Category: politics

Dalel Benbabaali: Sad to see what happened to Notre Dame. Here’s another UNESCO world heritage site that has been recently destroyed. It’s called Sanaa and it’s in Yemen. There’s no international outpouring of emotion and Macron will not call for contributions to rebuild it because he’s actually helping its destruction with French weapons.

sri lanka ♥

Azad Essa: It is precisely the tone set by her own colleagues that have allowed the salacious and vindictive attacks to escalate.

And one has to ask if any of this is surprising?

What has this liberal establishment done for Muslims in America besides extend surveillance on the community, bomb their cousins in the Middle East or in the Horn of Africa and hold an iftar once-a-year?

What further proof other than the relentless attacks on Omar is needed to illustrate that almost 18 years after 9/11, American Muslims are neither safe from violence nor free from suspicion and blame; whether they are selling hot dogs from a food truck or sitting in Congress.

The normalisation of anti-Muslim racism is not something that emerged with Trump. It’s as American, as they say, as apple pie. More here.

Sophia Azeb: To bear witness, as June Jordan insists on doing, is no small task when the world-making and destroying machinations of such formidable global power plays are simultaneously obscured by the shadows such catastrophes cast over their victims. Bearing witness with the intention to forge the language through which catastrophe is made seeable and knowable is particularly and forcefully discouraged. June Jordan’s determination to bear witness is a testament to her commitment to an elective affinity emergent of “inveterate statelessness,” to borrow liberally from Fred Moten. Who June Jordan is as a witness – a Black woman, queer, feminist, Caribbean, American, essayist, journalist, poet, tirelessly courageous – is thus an essential aspect of her being and practice to recognize and hold aloft.

That I begin with a reflection on June Jordan, a Black woman, is not incidental. That I am a Palestinian, no poet but a theorist informed by the intellectual orientation and promise of the field of Black studies and the study of Black literature, is also not incidental. I am a student of Black liberation, I must foreground and cite the Black women who guide us in the commitment to action that the work of solidarity entails. The deliberate targeting of Ilhan Omar – and the curious silences that suffuse the discourses circling this event – demands that I too bear witness. More here.

Eliza Griswold: Last July, the pattern of killings of Muslims grew so dire—in 2018, there were thirteen fatal cow-related lynchings—that the Indian Supreme Court demanded that the legislature formulate laws against the practice, which it has yet to do. Last month, Human Rights Watch released a hundred-and-four-page report documenting the violence, and the inaction—and abuses—of the government officials charged with investigating the crimes. “Lynching has become a nationalist project,” Mohammad Ali, a prominent Indian journalist who is currently working on a book about the phenomenon, told me. He said few perpetrators are punished, which has created a culture of impunity. Killers are lauded in some quarters as heroes for defending the faith and eradicating Muslims.

The Khans’ case was rare in that Pehlu, who briefly regained consciousness before dying, was able to identify several of his attackers by name, none of whom were charged. […] A video of the attack, recorded by one of the perpetrators, was posted on a YouTube channel related to the Bajrang Dal. It quickly accumulated more than six hundred thousand views.

[…] There were dozens of similar videos showing killings of Muslims, which were deeply disturbing both for their violence and for the obvious pride that the attackers took in being Internet stars. In one, a man wearing white pants and a bright pink sweater beat a Muslim man to death with a stick and sets him on fire, accusing him of committing “love jihad”: falling in love with a Hindu woman. After recording the murder, the attacker turns to the camera and says, “I am appealing to all Hindu sisters that don’t get into the trap of these jihadis. These people will win your heart and satisfy their lust.” In the another, a Bajrang Dal member leans into a truck’s open window. “What is your name?” he shouts, slapping the driver. “Mubarak,” the driver replies. The cameraman slaps him again. “Say ‘Mubarak Muslim,’ ” he demands. Finally, we found the video of Pehlu’s murder. It begins with Pehlu sitting on a curb, his palm upturned as he pleads with someone off camera. Then one of the attackers knocks him backward, and he disappears from the frame. More here.