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Ramadan in Gaza: ‘We used to adorn our street, now everything around us is bleak’

The Guardian World news: Islam - 10 March, 2024 - 15:13

Displaced families prepare to spend holy month in Rafah amid food shortages and fear of attack

Seventy days after they were forced to leave their house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, Hanaa al-Masry, her husband and their six children are preparing for Ramadan in their new home: a dilapidated tent. Here, there will be no decorations, no joyous family meals and no reading of the Qur’an under the lemon and orange trees in the garden.

The Muslim holy month – a time for friends and family as well as religious contemplation, prayer and fasting – starts on Monday and will be like none that anyone in Gaza can remember.

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Survivors of UK terror attacks warn: ‘Don’t equate Muslims with extremists’

The Guardian World news: Islam - 10 March, 2024 - 06:00

Open letter signed by families of victims including Manchester Arena bombing says debate ‘must not play into terrorists’ hands’

More than 50 survivors of terrorist attacks, including the Manchester Arena bombing and the London Bridge attacks, have signed an open letter warning politicians to stop conflating British Muslims with extremism.

The signatories include Rebecca Rigby, the widow of soldier Lee Rigby who was murdered in south-east London in 2013, and Paul Price, who lost his partner, Elaine McIver, in the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. They caution against comments which play “into the hands of terrorists”.

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‘Waiting for the storm’: Israelis and Palestinians fear difficult week as Ramadan starts

The Guardian World news: Islam - 10 March, 2024 - 05:00

Key site is al-Aqsa mosque on what Jews call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Peaceful access for Muslims could send a message of calm

Israelis and Palestinians are bracing themselves for a tense and ­potentially violent week, with no sign of a ­ceasefire likely in Gaza and calls from Hamas for protest marches around the Islamic world to mark the start of Ramadan on Monday.

Earlier this month, a halt to hostilities before the Muslim holy month looked possible, but hopes have dimmed since indirect talks in Cairo ended without progress last week.

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Muslim Communities Across The U.S. Prepare For Ramadan Amidst Heightened Islamophobia

Muslim Matters - 7 March, 2024 - 05:10

Muslim communities across the U.S. are gearing up for Ramadan amidst an unprecedented increase in Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias in light of Israel’s war on Gaza. Several masjids are also increasing their security measures this Ramadan in the aftermath of several Islamophobic and anti-Arab attacks.

The Context

The past few months have been marked by an increase in anti-Muslim incidents in light of Israel’s war on Gaza. Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American was stabbed to death 26 times. Three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont for wearing a kuffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, and one of them is permanently paralyzed from the chest down. 

In November 2023, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported an 216% increase in requests for help and reports of bias compared to the previous year. Palestine Legal, an organization that protects the rights of people in the U.S. who speak out in support of Palestine, experienced an unprecedented surge in requests for legal support from people targeted for Palestine advocacy.

Muslim communities across the country are heading into Ramadan amidst a tense environment and with Gaza at the top of many people’s minds. 

Masjid Ramadan Preparations Muslim Communities on campus

Ramadan decorations at the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing. (photo courtesy of the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing)

With this increased targeting of Muslims, many communities across the country are heightening their security measures in light of recent Islamophobic and anti-Arab attacks. 

Thasin Sardar is a board member at the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing in Michigan, a large and diverse community with over 1,000 attendees at each Jumuah prayer. He says about a third of the community consists of students, a third of refugees and recent immigrants, and a third of long-time residents. 

Sardar says his community has been organizing rallies and protests in support of Gaza, and people are not shying away from being vocal despite potential safety concerns. 

“Nobody is afraid of any repercussions,” he says. “We are not going to give up on asking for a ceasefire.” 

In light of events in recent months, the community has prepared for Ramadan by arranging for a greater security presence including members from within the community. This is in addition to the usual Ramadan preparations and setting up by decorating the masjid. 

Understanding the Environment on College Campuses

College campuses have been particularly impacted by what’s happening in Gaza, and campuses are roiled by debates over free speech and institutional suppression of pro-Palestinian activism. 

Columbia University suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Rutgers University also suspended SJP, then reinstated it but on probation. Former Israeli soldiers sprayed an illegal chemical “skunk” on pro-Palestinian protesters. Pro-Palestinian students at Harvard are suing the university for failing to protect them from harassment. NYU suspended a pro-Palestinian student, revoked her scholarship, and denied her campus housing until fall 2024. Over 43 students at the University of Michigan are facing harassment, intimidation, arrests, and charges for their campus activism. 

And the list goes on. 

This suppression is prevalent despite the fact that a majority of Americans, and a majority of Muslim and Jewish Democrats, favor a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, according to research by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. 

In addition to organizing regular Ramadan programming, Muslim chaplains at American universities continue to be tasked with the challenge of serving and supporting students amidst a tense environment on college campuses. 

