In Gaza, vehicles, fuel and small change are in short supply; we are left with walking.

Politicians and pundits in the UK are fuelling a moral panic around “the Muslim vote." Once seen as a reliable base for the Labour Party, the Muslim community’s growing support for independent candidates and the Green Party is now being framed as a threat to democracy. As the country heads towards the local elections, Taj Ali investigates whether a singular “Muslim vote” exists, and examines how these divisive narratives around sectarian politics are shaping public debate and impacting communities across Britain.

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Those with chronic conditions in Gaza most at risk as Israel keeps crossings closed to aid.

Jon Elmer breaks down how resistance operations in southern Lebanon are reshaping the battlefield, while Ali Abunimah interviews Maha Hussaini on Israel’s systematic sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners.

Once an easy trip, the route from Khan Younis to Deir al-Balah is full of shocks and stresses.

A failed military doctrine from Gaza is being wielded to similarly futile effect against Iran while Israel shirks diplomacy over the core issue of Palestine.

Deep Harbor overwhelms Darius with its immense masjid, refugee camps and wide river, while tensions within the family deepen.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

* * *

Preparing for the Journey

The next day was consumed by work.

Zihan Ma wanted the farm put in order before we left, so Haaris and I labored from dawn until nearly sunset. We repaired a loose section of fence near the north pasture, hauled water, split wood, cleaned the barn and replenished the feed bins. We cut and soaked fodder for the animals, mixing it with bean mash in great steaming buckets while the donkeys brayed impatiently nearby. The weather had turned colder still, and our breath hung white in the air.

Far Away spent most of the day asleep, but by afternoon he had begun moving about the house on his own. His splinted leg forced him into an awkward hobbling gait, and several times I moved instinctively to pick him up, but he glared at me with such offense that I relented.

Bao-Bao shadowed him everywhere.

The old cat behaved as though Far Away were some wounded soldier under her authority. She followed him from room to room, occasionally stopping to lick the fur around his ears or inspect his bandages with grave seriousness. Once I caught Bao-Bao cuffing him lightly on the head after he tried to jump onto a stool and failed.

I laughed despite myself.

“You see?” Haaris said smugly. “Bao-Bao likes him.”

“I think she thinks he’s her long-lost brother or something.”

“That too.”

Far Away eventually settled beside the stove and fell asleep again, while Bao-Bao curled protectively beside him like a guardian spirit.

That evening, after Maghreb, I sat alone in my room looking unhappily at my belongings. I owned very little: my blanket, travel pack, dao and spear, work clothes and the softer set of clothes I wore around the house or to sleep. I had nothing suitable for Jum’ah in a masjid, or a visit to family.

I imagined myself standing among wealthy merchants and educated men dressed like a scarecrow from a muddy farm. The thought filled me with embarrassment.

A while later there came a knock at the doorframe. Zihan Ma entered carrying a folded bundle.

“I nearly forgot,” he said.

He handed the bundle to me. Inside was a new suit of clothing: dark blue trousers, a long tunic of thick but soft cloth, and a black outer vest with careful stitching along the edges. Beneath the clothing lay a pair of sturdy black shoes. The clothes were beautiful and much nicer than anything I’d ever owned.

I stared at them. “For me?”

“Who else?” Zihan Ma said mildly. “You cannot attend Jum’ah looking like a farm hand.”

My throat tightened unexpectedly. “Thank you,” I managed.

He nodded once and left without further words.

The Road North

We departed before sunrise on Jum’ah. I wore my clothing and shoes, the Muslim kufi cap Zihan Ma had given me, and the dhikr beads around my neck. I felt natty and pleased with myself, and happy to be going on this trip. A thread of worry worked its way through my gut – what would happen if we encountered my mother’s family? – but I waved my hand to dismiss these thoughts.

Still, I strapped my dao across my back. It was not only the threat of my mother’s family that worried me. Whatever Zihan Ma believed about violence, the roads were no longer safe. The memory of the six intruders had not left me. Life had repeatedly taught me an important lesson: that there were people out there who saw other human beings as nothing more than prey. I would not be caught unprepared.

The wagon creaked softly as we loaded our things. Lee Ayi packed food for the journey while Haaris secured blankets and water gourds. I strapped my dao across my back before climbing aboard. I also brought my travel pack and a few of the gold coins I’d brought with me to my aunt’s house. I had of course passed through Starling once before – for that, I’d learned, was the name of the city to the south where I’d been assaulted and where Zihan Ma’s sister lived. It had seemed chaotic and overwhelming back then. But at the time it was my first glimpse of a big city, and I was wounded and feverish. Maybe it was actually a nice place. There might be things to buy. I wanted to get something for Haaris in particular. I knew I’d been cold toward him lately, and I needed to make up for it.

Zihan Ma and Lee Ayi sat on the front seat of the wagon, and Haaris and I behind them. As I settled myself, I caught Zihan Ma looking at the dao. Not a glance, but a long, solemn stare. He said nothing, however, and that somehow felt heavier than disapproval.

The wagon rolled out through the gate and onto the main road. Frost silvered the fields. The morning air smelled of damp earth and smoke from distant cookfires.

At the crossroads the wagon turned north.

“Wait,” I said. “We’re not going to Starling?”

“No,” Lee Ayi replied from beside me. “We’re going to Deep Harbor.”

I sat up straighter. “Deep Harbor?”

“My mother lives there,” she explained. “It’s her birthday.”

My stomach tightened slightly at the mention of my grandmother. I had almost forgotten she existed.

The Vendor

We breakfasted on steamed vegetable buns and pickled cabbage as the donkeys trotted along and the wagon rumbled over the dirt road. Fog lay over the fields and the road like the breath of an ice-dragon, and I pulled my tunic tight. All the farms we passed had high walls – many of which looked newly constructed – and had either heavy gates, or guarded entrances. Some sold their farm products at roadside stands.

We passed through a small village halfway to Deep Harbor. and the air brought the scent of roasted chestnuts. Haaris pleaded for some. Relenting with exaggerated reluctance, Zihan Ma dismounted to haggle with a vendor selling a variety of roasted nuts heated in an iron pan over hot coals.

