The Biden administration also entertained moving Palestinians out, but shifted focus to arming Israel’s genocidal onslaught instead.

Five arrested after Salwan Momika reportedly killed during TikTok live stream, hours before trial verdict due

Sweden’s prime minister has said a foreign power may have been involved in the fatal shooting of an anti-Islam campaigner just hours before a trial verdict over his burning of the Qur’an was due.

Police arrested five people over the killing of Salwan Momika, 38, who was shot late on Wednesday in a house in the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm. Authorities did not say whether the shooter was among those detained.

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A couple of weeks ago I started a petition to completely reform our Islamic institutions. Specifically to reform how our masajid, our schools, and our community centers can proactively prevent sexual crimes against children.

We have unfortunately heard too many stories of children being sexually assaulted or even sexually abused by teachers or trusted staff members in these institutions. Hurt, angry, and ashamed that this could ever happen within the walls of an Islamic institution, we simmer with our emotions. Sometimes that simmering and contemplation happens alone as we stay up, sick, thinking about our own children and how we can protect them from predators in our midst. Sometimes that simmering happens in community; we may come together briefly in musallahs, healing circles, and online lectures to process our collective betrayal and pain. But eventually, every time, that simmering recedes and time goes on and things essentially go back to normal. Until the next time… 

I’m advocating for the end of “next time”. We must firmly and fearlessly stand up for our children and ensure that our institutions keep their safety first and foremost. This is not a responsibility that falls on any one given person. Keeping our children safe is the job of the collective. I am calling on parents, family members, teachers, imams, staff members, and anyone who interfaces with the Muslim community to protect our house from those who wish to prey on the most vulnerable among us. These children, whether we are their caregivers or not, are our amanah (our divine trust) and we can not let our children down again. We must reject the notion that this is an individual person’s/masjid’s/community’s issue. I outline 5 actionable steps that every masjid, Islamic school, and Muslim community center must take in order to proactively prevent sexual crimes against children.  

1. Require Background Checks and Live Scan Registration for All Teachers: All educators, staff, and volunteers working with children must undergo thorough background checks and be registered with Live Scan systems to prevent individuals with harmful histories from gaining access to our children.
2. Provide Training on Recognizing, Disrupting, and Reporting Sexual Misconduct: Comprehensive training programs must be established to equip all teachers and staff with the tools to identify, intervene in, and report any form of sexual misconduct. 
3. Implement a Committee for Handling Grievances: Establishing a transparent and accountable committee to address grievances related to sexual misconduct is essential. This committee must include professionals trained in trauma-informed care and Islamic ethics. 
4. Provide Parents with Resources for Discussing Safety Issues with Children: Parents must be empowered with the knowledge and resources needed to have critical conversations with their children about personal safety, boundaries, and how to report inappropriate behavior. 
5. Decline to Invite or Financially Support Offending Teachers:  Islamic institutions must unequivocally refuse to host, invite, or financially support individuals credibly accused or found guilty of sexual misconduct. 

If every masjid, school, and Islamic community center would enact just these 5  reforms we would see markedly reduced incidents of sexual violence against children. While this is not an exhaustive list of protective measures, they are attainable and are proven methods to protect children. The great news is that there are Islamic institutions that have already taken steps to protect our children. I’m calling on you to be a champion for Muslim kids by introducing these reforms to your community. You can start by contacting institutions you’re a part of and asking about how they plan to protect children. You can share the reforms listed above with your local community leaders. You can sign the petition and encourage your friends, family, and social network to do the same.

I urge you, again, to protect our house. These are spaces where our children beam with joy on our most sacred holidays, where they get to connect with friends who look like them, and where they build confidence in who they are in the world. These are spaces where our children learn to connect to a higher purpose and where they see what it means to be in a community. Let them see too, that the adults protected them and that we were intentional, brave, and relentless in our advocacy for their innocence. 

 

Related:

– An MM Recap: Toolkits To Fight Child Sexual Abuse

– Safeguarding Children In Today’s World: An Islamic Perspective On Child Sexual Abuse Prevention And Protection

The post 5 Steps And A Petition For Reform: Ending Sexual Violence Against Children In Islamic Institutions appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The return of Palestinians to the north teaches us that life may be harsh, but it will give us moments to rise again.

