Muslims worldwide stand in solidarity against Macron-led Islamophobia
Muslims worldwide stand in solidarity against Macron-led Islamophobia
Muslims in all corners of the world united against rising Islamophobic sentiments in Europe, especially in France, as protests and boycotts continue to spread.
Intellectuals and politicians from southern African nations slammed France on Tuesday for President Emmanuel Macron’s insulting remarks about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
“Leaders like Macron are espousing this racist and bigoted narrative to strike fear and hatred,” Muhammad Khalid Sayed, a lawmaker from South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) party, told Anadolu Agency (AA).
“Macron is also trying to shift focus away from his own domestic problems like corruption and cutting of social spending,” said Sayed, who chairs the provincial branch of the ANC Youth League. “The move toward Islam in the West is striking fear in Western leaders like Macron, and they use this narrative for cheap political means to stay relevant and stay in power.”
Read more at: Daily Sabah
Muslims in all corners of the world united against rising Islamophobic sentiments in Europe, especially in France, as protests and boycotts continue to spread. Intellectuals and politicians from southern African nations slammed France on Tuesday for President Emmanuel Macron’s insulting remarks about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. “Leaders like Macron are espousing this racist and bigoted narrative to strike fear and hatred,” Muhammad Khalid Sayed, a lawmaker from South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) party, told Anadolu Agency (AA). “Macron is also trying to shift focus away from his own domestic problems like corruption and cutting of social spending,” said Sayed, who chairs the provincial branch of the ANC Youth League. “The move toward Islam in the West is striking fear in Western leaders like Macron, and they use this narrative for cheap political means to stay relevant and stay in power.”
Naomi Campbell says she still experiences racism in Britain: ‘Nothing has changed’
Naomi Campbell says she still experiences racism in Britain: ‘Nothing has changed’
Naomi Campbell has been highly regarded as one of the most famous supermodels in the world for decades, becoming a household name and paving the way for younger women in the industry. But the London native shared with Vogue that none of that success came easy. In fact, Campbell’s rise was met with scrutiny and even racism that she still experiences and is no longer afraid to call out.
“I never used to say the word racism; I just used to say, it’s territorialism,” she shared in the publication’s November 2020 issue. “I never wanted people to say that I used that as an excuse, that I was throwing that word out. Now I’m happy that everyone’s all on the same page, that everyone feels comfortable to come out about their experiences without feeling some stigma. But for me, nothing’s changed. I’m going to speak the same way.”
Campbell, 50, went on to say that she’s long been an advocate for Black models, even taking younger Black men and women in the industry under her wing. Still, she didn’t immediately understand her responsibility within the industry.
After Long Fight, ADL is Relieved at Facebook Announcement That It Will Remove Holocaust Denial Content
After Long Fight, ADL is Relieved at Facebook Announcement That It Will Remove Holocaust Denial Content
ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) is relieved by Facebook’s announcement that it was updating its hate speech policy to prohibit any content “that denies or distorts the Holocaust.” This comes after nearly a decade of ADL advocating for such changes and just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, where users have been using the platform to perpetuate hate and conspiracy theories at alarming rates.
Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO, issued the following statement:
We are relieved that Facebook has finally taken the step that we have been asking them to take for nearly a decade: to call Holocaust denial and distortion what it is – “hate speech” – and in doing so, to remove it from their platform. The Holocaust, the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and several million others during World War II, is one of history’s most painstakingly examined and well-documented genocides.
Since 2011, ADL has been calling publicly and privately for Facebook to change its policies to classify Holocaust denial on its platform as a form of hate speech, because Holocaust denial is most certainly hate speech. While Facebook has made numerous positive changes to its policies since that time, it stubbornly had held onto this outrageous platform policy, even in the face of the undeniable threat of growing antisemitism and antisemitic violence around the world.
The persecution of the Uyghurs is a crime against humanity
The persecution of the Uyghurs is a crime against humanity
The first stories from Xinjiang were hard to believe. Surely the Chinese government was not running a gulag for Muslims? Surely Uyghurs were not being branded “extremists” and locked up simply for praying in public or growing long beards? Yet, as we report in this week’s China section (see article), the evidence of a campaign against the Uyghurs at home and abroad becomes more shocking with each scouring of the satellite evidence, each leak of official documents and each survivor’s pitiful account.
In 2018 the government pivoted from denying the camps’ existence to calling them “vocational education and training centres”—a kindly effort to help backward people gain marketable skills. The world should instead heed Uyghur victims of China’s coercive indoctrination. Month after month, inmates say, they are drilled to renounce extremism and put their faith in “Xi Jinping Thought” rather than the Koran. One told us that guards ask prisoners if there is a God, and beat those who say there is. And the camps are only part of a vast system of social control.
