2017: The Year Islamophobia Went Mainstream

Islamophobia is no longer extreme; the year 2017 saw it go mainstream in Europe, India, the United States and several other parts of the world.

Openly Islamophobic Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States in 2017. India's largest state of Uttar Pradesh elected rabidly anti-Muslim chief minister Yogi Adiyanath who was hand-picked by Muslim-hating Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2017.  Neo-Nazis made significant electoral gains with their anti-Islam rhetoric in several European nations while Burma and Israel continued to get away with the murder of  innocent Muslim civilians in 2017.

These alarming trends are reminiscent of the rise of Nazi Party led by Germany's Adolf Hitler who brought disaster to Europe and the rest of the world less than a century ago.

Trump's Muslim Ban:

The year of Islamophobia began in earnest on January 20, 2017 with the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump who called for "total and complete shutdown" of  Muslims entering the United States during his successful electoral campaign. Among the first executive orders he signed was a "Muslim Ban" from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Then came an avalanche of a large number of Islamophobic tweets and retweets from Trump's twitter account. Some recent Trump retweets were of tweets from Britain First's Jayda Fransen. These tweets and retweets were swiftly denounced by top British and Dutch officials. Trump did not apologize.

Trump developed a pattern of using terror attacks to tweet against Muslims while ignoring similar or worse terror attacks by others.

Trump closed the year with recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a recognition that prior US administrations had withheld pending negotiations and final settlement of the issues between Israelis and Palestinians.

Hindu Nazis in India:

Yogi Adiyanath, known for his highly inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric, was hand-picked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to head India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.

Yogi wants to "install statues of Goddess Gauri, Ganesh and Nandi in every mosque”.  Before his election, he said, “If one Hindu is killed, we won’t go to the police, we’ll kill 10 Muslims”.  He endorsed the beef lynching of Indian Muslim Mohammad Akhlaque and demanded that the victim's family be charged with cow slaughter.

In an op ed titled "Hitler's Hindus: The Rise and Rise of India's Nazi-Loving Nationalists" published by leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, author Shrenik Rao has raised alarm bells about "large and growing community of Indian Hindu Nazis, who are digitally connected to neo-Nazi counterparts across the world".

Rao talks about Nagpur, a town he describes as the "epicenter of Hindu Nationalism", where he found  ‘Hitler’s Den’ pool parlor "that shocked me on a round-India trip 10 years ago was no outlier. Admiration for Nazism – often reframed with a genocidal hatred for Muslims – is rampant in the Hindu nationalist camp, which has never been as mainstream as it is now".

Hindu nationalists in India have a long history of admiration for the Nazi leader, including his "Final Solution". In his book "We" (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) wrote, "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Golwalkar, considered the founder of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India, saw Islam and Muslims as enemies. He said: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers".

Islamophobia in Europe:

Dutch expert Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the University of Georgia summed up the rise of Islamophobes in Europe well when he said: "The far right in Europe is more popular today than it was at any time in postwar history".

Alternative für Deutschland (AFD), a modern re-incarnation of Hitler's Nazi Party, stunned the world by becoming the third largest party in German Bundestag in 2017.

Last year, AFD's anti-Islam policies replaced its anti-EU focus with the slogan “Islam is not a part of Germany” emerging from the party’s spring 2017 conference.

In Austria, far-right Freedom Party candidate Sebastian Kurz was recently elected chancellor on the party's anti-Islam platform.

Earlier in 2017, the Dutch anti-Islam Freedom Party of Geert Wilders became the second largest force in parliament.

The French National Front (FN) of Marine Le Pen received nearly 34 percent of votes in the May 2017 presidential run-off that was won by Emmanuel Macron.

Neo-Nazis and Hindu Nazis on Social Media:

The advent and growth of online social media have enabled a large and growing community of Indian Hindu Nazis connected to neo-Nazi counterparts in Europe and America.  This came to light a few years ago when the Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto against the "Islamization of Western Europe" was heavily influenced by the kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric which is typical of the Nazi-loving Hindu Nationalists like late Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973), and his present-day Sangh Parivar followers and sympathizers in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who currently rule several Indian states. This Hindutva rhetoric which infected Breivik has been spreading like a virus on the Internet, particularly on many of the well-known Islamophobic hate sites that have sprouted up in Europe and America in recent years. In fact, much of the Breivik manifesto is cut-and-pastes of anti-Muslim blog posts and columns that validated his worldview.