A university chaplain on the West Coast, who wishes to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, says the past few months have been very difficult for students. 

“This has been one of the scariest times on campus,” she says. “It feels reminiscent of post-9/11, and I think that was a pretty broad consensus among a lot of chaplains that I spoke with.” 

“There’s a lot of grief and a lot of helplessness,” she says. “We’re watching what’s going on and we don’t really know what to do…I don’t know how anyone can be okay.”  

She mentioned that her community has implemented increased security measures for months which will continue throughout Ramadan. Students have also been running their own security shifts due to the vitriol on campus. They are also making a concerted effort to avoid walking home alone and in pairs or small groups. 

“There is a heightened level of awareness,” she adds. 

Imam Khalil Abdullah, who is the Muslim chaplain at Princeton University, says he has been intentional about trying to provide students with a safe space and sense of community during these times. He hopes this will continue during Ramadan.

“That’s what Ramadan and our iftars will be,” he adds. “Like big healing circles.” 

He also acknowledges that “different campuses are experiencing Islamophobia in a different way that requires us as chaplains to respond in different ways.”

Maintaining the Ramadan Spirit While Addressing the Suffering in Gaza 

Thasin Sardar from the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing says the community will continue to hold all its regular Ramadan programming.

“The celebratory mood is going to be a little dampened as we continue to grieve over what’s happening in Gaza,” he says, “but the spirit of Ramadan that people at large are used to, we’ll try to keep that as energetic as possible.”

In Dearborn, Michigan, community leaders announced the cancellation of this year’s annual suhoor festival “in light of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” Suhoor fests typically attract 100,000 visitors from across the U.S. and Canada. They say it feels “inappropriate to celebrate at a time of such gravity.”  

Muslims across the country are continuing their activism and advocacy for Palestine heading into Ramadan. During a Jumu’ah khutbah last week, Dr. Omar Suleiman talked about the importance of keeping the momentum for Gaza, while recognizing that many community members feel that Ramadan this year is not the same because of what’s happening. 

“If Ramadan is a month of worship, is a month of ibadah, what better month to get closer to Allah subḥānahu wa ta'āla (glorified and exalted be He) to where our du’a for our brothers and sisters are more impactful,” he says. “What better month to lose your appetite for this dunya if you haven’t lost it over the last five months watching what’s happening in Gaza.” 

 

Related:

From The Chaplain’s Desk: Prep Guide For Ramadan On Campus

Ramadan At The Uyghur Mosque: Community, Prayers, And Grief

The post Muslim Communities Across The U.S. Prepare For Ramadan Amidst Heightened Islamophobia appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Seething with anger

Indigo Jo Blogs - 5 March, 2024 - 23:22
A picture of a demonstration for Palestine in London; banners include "Jews against genocide", "Jews for Justice for Palestinians", "not in our name" and a Palestinian flag.A demonstration in London against the Gaza genocide in November 2023. (Taken by me.)

Since Brexit, there has been a particular theory about why people voted the way they did: that it wasn’t about immigration or racism, it was about something called ‘identity’. It was to do with people wanting to go back to an older Britain in a simpler time when we were supposedly self-sufficient. It doesn’t matter, according to this theory, if our economy suffers from leaving the EU because it was about something so much deeper than GDP. A few years ago I wrote a piece on homesickness and nostalgia (which is actually Greek for homesickness, rather than a longing for the past as in modern English) when the Anglican vicar Giles Fraser wrote a piece on it for Unherd; the modern nostalgist longs for a version of the past which often was not real, or only remembers the positive aspects of it and does not take into account why we cannot go back to it. Currently it is common to see comments under footage of the past, often street footage but also live music footage, about how much simpler or uncomplicated things were in the past, usually the 60s or 70s but sometimes the 80s; allegedly crime was low (it actually wasn’t) and we weren’t so worried about health and safety but quite often it appears that the faces were a lot whiter.

It’s no secret that Brexiteers are often very rich or funded by the very rich and these people do not want to accept that there are material reasons why people voted the way they did because they do not want to address the fact that their economic orthodoxies which have prevailed since Thatcher’s time failed the people. The turning point was Blair’s decision to jump the gun on worker migration from weaker economies, such as the countries which joined the EU in 2004, such as Poland, and admit them without restriction when other countries in the EU did not; a lot of Remainers are fond of dismissing any objection to this as racism or simplifying it down to “they’re taking our jobs”, but as I have discussed on here previously (as someone who works in one of the sectors affected by this decision), it is a lot more complicated. Brexiteers, on the other hand, refuse to entertain any economic explanation. It’s not that they’re pro-immigration — far from it — it’s that they don’t want to entertain any challenge to laissez-faire Thatcherite economics.