In 2018 the government pivoted from denying the camps’ existence to calling them “vocational education and training centres”—a kindly effort to help backward people gain marketable skills. The world should instead heed Uyghur victims of China’s coercive indoctrination. Month after month, inmates say, they are drilled to renounce extremism and put their faith in “Xi Jinping Thought” rather than the Koran. One told us that guards ask prisoners if there is a God, and beat those who say there is. And the camps are only part of a vast system of social control.
Germany delivered a statement calling on China to respect human rights
On behalf of 39 states, Germany delivered a statement calling on China to human rights, especially in #EastTurkistan, #Tibet and #HongKong. It called for urgent and unfettered access to investigate the camps and for China to stop mass arbitrary detention.
On behalf of 39 states, Germany delivered a statement calling on China to respect human rights, especially in #EastTurkistan, #Tibet and #HongKong. It called for urgent and unfettered access to investigate the camps and for China to stop mass arbitrary detention.
The statement also called on all countries to respect the principle of non-refoulment and not send #Uyghur refugees back to #China.
The WUC welcomes this vital statement. This is the largest coalition denouncing atrocities in China.
The coalition to #StopUyghurGenocide is growing.
—
Source: World Uyghur Congress
On behalf of 39 states, Germany delivered a statement calling on China to respect human rights, especially in #EastTurkistan, #Tibet and #HongKong. It called for urgent and unfettered access to investigate the camps and for China to stop mass arbitrary detention. The statement also called on all countries to respect the principle of non-refoulment and not send #Uyghur refugees back to #China. The WUC welcomes this vital statement. This is the largest coalition denouncing atrocities in China. The coalition to #StopUyghurGenocide is growing.
George Floyd’s “brutal, brutal death” is a reminder of “this ugly underbelly of our society,” former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday.
“People all across this country are enraged and rightly so,” Biden said of Floyd’s death Monday in the custody of Minneapolis police, according to a pool report. “Everyday African Americans go about their lives with constant anxiety and trauma of wondering, ‘Will I be next?’ Sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not.”
The presumptive Democratic nominee for president made the remarks during an online fundraiser hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. His comments came after the governor of Minnesota activated the National Guard amid growing social unrest in the state, and after a local prosecutor said he would hold off on charging any of the officers involved in the incident.
Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died Monday after a white police officer pinned him to the ground, kneeling on his neck for roughly eight minutes. He died after an ambulance was called to the scene to take him to the hospital. All four responding officers have since been fired.
Biden said the incident is emblematic. “These tragedies, these injustices, cut at the very what of our most sacred of beliefs: that all Americans, equal in rights and in dignity, are part of an ingrained systemic cycle of racism and oppression that [run] throughout every party of our society.”
“If we’re not committed as a nation,” he added, “with every ounce of purpose in our beings, not just to bind up this wound in hope that somehow the scab once again will cover things over — but to treat the underlying injury — we’re never going to eventually heal.”
Protests over the death of a black man who was killed after a white police officer pinned him to the ground have spread to Los Angeles – as Donald Trump said the FBI are investigating.
George Floyd died on Monday in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after police officer Derek Chauvin was filmed kneeling on the handcuffed man’s neck for at least eight minutes while arresting him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 note in a shop.
Mr Floyd, 46, who was shirtless and unarmed, can be heard in the widely circulated mobile phone footage saying he could not breathe before paramedics are seen lifting the limp man onto a stretcher and into an ambulance before he was pronounced dead in hospital.
Hundreds of protesters, some who were looting shops, clashed with riot police firing tear gas for a second night in Minneapolis on Wednesday in an outpouring of rage over his death.
For two days they have been calling for Mr Chauvin and three other police officers – named by Minneapolis police as Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng – who were with him to be charged over Mr Floyd’s death.Advertisement
The protesters walked two miles to the police department’s Third Precinct station, about half a mile from where Mr Floyd was arrested, and filled the streets surrounding it.
Some demonstrators were seen throwing rocks and bottles at police while nearby shops, including a Target, a Cub Foods and an auto parts store, were looted with no evidence of police intervention.
Another protest unfolded on the street outside Mr Chauvin’s home, with red paint spilled on his driveway and “murderer” written in chalk on his driveway. Police told protesters Mr Chauvin was not there and nobody answered the door to reporters.
Nearly 2,000 miles away in Los Angeles, several hundred protesters – nearly all in masks due to lockdown rules – marched in anger over his death from City Hall to a downtown freeway, blocking traffic and breaking windows on two California Highway Patrol vehicles.
Why do Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly a third of the known coronavirus death toll? Not because of government incompetence, the Trump administration is arguing, but because Americans are very unhealthy.
The United States organized response to the pandemic had been “historic”, Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, told CNN on 17 May, but America “unfortunately” has a “very diverse” population, and black Americans and minorities “in particular” have “significant underlying disease”.
Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor interviewing Azar, paused and squinted. Surely, he asked, Azar was not arguing that “the reason that there were so many dead Americans is because we’re unhealthier than the rest of the world?”
Azar doubled down: “These are demonstrated facts.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the American people that the government failed to take adequate steps in February …” Tapper said.
“This is not about fault. It’s about simple epidemiology,” Azar said, adding in a pious tone: “One doesn’t blame an individual for their health condition. That would be absurd.”
Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing. Someone had to be held responsible for an American death toll approaching 100,000 people, worse than any other country’s reported deaths. In order for the Trump administration to remain blameless, someone else had to be blamed, and the administration was now blaming the dead.
It took less than a month after the first shelter-in-place orders to devolve into a full-blown partisan culture war, complete with armed protests egged on by the president; conservatives questioning or denying death numbers; pundits arguing against a continued lockdown with lines like, “You can call me a Grandma killer”; attempts by hair salons and barbers to stage acts of civil disobedience; and some states led by Republican governors moving to quickly reopen, even as other states with Democratic governors announced months of continued restrictions.
A majority of Americans remain supportive of public health restrictions, including nearly half of Republican voters and 68% of people who have lost a job or suffered a pay cut.
The anti-lockdown demonstrations at state capitols have attracted a messy jumble of protesters: anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists, rightwing provocateurs, members of known anti-government militias, gun rights advocates, established conservative groups backed by wealthy billionaire donors, Republican stalwarts and people who were actually out of work.
It would be wrong to argue that racism was the sole motivation for the protests, or even a decisive factor for the many different protesters who showed up.
But the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.
National Action Plans Needed to Counter Intolerance
(New York) – Governments should take urgent steps to prevent racist and xenophobic violence and discrimination linked to the Covid-19 pandemic while prosecuting racial attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 8, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that “the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” and urged governments to “act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate.”
Government leaders and senior officials in some instances have directly or indirectly encouraged hate crimes, racism, or xenophobia by using anti-Chinese rhetoric. Several political parties and groups, including in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Greece, France, and Germany have also latched onto the Covid-19 crisis to advance anti-immigrant, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic conspiracy theories that demonize refugees, foreigners, prominent individuals, and political leaders.
“Racism and physical attacks on Asians and people of Asian descent have spread with the Covid-19 pandemic, and government leaders need to act decisively to address the trend,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director. “Governments should act to expand public outreach, promote tolerance, and counter hate speech while aggressively investigating and prosecuting hate crimes.”Read more…
The Muslim community in the US state of Georgia is searching for answers after a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a Sudanese-American man earlier this month.
Yassin Mohamed, 47, was killed on May 9 by an Evans County sheriff’s deputy near the rural town of Claxton, which sits roughly 200 miles (320km) southeast of Atlanta, the state capital.
According to police reports, Mohamed was throwing rocks at the deputies during the incident that led to his death. He had had several encounters with law enforcement agencies in the 24 hours prior to that incident.
During one of those encounters, Mohamed was taken to hospital, leading the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Georgia) to question whether Mohamed was suffering from some kind of mental health issues.
“We’re unclear as to the mental state of Mr Mohamed, and until the culmination of the investigation we won’t know for sure,” said Murtaza Khwaja, the legal and policy director of CAIR-Georgia, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation.
“What we do know is that law enforcement is treating this a mental health crisis,” Khwaja claimed. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) would not comment on the mental health of Mohamed and the Evan’s County Sheriff’s department did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
In the May 9 incident, the GBI said in a statement that deputies were called after midnight and found Mohamed walking on the road. An altercation ensued after the deputies attempted to make contact.
Mohamed began throwing rocks at law enforcement, hitting one of the deputies once and “charging” him with a “larger rock”, causing the deputy to fire his weapon, the GBI said.
Mohamed died before being taken to hospital. The deputy was not seriously injured.
Prior encounters
Prior to the deadly encounter with the Evans County deputy, Mohamed had “six or seven” interactions with law enforcement and emergency services over the course of the night, according to CAIR.
These included run-ins with the Glennville police department, the Claxton police department, and emergency medical services (EMS). Mohamed was detained by law enforcement and taken to hospital, where he refused treatment, the GBI confirmed to Al Jazeera.
During another instance, Mohamed attacked a police officer and ambulance with a plastic pipe. A video taken by law enforcement and obtained by local news outlet AllOnGeorgia shows the incident.
In the video, Mohamed, who was walking on the road at night, approaches the police car which stopped to approach him, wielding a large, plastic pipe. An officer steps out of his vehicle after warning Mohamed, draws his firearm and appears to drop it, the video shows. Another officer assists in the encounter, and Mohamed is held on the ground. EMS later takes him away.