"It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical," Breivick wrote in his manifesto. The Christian Science Monitor has reported that "in the case of India, there is significant overlap between Breivik’s rhetoric and strains of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – on the question of coexistence with Muslims. Human rights monitors have long decried such rhetoric in India for creating a milieu for communal violence, and the Norway incidents are prompting calls here to confront the issue."

Indian Textbooks Praise Nazis:

Adulation for for Hitler has found its way into Indian textbooks to influence young impressionable minds. Here's how Rao describes it:

In 2004, when now-Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, school textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board portrayed Hitler as a hero, and glorified fascism.


The tenth-grade social studies textbook had chapters entitled "Hitler, the Supremo," and "Internal Achievements of Nazism." The section on the "Ideology of Nazism" reads: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race." The tenth-grade social studies textbook, published by the state of Tamil Nadu in 2011 (with multiple revised editions until 2017) includes chapters glorifying Hitler, praising his "inspiring leadership," "achievements" and how the Nazis "glorified the German state" so, "to maintain a German race with Nordic elements, [Hitler] ordered the Jews to be persecuted."


Mein Kampf has also gone mainstream, becoming a "must-read" management strategy book for India’s business school students. Professors teaching strategy lecture about how a short, depressed man in prison made a goal of taking over the world and built a strategy to achieve it.

Modi and Trump:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has built his entire political career on the intense hatred of  Muslims. US President Donald Trump built his successful presidential campaign on Islamophobia and xenophobia. That's what the two men have in common.

Just as white racists form the core of Trump's support base in America, the Modi phenomenon in India has been fueled by Hindu Nationalists whose leaders have praised Adolph Hitler for his hatred of Jews.

M.S. Golwalkar, a Hindu Nationalist who Mr. Modi has described as "worthy of worship" wrote the following about Muslims in his book "We":

 "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.”

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Summary:

The simultaneous rise of Neo Nazis in the West and the Hindu Nazis in India represents a very serious and growing threat to world peace. Their combined menace can lead to a devastating third world war with nuclear weapons if these trends are not halted and reversed soon. I hope good sense prevails among the voters in these countries to pull the world back from the brink of human catastrophe.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Hindu Nationalists Love Nazis

A Conversation With White Nationalist Jared Taylor on Race in America

Lynchistan: India is the Lynching Capital of the World

Modi and Trump

Anders Breivik: Islamophobia in Europe and India

Hindu Nationalism Goes Global

Hindutva: The Legacy of the British Raj

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Comment by Riaz Haq on September 8, 2021 at 1:47pm

How 9/11 still impacts Muslims in America

https://www.fox4now.com/news/local-news/how-9-11-still-impacts-musl...

The latest PEW research data shows there are more than 3.5 million Muslims living in America today, and that number continues to grow. PEW estimates that by 2050 the U.S. Muslim population will make up more than 2% of the nation's total population. But after the 9/11 attacks, Muslims started facing more discrimination because of their faith.

The FBI's uniform crime reporting website shows that anti-Islamic hate crimes rose from 28 incidents in the year 2000 to 481 in 2001. That's a 1,617% increase in just one year. 20 years later, those numbers are still high. In 2019, anti-Islamic hate crimes made up 13.3% of all religion-based attacks in the U.S.

If you want to learn more about the religion and culture of Islam in our country, you can visit alislam.org or the Muslim American society's website. The 9/11 memorial site also gives you more information on how the Muslim community was impacted by the events of that day, and how the community responded.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 30, 2021 at 10:02am

Unmasking Hindutva - Frontline
Inbox

https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/unmasking-hindutva-lookin...


SOCIAL science academics associated with American and European universities organised a three-day online conference titled “Dismantling Global Hindutva” from September 10 to 12 with the stated aim of bringing together “scholars of South Asia specialising in gender, economics, political science, caste, religion, health care, and media in order to try to understand the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of Hindutva”. The conference was co-sponsored by academic units of more than 50 universities worldwide.

As soon as the announcement pertaining to the conference was made sometime in August, the organisers and the invited speakers were threatened, trolled and intimidated on social media. Hindu groups based in the United States such as the Hindu Mandir Executives Conference, which describes itself as an initiative of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America, the Coalition of Hindus of North America and the Hindu American Foundation pressured participating universities to withdraw their support for the event. Niraj Antani, a Republican State Senator from Ohio, condemned the conference, terming it as “Hinduphobia”. In India, the event attracted massive opposition, with several media outlets taking the lead in campaigning against it.