Yesterday I saw a long thread by the right-wing think-tank propagandist Matthew Goodwin, appealing to the “ruling class” to “save Britain” by doing ten things. Eight of these are in the thread; two of them are on his website, not paywalled as I write. It’s astonishing that he thinks that what the average British person cares about is “radical Islamism” which has hardly shown its face at all since last October or the spectacle of people “glorifying terrorism” in mostly peaceful demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza by affixing pictures of gliders to their bags, or the fact that a Tory MP resigned because he feels threatened, or that voters in Rochdale voted for George Galloway instead of a mainstream party candidate, after the most popular party there withdrew support for their own candidate. Many of us agree that the country is falling apart, but Goodwin says nothing about the most obvious facets of this. He tells us he knows young people who “now talk openly about joining the so-called ‘great retreat’, by leaving Britain altogether” and assumes that this is because of radical Islamists, rather than houses nobody but the rich can afford and lack of job prospects. He says nothing about our health or social care, about the cost of living, about house prices and rents, about schools which are physically falling down, about the often disastrous handling of Covid and the contempt our wealthy politicians showed for the rules they imposed on us all, about how we cannot export food because of customs barriers we have inflicted on ourselves through Brexit and the businesses going bankrupt as a result; nothing about councils going bankrupt up and down the country because the government has been starving them of funds, and because the things they did to raise revenue failed during the pandemic, nor about the libraries and other valuable public amenities being lost as a result; nothing about our environment, the state of our waterways, the beaches we cannot swim at because of the raw sewage being discharged by privatised water companies.

Maybe Goodwin lives in a part of the country where the river water is pure, social care is cheap and libraries are well-staffed and well-stocked. For some reason he thinks that these issues gossiped about in the Westminster village and in papers owned by the super-rich and mostly written for by the upper middle class are of more concern to everyone than the actual fabric of our society falling to pieces. It’s the ruling class that are angry that the plebs of Rochdale chose to elect someone they dislike, and that people keep demonstrating in London against an appalling display of cruelty and depravity against a civilian population they identify with in Palestine. He writes as if the election was a terrorist attack in itself, when in fact it was a quite lawful democratic vote. Many ordinary people are appalled at the ongoing savagery even if they believed that reprisals were justified in October. Not everyone shares the identification with Israel of large parts of our ruling class and media elite. (The nearest thing to terrorism going on here right now is the gang of vandals going round with knives, cutting down cameras and even traffic lights as a way of physically fighting the London Ultra Low Emission Zone, and posting their exploits on YouTube, but Goodwin has nothing to say about this group of lawless suburban white men.)

Absurdly, he claims we have a “policy of mass immigration” as if this was still the 1960s and planeloads of newcomers were arriving from the Commonwealth every week. The fact is that British people, thanks to rules introduced by the present government, find it nearly impossible to bring in spouses or other family members from overseas unless they are high earners (another reason why some British people might find they cannot live here anymore). British businesses such as Asian restaurants are finding it impossible to bring in the staff they need who have the skills necessary because British-born Asians get degrees and prefer better paid jobs. There was a high proportion of Brexit votes among British Asians, who had noticed that earlier attacks on spousal immigration happened around the same time during the last Labour government as the migrant workers started arriving from eastern Europe. It’s equally absurd to link “mass immigration” with Islamist extremism; the majority of Muslims here are British citizens who have been here for three or four generations, and those who were radicalised usually were because of racism; the same is true of the claim of ‘ghettoisation’. But this argument is not worth exploring here anyway, as there has not been a single serious violent incident in the UK since the start of the Gaza genocide (hence the reminders of things that happened in the past). It has all been peaceful protest and an election upset. But to this country’s radical Right, that’s really no difference from terrorism; the difference between violent and “non-violent extremism” is artificial, as Melanie Philips once claimed.

Goodwin’s article comes straight out of an echo chamber. The liberals and Left are often accused of only listening to each other and of being surprised at general elections that go against them because all those they follow on Twitter think the same way they do, but here we see someone completely oblivious to the difficulties normal people are facing, and seething with anger about a by-election result and a persistent protest about a horrific orgy of violence that will not stop, and would if any other country was responsible provoke calls for military action rather than a mere ceasefire. The average person is seeing the cost of living continue to rise, services being shut down, taxes in some places going through the roof to pay council debts; Goodwin wants us to be angry about brown-skinned people getting uppity rather than brown stuff filling our streams, rivers and coastline. He knows the Tory party cannot win an election by appealing to its record, which is wretched; their alternative, rather than admitting defeat and failure, is to look around for scapegoats and distractions. His ten demands are not a programme for bringing people together but for picking fights that might be solved with repression. There may be deeper things than GDP, but people will not ignore the decline in their standard of living forever.

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