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Assad’s fall welcomed in southern province of Suwayda but community continues to press Damascus caretaker government

Suwayda is well-equipped for protests. The central square of the city, home to one of Syria’s larger minority communities, hosts the crowds of weekly – or sometimes even daily – demonstrators calling for the representation and public services they have demanded for years.

Long before the fall last month of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the southern province of the same name had become a byword for resistance to rule by Damascus, unafraid to protest despite Assad’s crackdown on dissent and his hollow pledges to protect communities like theirs.

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Outgoing American leader Joseph Biden (2021-25) marked the final hours of his presidency with a series of executive pardons that included much of his family and political allies, but failed to pardon a notable Muslim scientist imprisoned under the most dubious circumstances. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American neuroscientist who has spent two decades in American custody in circumstances whose controversy tests the borders of farce, remains in custody in spite of major protest at the circumstances and condition of her imprisonment.

Biden Away till the Eleventh Hour

Having ridden to power four years ago with a sheen of affected virtuosity against the conduct of his rival Donald Trump, Biden’s last months in office proved an increasingly humiliating mess. He had ridden to power promising to uphold the institutions and international norms that Trump had so obviously scorned, yet attracted international outrage at his blatant erosion of these norms to defend an Israeli genocide of Palestinians that he defended to the end. It was not until a public humiliation in a debate with Trump that Biden was forced belatedly to withdraw from a presidential race that was clearly beyond his physical capability, and his much-hyped replacement and deputy Kamala Harris received a historical trouncing in the subsequent election.

Realizing that Trump’s return was imminent, Biden took time in December 2024 to pardon his son Hunter, who had been accused of criminal corruption during the previous election cycle and had pleaded guilty to various misdemeanors. Additionally, in the final hour of his presidency, he expanded the beneficiaries of the pardon to other family members: three siblings and two in-laws. Biden hastened to add that the beneficiaries of his pardon had committed no crime and that he was preemptively defending them from persecution.

He also issued pardons for other prominent targets of Republican ire: his former medical advisor Anthony Fauci and former military commander Mark Milley. Fauci, who ran the state agency against infectious diseases for nearly forty years, became a household name during the outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020. Widely lionized at first for his public appearances early in the pandemic, Fauci attracted mounting criticism from the right as the pandemic wore on and, in particular, over his increasingly evident split with Trump.

Milley has had a similarly politicized record: he had distanced himself from Trump’s hard-charging rhetoric, speculated that Trump wanted to mount a coup, and has accused him since of fascism. This won him the hatred of the right and the approval of liberals. In 2023 alone three glowing biographies were written on the fairly unremarkable general, while the rightwing continues to view him as the personification of American military failures.

Also pardoned was the committee that had been assigned to investigate the 2021 attack on Congress which was seen as hostile to Trump. This included Liz Cheney–daughter of the infamous former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, and a cossetted ally of Biden’s establishmentarian Democrats in recent years–as well as several other senior politicians and police officers who had testified in the case.

With Biden in such a forgiving mood, it was widely hoped that he would pardon the United States’ most internationally famous female prisoner Siddiqui, whose ordeal under American custody was long hushed up and has attracted widespread sympathy with years of tireless advocacy from her sister Fowzia and her lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, as well as well-known Palestinian-American imam Omar Suleiman and former American captives such as Moazzam Begg. An online petition collected nearly 1.7 million signatures. None of this, however, could move Biden quite as touchingly as shared blood and politics.

The Strange Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Given Biden’s commitment to protecting his family from political persecution, it is strange that he spared no thought for a case as clearly politicized as any: this one not in the realm of American partisan politics but the early years of the United States’ fantastically destructive “War on Terror,” when Washington -led by Dick Cheney, the pointedly sadistic father of Biden’s beneficiary Liz- imposed a dragnet and “guilt by association” on countless Muslims and even countries. The failure of that approach does not seem to have triggered any self-reflection over its implications for such individuals as Siddiqui who were swept up in the dragnet. 

Known as an upstanding Muslim scientist in the United States, the case against Aafia Siddiqui seems to rest largely on circumstances and “guilt by association”. One commonly cited argument is that she was an admirer of the 1980s Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam who had encouraged Muslims to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This standard would, of course, implicate not only countless Muslims but many governments, Muslim and otherwise, who also supported the jihad against the Soviets: American intelligence and a good number of anti-communist American politicians who had funded the resistance to the Soviets for Cold War purposes.

