A spotlight of suspicion was trained on them again even before the latest acts of extremist violence, including two beheadings. President Emmanuel Macron has forged ahead with his effort to rid Islam in France of extremists, part of a project he labels “separatism,” a term that makes Muslims wince.

Amid intensifying rhetoric and fresh attacks by outsiders, including the killings of three people Thursday at a Catholic church in Nice, Muslims in France have kept their heads down and chins up. But deep down, some are squirming, feeling they are being held responsible.

Islam is the second religion in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. But the country’s estimated 5 million Muslims have walked a delicate line in search of full acceptance in what for many is their nation of birth. Discrimination casts a shadow over some and is an outright barrier to mainstream life for others.

France’s cherished value of secularism, which is meant to ensure religious freedom, has in recent years been used by the state to reign in customs practiced by some Muslims. The president’s proposed law may mean further tinkering with the 1905 secularism law born out of a conflict with the powerful Roman Catholic clergy.

The rise of Islam into public view was gradual and mostly went unnoticed until the far right seized upon it as a threat to the French identity. Over the years mosques have multiplied, along with Muslim schools.

The religion with no single leader has multiple strains in France, running from moderate to Salafist with a rigorous interpretation of the religion to outright radical upstarts.

In his project, Macron envisions measures like training imams in France instead of bringing them in from Turkey, Morocco or Algeria.

Source: The Associated Press

Australian Security and Intelligence Organization director general Mike Burgess issued the warning at a parliamentary committee meeting early this month, and his agency’s annual report said the threat has increased in recent years.

The warning came as Australia’s top Islamic body warned a national government inquiry that discrimination against Muslims is on the rise.

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils said the government’s proposed Religious Discrimination Bill does not go far enough to address an increasingly intolerant society.

Australian author and journalist Andy Fleming, who has closely monitored the extreme right in Australia for 15 years, told The National the possibility of a far-right attack is “fairly high”.

Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, who is working on a research project with the generation who grew up during the War on Terror, told The National that anti-Muslim bigotry “intensified and escalated” after the attacks of 9/11.

Source: The National

In an effort to overcome that perception, the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, the nation’s only accrediting agency for Muslim schools, is changing its curriculum. It will ask its 78 accredited or member schools, located across 24 U.S. states, to arrange meetings between their own students and those at other, non-Muslim schools. “People in this country, they want to know about Muslims, they want to know what’s going on inside Islamic schools,” said CISNA Director Sufia Azmat.

The Council is asking its educators to launch more volunteer projects outside the Muslim community, attend local government meetings and create a database of alumni to track their graduates’ success. The move comes at a time when Muslims are under intense scrutiny, largely the result of extremist attacks carried out in the name of Islam in the United States and abroad.

A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations released this month showed a 57 percent spike in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded in the United States last year compared with 2015. In the 10 days following U.S. Election Day on Nov. 8, physical and verbal attacks against Muslims ticked up 6 percent compared to the same period the prior year, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

The details of the U.S. Islamic schools’ new curriculum are still being hammered out, but the purpose is clear, CISNA’s Azmat said: “Be open to outsiders.” A recent study of about a third of the nation’s Muslim high schools conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia found that the students did not vary much from their non-Muslim peers in terms of interests and sense of being American.

Many of the nation’s Islamic schools have kept a low profile since the first school opened in the United States roughly 30 years ago, partly to avoid harassment. The outreach efforts could face similar resistance to those of U.S. public schools that have attempted to teach about Muslims in social studies classes. Some parents in San Diego, California, and Chatham, New Jersey, recently objected to lessons about Muslims.

Continue reading at: Reuters

A new study by researchers at California State University-San Bernardino found that anti-Muslim hate crimes are at the highest level since the period immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The study, which examined hate crimes in 21 states and the District of Columbia — 56 percent of the U.S. population — found that hate crimes against Muslims in 2015 jumped more than 86 percent over the previous year, from 114 to 213.

That makes 2015 “the worst year for anti-Muslim hate crime that we’ve seen since 2001 and the second-worst that we’ve seen since records have been kept,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. “We’re now about nine times more than the numbers we saw pre-2001.”

The increase is due to a combination of factors, Levin said, including an escalation of terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas and the existence of a galvanized national political movement that uses anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The statistics don’t indicate how many of the hate crimes were committed by anti-government extremists, but experts say the number is significant. And Daryl Johnson, a former senior analyst with the Department of Homeland Security, said the political rhetoric has played a key role in the surge.

While the militia movement has typically targeted the government as well as federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Johnson said, the Kansas case highlights how the movement has expanded its targets.

“They justify targeting Muslims because they believe that Muslims are connected to ISIS and every mosque is an indoctrination center,” he said. “So they stereotype and broad-brush every Muslim as a threat and sympathizer with ISIS.” Fueling the anti-Muslim attitudes, Johnson said, are terrorist attacks such as those in Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino.

Because most militias are defense oriented, Johnson said, they’re preparing for the next ISIS attack. Levin said that although violent jihadis inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaida remain the most prominent terror threat in the U.S., “we now face a multifaceted terrorism risk.”

Read more at: The Kansas City Star

“At least it doesn’t give an excuse for the Islam haters to falsely claim that Muslims were celebrating on 9/11,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on Islamic Relations. “That was the concern.” Eid al-Adha commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim, or Abraham, to sacrifice the life of his son for God. The timing of the holiday depends on when the new moon is seen at the start of the Dhu al-Hijjah month, according to the Islamic calendar.

CAIR and other Muslim groups have repeatedly expressed concern about a surge in hate crimes against Muslims in the wake of attacks by extremists in San Bernardino, California, Orlando, Florida, and elsewhere. “The safety concerns are almost daily issues now,” Hooper said, noting the recent killing of a New York imam and the stabbing of a Muslim woman in the city on Wednesday night. The suspect in the imam slaying pleaded not guilty in court on Thursday to murder charges.

Source: Reuters