I dismounted to stretch my legs. The vendor, a thin man with a mustache, weighed the nuts on a scale, then scooped them into a paper wrapper, moving quickly with practiced hands.

The vendor cheated my uncle. I saw it with my own eyes. My father had taught me many kinds of scams and tricks, not necessarily to employ them, but to be aware. I bit my upper lip, wrestling with the question of whether to say something, but as it turned out it wasn’t necessary, for Zihan Ma stopped the vendor with an upheld hand.

“Your scale is rigged,” he said mildly. “You charge for a full measure, yet give less.”

The vendor spread his hands innocently. “Impossible, honored uncle.”

Zihan Ma reached into a coat pocket and came out with a small iron disk. “This,” he said, “is a half-jin measure.” He dropped it on the scale, and I watched as the needle on the scale settled on half a jin plus two liang.

The vendor’s face reddened, and he shot a glance at a burly man who stood nearby.

Zihan Ma followed the man’s gaze. “Your boss doesn’t know. You’re pocketing the difference.”

The vendor formed prayer hands and bowed deeply to Zihan Ma. “Please do not say anything, honored uncle. I beg you. I have a family…” He went on like this.

Ignoring him, Zihan Ma called out to the boss and informed him of what was happening.

The boss crossed his arms and set his jaw. “Why should I believe you? Maybe you’re the cheater. This man has worked for me for two years.”

“Believe as you wish,” Zihan Ma said calmly. “It’s your loss.”

He was about to turn to leave, accepting the loss of a few copper coins. I could not accept that. It wasn’t the loss of the coins, but that someone might question the honor of this great man, the best man I had ever known. I pointed to the mustachioed vendor.

“Right front pocket,” I said. “He used a magnet to rig the scale.”

Looking skeptical, the boss slipped a hand into his employee’s pocket and found the magnet I knew was there.

As the boss seized the vendor and began to shout at him, Zihan Ma turned away. A little further down the road, he bought a bag of carrots. Back on the wagon, Lee Ayi, Haaris and I ate our chestnuts in silence as Zihan Ma fed the carrots to the donkeys.

The nuts were salty and rich. I kept licking my fingers for the salt. The vendor might have been a thief, but he cooked good nuts. The scene that had transpired with the vendor did not bother me. I had seen and been through much worse. But Zihan Ma was quiet, and seemed troubled.

Dishonesty

Donkeys fed, we continued on our way. After a while, Zihan Ma looked back at me and asked, “How did you know about the magnet?”

I gave a slight shrug. “My father taught me to ignore people’s words and watch their hands.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s good advice. What did you think of the chestnut vendor?”

Something told me that I was on unsteady ground. Zihan Ma rarely asked casual questions. I weighed my words. “Cheating is wrong.”

“I agree,” my uncle said. “Dishonesty troubles me greatly.”

“Yeah,” Haaris said. “That guy was a crook.”

“Dishonesty among family,” Zihan Ma went on, “is the worst of all, for the closer the relationship, the worse the hurt.”

My uncle glanced back at me, where I sat on the back bench with Haaris. Looking forward again, he said, “If two people practiced martial arts every Friday on my farm, I would likely hear of it. Farmworkers speak. Especially when they are curious.”

Neither Lee Ayi nor I answered. My throat was tight as I swallowed.

“And,” Zihann Ma went on, “if I found part of the far field trampled repeatedly, with familiar footprints in the soil, and if I saw a boy returning late at night carrying a dao…” He shrugged lightly. “I might make certain guesses.”

“Forgive me,” Lee Ayi blurted out. She dropped to her knees in the wagon and pressed her forehead to Zihan Ma’s knees as he drove. Her arms hugged his legs. “Husband, I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

Haaris’s face showed alarm. “What happened? What is it?”

Zihan Ma looked genuinely distressed. “Jade, sit in your place. This is not seemly.”

“No,” she said miserably. “I deceived you.”

He gently took her one arm and lifted her back to her seat.

“You are my wife, not my servant,” he said softly. “Enough.”

I wanted to apologize too. The words gathered in my chest, but would not come out. Because the truth was ugly and tangled: I was sorry for deceiving him, but not for training.

At last I lowered my eyes and said quietly, “I will do better.”

Zihan Ma turned his head to study me for a long moment, and I could not tell if he was satisfied or saddened.

“What are you guys talking about?” Haaris demanded again.

When nobody spoke, I answered him. “Your mom and I were practicing martial arts.”

He sat back with a puzzled frown. “Oh. That’s all?” After a moment, he added, “My mom knows martial arts?”

“All of us Lees do, apparently.” Though my words were dry, something inside me felt heavy. I had been called a liar without the word ever being spoken aloud, and worse still, it was true.

Yet what else could I have done? The dao, the training, the movement of my body through forms and strikes – these things felt less like choices and more like a current carrying me somewhere I could neither understand nor resist.

Sadaqah

For the rest of the drive, my thoughts were jumbled. I didn’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I was scared that Zihan Ma’s opinion of me was souring. I didn’t know what that might mean for my future. On the other hand, I was relieved that the truth was out. At least I didn’t have to pretend anymore.

As we approached the city, I encountered a world I had not seen before. Refugees crowded the roadsides. Some lived beneath crude shelters made of sticks and cloth. Others huddled beneath wagons or slept in ditches wrapped in blankets so thin they scarcely deserved the name. Children watched the road with hollow eyes.

“I had no idea it was this bad,” Lee Ayi said.

“It’s worse in Starling ,” Zihan Ma muttered. “The refugees are coming from the south in great waves.”

Barefoot people trudged along the road with their packs on their backs. Women carried crying babies. An old man with one arm stood beside the road holding out a bowl without speaking. At one point we passed a woman crouched beside a tiny cookfire, boiling common weeds in a small blackened pot while two little girls sat beside her silently, too tired even to cry.

“Stop please,” I said suddenly.

Zihan Ma pulled gently on the reins.

I climbed down from the wagon and retrieved one of the wrapped food bundles Lee Ayi had prepared for the journey. The woman looked up at me uncertainly as I approached.

“For you,” I said awkwardly, offering the food.

One of the little girls stared at the bundle with enormous eyes. The sight of her struck me unexpectedly hard. I remembered another little girl, offering me a sweet treat on a stick while I was wounded and alone in the streets of Starling. I remembered her kindness, small as it had been, and how much it had mattered. Now it was my turn.

