Massacres in Rafah and Jabaliya while hospitals are bombed and forced out of service.

Many of the people uprooted from Khan Younis have now come back.

Evacuation is a crushing blow to the soul.

US weapons used in Rafah strike that killed dozens of displaced Palestinians.

Israel lobby wants to protect pro-Israel candidates from left-wing challengers.

We haven’t seen them since February, when Israeli forces took them from Khan Younis.

The massacre at Tal al-Sultan exposed Israel's assurances as dishonest.

by Dawud Walid and Dr. Hatem El Haj

As Muslims committed to Islamic sacred law, we appreciate the sincere outpouring of concern among college students throughout the West who seek to put an immediate end to the genocide against our brothers and sisters in Gaza, as well as seek freedom for Palestinians from illegal occupation. Given that we are teachers of varying Islamic sciences and engage students and activists, we have some words of encouragement, plus sincere advice in staying true to prophetic etiquettes for Muslim advocates engaged in protests and university encampments as well as those non-college students who are considering raising awareness about the plight of Palestinians at upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions this summer.

Stay Hopeful of Divine Mercy and Assistance

Allah says in Surah al-Baqarah, Ayah 214:

 

“Or do you think that you will enter Jannah while you have not yet been visited with difficult circumstances like those who passed on before you?  They were touched by hardship and suffering and were shaken until the Messenger and those who believed with him said ‘When with the assistance of Allah coming?’ Unquestionably, near is the assistance of Allah.”

Allah (Mighty and Sublime) who came to the aid of the Sahabah (may Allah be pleased with them) in times of great difficulty is fully aware of the suffering of the people of Gaza and is in full control. As Gazans continue to show resilience in the face of great calamity, we should remain hopeful of the promise of Allah and maintain gratitude for the relative ease that we are living in though we face issues such as police intimidation, doxing, and false media narratives. This hope does not mean that we should not be appalled by and grieving over the atrocities committed against our fellow believers and human beings, nor does it mean that we should fail in doing our utmost to stop this oppression. On the contrary, placing our trust in Him should empower us with the confidence and vigor to strive tirelessly, for we can never lose when working for His sake. However, this also means that our efforts must align with His pleasure, as we maintain full trust in His infinite power and boundless wisdom.

Perfect Justice is Reserved for Allah in the Akhirah

Remember that as we all strive to see just outcomes for the struggle for justice for Palestinians in our lifetimes, Allah is the ultimate determiner of outcomes, and the manifestations of those come about based upon His Divine wisdom, not our temporal timelines.  We hope to see a liberated Palestine sooner rather than later, but know that on the Day of Judgement all criminals shall be held to account. No one is getting away with anything in the end.

Repentance is a Key to Success

          Allah says in Surah an-Nur, Ayah 31:

“And repent to Allah together O you who believe in order that you obtain success.”

 Repentance or turning to Allah is a spiritual station with a beginning that has no ending until we depart from this world. To be successful in this life and the next, we must turn our hearts towards Allah .  This begins with having remorse for the sins that we commit, negligence of what we have not fulfilled, and deficiency in not striving for excellence to improve in our endeavors. Repentance also involves seeking forgiveness and desisting from those matters which lead us into error and negligence. Beyond being mindful of sins that we could be committing including in the name of trying to bring about good, we should be keenly aware that our sins have a negative impact upon the Ummah; thus, while trials from Allah may befall the best of His creations to elevate their ranks, relief from these trials should be sought through sincere repentance.  It is narrated that Ali bin Abi Talib supplicated, “And forgive me of sins which bring calamity (al-Bala’) descend.”1

The first struggle for those involved in activism and community organizing as Muslims, therefore, should be in repentance, preferably awakening from sleep in the last third of the night prior to Fajr prayer. In general, seeking forgiveness throughout the day should be part of the daily spiritual program of activists. Our Prophet said, “By Allah, Surely I seek forgiveness with Allah and repent to Him everyday more than seventy times.”2

Success Comes from Allah not Merely Material Means

Ultimately, the ability to achieve success or tawfiq is directly connected to our obedience to Allah . Therefore, it is incumbent that all activism and community organizing is congruent with the Qur’an and Sunnah. Created means or asbab should be pursued, but relying on them instead of Allah will ultimately lead to failure. Before deploying means or strategies, we believe that it is incumbent for activists before acting to consult qualified scholars or advanced students of knowledge for the purpose of striving for this congruency.  Allah says in Surah an-Nahl, Ayah 43:

“And We sent not before you except men to whom We revealed [Our message]. So, ask the people of scripture if you do not know.”