Another accusation is that Siddiqui’s second marriage was with a distant relative of Khalid Shaikh, mastermind of the September 2001 attacks on the United States; again by which flawed associative conviction many others could be swept up, even such governments as Saudi Arabia whose ruling clan is close to the bin-Ladin mercantile clan. Rounding off the case against Siddiqui are criticisms of her personality by an ex-husband whom she divorced before the events in question.

During the spring of 2003 Siddiqui disappeared in Pakistan, with widespread accusations that she had been abducted and transferred to American custody in the neighbouring occupation of Afghanistan. The fact that her relative-by-marriage, Khalid, had been captured to widespread publicity a few days earlier indicates that she might have been swept up in a corresponding dragnet. She is thought to have been kept at the Americans’ Afghan headquarters at Bagram; though the United States has officially denied holding her there, other inmates at the prison confirm that she was held there.

In 2008 Siddiqui somehow escaped and resurfaced in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, where she was accused of attacking an American soldier and imprisoned again. In early 2010 she was sentenced to an effective life sentence of eighty-six years in prison, to widespread outrage in and beyond Pakistan. Various leaders -including the generally pro-American former Pakistani foreign secretary Riaz Khan and the former American attorney-general Ramsey Clark- criticized the decision as a political one. Clark, who held the attorney general’s role in the 1960s, remarked that “Doctor Aafia Siddiqui was victimized by the international politics being played for power. I haven’t witnessed such bare injustice in my career.”

Skeletons in Whose Closet?

Indeed Siddiqui’s sentence took place against the American “surge” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which involved a backroom struggle between the American government and Pakistani military -the initial parties in her abduction- in which both sought leverage over the other. It is exceedingly likely that her very public sentence, which provoked outrage in Pakistan, was a case of such leverage. Her sentence for having allegedly attacked an American soldier at a foreign base -akin to the farcical imprisonment of the teenaged Canadian citizen Omar Khadr– is an especially stark contrast to the practical impunity with which American agents ran riot in Pakistan, a country with which the United States was not officially at war. A year after Siddiqui’s sentence, American mercenary Raymond Davis killed two Pakistanis and was released under an American fiction that he was a diplomat, again to widespread public outrage.

Contributing to the confusion and politicization of such cases is the role played by supposedly neutral but essential partisan observers. The supposedly neutral reporter Deborah Scroggins for example worked with an American government agency in Afghanistan, and heavily implicated Siddiqui. So did sympathetic reporters such as Carlotta Gall, daughter of a British spy whose criticism of the American war was that it did not more directly target Pakistan. Such observers pathologized the Pakistani reaction to Siddiqui’s arrest and essentially took American accusations at their word regardless of glaring discrepancies.

Since then, the Pakistani establishment has capitulated, in 2022 mounting a constitutional coup in league with controversial former ambassador neoconservative ideologue Husain Haqqani and Biden’s envoy Donald Lu. A cheerleader of the war on terror, Haqqani had in the early 2010s endeared himself to the United States by siding with them in their backroom struggle with the Pakistani military, but has since instead opted to help Washington co-opt the Pakistani military. Regionally the coup’s effect was to instantly ratchet up tensions with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as Pakistan posed as a frontline state for the United States’ regional isolation of Afghanistan. It is worth noting that many Taliban’s leaders are former American prisoners, who during the 2019-20 talks in Doha also called for Siddiqui’s release. But her ordeal is far too embarrassing to too many actors to let her go so easily.

In denying a very questionably convicted prisoner the same clemency afforded to his family and political allies, Biden simply followed a longstanding pattern stemming both from personal indifference toward Muslim suffering and from the larger patterns of a war on terror of whom Siddiqui is an archetypal victim.

 

Related:

– Are We At A Turning Point In The Campaign For Dr. Aafia Siddiqui? 

– Protests Gather Steam For The Release Of MIT-educated Neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui

The post Pardon me? Biden Withholds Clemency From Aafia Siddiqui appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

This blog is now closed, you can read more of our UK political coverage here

Q: Are doctors able to recognise depression? And can they decide if that affects someone’s capacity to make a decision about their health?