The woman accepted the food with trembling hands. “May the ancestors reward you,” she whispered.

Though I did not believe as she did, I said, “Thank you. May Allah make it easy.”

When I climbed back into the wagon, Lee Ayi rubbed my shoulder affectionately.

Zihan Ma smiled faintly. “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ taught that every bone in the body must give charity each day. Today Darius has given his sadaqah before the rest of us. He has set a good example.”

With some of the heaviness inside me lightened, I lowered my eyes awkwardly while Haaris grinned at me proudly.

Deep Harbor

As the sun arrived at its zenith, Deep Harbor appeared.

I had never seen a city so large. Gray walls rose high above the surrounding land, their watchtowers crowned with curved roofs. Beyond them I glimpsed tiled buildings packed together like scales upon a fish. But what struck me most was the river. It was enormous.

I had seen streams, ponds and irrigation channels all my life, but this moving expanse of water seemed like a living thing. Barges floated upon it carrying cargo beneath tall square sails. Smaller boats darted between them like water insects. Hundreds of birds wheeled overhead crying harshly. The air smelled of wet wood, fish, mud, smoke and river water.

I stared openly.

Haaris laughed. “You’ve never seen a real river before.”

“No,” I admitted.

The roads thickened with traffic as we approached the city: merchants, ox carts, laborers, mounted officials, wandering monks, and refugees pressed together in uneasy currents. I noticed that many people carried weapons, from spears to daggers, and a few swords.

The city gates stood open, guarded by weary soldiers carrying spears and wearing armor.

Inside was noise. Vendors shouted from crowded stalls. Metal clanged. Wheels rattled over stone. Steam and smoke drifted through the narrow streets carrying the smells of frying oil, fish, dung, incense and humanity packed too tightly together.

I turned constantly, trying to absorb everything at once.

“There,” Haaris said proudly, pointing ahead.

The masjid stood in the distance among the crowded streets like a place from another world, its twin minarets reaching for the sky.

Before we entered the masjid district, Zihan Ma pulled the wagon into a riverside stable yard thick with the smells of hay, manure and mud. Stable hands shouted, and a bell rang from a nearby ship where dozens of men unloaded crates onto a wooden pier. In the stable, many horses and donkeys were housed, some calmly eating, and others – not used to the city – were nervous, with ears swiveling. Our donkeys were a bit anxious, but Haaris stroked their faces and whispered in their ears, and they calmed down.

“You will not be able to enter the masjid with the dao,” my uncle whispered to me. Conceal it in the wagon, under your blanket.

I chewed my upper lip, thinking. The idea of leaving my weapon unguarded was abhorrent. But what choice did I have? I did as Zihan Ma said, and he paid the stable keeper, and we proceeded on foot to the masjid.

I craned my neck, trying to take it all in. The towering structure was easily the largest I had ever seen. Its architecture resembled the surrounding Chinese buildings, with sweeping tiled roofs and carved beams, yet Arabic calligraphy adorned the entrance in flowing black strokes, and the minarets seemed to pierce the sky. Hui men streamed through guarded gates wearing robes, caps and turbans, speaking in a dozen accents and dialects, while women in hijab entered from a separate gate.

A Resolution at Jum’ah

Lee Ayi bade us all goodbye and entered through the women’s gate.

The adhan began. I had heard Zihan Ma call the adhan many times at the farm, and had learned to call it myself. But this was different. The voice rose high above the noise of the city, echoing against walls and rooftops until it seemed to fill the entire district.

I followed Zihan Ma and Haaris through the courtyard and into the prayer hall. The room was immense. Sunlight filtered through latticed windows onto thick carpets over polished wooden floors. Hundreds of men sat cross-legged, rich and poor alike. I saw merchants in fine silk beside laborers with patched sleeves. Old men leaning on canes. Young boys scarcely older than Haaris.

The khutbah was about the meaning of success in Islam. The Imam said that we insisted on measuring success in material terms, but in Islam that was meaningless. Rather, success was defined as nearness to Allah, sincerity with all people, righteousness in public, and compassion in the home.

It was interesting, but maybe over my head. And I was distracted by the spectacle. When the prayer began, a thousand people stood shoulder to shoulder, and a hush fell over the assembly. I understood in that moment what it meant to belong to something greater than myself. I resolved in that moment that I would try to be the man Zihan Ma wanted me to be. I would put away the sword and take up the acupuncture needles, the sewing thread, and the herbs. I would strive to be the best healer I could be, under his tutelage. It was a great opportunity to be more than I had been raised to be, more than my father had been. I would be a fool not to take it.

When the prayer ended, the worshippers flowed gradually back into the streets of Deep Harbor. The noise of the city returned all at once, as if someone had lifted a curtain. Vendors shouted, gulls wheeled overhead, and somewhere nearby a man hammered metal with steady ringing sounds.

Gifts

The streets near the river were crowded almost beyond belief. We passed spice merchants, tea houses, fishmongers, butchers and wandering peddlers carrying entire shops suspended from shoulder poles. Barges drifted along the river beside us while laborers shouted and unloaded crates by hand.

“Listen carefully,” Lee Ayi said as we walked. “My mother’s name is Safiya Bai. You will address her as Nai Nai.”

I nodded.

“My stepfather is Su Chen. You should call him Master Chen.”

Something in her tone made me glance sideways at her.

“He is… particular,” she said carefully.

“That means he’s mean,” Haaris translated helpfully.

“Haaris.”

“What? It’s true.”

Lee Ayi sighed. “Master Chen values manners very highly. Be polite. Speak little. Don’t argue with him.”

“I don’t argue with people.”

Haaris snorted so loudly that a passing merchant looked over. “You are arguing about arguing.”.

“I am not.”

“Also you argued with me yesterday about whether crows can understand insults.”

“You were being silly.”

Haaris burst into laughter while even Lee Ayi smiled faintly.

We stopped beside a food stall where an old Hui man was pulling noodles by hand. He stretched and folded the dough so quickly I could hardly keep track of his hands. The noodles were dropped into boiling broth along with sliced lamb, greens and oil bright with chili.