 Be Scrupulous Regarding Coalitions

Although we need to be in coalition with others out of necessity based upon current socio-political dynamics, we must be cautious not to reduce Islamic commitment to justice to the sensibilities of the “Progressive Left” and Neo-Marxists. We cannot control others’ language and means, but we do have control over ours.

Our aim should not be merely to gather large crowds at our events. We must exercise caution in offering platforms to those with differing agendas, ensuring that we do not carelessly support the promotion of what is reprehensible in our religion under the guise of “solidarity.” Moreover, we must exercise caution in joining actions or disruptions led and controlled by others with differing agendas.

No Crossing of Redlines that Violate Islamic Sacred Law and Prophetic Etiquettes

There are certain acts that we must be clear on that are redlines that should not be crossed which are sinful and/or can repel people of conscience from supporting Palestinians:

• Any form of physical violence or blatant intimidation of persons who disagree with our position on Palestine. For instance, not going to university officials’ private homes where their families reside trying to enter those domiciles, nor scaring their children—an action inconceivable for any Muslim.
• Destruction or vandalism of private or public property. For example, not spray-painting “Free Palestine” and “Long Live Intifada” on university buildings.
• Using profanity in chants and slogans.
• Disregarding Islamic teachings on modesty and gender interactions, which are binding on both Muslim men and women, and needlessly exposing Muslim women to the risk of being manhandled by officers or violated by antagonists.
• Facilitation of “teach-ins” at encampments that promote or seek to normalize the forbidden. So-called “Pinkwashing teach-ins” which are staples of the sexual and gender confusion movement is an example.
• Blocking highways and bridges in the name of disruption.
• Hunger strikes in the name of “solidarity” with the people of Gaza who are deprived of food and water.

We have a religious obligation to assist our brothers and sisters in Gaza through spiritual means, monetary support, and socio-political means. There are forms of the latter from lobbying one’s elected officials to more passive means such as boycotting Israeli goods. While protests and encampments can be useful, we should exercise prudence to ensure that their benefits outweigh their potential harms. They should also not be mere outlets for venting frustrations but rather serve as launching pads for greater and long-term efforts.

As we have concern for the Ummah, we felt obligated to remind our beloved college students and others in the movement that our moral compass must be Islamic sacred law and our tone be guided by the etiquettes embodied by the Prophet . We hope that this is received with a good opinion of the writers and that it is not dismissed as “moralizing” or “tone-policing” as morality and tone matter in our activism, especially when it comes to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

And Allah knows best.

 

Related:

– American Muslim Scholars Express Support For University Student Encampment Protests

– Quranic Verses For Steadfastness For The Valiant Protesters On Campus

1    Ibn Abi Shaybah, Al-Musannaf fi Ahadith wa al-Athar, #295102    Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, #6307

The post Holding Onto Prophetic Etiquettes When Protesting: Encouragement And Advice For Muslim Human Rights Advocates appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen reports from Uttarakhand, which offers a glimpse into what the future might look like if the BJP retains its power in national elections

“One of the most significant elements of Modi’s rule is how his Hindu nationalist politics has reshaped the country,” the Guardian’s south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen tells Michael Safi. “Uttarakhand is a state where I think we’ve seen the real consequences of that narrative play out.”

Hannah explains how religious tensions have been stoked in the state of Uttarakhand through conspiracy theories, political rhetoric and the destruction of Muslim shrines and tombs. We hear about the rising violence against the Muslim minority in the area and why this election is a concerning time for them in the state.

Continue reading...

News report (04:07); Tarek Loubani on Gaza’s medical catastrophe (24:19); Asa Winstanley examines widespread acceptance of Hannibal Directive across Israeli society (01:09:55); Jon Elmer breaks down videos of Palestinian resistance operations from Rafah to Jabaliya (01:37:44); Group discussion (02:45:55).