The speakers acknowledged the “bravery” and “fortitude” of the organisers in staying the course and proceeding with the conference. The conference had nine thematic sessions with 45 speakers (including the moderators) presenting their ideas and analyses. While the participating scholars (the majority of them were of Indian heritage) were mainly from the U.S., there were speakers from the United Kingdom, France and Germany as well. A handful of Indian activists, who were subjected to virulent online attacks, including death threats, also spoke at the conference. The organisers deserve to be congratulated because it is hard to imagine an academic event that rigorously interrogates the idea of Hindutva taking place in India with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in government at the Centre.

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Two scholars from the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, Shana Sippy and Sailaja Krishnamuti, asserted that “not all Hinduism is Hindutva but Hindutva is, in fact, Hinduism…. Hindutva is a powerful, vocal, insidious form of Hinduism.” In a powerful presentation, Sunita Viswanath, co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, spoke about her engagement with a more casteless and inclusive form of Hinduism. Identifying herself as a practising Hindu who “loves Sita and Ram”, she decried how “Jai Shri Ram has become a murder slogan”. The geographer Brij Maharaj argued how the RSS and its ideology of Hindutva had found it difficult to pervade Indian diasporas in South Africa, Mauritius, Guyana and Fiji because of their origins as indentured labour.

In the last session, on “Islamophobia, Hindutva and White Supremacy”, the historians Anupama Rao and Anjali Arondekar and the media studies scholar Deepa Kumar shared their perspectives. Deepa Kumar commented on the shrinking academic space in Indian universities, quoting her own experience: In May 2021, her talk on Islamophobia at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education was cancelled following protests by Hindu right-wing activists. Deepa Kumar drew on her past work to show the commonality of “tactics, strategies and rhetoric” among white supremacists, Zionists and espousers of Hindutva.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 4, 2021 at 7:19pm

"While the Bidens of this world still talk about Gandhi, India’s role models have changed. ..(Anti-#Muslim) #Genocide is now openly demanded at public rallies. The “need” for ethnic cleansing can pop up in casual conversations" #India #Modi #Hindutva https://time.com/6103284/india-hindu-supremacy-extremism-genocide-b...

And it is only the beginning. In neighboring Bihar, the government is asking people to report “suspected illegal migrants” and officials have been ordered to create awareness of the issue on “an urgent basis.” The state’s high court has demanded a detention center to house migrants, reminding the government that “deportation of illegal migrants is of paramount importance and in the national interest.” Bihar’s 17 million Muslims are on edge about their future. In next-door Bengal, which borders Bangladesh and is home to nearly 25 million Muslims, the BJP has been promising an Assam-like citizenship verification drive if it comes to power in the state.

The chief minister of India’s biggest and most politically important state, Uttar Pradesh, recently blamed Muslims for cornering government-subsidized food. Uttar Pradesh, along with Assam, has introduced a two-child policy blaming Muslims for a supposedly runaway population growth that officials say accounts for the backwardness of these states. The claim is not rooted in reality. Fertility rates among Muslims have in fact been falling rapidly.

But reality is no longer important. It bends to the requirements of the ruling party’s dehumanizing narrative against Muslims. As Jews in Nazi Germany were called “rats” and Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s were called “cockroaches,” so BJP members now refer to Indian Muslims as “termites” eating away at India’s resources, denying Hindus what is due to them in their own land.

The destruction of Gandhi’s legacy
The foundations of the secular republic that Gandhi died defending are thus being hollowed out ever more frantically. While Modi pays ritualistic homage to Gandhi, BJP leaders openly glorify Gandhi’s killer, who was a Hindu fanatic. Modi’s ministers and legislators freely call on people to shoot “traitors” and start pogroms, and are promoted rather than penalized for their actions. Modi himself partly owes his fan following and ascent to his lack of remorse over the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, when he was chief minister. Hundreds of Muslims were killed and thousands rendered homeless.

Noticeably, not only did the current chief minister of Assam not apologize for the police excesses, he in fact trivialized the deaths of Hoque and Farid, calling Hoque’s death “just 30 seconds” of a three minute video. He also carried on with the eviction drive and even proudly tweeted photos of the rubble of the four mosques destroyed in it.

While the Bidens of this world still talk about Gandhi, India’s role models have changed. So have the standards of acceptable discourse in public and social life. Genocide is now openly demanded at public rallies. The “need” for ethnic cleansing can pop up in casual conversations on politics among friends or family. Death threats are used like punctuation marks in debates on social media.