We bought four steaming bowls and stood eating beside the man’s stall while gulls cried overhead. It was the best noodle soup I had ever tasted.

Nearby another vendor sold skewers coated in sesame and honey. Haaris wanted three. Zihan Ma allowed him one, and one for me.

As we continued through the marketplace, I found myself studying the stalls carefully. There were things here I had never imagined: tiny carved animals made of jade, lacquered boxes, clocks worked by water, silver rings, embroidered slippers, fishing lures with feathered hooks, paper lanterns painted like flowers.

At one stall I stopped short.

The merchant sold knives.

Not fighting knives. Folding knives, utility blades, skinning knives and carving tools. One particular knife caught my eye. It was compact and sturdy, with a polished wooden handle and a locking brass ring.

It was perfect for Haaris. I imagined buying it for him as a gift, and the delight on his face. Then I imagined Zihan Ma’s disapproving expression, and moved on.

A few stalls later I found an old man selling whistles carved in the shapes of birds. Some were painted brightly, others plain polished wood. When blown, they produced trilling calls remarkably similar to real birdsong. I remembered Haaris trying to learn to whistle through a blade of grass.

I picked up a swallow-shaped whistle carved from dark cedar. “I’ll take this one,” I said. The merchant wrapped it carefully in cloth.

It was the first time in my life I had ever bought a gift for someone. I was surprised by the warm, happy feeling in my chest. I found that I was smiling as I imagined how excited Haaris would be. I loved this feeling, and decided that I would buy gifts for the others as well. Maybe… maybe Zihan Ma would not be angry at me anymore if I got him something nice. My smile slipped for a moment as these sad thoughts intruded, but I continued shopping.

Farther along I found something for myself: a soft leather money belt worn beneath the clothing, with a hidden inner compartment stitched cleverly into the lining. I examined the stitching carefully before buying it. No one looking at it would guess it concealed anything valuable. That alone made me trust it.

At another stall I found a beautiful medical needle set housed in a slim bamboo case alongside fine silk thread. The needles were more delicate than the ones we used at the farm.

“This is excellent steel,” the merchant insisted. “Made in the western provinces.”

I bought it for Zihan Ma and dropped it into my travel pack.

“What’s that?” Haaris asked, craning his neck.

“You’ll see.”

“Come, Darius,” Zihan Ma said. “It’s time to go.”

“One minute!” Hastily I began studying the nearby stalls. My gaze landed on a table covered in combs, pins and ornaments. Some were wooden, and others were fashioned from shell or polished bone. One comb caught my attention. It was simple but elegant, carved from dark wood with tiny inlaid flowers of mother-of-pearl near the handle. I picked it up.

Lee Ayi’s hair was almost always tied back hurriedly for work. I realized suddenly that I had never seen her own anything decorative at all.

“That one,” I said.

The vendor smiled knowingly.

I smiled to myself, thinking of how much fun it would be to give these gifts to my new family. I would surprise them when we returned home. It would be exciting!

We moved away from the river, and the homes around us improved, becoming large, with high walls and ornate gates. We stopped in front of a grand home – a palace to my eyes – with a colorfully dressed guard at the gate.

Lee Ayi regarded me solemnly. “This is Master Chen’s house. Remember what I told you. Do not speak unless spoken to.”

Something in her tone put me on edge, and I felt my warm, cozy feeling disappear.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 12 – Accused

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

As Light As Birdsong: A Ramadan Story

Kill The Courier – Hiding In Plain Sight

The post Far Away [Part 11] – Deep Harbor appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The arrest of the suspect in the Golders Green and Great Dover Street stabbings.

Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his dog and had recently been released from a south London psychiatric unit. The first man stabbed was attacked at Great Dover Street on the south-eastern edge of central London and was also of Somali origin. The other two were Jewish men, attacked at Golders Green, an area of north London which is actually mixed but is also a centre of the Jewish community. After this, he was arrested by a group of officers who used a Taser and kicked him repeatedly in the head. The second two stabbings were proclaimed a terrorist incident by the Metropolitan Police; the terrorism threat level was raised from substantial to severe, the second highest of five levels (low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical; since 2006 it has never been lower than substantial). The incident prompted a lecture from the Prime Minister and much hand-wringing in the mainstream print and broadcast media: calls to “stand with the Jewish community”, people claiming antisemitism was now a matter of national security, and that the marches against the Gaza genocide which have been taking place every two or three weeks in central London since the start of the Gaza genocide should be curtailed, or that what the protesters are allowed to say be policed a lot more because it “makes Jews feel intimidated” and contributes to antisemitism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now X) saw tweets from broadcasters such as Sky News referring to the incident as a double stabbing when in fact the man had been charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Melanie Phillips posted a tweet moaning that “the really terrible thing is that the lies told about Israel day in, day out have poisoned British discourse so badly that people don’t want to hear about the Holocaust or Jewish suffering ever again”. That tweet embedded a video in which Rabbi Doron Birnbaum said he had received the news of the stabbings while accompanying a group from a London Jewish school to Poland, suggesting that one day someone might lead Jewish schoolchildren around London as he had just done in Krakow, pointing to inscriptions on walls and saying “a Jew lived here”. The real reason people are weary of protestations of Jewish victimhood is that we have had a bellyful of it since 2015: one spurious or exaggerated claim of ‘antisemitism’ after another, many of them from people with columns in national newspapers or seats in Parliament. After a two-and-a-half year genocide, amply documented by the victims and in some cases the perpetrators in both mainstream and social media, the idea that a few stabbings and arson attacks in London are the first killings of a new Holocaust or a harbinger of pogroms looks fanciful. Phillips’s tweets was shared by “La Scapigliata” (Maja Bowen), a Serbian bigot most notorious for her doctrinaire stance on transgender issues and waving her medical degree to prove that her stance must be right, who then complained about the “lies told about Serbia and Repblic Srpska (sic), day in, day out” etc. The people who inhabit Republika Srpska ran concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims in the early 90s, in some of which women and girls were gang-raped by men who had been their neighbours months earlier. They massacred the men and boys of Srebrenica after the town fell, an acknowledged act of genocide. Some of their atrocities, like the Sarajevo bread queue massacre, have been echoed (or copied) in acts by the Israelis during the genocide in Gaza. Anyone over 40 remembers this; nobody except the very old remembers anything that happened during World War II, which ended 81 years ago.