Some of Dublin’s best known hotels have received Israeli loans.

Preventing births is a clear example of genocide.

Israel has forced us to lead a strange life.

Air pollution is worsening our health.

More than half of the victims were women and children.

Deadly attack comes days after World Court ordered halt to Rafah offensive.

Annalena Baerbock’s atrocity propaganda may be incitement to genocide.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan responds to widely criticised comments by Nigel Farage over the weekend

• UK politics live – latest updates

A Foreign Office minister has claimed some Muslims in Britain “want to challenge” fundamental UK values.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan was responding to widely criticised comments made by Nigel Farage, the honorary president of Reform UK, who said on Sunday there was a growing proportion of people in the UK who “loathe much of what we stand for”.

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Anniversaries of the foundation of the Israeli state in May 1948 are usually marked with grief over the loss of Palestine and the slaughter and displacement of its people in favour of a supremacist ethnostate. On this anniversary (May 15, 2024), as Palestine faces perhaps its greatest and certain bloodiest challenge since then under an unrepentant Israeli genocide, we decided to recall some of the notable figures in early Palestinian history – people who resisted and confronted with body and soul, word and deed, the ethnonationalist Zionist movement and the British occupation behind it.

Background

Since capturing Palestine and much of the Fertile Crescent alongside France from the collapsing Ottoman sultanate, the British Empire had blatantly indulged the Zionist movement – an originally fringe ethnonationalist movement that sought to establish a Jewish ethnostate along European lines – at the expense of the largely Arab and mostly Muslim inhabitants, who had broadly lived in harmony with Christians and Jews for centuries. Both France, in Syria, and Britain, in Iraq and Palestine, faced repeated resistance during the thirty-year ‘mandate’ period between the World Wars. Often militancy from one region carried over to the others, since the colonial borders were not fully enforced: if today’s Palestinian resistance is a vanguard for a somnolent Muslim world as a whole, so too was it a vanguard for the colonised Middle East in the mandate period.

Then, as now with the United States, Zionist expansionism was blatantly indulged by the empire, which saw it as a solution to the mounting antisemitism in Europe and a civilizational outpost amid disdained Muslims. Riots over Jerusalem in 1929, for instance, saw Muslims and Arabs punished far more severely than Zionist Jews. Some Arabs, particularly elite families, tried to accommodate the mandates, but Palestinian resistance emerged and flourished largely among the peasantry and middle classes. The 1930s Palestinian revolt, occurring in tandem with political strikes in French-occupied Syria, had two trends: politicians tried, with little success, to negotiate their rights with regard to the Zionists generally favoured by Britain, while preachers and peasants fought in the field. Broadly speaking, early Palestinian resistance acquired a distinctly rural, populist, and religious flavour – it was then that the keffiyeh, the common head garb of the Palestinian countryside, became synonymized with resistance, as opposed to the fez favoured by the upper crust. Commanders often prefixed their names with “al-Mutawakkil al-Allah”, Allah’s dependent.

During the Second World War in 1941, the more internationally connected resistance joined an ill-fated, German-backed coup against the British-installed monarchy in Iraq: this was swiftly dispatched when Britain called in its Transjordanian Arab paramilitaries, which would later become the Jordanian army. Finally in the late 1940s came the infamous “Nakba” or calamity: this began with fierce conflict between Palestinian and other Arab militants on one hand and the now-massive Zionist militia on the other, and ended with the newly formed Israeli state routing half-hearted campaigns by newly independent Arab states. Blow for blow, it was militant groups rather than professional armies that acquitted themselves better, laying a platform for a Palestinian resistance that continues to put neighbouring states to shame. Here we will cover and introduce to an English-speaking audience some remarkable pioneers of Palestinian resistance.