Whitty says doctors can identify depression. But he says it is harder for them to assess if that is affecting capacity.

That’s where help from colleagues from psychiatry, mental health more widely, is going to be useful. But that should be good medical practice, in my view, under all circumstances.

Certainly what I wouldn’t want is to be in a situation where the existence of the fact that someone who has a terminal diagnosis has some degree of low mood in itself just rules them out from any kind of medical intervention, this or any other. That shouldn’t be the case.

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A chance encounter brings up trauma and grief.

As a former Libyan foreign minister, I urge the world not to let Syria become another cautionary tale of a nation left to crumble under the weight of global apathy and splintered leadership

In December, the world watched in awe as Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria imploded. But as Syria rejoices, I bear a warning: we cannot let Syria’s power vacuum fester into another civil war, as the international community did in Libya.

As Libya’s first female foreign minister, I am painfully aware of what is at stake. When images of our own dictator’s dead body were broadcast to the world in 2011, we believed Libya had been liberated. But the euphoria of revolutions often gives way to darker realities.

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My family has been reduced to wishing to return to Gaza City, where my ancestors were forcibly expelled in 1948.

Large areas of Gaza's southernmost city are now uninhabitable.

Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, two of the girls killed in the July 2024 Southport massacre

Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport massacre in which three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in the town near Liverpool. The crime led to rumours being spread that the attacker was an immigrant, which was a pretext for racist riots in cities across the country. Rudakubana was sentenced to detention “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence, with a minimum ‘tariff’ of 52 years, which means he will not be considered for parole until he is 70. (A juvenile, as he was a few days shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the attack, cannot be sentenced to a whole-life sentence.) Much has been revealed about Rudakubana’s violent past and his obsession with violence, but the same people who cheered on the summer riots last year have still not let go of their belief that Rudakubana was a Muslim, or motivated by “Islamist ideology” (when he was brought up Christian and no evidence exists that he converted), or that the incident has something to do with immigration because his father was a Rwandan refugee in the mid-1990s. The prime minister, meanwhile, has responded with the promise of a public inquiry and that nothing will stand in the way of making sure such a crime cannot happen again; in other words, he will surely find something to ban or some obstacle put in the way of people living their lives to make sure that particular horse cannot bolt again.

It has been reported that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent, the scheme for intercepting and diverting people who have (or appear to have) started on a path which may lead to involvement in terrorism, several times since age 13, when he was expelled from his secondary school after declaring his intention to take a knife to school to attack an alleged bully, and each time declared unsuitable for their intervention because he appeared to be motivated by no particular ideology. It’s no secret that Prevent was first aimed at Muslims, and it’s well-known that Muslim parents fear their children being referred to it on the basis of a political opinion they have expressed in class about something like Palestine. It’s also a fact that right-wing securocrats have poured scorn on the suggestion that anyone but Muslims poses a major threat, dismissing it as wokery or “political correctness gone mad”, despite the declining influence of groups like Al-Qa’ida and then ISIS and the decreasing potency of the actual terrorist attacks inspired by them (stabbings and vehicle rammings rather than shootings and bombings, which suggests the lack of both know-how and access to materials) and the increasing frequency of incidents associated with extreme misogyny and the “Incel” subculture. Prevent had not been allowed to keep itself up to date since the “war on terror” years in which it was set up, thus it had no means of diverting people driven by more straightforward hatred than ideology.

Some of the same people who hyped the “rape gang” controversy out of nowhere two weeks ago have clung to the lies they spun during the riots last summer. Axel Rudakubana is Black, therefore it’s about immigration, as they see no difference between immigrants and their descendants born here (some of whom are of mixed parentage). If his father had not been granted asylum quite legitimately more than ten years before he was born, this atrocity would not have happened; the idiot logic on which so much anti-immigrant policymaking is based. They tell us over and over again that these things happen because we “allow people to immigrate who do not share our values”, regardless of whether the perpetrator was ever able to immigrate or ever had a choice about being born here, let alone where their parents or even grandparents had been born, or whether that hostility was born from the violent racism Black and Asian people suffered for much of the three decades after they began settling here. The simple fact is that school shootings have become a routine fact of life in the USA where guns are readily available and some young people will be living in homes where there are automatic weapons. That is not true in the UK, but everyone is aware of them and when people know that is one way of expressing their anger, the likelihood that someone will do it increases. It is a case of the “genie being out of the bottle” which cannot be shoved back in again.