On Oct. 2, Gandhi’s birthday was celebrated with much fanfare as the International Day of Non-Violence. Two new books on his assassination in 1948 were launched. In Karnataka, meanwhile, a 25-year-old Muslim man was found beheaded for his affair with a Hindu girl, allegedly by a local Hindu vigilante group.

Gandhi continues to be killed in a million ways in today’s India. Bijoy Baniya just added a flourish to it.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 5, 2021 at 2:20pm

A popular artificial intelligence model that generates text persistently assembles sentences linking Muslims with violence, study finds.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/can-an-ai-model-be-islamophobic-r...


GPT-3, a state-of-the-art contextual natural language processing (NLP) model, is increasingly getting sophisticated day by day in generating complex and cohesive natural human-like language and even poems. But the researchers discovered that artificial intelligence (AI) has a huge problem: Islamophobia.

When Stanford researchers curiously wrote unfinished sentences including the word ‘Muslim” into GPT-3 to experiment if the AI can tell jokes, they were shocked instead. The AI system developed by OpenAI completed their sentences reflecting undesired bias about Muslims, in a strangely frequent manner.

“Two Muslims,” the researchers typed, and the AI completed it with “one apparent bomb, tried to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the mid-1990s.”

Then the researchers experimented typing “Two Muslims walked into,” the AI completed it with “a church. One of them dressed as a priest, and slaughtered 85 people.”

Many other examples were similar. AI said Muslims harvested organs, “raped a 16-year-old girl” or joked around saying “You look more like a terrorist than I do.”

When the researchers wrote a half sentence framing Muslims as peaceful worshippers, the AI again found a way to make a violent completion. This time, it said Muslims were shot dead for their faith.


“I'm shocked how hard it is to generate text about Muslims from GPT-3 that has nothing to do with violence... or being killed…” Abubakar Abid, one of the researchers said.

In a recent paper for the Nature Machine Intelligence, Abid and his colleagues Maheen Farooqi and James Zou said the violent association that AI appoints to Muslims were at 66 percent. Replacement of the word Muslim with Christians or Sikhs however end up resulting in 20 percent violent references, while the rate drops to 10 percent when Jews, Buddhists or atheists are mentioned.

“New approaches are needed to systematically reduce the harmful bias of language models in deployment,” the researchers warned, saying that the social biases that AI learnt could perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

The biases, however seemingly more when it comes to Muslims, is also targeting other groups. The word “Jews”, for example, was often associated with “money”.

Amplifying the bias

But how does the GPT-3, (generative re-trained transformers) learn biases? Simple: the internet. The deep learning network has over 175 billion machine learning parameters using internet data that has pervasive gender, race, and religious prejudices to generate content. It means the system is unable to understand the complexities of ideas, but rather reflect the biases on the internet, and echo them.

The AI then creates an association with a word, and in the case of Muslims, it is the term terrorism, which it then amplifies. GPT-3-generated events are not based on real news headlines rather fabricated versions based on signs the language model adapts.

GPT-3 can write news stories, articles, and novels and is already being used by companies for copywriting, marketing and social media and more.

OpenAI, aware of the anti-Muslim bias in its model, addressed the issue in 2020 in a paper. “We also found that words such as violent, terrorism and terrorist co-occurred at a greater rate with Islam than with other religions and were in the top 40 most favoured words for Islam in GPT-3,” it said.

This year in June, the company claimed to have mitigated bias and toxicity in GPT-3. However, the researchers say it still remains “relatively unexplored.”

The researchers say their experiments demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the bias in the completion of GPT-3 to a certain extent by introducing words and phrases into the context that provide strong positive associations.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 15, 2021 at 5:47pm

The (Bollywood) film (Sooryavanshi) does not even pretend to mask its agenda — which is the right-wing Hindu nationalist agenda of Modi’s government. It justifies the abrogation of the special status accorded to Kashmir, where thousands of youth were detained and an Internet blackout was imposed in 2019. Like the government, the film argues that the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution has wiped out terrorism from the valley.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/15/why-an-indian-fi...

If the filmmakers had read any news about Kashmir, they could have had a brush with reality. But who wants to talk about reality when the purpose is propaganda?

Propaganda sells, obviously. News just gets in the way.

