Israel launched a military assault against a refugee camp during the holiday.

This failed policy was sold as a defence of French secularism. Instead it has opened the floodgates of intolerance and become a tool for exclusion

In the early 2000s, I decided to commit to feminism, so I joined a feminist campaigning group, convinced I had found an organisation that would defend the rights of every woman equally. At the time, a national debate was raging: in the name of laïcité – or secularism – France was questioning Muslim schoolgirls’ right to wear head coverings in secular state schools. In March 2004, after months of debate, the French parliament voted through a ban on headscarves in schools, outlawing “symbols or clothing that conspicuously demonstrate a pupil’s religious affiliation”.

That is when I realised that the decision was quite popular in feminist circles, including the predominantly white group I was part of. Many white feminists thought it was their mission to help emancipate Muslim women and girls from a particular type of patriarchy tied to Islam. I quit the group. If Muslim women were enduring a specific form of patriarchal oppression, and really had no agency or free will when it came to wearing the hijab – a view I don’t share – how would it help them to exclude them from schools and access to emancipatory knowledge?

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UN genocide report shows how impunity has unravelled post-World War II international order.

An uncle kept digging until he found his niece's body.

I was offered a new job just before Israel declared war on Gaza.

While some were freed or escaped, the authorities’ waning interest and ongoing mass abductions by militants has left campaigners and families of missing pupils in despair

When her Boko Haram captors told Margret Yama she would be going home, she thought it was a trick. She and the other girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok, in north-east Nigeria’s Borno state, had been held for three years and had been taunted before about the possibility of release.

Conditions where they were being held in Sambisa Forest were harsh. Food and water were limited, the work was hard and the surveillance from the Islamist militants was suffocating. But then came the day in May 2017 when the girls were escorted to a Red Cross convoy on the edges of the forest.

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The Brighton Hill Roundabout. (Source: Auto Shenanigans)

Today I saw a video by a couple of guys who make YouTube videos about roads, accusing Hampshire county council in south-eastern England of spending £20 million on making a bad roundabout even worse. (Not the first time they’ve accused councils of doing this.) The roundabout is the Brighton Hill Roundabout on the A30 in Basingstoke, where it meets the old by-pass (now a local road) and three other local roads, and previously had a network of subways under both it and some of the feeder roads, linked by walkways inside the roundabout. Now, the roundabout has been enlarged, extra lanes added to the roadways, and the subways replaced by at-level pedestrian crossings. The two men opined that the pedestrian crossings make the extra lanes pointless, and point out other defects, some real (such as traffic lights obscuring traffic signs) and some spurious (such as traffic lights being on a roundabout at all). A friend told me that people she knew used the roundabout and did find the new layout confusing, but that this was nothing to do with the removal of the subways which she agreed with.

First, why have traffic lights on a roundabout? The answer is that a priority-only roundabout only works at a junction which isn’t too busy. Where you have multiple busy roads meeting at a roundabout, you end up with one stream of traffic dominating it and traffic from other directions queuing, sometimes for hundreds of yards, because they can’t get in edgeways. The Waggoners’ Roundabout in west London is a classic example: at busy times it can take a long while to get onto the roundabout from the westbound A4 (from Heathrow) because of fast-moving traffic coming round from the A4 from London and the A312 from Feltham. This may have been the situation at the Brighton Hill Roundabout and adding the signals would have ensured everyone could get onto the roundabout; however, it also facilitates the pedestrian crossings.

Second, why slow traffic down? Isn’t the whole point of roads and cars that you can drive fast? The answer is that the council might not want through traffic using local roads; they want them to take the M3 from the nearest place, which for much of Basingstoke is the eastern junction, or junction 6 (this is convenient for the town centre and the large industrial area on the north-eastern side of the town), rather than take the scenic route through the suburbs of Basingstoke. Slower traffic is also safer to cross for both pedestrians and cyclists. There’s a perfectly good motorway a few hundred yards away (which is maintained by central government, not the county council).