Some more mainstream figures have been making some equally ridiculous suggestions. On Tuesday, the home secretary Yvette Cooper promised a public inquiry into, among other things, “how Axel Rudakubana was able to murder three girls at dance class despite being on the authorities’ radar” according to the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. The answer is that up until the day of the crime, he had not committed any crime serious enough to merit restricting his access to children; all his violence had been directed at adults or his own schoolmates, not children much younger than himself. We put those sorts of restrictions on known child molesters, not tearaways with morbid obsessions. The government complain that a video of a bishop being stabbed in Sydney last year was still available on Twitter everywhere except Australia; the video would have been copied numerous times making banning every copy of it impossible, and his being able to view it before setting off probably was not the reason he did the murders anyway. The previous government has already legislated onerous requirements for operators of “social media” websites to ensure the safety of teenagers who might use them, resulting in a number of forums either blocking British users or shutting down, as they cannot afford to comply (of course, the major players such as Facebook can and the unscrupulous will not); it has been observed that the government reacts to every such incident by looking for ways to control the Internet rather than to improve the services which might have been able to help Rudakubana well before he committed these murders. That, of course, would cost money.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, aged nine, murdered by Axel Rudakubana

In her interview with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1 yesterday, the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch blamed the attack on people who “despite being here from childhood or born here, they’re not integrating into the rest of their society; they hate their country, and they’re being told that everything about the UK is terrible”. Kuenssberg pointed to the Rudakubanas’ involvement in the church and their son’s Christian upbringing and asked Badenoch what her evidence was that the crimes were anything to do with lack of integration; she responded with an irrelevant aside about rape gangs, and by claiming that it was a ‘problem’ that every time ‘we’ try to “have these conversations”, they were shut down by demands for evidence. The BBC noted that the judge who sentenced Rudakubana did not mention his supposed lack of integration. Rather, this was a loner who had developed obsessions and fascinations with violence and such people exist among many other ethnic groups as well. Kuenssberg, despite asking her for evidence, did not make that point at all, nor did she reinforce the point that claims need evidence.

Finally the same people looking to blame immigrants are also casting blame at Axel Rudakabana’s family (with one racist numbskull on Twitter drawing attention to how his innocent brother’s wheelchair was funded by public donations); there is an assumption that they must have known and said nothing over the five supposed years between his expulsion from his first secondary school and the July 2024 murders. They are actually facing a police investigation for failing to report one of the later incidents; what we do know is that his father had intervened to prevent him going off armed in a taxi to carry out another violent attack. If he gave up reporting, it’s because he had given up expecting any results. Peter Hitchens tells us he has a “sneaking suspicion” that Rudakubana’s sudden change of personality at age 13 was due to marijuana use, but offers absolutely no evidence; given that he has been arrested numerous times since age 13, he would have had at least one drug test, so surely the police will know if he had used cannabis or even if he was acquainted with any dealer, since you can’t simply buy the drug at the corner shop.

But ultimately, the Southport massacre was one person’s idea from beginning to end and that person is Axel Rudakubana, and he is now in prison where he is no danger to society. It’s not his family’s fault, it’s not his school’s fault, nor the fault of other Black people, or Rwandans, let alone asylum seekers, Channel boat migrants or Muslims, none of which he was. By the same token, the fault for the August riots lie with none of those people either, nor even with Keir Starmer who followed legal protocol by refusing to divulge more information than was appropriate, but with those who participated, those who spread the misinformation that fed them and those who made excuses. If it’s a time to face up to anything, it’s the destruction of the services which might have guided him away from his fascination with destruction, and maybe kept him off the streets and safe while doing so. If our government want to honour the three girls who were murdered and make it less likely that such an atrocity might ever happen again, they might like to put some of those things back in place and reconfigure Prevent to tackle the growing tendency of extreme online misogyny. To people like Matt Goodwin, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, it’s an opportunity to talk about the same things they’ve been talking about for years, diverting everything onto. Rudukabana was Black, therefore it’s a race issue and by extension an immigration issue rather than an issue of misogyny and our broken education and mental health systems. One can be reacted to with violence; the other will take time and money.

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