Qassam’s Movement

An obvious starting point for any account of Palestinian resistance is the Islamic revivalist Izzuddin Qassam, whose pioneering social and military activity laid the grounds for resistance. A former Ottoman chaplain from the Levantine coast who had fought the Italians at Libya, Qassam had during the 1920s participated in the Syrian revolt against France before making his way to the Haifa region. In contrast to the Palestinian aristocracy, he organized chiefly in the countryside, mixing Islamic spirituality with feverish underground activity and collecting hundreds of volunteers dispersed in small cells throughout rural Palestine. Jerusalem was not simply a city, he liked to say, but as the first qibla and one of Islam’s holy cities a question of Islamic creed. Though Qassam did not survive to see the fruits of his labour – just months before the 1936 revolt broke out, he was killed at a cave by a British patrol – his followers formed the resistance’s nucleus, and he has since been respected across the Palestinian political spectrum.

Among Qassam’s lieutenants were the preacher Farhan Saadi, whom the British occupation accused of a litany of crimes but who was actually executed, by a military court, on the relatively innocuous charge of carrying a weapon. Saadi was eighty years of age and in the midst of a Ramadan fast when he was executed, and his death left a considerable impression. Attia Awad, another follower of Qassam, maintained Qassam’s front in northwest Palestine until he too was killed in a major battle near Jenin in the spring of 1938.

Perhaps the most formidable of Qassam’s lieutenants was Khalil Issa (Abu Ibrahim the Elder), who came closest among the generally decentralized resistance to a strategist and often flitted back and forth from Damascus. Unlike the more clement Qassam, he tried to eliminate traitors in the Palestinian ranks, earning him a ruthless reputation. This was emulated by Yusuf Abu-Durrah (Abul-Abed), a labourer from the highlands who replaced Awad and was known for trying collaborators. British propaganda leapt to vilify him, but Abu-Durrah’s court was locally reputed to be quite fair and his aide Yusuf Alam, an especially capable commander. Their main problem was their relations with the minority Druze at Mount Carmel, who leaked their whereabouts to the British army.

Gentlefolk and Adventurers

A contrasting approach to Qassam’s was that of the elite Hussaini family, who as provincial notables had been key players in the Ottoman government but also tried to politically represent the Palestinians under British rule, competing with the more accommodationist Nashashibis. The most notorious Hussaini scion was the ambitious mufti Amin Hussaini, who tried to wangle his local influence into becoming first an official and then a “shadow” ruler of Palestine, often resorting to cutthroat tactics and unsavoury alliances both as a politician and insurgent leader. The mufti’s best-known lieutenant, operating in Lydda, was Hasan Salameh (Abu Ali).

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini – Former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (PC: Getty Images)

The mufti’s cousin Jerusalem mayor Musa Kazim was also a notable politician, and is believed to have been mortally wounded by British police leading a march in 1934. But it was Kazim’s gallant son Abdul-Qadir Musa Hussaini who enjoyed the most unambiguous esteem. Maintaining a dignified distance from internecine Palestinian squabbles, Abdul-Qadir cut his teeth fighting at Jerusalem, where he was seriously injured, in the autumn of 1936. Here he fought as second-in-command to Saeed As, the former military commander of the 1920s Syrian revolt, who was himself killed.

Saeed and Fawzi Qawuqji arrived from Syria with a storied reputation, to be welcomed by Palestinian politician-turned-commander Ibrahim Nisar. As former Ottoman soldiers, the trio had taken different paths: Qawuqji had loyally served the Ottomans till the end, but Saeed and Nisar had joined a British-backed Arab revolt. After the sultanate’s collapse, Saeed and Qawuqji fought for the shortlived Arab monarchy in Syria that was overrun by France and then led the Syrian revolt in the 1920s. Nisar then joined Palestinian politics before taking up arms and attacking Anabta in 1936. Qawuqji, a restless adventurer whose main focus was obtaining independence from colonialism, had meanwhile trained the nascent Saudi army before resurfacing – as a “known scallywag”, in the alarmed parlance of British authorities – in Palestine to assist the resistance there. In the autumn of 1936 Saeed and Qawuqji in battles near Tulkarm and Jerusalem respectively, but as “outsiders” their impact was limited: Saeed lost his life and Qawuqji, in particular, would be the victim of relentless slander by the mufti.