The word ‘terrorist’ is being widely misused, including officially, detached from what most people understand by it. Those of us who lived through any part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland know what terrorism looks like and what it involves: principally, bombs and bullets, used to stage mass-casualty events. The same effect can be achieved through vehicular impact and the sabotaging of equipment or computer networks (though these two activities are not always terrorism). One man with a knife, acting without instruction from anyone, cannot commit a terrorist attack. A political motive, or a presumed one, is not enough. The state, within hours of last Thursday’s stabbings, rushed to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ and raised the “terror alert level” before knowing anything about the perpetrator, including his history of mental illness and his criminal record, let alone another stabbing he carried out hours earlier, purely because the victims were Jewish, a measure not taken after attacks by white racists on members of other minorities. A racist attack is not a terrorist attack; a terrorist attack is a mass-casualty attack (or one intended as such) on members of the public. It does not cause mere disruption but loss of life or injury.

Skegness: anti-immigrant protester destroys a rainbow umbrella

Twice since the last general election, we have seen mob attacks on Muslim and immigrant communities in this country. The first was because of a triple murder wrongly believed on the basis of rumour to have been a Pakistani; the second was because of a report of a rape that turned out to be false. There have been a Muslim woman deliberately hit by a car and two Sikh women, believed to be Muslims, raped. Social media has been full of the most insane slurs on Muslims and Islam that I have seen at any time, even exceeding the worst of the pro-war mid-2000s blogosphere, much of it being boosted by accounts belonging to certain feminists or serving or former police officers. By contrast, there has been no mob attack on Jews any time since the genocide began and nobody raped; campaigners for Palestinians’ rights are careful to mention Israel and Zionists or Zionism rather than Jews in general. The only violence anyone in the campaign defends is the sabotage of military hardware being manufactured here that is known will be used on civilians. Yet, the dominant pro-Israel voices in the mainstream media refer to our peaceful protests as “hate marches” and accuse us of fomenting antisemitism or even terrorism, while using words like ‘protesters’ in reference to the mobs which roam around looking for immigrants or their homes to attack (as I write, they are fomenting another ‘protest’ in Skegness).

Nobody needs to have gone on any protest to know what Israel has been doing. We do not know if the Golders Green knifeman or any of the people who have carried out the small numbers of attacks on Jews this year — their total number is considerably fewer than those who descended on Epsom to avenge a rape that never happened — attended a single protest. They just have to have seen any of the vast number of videos that come out of the West Bank, Gaza and now Lebanon. The fact that attacks on Jews and Jewish properties in London only started happening on a regular basis in March this year, just as Israel and the US attacked Iran, suggests that most of the recent spate is not the work of ordinary Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers outraged at Israel’s massacres but of Iranian-backed groups and that the Palestine solidarity campaign and its protests are innocent of any involvement or contribution. However, anyone who must ask why everyone is not “standing with the Jewish community” has to look at the attitude that community has displayed since the genocide began. True, ordinary British Jews are not the state of Israel but many of its official bodies act as de facto press offices for it.

A large contingent of the Jewish community, including a number of mainstream Jewish community groups, Synagogue chains and senior leaders, in the western world actively supports Israel. This does not just mean believing in principle that there should be a state of Israel, much as believing women should have the right to vote does not make you a feminist in 2026. It means amplifying its propaganda, repeating false claims about anything from the 1948 Nakba to the 2023 attacks on Israel and beyond, sowing and then reinforcing false doubts about Israeli abuses in both Gaza and the West Bank and blaming victims. It means organised letter writing to the media, complaining of ‘bias’ whenever a newspaper or broadcaster fails to echo Israel’s version of events. It means trying to drive Muslim professionals out of their jobs by complaints to regulators such as the GMC. It means making demands that reminders that Palestinians exist, such as children’s artwork, be removed because it “goes against neutrality” or “makes Jews feel unsafe” or some other concocted reason. It means making false complaints about ‘antisemitism’ while straining the definition of that through the needle’s eye; this includes any mention or acknowledgment the existence of Jewish or pro-Israeli lobbies, or Jewish influence on the mainstream media or political parties. It means demanding the censorship and silencing of opposition to Israel and its oppressions. It means crying antisemitism when Jews are linked to Israel while maintaining actual links, not only to Israel itself but its armed forces, settlers and extremist organisations.

If you are one of the people doing any of this, don’t blame those who marched peacefully against Israel’s depredations on the natives of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon for the lack of sympathy from people other than your friends in high places when you play the victim. We have simply heard these protestations far too many times already.

Mum taught us to stay kind and honest, even when things were hard. Now I feel her presence in choices that don’t feel easy, but feel right

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

Mum was kind and gentle in a way that felt so natural. She raised all five of us pretty much on her own after Dad passed away. Those were not easy years, and there were many moments when life could have pushed us in the wrong direction, but she never let that happen. She taught us to stay kind and honest, even when things were hard.

Her father named her Ţalā, which means gold in Farsi. But she was even more precious than that.

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Charities bringing Jewish and Muslim people together say work to overcome division more important than ever

‘I feel punch drunk,” says Laura Marks, the co-founder of Nisa-Nashim, a Jewish-Muslim women’s network, referring to the alleged attempted murder of two Jewish men in north London this week: “Every day it feels like there is something else. It’s relentless.”

Nisa-Nashim was set up as a charity eight years ago to bring Jewish and Muslim women together through social events. The idea was to nurture relationships in UK communities that could help overcome the distrust, division and religious stereotyping exacerbated by Israel-Palestine tensions in the Middle East.

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Israeli court extends administrative detention for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

Survivors describe rape, genital mutilation and forced humiliation carried out with impunity and shielded by authorities.

Mainstream media focus attention on Hasan Piker rather than ongoing Israeli military killings targeting Palestinians.

Dubravka Šuica wants Palestinian Authority to play by Trump’s rules.

Universities have been forced to disclose investments.