However, the biggest issue is why they got rid of those subways. Subways mean pedestrians can walk safely away from the traffic and the drivers can put their foot down because of nobody slowing them down, right? The problem is that subways and segregated walkways are a facet of twentieth-century urban planning that rapidly turned sour as they became favourite hangouts for undesirables of one kind or another; we have seen them removed from council estates where they used to link housing blocks, and from many other busy junctions. People, especially women, just don’t feel safe walking through them and a network of subways and walkways through a roundabout will, at less busy times and especially at night, be secluded; they will feel much safer using an at-level crossing where they can be easily seen and so can everyone else using it. Without them, they will be forced to take detours or just risk crossing the road, and many women would rather risk being run over than being raped. As a female acquaintance told me when I mentioned this on Twitter, “subways are a big no-no especially for lone women”. Yes, we all know that most rapes are acquaintance rapes, but every so often there’s an exception (here in the south-east we all remember Antoni Imiela, surely) and if you’re a man, you wouldn’t want your wife or sister to be the first to find out.

So, just because a junction upgrade or alteration means that drivers can’t speed through it as fast as they used to be able to, it doesn’t mean it’s bad or that it’s a waste of money. No doubt the council decided that it was more important that people be able to walk or cycle from one bit of their own town to the next safely than that motorists be able to speed across a suburban area without more than dabbing the brake pedal when they could well use the perfectly good motorway, or just slow down a little bit. In many towns in the UK, as in Europe, urban spaces are being redesigned so that pedestrian safety comes before driver speed and that roads aren’t the impenetrable barriers between neighbourhoods that they often have been since the 1960s. As frustrating as it may be for some motorists, an upgrade that makes pedestrians’ and cyclists’ journeys safer is money well spent.

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Weekly news roundup (01:21); Antony Loewenstein on Israel’s use of AI during its genocide in Gaza (18:08); Jon Elmer on resistance ambush in Khan Younis and Hizballah downing Israeli drone (01:10:22); A discussion on regional and political developments (02:00:39).

Anti-Palestinian groups and individuals claim that criticism of Israel’s genocide is tantamount to anti-Jewish bigotry.

Muslims mark the start of the three-day festival that signals the end of the holy month of Ramadan

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One Briton says celebration is ‘reminder of how blessed we are’ as thoughts turn to those facing famine in besieged strip

Millions of Muslims across the UK celebrated Eid on Wednesday after the first sighting of the new crescent moon, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

The Baitul Futuh mosque in London, one of the largest in Europe, welcomed more than 5,000 people to pray and celebrate the three-day festival, one of the most important holidays in the Islamic calendar.

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Air deliveries remain haphazard as those who refused to leave northern Gaza try to survive Israel’s imposed famine.

When will all this misery end?

Footage from around the world has captured celebrations of Eid al-Fitr as Muslims marked the end of the fasting month of Ramadan with the three-day festival. For many, however, the six-month war in Gaza has cast a shadow on the Islamic holiday

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Tehran’s foreign policy is rooted in its history and worldview, including anti-colonialism, expert tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

College with Mossad links benefits from funding.

The proposed new block of flats in Riddlesdown Road, Purley (source: Polaris Passivhaus)

Last week Chris Philp, the Tory MP for Croydon South, a wealthy district on the southern edge of London where suburban streets rise up into the North Downs, posted a blog entry and an accompanying Tweet about the new Tory council’s refusal to allow a small block of flats to be built on the space of what he calls a “family home” on Riddlesdown Road, one of the aforementioned downside suburban streets. He calls the proposed building ‘ugly’ and says of the decision that it is “a welcome further example of the new approach to planning being taken by the Conservative-run planning committee – by contrast to the previous Labour-run committee which used to wave every application through”. In a similar blog post from this past January, he welcomed the refusal to allow a number of garages in another street in his constituency to be converted into semi-detached houses. In every such post, his rhetoric is the same: of course new houses (or flats) are needed, but let’s build them where they “fit in” and not in nice green suburbs like ours. Flats, he says, should be built in “Croydon town centre, central London and brownfield sites – not green suburbs like ours”. Not in his back yard, in other words.

