill us last night.”

Many comments on social media expressed shock at the violence and its apparent impunity.
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1785614477561344489

Others grimly noted the parallel with Zionist militia violence in Palestine, where thuggish Israeli settlers regularly brutalize Palestinians with the protection, and frequent participation, by the Israeli state.

https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1785606983065739581
https://twitter.com/thaqafatalhind/status/1785642951697154131

Related:

– Callous Campus Crackdowns On Pro-Palestinian Protesters Grip The United States – MuslimMatters.org

We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – Ramadan While Under Attack In Gaza

The post Zionist Instigators Storm Los Angeles Campus appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Lessons are being arranged for displaced children in Rafah.

Israel’s threatened ground invasion into Rafah would be catastrophic, rights groups warn.

We have all been watching the courage of America’s university students (and those from across the world) as they encamp in peaceful protest of Israel’s genocide against Gaza and demand from their institutions that they divest from their investments in that apartheid state.

We have also seen the hypocrisy of their institutions on full display -these supposed beacons of free speech, academic freedom, and intellectual dissent-, as they attempt to crush the peaceful protests…evicting them from student housing, suspending them, canceling their meal plans; and when all of that failed, responding with overwhelming force, and calling on local police to arrest the students that are entrusted to their care. 

Students and pro-Palestinian supporters occupy a plaza at the New York University campus. [David Dee Delgado/Reuters]

The scenes that we have witnessed will mar the image of these institutions for a long time: snipers on the roofs of Ohio State University, professors being thrown on the ground and viciously arrested at Emory University in Atlanta, and students praying in handcuffs at the University of Southern California.

And yet these students persist, and the encampments continue to grow.

I would say that we are proud of them, but it is much more than that…we are inspired by them and also aspire to be like them.  

They are the ones leading, and we support them however we can. 

In this spirit, I want to share that our Prophet ﷺ said, “Know that victory comes with sabr.” 

Sabr is a word that is generally translated as patience, but it is much bigger than patience; it is resilience, perseverance, persistence, fortitude, steadfastness, grit, consistency, and discipline – among other things.

And this is a moment in history that requires sabr and steadfastness.

Our greatest source of inspiration and guidance is the Quran, and when we look through its verses we find incentives for steadfastness andmresilience of which here I will share five. 

1. Asking Allah for steadfastness

And Allah informs the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that,
“And had We not made you stand firm, you would nearly have inclined to them a little.” [Surat Al-Isra: 17;74 

2. Making much remembrance of Allah

When  Allah sent Moses and Aaron to Pharoah they were commanded,
“Go, you and your brother with My signs and do not slacken in My remembrance.” [Surat Taha: 20;42]

The remembrance of Allah strengthens the spirit and the body, and it was this regimen that Allah instructed Moses and Aaron to keep as they faced one of history’s greatest tyrants.

3. Seeking forgiveness for sins

“And they said nothing but: ‘Our Lord! Forgive us our sins and our transgressions (in keeping our duties to You), establish our feet firmly, and give us victory over the disbelieving people.'” [Surat Al-Imran: 3;147]

There is nothing that causes defeat more than sins, and so those seeking victory should tirelessly and constantly ask Allah to forgive them. They recognize that in the end victory comes from Allah ; the most important factor to secure then, is the support of Allah , and they do that by keeping their duties to Him and avoiding sins.

4. Reflecting on the Quran and acting upon it

“Say, [O Muhammad], ‘The Holy Spirit has brought it down from your Lord in truth to make firm those who believe and as guidance and good tidings to the Muslims.'” [Surat Al-Nahl: 16;102]

“And each [story] We relate to you from the news of the messengers is that by which We make firm your heart. And there has come to you, in this, the truth and an instruction and a reminder for the believers.” [Surat Hud: 11;120]

Allah says that He related the stories of the Prophets to give the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ heart resolve. And when you read and reflect on the stories of the Prophets it also grants your heart resolve, so that you know that when you stand for truth you are standing in a long line of Prophets and believers who were tested before you; who stood their ground before you, and that the truth ultimately wins. The truth will come and falsehood will perish, falsehood is bound to perish.

5. Supporting the cause of Allah

“O you who have believed, if you support Allah , He will support you and plant firmly your feet.” [Surat Muhammad: 47;7]

Ibn Kathir in his commentary of this verse quotes a hadith that is controversial in its authenticity in which the Prophet ﷺ says, 

“مَنْ بَلَّغ ذَا سُلْطَانٍ حَاجَةَ مَنْ لَا يَسْتَطِيعُ إِبْلَاغَهَا، ثَبَّتَ اللَّهُ قَدَمَهُ عَلَى الصِّرَاطِ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ”

“Whoever communicates to an authority the need of someone who is not able to communicate it, Allah will make their feet firm on the sirat (bridge over the hellfire) on the Day of Judgment.”

And that is exactly what these students are doing: communicating to their universities, and the world, on behalf of the children of Gaza that their complicity and maintenance of the status quo as a genocide is unfolding is unacceptable. 

 

May Allah make their feet firm, and may He grant them victory. 

 

Related:

– Callous Campus Crackdowns on Pro-Palestinian Protesters Grip the United States – MuslimMatters.org

– Protests: An Islamic Perspective – MuslimMatters.org

 

The post Quranic Verses For Steadfastness For The Valiant Protesters On Campus appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

May 1, 2024

 
Scenes of a Police State

In scenes more reminiscent of a flailing police state than anything else, several major university campuses across the United States of America have witnessed crackdowns against non-violent pro-Palestine protest encampments. In the northeast, New York’s Columbia and City Universities have both seen police crackdowns against both students and faculty protesting links to Israel. On the West Coast, meanwhile, police stood by to watch as hundreds of pro-Israel thugs attacked student protesters at Los Angeles’ University of California.

