Controverisal right-wing figure Nigel Farage was accused on Sunday of generalizing about UK Muslims for “not sharing British values” during an interview on Sky News.

The honorary president of the Reform UK party was being interviewed by the channel’s presenter Trevor Phillips, whom he told there is “a growing number of young people” in the UK who were “on the streets of London every Saturday” and “loathe much of what we stand for.”

When pressed by Phillips on whether he was referring to British Muslims, Farage said: “We are. I am afraid I found some of the recent surveys saying 46 percent of British Muslims support Hamas, support a terrorist organisation that is proscribed in this country.”

He was quoting a Henry Jackson Society poll released in April that reported that only one in four British Muslims believed Hamas members committed murder and rape in Israel on Oct. 7 last year, in which around 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in an attack on the south of the country.

Farage compared British Muslims to people of British-Caribbean origin, who he claimed had a shared herotage with the UK, and asked Phillips — whose parents moved to Britain as part of the Windrush generation from the West Indies — how many people in his community could not speak English.

Phillips replied: “We all speak English,” before adding that many British Muslims also spoke the language.

Farage rejected the claim and said that we had not been appearing on the program to “attack the religion of Islam,” adding that he had not done so. He blamed the issue on the two main British political parties and their immigration policies.

“I’m blaming elements of that community, I’m not blaming them. I’m stating a fact, no one else dares tell the truth about this,” he said.

“On the broader question, the biggest single problem this country faces is the population explosion. And it will not be debated in this election.

“Why? Because Labour started it and the (Conservatives) accelerated it. That has led to a problem on a scale unimaginable. Nobody in history has allowed more people in who are potentially really going to fight against British values than (Prime Minister Rishi) Sunak.”

Source: Arab News

As campus protests raged across the country and pro-Palestinian demonstrators were increasingly cast as antisemites, Khaled Beydoun feared the characterization was a disservice not only to Muslim students but also to their Jewish peers.

As an associate professor of law at Arizona State University and a scholar of the First Amendment, religion and national security, Beydoun was frustrated by what he saw as discussions of antisemitism overshadowing clear demonstrations of Islamophobia. He also disagreed with how the two prejudices were pitted against each other.

“To understand Islamophobia and the way it developed in the United States, you have to understand how antisemitism developed,” he said. “Once you see these two forms of bigotry as essentially arising from the same rotten core, you’re able to demystify the idea that they’re oriented against one another.”

Beydoun, a Muslim himself, has used his 2019 book—American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear,—and his academic and social media work since, to chart the historic roots and legal implications of Islamophobia in the U.S.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Beydoun about his view on campus protests, and how he links them to widespread discrimination against Muslims that was inflamed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Read the conversation on: Inside Higher Ed

In an interview with ‘Le Monde,’ researcher Olivier Esteves presents the conclusions from the survey he co-directed.

After noticing some of their former Muslim students take the Eurostar to leave for London for good, researchers Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard and Julien Talpin decided to take a closer look at why French Muslims were moving abroad. Their “survey of the French Muslim diaspora” was recently published under the title La France, Tu l’Aimes Mais Tu La Quittes (“France, Loving It But Leaving It”).

In an interview with Le Monde, Esteves, an English professor and specialist in English-speaking cultures and societies at the University of Lille, presents the main conclusions from the survey he co-directed.

Le Monde: The book you’re publishing is about French Muslims who decide to live abroad. Do we know how many of them there are?

Olivier Esteves: There are probably tens of thousands of them, but we can’t give a precise figure. First, we don’t know exactly how many French people live abroad since a significant proportion of them do not register on consular electoral lists. Second, there are no religious statistics in France, which means we don’t know how many French people are Muslim.

In any case, the question of “how many” was not what we were most interested in. What we wanted to understand was “why” these French Muslims were leaving their country.

Le Monde: And why is that?

Olivier Esteves: Their main goal is to escape an “Islamophobic atmosphere.” In our interviews, respondents very frequently mentioned the hostile media and political discourse toward Islam and Muslims.

Personal discrimination, particularly in the workplace, also contributed to their decision to leave. Among Muslims, some groups are particularly stigmatized and are therefore more likely to leave. This is particularly true of women who wear a hijab. It is also the case for converts who, in adolescence or adulthood, suddenly experience discrimination they had not experienced as a child.

However, many of them do not leave for just one single reason. In addition to a yearning to escape Islamophobia, they cite other reasons for leaving. Some respondents – a very small minority – felt that they could only find religious fulfillment by settling in a Muslim country. Others, more numerous, also left to learn English, because of their thirst for adventure or to seize new professional opportunities.

Read the full interview on: Le Monde

Speaking to the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Monday, Bruno Kahl said that though Europe and the US had not seen any more major terrorist attacks like those of two decades ago, “Islamist terrorism has developed further and cost very many human lives. The number of terrorist actors and the danger they pose has increased.”

There have of course been major successes in the fight against the Islamic State in the past few years — especially the 2019 killing of the group’s self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the destruction of the “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq as a quasi-state entity. But since then, said Kahl, IS has turned into a decentralized network, much like al-Qaida, whose suborganizations “are even spreading out.”

This isn’t exactly news, according to Mirna El Masri, a radicalization and terrorism researcher at the Hamburg-based German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). “There had been indications in 2019 after the loss of its territories that IS had strengthened considerably,” she told DW. “On the other hand, new circumstances have exacerbated the situation in the past year, which might explain why Kahl has decided to talk about this now.”

Source: DW