Louise Casey says Birmingham demonstrations have been put in ‘all-too-difficult box’
The former integration tsar, Dame Louise Casey, has accused ministers of “radio silence” over protests against the teaching of LGBT equality at a Birmingham school.
Casey said the government had failed to act on what she described as homophobic demonstrations because it was in the “all-too-difficult box”.
(June 6, 2018)
Continue reading...This week India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, clocked up 100 days in office in his second term. Mr Modi has chosen to govern much as he did his first term – as a rightwing populist on behalf of the majority Hindu population at the expense of the rights of minorities, especially Muslims, in his vast country. He dominates his nation’s politics: in May he became the first prime minister since 1971 to win majorities in parliament in back-to-back elections. He also dominates his Bharatiya Janata party, with a third of voters who supported the ruling coalition saying they would have voted for another party if Mr Modi had not been leader. Yet he has ruled rashly and in his party’s narrow interest, keeping the electorate aroused with nationalist delusions that only he can protect India from its rival, Pakistan, and the majority community from “fifth columnists”.
India risks becoming an ethnic democracy with an implied two-tiered citizenship. It is not one yet. However, in deed Mr Modi gives the impression that this is desirable. This month almost 2 million people living in Assam, a state in north-eastern India, have been left at risk of statelessness because they cannot prove they arrived there before Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan in March 1971 in special courts that, says Amnesty, are “shoddy and lackadaisical”. No one is sure how many Indians who have been declared “foreigners” are Muslims. The evidence suggests many are. Mr Modi’s right-hand man called them “infiltrators” and “termites”, who ought to be thrown “into the Bay of Bengal”.
Continue reading...Pope Francis has been visiting two of the poorest countries in the world, but on the way he took a moment to attack his enemies in the richest. Handed a book by the French journalist Nicolas Senèze, which recounts the efforts of a rightwing American clique to force him out of office, he described it as “a bomb”, and said that it was “an honour when the Americans attack me”. There was no mistaking the depth of the split within the world’s largest and most important Christian church.
In the developed world, and especially in Europe and North America, organised Christianity is collapsing, particularly among the young. This is as true of the Catholic church as of any other. In this country its numbers are maintained by immigration, and its morale, at least in part, by a policy of avoiding largely empty churches by using only enough to keep them full; in the US, lapsed Catholics are numbered in tens of millions. In all these countries, religious affiliation falls with every generation and there is no end to the process in sight.
Continue reading...Nudrat Afza, a single mother who can’t afford her own camera, talks us through her new show – of poignant shots capturing the last 45 Jewish worshippers in the city’s only remaining synagogue
The last UK census, which took place in 2011, found that there were just 299 Jews left in Bradford, a tiny number for a city that became home to so many German Jews in the 19th century that the warehouse district they created is still called Little Germany. The Muslim population, meanwhile, hit 129,041 the same year.
The city’s synagogue, a grade II-listed building, almost shut down in 2013, unable to afford roof repairs – until the Muslim community raised funds to cover costs. A £103,000 lottery grant followed, enabling full repairs, but the number of worshippers has stuck stubbornly at just 45 – with occasional newcomers balancing out the deaths of elderly worshippers.
Continue reading...Barts NHS trust criticised for bringing Islamic religious beliefs into life support case
An NHS trust has been criticised for arguing that the family of a seriously ill five-year-old girl are incapable of acting in her best interests because of their Islamic religious beliefs.
The parents of Tafida Raqeeb, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in February and is on a life-support machine, want to fly her to Italy for treatment against the judgment of doctors at the Royal London hospital.
Continue reading...Niquel Johnson said when he ordered at a Philadelphia store he gave his Islamic name, Aziz
A Philadelphia man has said he is considering legal action against Starbucks after an employee asked for his name to label his drink but ended up writing the title of the Islamic State.
Niquel Johnson, 40, told the Washington Post that when he ordered his drinks last week he gave his Islamic name, Aziz, as he had done in the same store “countless” times before. This time, the three drinks he ordered all came back labelled “Isis”.
Related: Coffee shop racism: where America's racial divisions are exposed
Continue reading...In Texas, the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention expects anti-fascist counter-protests
In Houston, an annual Islamic convention hosting presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro is bracing for an armed far-right protest and a counter-demonstration.
Related: 'Tip of the iceberg': what a Nazi salute video says about Orange county
Patrick Strickland is a freelance reporter and author
Continue reading...Scientists say global heating could endanger pilgrims as soon as next summer. This must be our call to action
According to research published last week by US scientists, hajj is set to become a danger zone. As soon as next year, they say, summer days in Mecca could exceed the “extreme danger” heat-stress threshold. The news comes just weeks after over 2 million people completed their journey of a lifetime. The environmental threat to the holy pilgrimage is a panic button for British Muslims like me, signaling that the climate crisis is endangering an age-old sacred rite.
Hajj is a pillar of Islam that I’ve yet to undertake, and the physical endurance required will only become more gruelling in coming decades – scientists predict that heat and humidity levels during hajj will exceed the extreme danger threshold 20% of the time from 2045 and 2053, and 42% of the time between 2079 and 2086.
Too often 'saving the planet' is seen as something for the rich, a kind of green elitism
Related: My film is bridging cultural divides. This gives me hope in such polarised times | Sarfraz Manzoor
Continue reading...This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s hardline rule
The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. “It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Continue reading...Richard Braine accused of stoking tensions after also saying there are no ‘moderate Muslims’
Richard Braine, the new Ukip leader, has been accused of whipping up religious tensions and anti-Muslim prejudice after leaked emails showed he argued that people should no more want Muslims to settle in their country than Nazis.
Braine, who won the leadership after a campaign in which he expressed anti-Islam views, also suggested that non-Muslims needed to help Muslims to “cast out their demon” and argued there was no such thing as “moderate Muslims”.
(November 5, 2010) Nigel Farage
Continue reading...I know it’s coming – the double-take at my face, the auxiliary taps on the keyboard, the indiscreet scribble on my boarding pass. I find myself thinking a familiar thought: thank God I came early.
On what seemed like a packed flight from London to Los Angeles – I was the only person pulled aside for “random additional security screening”.
Pushed and prodded, it can be difficult to remain patient and go the extra mile to be compliant
Related: Where is the outrage about the Tory party’s Islamophobia? | Owen Jones
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