Palestinian Commanders

Apart from career soldiers, the Jerusalem front included Muhammad Ashmar, a conservative preacher from Damascus who had also fought against France. They also sent southward Abdul-Halim Shalaf (Abu Mansour), a descendant of the famed Islamic scholar Abdul-Qadir Gilani, who proved a particularly enterprising commander after replacing martyred field commander Issa Battat. In May 1938 Abdul-Halim raided his hometown Hebron, and the subsequent autumn he went so far as to capture Birsabaa, where he set up a small but well-organized garrison and a functioning Islamic court whose justice and efficiency were noted even by British travellers.

The most respected Palestinian leader of the revolt was farmer Abdul-Rahim Muhammad (Abu Kamal), another veteran of the Ottoman army who fought around Tulkarm. With an upright and pious reputation among friends and foes, he refused to eliminate the mufti’s rivals by famously noting that he fought not for the Hussainis but for the homeland. Somewhat of a contrast was his rival for military command, Arif Abdul-Raziq (Abu Faisal), a mufti loyalist who delighted in a cloak-and-dagger guerrilla organization and signed off his communiques as “Qassam’s ghost”. A shadowy but skilful commander, Arif’s most notable achievement was to seize control of Jerusalem’s Old City from under the British noses at the revolt’s peak. British troops, for their part, recognized his cunning in a shanty: “Arif had a little mare, its fleece as white as snow; and where that mare and Arif went, we’re jiggered if we know.”

Abdul-Rahim and Arif competed for military command, and in an attempt to reconcile them Muhammad Saleh (Abu Khaled), another of Qassam’s original followers, arranged a feast at his base near Yaffa. But he was killed when British planes bombarded the feast, and his family took up the gauntlet – first, his cousin Abdul-Fattah Mustafa, who was also killed by an airstrike, and then his brother Abdul-Rahman. Often it was local networks of family and friends that would keep what was still a very decentralized revolt ticking.

But with Britain beefing up its forces and gaining the support of both Palestinian collaborators like the Nashashibis and defecting commander Fakhri Abdul-Hadi – whose militias were euphemistically called “peace bands” – and Zionist militias, the revolt faded by 1939. Birsabaa was recaptured in the spring, and Abdul-Rahim was killed in the field: the British officer who led the attack, Geoffrey Morton, doffed his cap to his slain opponent and noted, “Abdul-Rahim had a special respect among his people, and among us.” Morton also noted with surprise the dignified fate of Abu-Durrah, who was captured, and his second-in-command Yusuf Alam killed, in the revolt’s last stage. Similarly to Farhan Saadi, and contrary to British propaganda that had dismissed him as a lowly butcher, Abu-Durrah went to the executioner’s block with cool sangfroid and the abiding respect of his people.

The Impact of the World War

By this point, the Second World War had broken out. The more internationally-minded Arab dissidents – including Mufti Amin, Fawzi Qawuqji, Khalil Issa, and Arif Abdul-Raziq – decamped to Germany, which they hoped would end the Anglo-French occupation. The principal German experiment was to back a 1941 coup led by rightwing Iraqi officers against the British-backed monarchy in Iraq – ironically the same monarchy that had been expelled from Syria by France twenty years earlier. Qawuqji and Amin’s nephew Abdul-Qadir rushed to support the Iraqi junta, but it was a wasted expedition: Britain’s Transjordanian paramilitaries attacked from the west, brushing aside Qawuqji’s frontline at the Rutba fort in Iraq, and recaptured Baghdad.

After the World War came the final, grisly episode of the British occupation: the Zionist takeover of Palestine. Pressured in part by a mixture of advocacy and terrorism but also in part by their own colonial blinkers, Britain had stoutly favoured the now massive and well-armed Zionist militias, whose own ruthless haste to expel the Arabs was given urgency by the recent Holocaust. In effect, the Holocaust forced the international community – now dominated by Britain, France, and the United States – to accommodate Zionism, making the Palestinians pay for European antisemitism.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni [PC: Wikipedia]

Palestinian, and broader Arab, participation was for its part quite makeshift: the mufti, as the most influential leader, was neck-deep in intrigue, not least against Qawuqji, who returned to lead the “Inqadh Army” that combined Arab officers with Palestinian militants. The lawyer Nimr Hawwari attempted to found an Arab youth militia, but this failed to take off. The mufti’s own force was led by his nephew Abdul-Qadir, who laid siege to Zionist-occupied west Jerusalem in the winter of 1947-48. Hasan Salameh attacked in the nearby Lydda region, and Abdul-Qadir’s lieutenant Kamel Iraiqat lay in ambush to cut off Jewish reinforcements to Jerusalem, presenting the Zionists with their stiffest challenge.