Chairman of the American Conservative Union and former White House Director Matthew Schlapp recently offered a bit of illustrative wit. When asked about the 160 Iranian schoolgirls killed in an airstrike that a Pentagon probe and international human rights investigations1 have found the U.S. is likely responsible for2, he replied, they would otherwise have been “alive in a burqa.”3

Misogyny vs Murder

The statement was widely condemned for its callousness and ignorance. As it should be, as society ought at minimum to know murder is typically barbaric. But his remark matters for another interesting reason (beyond general indictment of the U.S. pundit class). The proposition, stated plainly, is the title of this essay. Why is conformity to nonconforming liberal sexual norms marshaled as the primary freedom for women? Also, who does it serve, and why must that framing not be allowed to stand? Women, vulnerable populations, may be detained, dispossessed, starved, bombed, torpedoed, and girls massacred in what is now being scrutinized as the fault of AI or out-of-date target data4, but should a society already bearing the brunt of this fail the cherry-picked test of gender modernity, this renders them civilizationally disqualifying. It is one of the little witticisms of contemporary media morality that misogyny and homophobia are graver offenses than murder.

We usually object by pointing to their hypocrisy, and defend by pointing to women’s autonomy and choice. Most objectors to sentiments like the one Schlapp professed, explain that we, as subjects of and in the West, have little standing to lecture others about progress while backing war. Additionally, conservative deployment of sexual freedom here is especially revealing. The freedoms they prescribe for Iranian women are ones they enjoy privately yet legislate against publicly in the U.S. – extramarital affairs, sexual libertinism, Grindr scandals, to name a few – suggesting that what’s exported is a useful ideological instrument and fantasy. 

Or, as I remember watching a clip of a comedian professing a species of glib progressive banter that, given enough time without being carpet-bombed (note the passive term – these questions seldom indict the doer’s worldview), Gazans might eventually “get to gay.”5 His line of defense for Palestine, good intentions aside, was poor anthropology of satisfactory pacing towards a liberal metropole. But can we go further and look at the epistemic framework? Why the primarily sexual nature of (Muslim) women’s freedom? How is this tenable, given the unspeakable scale of destruction wrought, and pointedly in a post-Epstein revelation?

The Cost-Effectiveness of Women’s Liberation

Part of the answer does lie in modern public political reason. It is very good at recognizing freedoms that can be cast as private acts, such as those of dress, self-expression, intimacy, etc., because they are litigated at relatively low cost. Public reason is far less good at recognizing freedoms that depend on collective provisions. Think of housing security, public transport, and healthcare, all of which require institutions and political economy (in sum, a bikini does not require land reform). This does not mean liberalism does not care for material conditions.6 But dominant contemporary discourse (including media, NGOs, rights discourse, and elite politics) privileges negatively conceived, low-cost liberties. One can therefore be passionately and outwardly exhibiting a desire for women’s liberation, while remaining entirely indifferent to (or supportive of) sanctions, bombardment, austerity, social collapse, the entire gamut of terrible things, and this is an internally consistent position.

We may intuitively know this, but remain hesitant to cross the line beyond calling it a hypocrisy into naming this libidinal economy of humiliation for what it is. No amount of disclaimers as to the true nature of the Shari’a or wrongful politics in the implementation of it, the excellence of Iranian women graduates, or describing the follies of the West – having arrived early to its current enthusiasms now reserving the right to discipline others for exhibiting traits it itself shed recently – will suffice, if we simply stop here.

The larger problem is that Muslim societies are described through a particular lens where time, place, class, institutions, strategy, and state interest are thinned out or disappear altogether7. Processes that could and would elsewhere be located alongside state formation and regional competition/conflict, militarization, or without deep interrogation into doctrine, even when, yes, that language is religious (I’ve previously written about Buddhist nationalism and the ongoing Rohingya ethnic cleansing, for example), are instead read as an indictment of a single theological civilizational body8. Veiling has acquired density now more than its reality, to which we can register anxieties about Islam9. It is made to do too much explanatory work. 

The Muslim Woman and the Libidinal Economy

I do not deny that norms governing women’s dress intersect with legal status, mobility, employment, or family structure. But it is not a proxy for them. It is a shorthand that should be refused, because it replaces concrete inquiry into state power and policy. The consequence is that liberation is displaced from the level of political economy to that of sexual life. Emancipation now is articulated as an exit from the most distinguishing religious norms, producing endless overreach in the process, leading to a severe contraction of the emancipatory horizon. Sovereignty, redistribution, peace, social provisions, the gamut of just things, recede while obscuring the perpetual war machine and its horrific consequences.

Fewer groups have been more burdened by this arrangement than the Muslim woman. She is a woman under compulsion, regardless of all else, one we can violently displace to modernity by becoming a woman in circulation. 

Thus, the expanding sexual market within the libidinal economy. Sex sells, nakedness sells. I don’t need to go down the route of conspiracy to speak plainly of pragmatic expansionary logic and its churn for fresh material (explicit comments on X about pornography and Iranian women, and some diaspora women’s own deployment of sexualized self-presentation on social media, are testimonies to this). The sexual market is a behemoth we (certainly I) do not quite grasp the magnitude of. For example, the global pornography industry generates an estimated tens of billions annually. Advertising, tourism, and surveillance capital all make the question of who profits from the expanded circulation of sex an urgent political-economic one; meanwhile, we Americans have yet to contend with the full enormity of the Epstein files.

Libidinal economies leave untouched those structures that rendered women in these regions precarious in the first place and, in fact, find them conducive to the project of expanding the sexual marketplace. Secular modernity finds the publicly naked body as the body least governed by transcendent authority or any communal or divine norms10. Consider the overbloated and heedless makeup and fashion and influencer realms, lingerie-style dresses masquerading as harmless trends.

Consider pornography production company BangBros launching “Tour of Booty”: a staged fantasy series consisting of videos shot on cameras mounted on the rifles of American soldiers on tour in the Middle East and Afghanistan. (For your own sake, do not look this up.) This is the same company that “pitched the idea of Mia Khalifa wearing the hijab to ‘play up the idea that she was “the pretty Persian girl gone bad”.11’” Another production company created a Hijab Hookup series12, describing its premise: “When growing up in a conservative and traditional culture, you must suppress your deepest desires. The Middle Eastern babes of Hijab Hookup know way too well how hard it is to keep their sexual urges silent, and they are finally ready to let their inhibitions run free! With the help of the right man, these hijabi ladies can’t wait to experience what the rigid cultural rules have withheld from them.”13 The unveiled, sexually available body is the body most fully converted into circulating sexual capital. Religious discipline of any kind, whether or not from the Islamic standpoint is correct, is irrelevant, as they all appear as an obstruction to this circulation. 