In 2011, when the Tories were first returned to power in coalition, the rhetoric was of “war on the NIMBYs” and getting new houses built over objections from incumbents who were upset that their views might be changed or that they might just not like their new neighbours, though they often discovered an interest in whatever rare species might be impacted. It seems Croydon’s planning policy is to favour incumbents over the need for new homes. It’s likely that the developers will appeal to the planning ombudsman and win, because this development is not ugly or huge — it’s a four-storey building, not a stereotypical tower block, and as it is on a hill, only one storey will be visible from the road — and the building intended to be demolished is nothing but a run-down white box with a flat roof, very rare in the UK including that area, and an upper storey with no street-facing windows — in fact, the new building would be much more in keeping with local architecture than the current building. The new building is intended to meet Passivhaus standards according to its architects, meaning it would be highly energy-efficient. Looking at other houses in the surrounding streets, they do seem to be mostly detached houses with a few semis, mostly Mock Tudor with a few more modern examples, possibly built in place of houses damaged by bombing during World War II; there is no distinct architectural ‘character’ to the area. The only thing he can mean is that the new flats will change the human make-up of the area; that different types of people will live in them than live in the detached houses that make up most of the area, possibly people who are less likely to vote for him.

The current building at 79 Riddlesdown Road. (Source: Polaris Passivhaus)

I also dispute his claim that the place for flats isn’t in a nice neighbourhood like his. All kinds of people are needed in a neighbourhood; the people who care for the elderly residents of some of these houses, the people who work in the shops, the teachers in local schools all have to live somewhere and none of them earn the kind of money that would buy you a four-bedroom house in Riddlesdown nowadays. Should they be expected to live in Croydon’s increasingly run-down town centre, or more than ten miles away in central London, to save wealthy homeowners what they might consider an eyesore? He talks about preserving “family homes for families” as if no family lives in a flat, and suggests that the flats be built on “brownfield sites”, as if that meant old factories which used to provide jobs, rather than any used plot of land, like this one. And as for the views, about the views people might enjoy from their flat windows: do “the sort of people who live in flats” have a right to no better view than roads, railways and concrete buildings? Maybe that floats some people’s boats but some might want to enjoy beautiful downland scenery, the same as or better than from the windows of some of the detached houses, and maybe they would like the cleaner air that comes with living closer to the countryside rather than breathing in the car fumes of Wellesley Road.

79 Riddlesdown Road is only one building; it is not intended to be social housing and will not solve the housing crisis or the climate crisis. However, it’s an interesting and innovative design and does actually fit in fairly well with the local architecture. Of course, most local responses are against; doubtless most people don’t want a big building project on their street and trucks coming up and down the road every day for the next couple of years. Philp’s ridiculous objection to this scheme is no more than pandering to NIMBYism, maybe in the hope of shoring up his wealthy voter base in the run-up to the general election. It’s a case of opposing change for the sake of it.

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A collection of combat videos.

by Dima Shamaly

[Connie Charles, mentor]

 

March 19, 2024

When we see the crescent moon

   As you know, every year we are aware that Ramadan is approaching by the sighting of the crescent moon. When the crescent moon appears, children’s voices become louder in the streets, and decorations fill every street and every house. 

   Each of us goes to the markets and malls to buy delicious food and necessities for the month of Ramadan. We seek out the foods that distinguish Ramadan from other months. Dates, for example, qatayef, and many other things. 

   The days of Ramadan are filled with remembrance of God, prayer, reading the Qur’an, and then preparing food for Iftar. After sundown, we eat only when the family gathers around one table, filled with all kinds of foods. 

  You hear the sounds of Tarawih prayer while sitting in your home, a fragrant recitation from an imam who has a golden voice in reading the Qur’an. Your heart is filled with humility and reassurance in every rak’ah you perform. Once you stand before your Creator, you feel that the whole world is nothingness and that you want to spend the whole night praying.

This is what I wrote during the month of Ramadan last year to my friend who lives in New York. She was feeling consumed by exile, and wanted reminders of the atmosphere of Ramadan in Gaza so that she would feel a little reassured and could return home in her mind.