Hundreds of campus protesters have been arrested

The crackdowns follow weeks of peaceful, and surprisingly disciplined protests against both the United States’ general support for, and the universities’ specific links to, the Israeli ethnostate that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, over half of them children, in a brutal and ongoing campaign for the last seven months.

Dispelling with a long-professed but always wafer-thin pretense of neutrality between Israel and the Palestinians, the American government – led by liberal Democrat Joseph Biden, whose Zionism is rabid even by the standards of American politicians – has thrown its full weight behind Israel. This includes financial support to the tune of billions of dollars, including a package pushed through in mid-April 2024 by the fanatical far-right Congressional speaker Mike Johnson, as well as indispensable military support and diplomatic cover. This happened even as the war sours on an American public that has historically been far more indulgent toward Zionism than the overwhelming majority of the planet.

Attempts to Reframe Opposition to Genocide as Antisemitism

Because Israel is a Jewish ethnostate, one of its defenders’ fondest strategies has been to present any criticism as being an essential hatred of Jews. Thus, antisemitism, and not the generation-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, was widely portrayed as being the cause for the October 2023 hostage raid by Palestinian militants that paved the way for the genocidal Israeli onslaught.

In the United States, Zionist organizations have openly advertised for provocateurs, especially such as can pass as Arabs, to infiltrate and break up the protests. Their aim has been to spread a false narrative, widely parroted in much of the mainstream media, that the protests are about intimidating Jews – even as hundreds of Jewish protesters oppose Israel’s genocidal violence done in their name and the Israeli state loses support among American Jews.

Zionist dissemblers ranging from manchild professor, arms industry profiteer, and widely alleged student-harasser Shai Davidai to serial bellyacher Sahar Tartak have leapt snout-first into the trough, yowling on international platforms about alleged attacks clearly belied by camera evidence and calling in paramilitary crackdowns after fearmongering about something as simple and fundamental as Muslim students in prayer. As with the enormously destructive war on terror that ravaged the Muslim world – a war that was encouraged, and whose patterns are fully embraced, by Israel – Zionist tactics revert at a pinch to the lowest common denominator.

Familiar Authoritarian Tactics

Zionist thugs attack pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA

These are, of course, tactics widely practiced by Israelis on Palestinians, but the close link between Israeli enforcement and their American counterparts may at least partly explain why they have caught on in the United States. The sight of Zionist thugs storming pro-Palestine protesters in Los Angeles while the police looked fondly on is eerily similar to what is routinely done by ethnonationalist ‘settlers’, fully enabled by Israeli institutions, against Palestinians.

Not that provocateurs are solely to blame. In mid-April 2024, for example, a congressional upbraiding persuaded Columbia president Minouche Shafik, an Alexandrian-born British aristocrat, to call the police on her students. The parallels with Arab autocrats from Anwar Sadat to Mohammad bin Zayed who have repressed their populations in order to indulge Israel is too obvious.

There is also historical precedence in the student occupation of the famed Hamilton Hall in 1968. At the peak of the Vietnam War, students occupied the hall and renamed it after Malcolm Shabazz “X”, the visionary revolutionary. During anti-apartheid protests in 1985, the hall was occupied and named after Nelson Mandela, the then-imprisoned and blacklisted South African opposition leader who would go on to end apartheid five years later.

In the current protest, the protesters that seized the hall chose to name it “Hind’s Hall”, after Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian child whose family and would-be rescuers were killed and who was pointedly left to die in a particularly callous example of the Israeli army’s brutality.

From Biden to Musk to Amy Schumer

Politicians and most media have also played their part. This reaches as high as Biden; unsatisfied with repeatedly humiliating himself by parroting Israeli lies over Gaza in the autumn, he has stepped up to redefine Arabic words such as intifada, a common phrase often but not exclusively used in the Palestinian context, as hate speech.

The government has recently announced that the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court does not for some reason extend to Israel. In addition, of course, it has repeatedly barred opposition to Israel at international forums and has cheerfully indulged Israel’s vilification of aid workers and mass slaughter of United Nations staff.

In the private sphere, degenerate moguls from Elon Musk to Bill Ackman have rushed to cover for Israel, while celebrities such as Amy Schumer have only been rewarded for dog-whistling bigotry, their base lies reimagined as boldly told truths.

The remarkable variety of Zionist indecency, and the extent to which they are willing to go, are certainly dispiriting for anybody with a brain and conscience. But it is precisely why the fight to cut support for Israel is so necessary, no less within the United States than without.

 

Related:

Podcast: Gaza’s Strength, Our Weakness | Shaykha Zaynab Ansari

Prophetic Lessons From The Muslim Men In Gaza

The post Callous Campus Crackdowns On Pro-Palestinian Protesters Grip The United States appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

As a physicist in Gaza, I mourn my professors killed by Israel.

News report with Nora Barrows-Friedman (01:44); Ali Abunimah debunks new “mass rapes” hoax (25:19); Journalist and teacher Donya Abu Sitta reports from Gaza (01:26:10); Jon Elmer analyzes latest resistance videos from Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen (01:40:46); Group discussion on Rafah and US campuses (02:24:18).

Where will we go if Israel invades Rafah?