Eclipsed in the Nakba

But with supplies running low and Arab armies – then led by the ineffectual monarchy in Cairo and the outright British-backed Hashimi monarchies in Iraq and Jordan – failing to deliver expected replenishments, the siege could not last. In an outburst celebrated because it has epitomized Palestinian relations with Arab states since, Abdul-Qadir exploded in anger at the generals: they were traitors, he fumed, and he would return to the field for martyrdom. That is exactly what happened: he was killed at the Qastal fort outside the city. Amid widespread grief, the front collapsed despite the best efforts of his peasant lieutenant, Ibrahim Abu-Dayyah, whose serious and eventually mortal injuries left half his body paralyzed until his death.

Partly hemmed in by logistical and political difficulty and partly by his own well-meaning limitations, Qawuqji was unable to relieve the Palestinians, and by the summer of 1948, his front in northern Palestine had collapsed. Salameh was killed in the west, but as the war progressed, the experience of Palestinian troops was put to less and less use: Khalil Issa was given a subordinate role in the north, and in the south Abdul-Halim Shalaf similarly played second fiddle to the incoming Masri army. Some of this might stemmed from the sociopolitical disadvantages of otherwise capable Palestinian commanders – in Nazareth, for example, Issa’s former lieutenant Abdul-Ghaffar Ibrahim kept pressure on the Zionists, only to be betrayed by the city’s elite Fahoum family who resented his peasant forces.

The last effective militia on the Muslim side was the Ikhwan, an Islamist sociopolitical group founded by Hassan Banna in Masr. Abdul-Halim had met Banna and joined the group, the first of many Palestinians – right up to today’s Hamas – to link up with the Ikhwan. They were led by Sinai native Kamel Sharif and – by the admission of the Masri army expeditionary commander Fouad Sadek – played a valuable supporting role, often relieving besieged garrisons and making vanguard attacks. But with the politically feuding Arab states now involved in Palestine, they too played a subordinate role, and ultimately could not prevent the Nakba from befalling the Holy Land.

Legacy

In spite of their eventual defeat, the resistance in Palestine left a major impact: Palestinian identity has been as shaped by resistance to European and then Zionist colonialism as by anything else. Many of the Arab fighters in this article were eclipsed by a rising tide of Arab autocrats. Fawzi Qawuqji and Khalil Issa wrote accounts of the struggle. Kamel Sharif, who also wrote widely on Palestine and Islam, participated in the 1956 Suez war against his old enemies Britain, France, and Israel: like his namesake Iraiqat, Sharif also assumed a senior position in the Jordanian state. Muhammad Ashmar, strangely for such a historically conservative preacher, endorsed a candidate from the communist party in the 1954 Syria election on the apparent assumption that the Soviets were preferable to the West, but otherwise kept out of politics. Nimr Hawwari returned to law to represent dispossessed Palestinians. Abdul-Halim Shalaf and Abdul-Ghaffar Ibrahim lapsed into quiet retirement; while Arif Abdul-Raziq met an appropriately murky end, in Bulgaria of all places.

But by the late 1960s, Palestinian militancy was again on the upswing, and since then has surmounted enormous challenges to confront a massively stronger opponent in Israel. In some cases, there were direct links: Abdul-Qadir Hussaini’s son Faisal, Abdul-Rahim Muhammad’s son Jawad, Hasan Salameh’s son Ali, and Ibrahim Nassar’s grandson Tayeb Abdul-Rahim were notable Palestinian commanders. But more often it was the example of resistance that sparked the imagination, often in poetry: Fadwa Tuqan, for instance, recalls her fascination with the gallant adventurer Qawuqji, while Abdul-Karim Karmi mourns the martyred Farhan Saadi.

