Author: mara.ahmed

For Kifah Shah, who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, many of the reactions towards the two women remind her of growing up as a Muslim girl in a majority non-Muslim community. It’s also emblematic of a larger scope of intolerance and ignorance towards Islam as a whole: “With mostly white people, [life] after 9/11 were a mixed bag of curiosity and coded (sometimes blatant) racism: from being asked whether or not I’ll have an arranged marriage to being told my uncle was [Osama Bin Laden] to having teachers dehumanize Muslim lives by saying an entire city in Iraq wasn’t worth the life of one U.S. soldier,” she remembers, adding that seeing trolls target both Omar and Tlaib by questioning their patriotism doesn’t surprise her.

“The right has asserted pernicious ideas about whether or not Muslims in the U.S. subscribe to the idea of ‘America,’ because if they don’t, or if they question any aspect of it, then they must subscribe to some other ‘state,’” Shah notes. “This conspiratorial, baseless, and harmful lens has for a long while attempted to push Muslims into dichotomies of good versus bad.”

[…] Yusuf agrees. “The typical profile of a congressperson has been an older, cisgender, heterosexual, white man with money for as long as our country has been around,” she begins. “For [two] Muslim women — one Palestinian and the other a Somali refugee — to enter a space that this country has excluded women, people of color, queer people, immigrants and anyone else from is extremely significant.” It is no surprise that the system is not set up for them to succeed in that space, she adds. “There can be no question why their identities are at the forefront of every discussion about their actions and words.” More here.

5 killed and many more injured outside data durbar, the most prominent sufi shrine in lahore. more here.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs: The U.S. government has been trying to strangle the Venezuelan economy.

It started with sanctions in 2017 that prevented the country from accessing international capital markets and the oil company from restructuring its loans. That put Venezuela into a hyperinflation. That was the utter collapse.

Oil earnings plummeted. The earnings that are used to buy food and medicine collapsed. That’s when the social, humanitarian crisis went spiraling out of control. And then, in this year, with this idea – very naive, very stupid, in my view – that there would be this self-proclaimed president, which was all choreographed with the United States, very closely, another round of even tighter sanctions, essentially confiscating the earnings and the assets of the Venezuelan government, took place.

Now Venezuela is in complete, utter catastrophe, a lot of it brought on by the United States deliberately, creating massive suffering. We know there’s hunger. We know there’s a incredible shortage of medical supplies. We can only imagine, because we won’t know really until the dust settles and careful studies are done, how much excess mortality there is, but, surely, in a context like this, this is a catastrophe largely created by the US, because this is an all-or-nothing strategy. What the US, what Trump, just doesn’t understand is the idea of negotiations.

This is an attempt at an overthrow. It’s very crude. It’s not working. And it’s very cruel, because it’s punishing 30 million people. More here.

ramadan begins with the israeli bombing of gaza, an open air prison. dozens of people have been killed including a pregnant woman and her 14-month old daughter. in what world is that ok? #gazaunderattack #istandwithgaza