This is why defending Muslim women by using the language of choice or pointing to the wisdom of modesty will not work because this framework does not want an answer about veiling; it wants it to displace every other question.

Zionism, the Sexual Marketplace, and the Munitions Industry

One of the ways Israel and Zionist supporters consolidate Western legitimacy is to position themselves as guardians of a sexual modernity that the Muslim world has not yet attained. The effect is that the expansion of the sexual marketplace and the expansion of the security state become mutually reinforcing projects. For example, a small number of ultra-wealthy donors have often had outsized influence on pro-Israel advocacy and U.S. policy discourse. As I write this (on March 23, 2026), headlines announce that Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans, has passed away, after a career profiting from pornography by “first buil[ding] a shady business as a teenager in which he operated websites that claimed to lead users to porn content involving underage children or bestiality.”14 He and his wife reportedly pledged $11 million to AIPAC in 2024.15

The current war with Iran, like its predecessors, recycles the same discourse. What the Shari’a dictates of women and how that has played out in Iran’s socio-politico-historical evolution, what Iranian women are doing or what abuses they face is irrelevant; the U.S. and Israel have already decided a priori that they are sexually deficient and in need. The marketplace, as it turns out, expands in one direction, and the munitions follow. 

The public may have condemned Schlapp’s statement, but it remains a reality that U.S. and Israeli aggression is violently proselytizing so long as it can still imagine itself as delivering women into modernity. So much so that a justification of murder by an audit of gender and sexual mores is respectable enough to conjure some attempt at serious response.

A serious account of liberation would ask what the endpoint is, not whether a woman is visibly “modern.” It would recognize that war rearranges gendered life in ways that peacetime morality and those living in peace scarcely understand, and determine whether they possess durable access to the necessaries of life. Until that confusion is cleared, the world will continue to be instructed, with great moral urgency, that the worst fate imaginable is to be insufficiently promiscuous in one’s intimacies, even while one is buried under rubble.

 

Related:

– Hijab And Niqab In North America: Politics, Identity, And Media Representation

– From Sri Lanka – The Niqab Ban and The Politics of Distraction

 

1    Amnesty International. (2026, March 16). USA/Iran: Those responsible for deadly and unlawful US strike on school that killed over 100 children must be held accountable. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable/. 2    Amnesty International. (2026, March 16). USA/Iran: Those responsible for deadly and unlawful US strike on school that killed over 100 children must be held accountable. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable/. 3     Lubin, R. (2026, March 5). MAGA lobbyist suggests Iranian schoolgirls killed in airstrikes are better off dead than ‘in a burqa’. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/iran-war-schoolgirls-matt-schlapp-piers-morgan-b2932767.html. 4    Copp, T., Mekhennet, S., Kelly, M., Horton, A., & George, S. (2026, March 11). Iranian school was on U.S. target list, may have been mistaken as military site. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/11/us-strike-iran-elementary-school-ai-target-list/. 5    Oganesyan, N. (2024, October 20). ‘SNL’s ‘Weekend Update’ features newcomer Emil Wakim unpacking young people’s support for Gaza: “Just stop bombing them, they’ll get to gay”. Deadline. https://deadline.com/2024/10/snl-weekend-update-emil-wakim-gaza-palestine-1236121223/.6    Liberalism. (2012). In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/liberalism/. 7    Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press.8    Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of religion. Johns Hopkins University Press; Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety. Princeton University Press.9     Ghumkhor, S. (2020). The Political Psychology of the Veil: The Impossible Body. Palgrave Macmillan.10    Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety. Princeton University Press.11    Duran, S. (2025). The hijab as technology: gendered and sexual racialization in ‘hijab porn.’ Porn Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2025.2580677. 12    ​​Ibid13    Rashidi, A. (2024, May 27). The image of Arabs in contemporary pornographic production. Raseef22. https://raseef22.net/english/article/1097418-the-image-of-arabs-in-contemporary-pornographic-production. 14    Murray, C. (2026, March 23). Leonid Radvinsky, secretive porn entrepreneur turned OnlyFans billionaire, dies at 43. Forbes.15    McCann Ramirez, N. (2024, February 1). OnlyFans owner pledged $11 million to Israel lobby: Report. Rolling Stone.

The post Why Liberation Is Sexual(ized) – The Forces Driving The Unquenchable Thirst To Emancipate Muslim Women appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

As a child, Azara Long often visited a linen shop on Sutter and Powell in San Francisco run by a Lebanese couple. Years later, she told a local newspaper that it was there, in that shop, that her path toward Islam began. “I got very interested in their religion,” she recalled. “It was in their shop that I actually became a Moslem.” Some religious lives begin through repeated human contact, where curiosity is given room to grow.

Long’s story appeared in the San Francisco News in 1958, at a moment when Muslim life in Northern California was still small enough to be overlooked and yet already rooted enough to sustain institutions, ritual life, and families. Her father had come from Yugoslavia, her mother from Italy. At 15, she said, she declared in the presence of Muslims that she had decided to become one. The paper described her as one of the first native San Franciscans to do so. Whether or not that claim can now be verified in full, the article had noticed something real: Islam was not only arriving through immigrants, but also drawing in Americans born around it.

The same newspaper account preserves a different scene. Bay Area Muslims had gathered to mark the feast associated with the pilgrimage to Mecca. The men prayed in the front room, facing the Kaaba. Behind them, about 50 women knelt on the wooden floor, their heads covered. Among them was Long, praying in what the paper called a “becoming blue sack dress” with a silk scarf tied under her chin. Nearby was a small American-born girl, Lila DeCaprio, watching the women closely and beginning to imitate them.