This year is different

This year, on March 3, she sent me a message asking whether my family and I were alive or not. She wanted details about how we would keep the month of Ramadan. I remained silent and did not respond. I did not know how to tell her that I had lost my ability to speak. I could not tell her any details. I was unable to say a word. How could I talk to her about all that I was experiencing? I had no words.

Spending Ramadan this year, in the Gaza Strip, is like being in the desert for a long time without enough food or drink. Each of us spends the day without doing anything, with no work to distract us, without study to be preoccupied with. We do nothing. Our faces show the bottomless fear and worry that each of us is feeling.

This year, we spend every day waiting for it to end, just to be over. At Iftar, the food for a family of no less than seven people is two cans of cooked beans or peas, tasteless and odorless, as if you were eating air. Canned food is the only thing available, that an individual in the Gaza Strip can find to buy. Other foods are for sale in local markets, but no one can afford them. 

Lack of control over sellers has made the prices of all goods in Gaza rise dramatically. I may go to the market carrying a hundred shekels—a good amount of money in normal circumstances, enough to buy a large amount of food—and all I can buy with it is a small bag of vegetables, enough for one salad plate, four bottles of water, and a box of dates.

Yet, we persist

Along with this situation beyond our control are the sounds of continuous bombing that come to our ears instead of the music of the call to prayer or the cannons, and along with Iftar this year there is the stench of the phosphorus bombs being dropped on us.

The thing that reassures us all is our unshakeable faith. With everything that happens, you will still find every family gathering in front of their tent to pray Tarawih prayers together. When those prayers are finished, everyone prays to God to be relieved of this horror we are living through. Every tent has its own supplication, and all tents have a common supplication. Any thought that God would abandon us or leave us without hope disappears simply by praying.

Even the elements are against us

On the seventh day of Ramadan this year, the weather in the city of Rafah, to which I have been displaced, changed from summer and sunny to continuous winter and bitter cold. Being cold in our tents seems to be the final way to make us feel pain, and it becomes worse when you have nothing to wear or to cover yourself with.

We are all bearing up, but we never thought it would get so bad. And now, the sound of the wind hitting the nylon of the tent is more difficult to endure than even the sound of continuous bombing, and there has been rain pouring on us in the night making us even more miserable. Yet we were able to sleep through the night, and were satisfied that it was God testing us.

Then, just a half hour before suhoor. I woke to the sound of my mother screaming, “The tent has fallen! Ya Allah, please have mercy on us.” I thought she was exaggerating, but opening my eyes and trying to sit up, I realized that wood and nylon were on top of us. 

We left the tent and spent the rest of the night out in the cold. My mother never complained or expressed doubt in God’s rule. She prayed till dawn, imploring God with all her strength to save us from the crisis we were in. I was amazed by my mother’s strong faith and firm belief in everything. 

I also prayed, asking God to reduce the affliction on us, or to get us out of this situation, to at least return us to our home. My 14-year-old sister, Farah, prayed too, saying, “Ya Rab, bring us back to our home and we will be satisfied with anything else. Bring us back to our home, and let them continue their war. Let them kill us, but while we are at home.”

Our faith gives us all we need

When morning came, I wanted to reach out to my friend in New York, but I knew I couldn’t say all of this to her. Something inside me prevented me from calling her, even though she was one of my closest friends. 

To my surprise, I found a message from her saying, “There is something in common between you and homeless cats. You are all in God’s care and protected in His eyes.”

Receiving this message was like a refreshing rain in the desert in which I had been without food or water for a long time. I realized that I was in God’s care and protection, and that my mother’s strong faith was not in vain. My sister’s prayers came out of her deep pain and her great hope in God. 

Faith is the strongest and the most enduring thing we have. Through all of our pain and suffering, we have faith. Whenever life gets tough and nothing makes sense, we have a refuge in Allah. We know that Allah is with us. Allah sees all that is happening and will never stop being with us and for us. Faith is the best thing my people have, and we are famous for it.

 

Related:

– We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – MuslimMatters.org

The post We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – Faith Is Our Way Of Resistance appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The Tutah family had spent a fortune on setting up a business.