The example set by Palestinian resistance is best seen, however, in the character of Izzuddin Qassam. Successive generations of Palestinians across the political spectrum, from leftists like the Shaabia (Popular Front for Liberation) to Islamists like Hamas, have lauded the shadowy preacher whose urgent, restless revivalism lit the torch for generations of Palestinian fighters.

***

Further Reading:

Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past, Ted Swedenburg. University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

Palestine in the Interwar Period: Between internationalization and revolution, Labeeb Bsoul. Lexington Books, 2023.

The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the fight for Arab independence 1914-1948, Laila Parsons. Hillel and Wang, 2016.

***

 

Related:

– Palestine in the Islamic Consciousness

– Fourteen Centuries Since Badr: Recalling Islam’s First Decisive Battlefield – MuslimMatters.org

The post Commemorating The Nakba: Profiles In Palestinian Resistance appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Hat Porter, pictured at Parliament last week

Last week there was a report (here in PDF and .docx formats) published by the National Survivor User Network, a mental health advocacy group run by people currently in or who have experience of the mental health system as patients, on the way women are treated in British mental health wards during their periods (author Hat Porter, who also addressed a round table at Parliament last week on the subject) was interviewed by Metro here). This includes not being provided with pads or tampons while they were prevented from leaving to buy their own, having products confiscated (particularly less well-known products such as cups), being told tampons are banned when they are not, being left naked with only an anti-ligature blanket for cover, and being expected to change in front of staff. Also last week, the BBC published a report based on interviews with teenagers who had been subjected to “deprivation of liberty orders” from the Family Court, in theory to protect them from harm but in practice required to live with abusive adults. One of the interviewees, detained on grounds that she was at risk of sexual exploitation, said she had been assigned male overseers, one of whom demanded on one occasion that she leave the shower, then burst in on her and assaulted her when she was naked. (The in-depth investigation is part of File on 4, here.)

As I have mentioned at length on this site in the past, I spent four years in a ‘special’ boarding school in the late 80s and early 90s and these stories take me back to that time when I was being “looked after” by people with no training whatsoever and who appear to have been recruited down the pub or at least on the grapevine, because they were often completely unsuited to any kind of caring whatsoever and had not been briefed on what was appropriate (or had been told it was OK to use violence). One of them (a man called Bill Sutton) began attacking boys on his first night there in January 1990. While we have qualifications for doctors, nurses and social workers and you cannot work in those roles without them, there do not seem to be qualifications (at least not mandatory ones) for people working in caring roles when these are often challenging roles with a great deal of responsibility, dealing with people who might have been traumatised, might have suddenly been torn away from their family, might be mentally ill, might have learning difficulties or autism, and they need to know how to act appropriately when dealing with distressed behaviour.

Women in closed or secure mental health wards (who often should not be in secure units anyway) being abused through denial of period care is not new; it was something Claire Greaves reported as having happened to her while detained at Ty Catrin, a Priory-run unit in south Wales, in 2016. This shows that we have people running mental health units in this country who have no sensitivity whatsoever to their patients’ needs and no concern for their dignity and mental wellbeing. As with the men being hired to guard teenage girls who were at risk of sexual abuse (which likely means further sexual abuse, i.e. they already had experienced some), it shows that we are recruiting people to both management and to non-clinical caring roles without a moment’s thought, without vetting for anything other than criminal convictions, without ensuring that their attitudes are consistent with delivering care to people who might not always be easy to care for, without ensuring that they would respond appropriately to challenges — for example, there are adults who believe that when a child or a teenager does not do as they are told, when they are told, the thing to do is to force them, as in the case of the young girl intruded on in the shower. Such people are not fit to work in a sensitive job with any young person, of either sex.

We have a crisis of recruitment in our health and social care systems; but the problem is not just quantity, but quality. We have know-nothing managers recruiting carers who do not care.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Who really “hates the NHS”?
• Why are children in care being sent miles from home?
• Travesty of justice, travesty of science
• This scandal has already broken
• Autism, female diagnosis and trauma