It is a striking image: Long, a convert who had first encountered Islam through the witness of others, now praying beside a child growing up within Muslim life in America. Lila’s father, Dr. Joseph DeCaprio, had converted to Islam six years before in Japan and married Lila’s mother, Menira, a native of Siberia. When the imam gave the sign, Long touched the floor with her head and recited with the others, “There is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet.” Little Lila then followed her example, saying the few Arabic words she knew: Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, in the name of God, most gracious, most merciful. In that room in San Francisco, Islam was not only being embraced. It was being handed on.

What survives of early American Muslim history is often fragmentary: a newspaper feature here, a photograph there, a few quoted lines that carry more than the reporter may have realized. But sometimes a fragment is enough to reveal an entire moral world. In Azara Long’s case, the world that emerges is one of immigrant hospitality, serious conversion, women at prayer, children learning by imitation, and an Islamic Center in San Francisco already anchoring a community.

Long herself understood Islam as more than a private conviction. In 1959, the San Francisco News reported that she had for some time dreamed of going to the Middle East, living for a while in an all-Muslim community, and sending her two teenage children to an Islamic school for a year or so. Soon, the paper said, that dream would come true. She was preparing to leave for New York, board an Egyptian liner, and spend time in Cairo. The article quoted the president of the Islamic Center of San Francisco, Mohamedali Mirdad, announcing her departure with a striking phrase: “San Francisco’s loss is Cairo’s gain.”

That line is memorable not only for its warmth but for what it reveals. This was a community with enough coherence to feel the temporary loss of one of its own. Long was not described as a passing curiosity. She was a charter member of the Islamic Center and had served as its secretary for 2 years. The girl who had first encountered Islam in a Lebanese-owned linen shop at 15 had grown into a woman helping build Muslim institutional life in California. Her story belonged not only to conversion, but to commitment.

The same article placed her beside Mirdad, whose own life opened another window into this early Muslim world. Whereas Long was presented as one of the first native San Franciscans to become Muslim, Mirdad was described as one of the few Muslims born in Mecca during the annual Hajj pilgrimage. He had spent years in San Francisco conducting an import-export business while dreaming of seeing family again in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and India. Even in the compressed language of a newspaper feature, one can glimpse the range of this community: a San Francisco-born convert of Yugoslav and Italian parentage, a child raised in Muslim practice in California, a physician who had embraced Islam when he married in Japan, and an immigrant leader whose life linked the Bay Area to Mecca, Cairo, and the wider Indian Ocean world.

The beginnings of this story are ordinary. Long did not describe herself as having been won over by spectacle or by some public campaign. She became interested in Islam because, as a child, she spent time in the shop of a Lebanese couple and came to know something of their religion there. That detail matters.

These fragments from San Francisco suggest a quieter truth: sometimes Islam is encountered through steadiness, familiarity, and the kind of character that makes a young person want to ask deeper questions.

There is something especially moving in the way the two surviving articles place Long in relation to others. In one, she is a convert remembering where her journey began. In the other, she is a woman at prayer beside little Lila, modeling a gesture of devotion that the child then imitates. The papers do not tell us everything that followed. They do not tell us whether Long remained abroad for as long as she hoped, or what became of her later life. But they preserve enough to show a chain of transmission: hospitality received, faith embraced, community served, example given.

To remember stories like this is not only to correct the historical record. It is also to recover something about how Muslim life in America has often grown: not always through grand institutions or dramatic public attention, but through storefronts, friendships, family prayer, women teaching by example, and communities patient enough to welcome those who were still learning. In Azara Long’s story, the path into Islam begins with curiosity, deepens into conviction, and matures into service.

Azara Long’s life reaches us only in fragments. Even so, those fragments are enough. They let us see an early Muslim San Francisco in miniature: immigrant and native-born, local and transnational, devout and ordinary. They show Islam not as interruption, but as presence.

And they remind us that long before many Americans thought to ask whether Islam belonged here, Muslims were already here — praying, teaching, welcoming, and helping others imagine a life within the faith.

 

Related:

– A Convert’s Story

– Podcast: How NOT to Talk to New Muslims | Shaykh Abdullah Oduro

The post When Azara Long Found Islam In A San Francisco Linen Shop : A Story From America’s Muslim History appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Disgraced former ambassador wrote he was Jeffrey Epstein's "best pal," but perhaps his most significant ties are with Israel and its supporters in the UK and beyond.

I’ve been speaking to Muslims across the country, many of whom are deserting Labour. They are as angry about potholes, traffic and litter as anyone else

• Taj Ali’s Guardian documentary, The Muslim Vote: Democratic threat or Islamophobic myth? | On the Ground, is out on Thursday 30 April

‘An establishment whitewash … a blooming disgrace. And I promise you that our democracy is not in a healthy state.” Nigel Farage was furious. Not just because the Reform UK candidate, Matthew Goodwin, had lost to the Green party’s Hannah Spencer in the Gorton and Denton byelection, but because a month on, after an official investigation, Greater Manchester police concluded there was no evidence of “family voting”.

The term family voting – a form of electoral fraud that refers to family members conferring, colluding or directing each other in the voting booth – seemed to come out of nowhere the day after that byelection result, circulating rapidly through the British political conversation before disappearing again. It became a talking point because the election observer group Democracy Volunteers raised concerns, saying it saw it happening in 15 of the 22 polling stations it observed. In the end, the police said they found “no evidence of any intent to influence or refrain any person from voting”.

Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. His book, Come What May, We’re Here to Stay: The Story of South Asian Resistance in Britain, is published in September. His Guardian documentary, The Muslim Vote: Democratic threat or Islamophobic myth? | On the Ground, is out on Thursday 30 April

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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EU leaders have normalised once fringe racist narratives in their migration, border control and even foreign policies

For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric – sentiments that endeared him to Donald Trump and his Maga base – offered his European counterparts the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury men and women. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Racism is not the work of one individual. It is structural. Racial logic is woven into our laws as well as our political, economic and social systems. It shapes access to jobs, housing, education and justice. It informs policing practices, border controls and foreign policy choices. Racialised biases are being stamped into our AI tools. A major scandal in the Netherlands arose because algorithms used to process childcare benefits wrongly flagged thousands of Dutch parents as fraudsters. A form of racial profiling left ethnic minority or migrant heritage families disproportionately impacted. The victims suffered devastating consequences including severe debt, forced evictions and wrongful prison terms and many are still struggling to recover.

Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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