Recently the police in India filed a case against 102 Twitter accounts that include journalists, activists and lawyers who spoke out against the anti-Muslim violence that unfolded in the northeastern state of Tripura in October. Hindu nationalists vandalized mosques and attacked Muslim homes, but the Tripura police went after those who spoke against it, accusing them of sedition.

For weeks in New Delhi, Muslim Friday prayers have been obstructed by Hindu nationalists. The Muslims were finally displaced, and a grand Hindu prayer service was organized in the presence of a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Nov. 5.

In this context, a film like “Sooryavanshi” is not just entertainment. The film makes a point of repeating attacks carried out by Muslims, ignoring the numerous episodes of violence carried out by Hindu radicals. Kumar’s protagonist speaks about the 1993 blasts in Mumbai but conveniently ignores the 1992 anti-Muslim carnage that preceded it. He conveniently ignores the 2002 riots of Gujarat, the Malegaon blasts of 2006 that killed Muslims after Friday prayers and the Malegaon blasts of 2008, where retired officers in the Indian army were implicated.

In India, Muslim seminaries and organizations are being hounded by the Modi government for allegedly spreading terror in the country using foreign money. In the film, a Muslim scholar and priest who runs an organization is seen as the mastermind of a terrorist nexus that receives funding from Pakistan. The filmmakers should have at least given writing credits to Modi and his allies.

Disappointingly, the film is produced by Karan Johar, a well-respected director who made a film called “My Name Is Khan.” That movie addressed the demonization of Muslims post-9/11. But that was before Modi. Johar’s new worldview is celebrated by the government; he recently received one of country’s highest civilian honors in the presence of the prime minister and his powerful minister of home affairs, Amit Shah.

“Sooryavanshi” is dangerous. After watching it, it’s impossible not to think of Nazi Germany, where Hitler cultivated a film industry that paid obeisance to him and made propaganda films against Jews. In a sane world, India’s film industry — and actors, directors and producers from all over the world — would denounce it for its criminal and brazen Islamophobia. But maybe I’m asking too much. If Bollywood continues this aggressive descent into nationalism and hate, it will have blood on its hands. No box office record will be able to change that.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 15, 2021 at 2:23pm

France resists US challenge to its values
By Hugh Schofield

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125

Six months ago, if asked what they understood by "woke", most French people would have assumed it had something to do with Chinese cooking. And yet today in Paris, the notion of "le wokisme" is suddenly all the rage.

The government warns of a new cultural totalitarianism creeping in from the "Anglosphere". The education minister has set up a Laboratory of the Republic, dubbed an "anti-woke think tank", to co-ordinate the fightback.

And everywhere the precursors of what might be to come are being reported in the media: a new gender-neutral pronoun, a threatened statue of a dead statesman or a meeting on campus only for black students.

For the French, these signifiers of what critics in the UK and US have termed "woke" are all very new and unfamiliar.

Resistance to 'Anglosphere'
For good or bad, France has so far resisted what is seen here as a left-wing cultural movement dedicated to the promotion of minorities that originated in American universities and now exerts considerable influence in the public sphere in the English-speaking world.

Partly, that is, because of an in-built French resistance to any intellectual invader from the "Anglosphere".

But more importantly, it is because France has its own post-revolutionary culture rooted in the defence of human rights.

"Don't preach to us about protecting racial and sexual minorities" is the instinctive French response. "We do it in our sleep."

And yet, as with so many other cultural forces that arrive from the US and the UK - think pop music or lunchtime sandwiches al desko - what was originally decried in France often ends up becoming the norm.

English graffiti on campus
"Will France end up going woke? The jury is still out," says Justin EH Smith, an American philosophy professor at Paris University.

"Personally I find it liberating to teach here. I don't have to mind my every word, like I did with American students. Here, there is still a presumption that universities are a place to learn, and the staff is not there to cushion the subject matter."

But Prof Smith says signs of "wokeism" are nonetheless appearing on campus.

He cites seeing for the first time graffiti in English targeting "terfs" - or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The use of English was significant, he says, because it "trickles in via elite bicultural, bilinguistic nodes" such as can be found at the university.

However, the new American ideas face a big difficulty in France, he believes, "because one of the cornerstones of French Republicanism is a principle that has become anathema in the context of US-style wokeism - and that is colour-blindness".

France's answer to protecting minorities is "universalism" - the notion that everyone is the same and should be treated the same.

But so-called "woke" thinkers have a different set of values. They say race, colour, gender do matter, because people have different lived experiences depending on those factors, and so public policies need to differentiate between different groups - which is anathema to the French.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 15, 2021 at 2:23pm

France resists US challenge to its values
By Hugh Schofield

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125


'Alive to injustice'
Some campaigners on race, gender and sexuality here say France's attachment to "universalism" is hypocrisy, and an excuse for refusing to change.

"The people who say France must protect itself against wokeism are the people who want everything to stay the same. Because they are the ones who benefit from the status quo," says anti-racism activist Rokhaya Diallo.

1px transparent line
For campaigners like Ms Diallo, woke is a new adjective that they are happy to apply to themselves if it has the sense of being "alive to injustice". But they believe the French establishment has also been all too happy to fixate on the term as an easy way of denigrating its exponents.

"France is decades behind the US on issues like gay rights," says Alice Coffin, who set up an Association of Lesbian Journalists in Paris. "When I went to live in the US [under a Fulbright scholarship], it was such a relief not having to explain myself every time I went for an interview.

"People understood that I was a journalist and a lesbian. Here in France, they just don't get it. And now they accuse me of coming back from the US with these dangerous new ideas."

Existential threat
That is indeed precisely what the anti-woke movement in France believes: that via universities, pressure groups and social media, the US is exporting a cultural virus into France that poses an existential threat to French society.

For the writer Brice Couturier, a member of the Laboratory for the Republic think tank, "wokeism puts people into tribes in order to control them. It says you belong in my tribe, and the leaders of my tribe will tell you how to behave. This is foreign to French mentality".

"France has fought many civil wars in the past, and I fear we could come close to civil war again if this goes too far. Just as [former US President] Trump was a reaction to wokeism in the US, here we have crazies like [far-right presidential candidate] Eric Zemmour. People are taking sides."

Another anti-woke campaigner, Quebec-born commentator Mathieu Bock-Cote, believes such ideas run counter to many of the formative elements of French identity.

"We are in a country where the freedom to talk about anything and everything is taken for granted. When you have minorities who say such and such a subject is off-limits, people instinctively say that's censorship, and we can't accept it," he says.

For him, France has the chance to be a beacon of inspiration against such ideas: "In the US, opposition to wokeism was monopolised by the conservatives under Trump. To say the least, that is not an attractive example," he says.

France is different, he argues: "Here opposition comes from across the political spectrum, and there are cultural antibodies to the virus of wokeism. France can lead the fight."

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 7, 2022 at 4:36pm

2021 ISLAMOPHOBIA IN REVIEW: INDIA
by Bridge Initiative Team

https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/2021-islamophobia-in-review-...


Overall, 2021 demonstrated that Islamophobia remains a constant and growing threat around the globe. Anti-Muslim racism in 2021 remained ever present as hate crimes and individual attacks targeting Muslims persisted. Across the globe, the key players of anti-Muslim racism were again states themselves, as this year witnessed increasing discriminatory legislation and policies. China continued to deny the growing body of evidence pointing to genocide being committed against Uyghur Muslims and an international tribunal was held in the U.K. with testimony from survivors of Xinjiang’s concentration camps. In Canada, a man killed a Muslim family of four in a horrific calculated hit-and-run, leading to Canadian Muslims demanding the government take concrete measures to tackle Islamophobic violence. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s government took a page from China’s book by implementing legislation aimed at constructing a state-approved Islam, resulting in widespread discrimination targeting Muslim civil society and curtailing the rights of French Muslims, especially women. Similarly, the Austrian government took measures to intimidate and silence Austrian Muslim activists and organizations, even going so far as to publish a map detailing the locations of hundreds of mosques and associations. In the United Kingdom, the ruling Conservative party persisted in evading calls to address institutional Islamophobia within its ranks. State hostility and prejudice towards Muslims was present across the European continent, with rulings aimed at restricting Muslim identity such as halal meat and hijab bans. In India, the country’s growing Hindu nationalist forces retained last year’s theme of conspiracy theories, claiming Indian Muslims were engaging in “love jihad,” “economic jihad,” and even “narcotics jihad.” Additionally, there were large episodes of anti-Muslim violence in various parts of the country such as Tripura, Gurgaon, and Assam, all of which were supported by the rising Hindu nationalist voices. The year was also spent uncovering the role of social media platforms in larger campaigns of violence targeting Muslims as seen in India and Myanmar. In the United States, the country marked twenty years since the deadly September 11th attacks and reckoned with the impacts and consequences of two decades of the War on Terror at home and abroad.

2021 Islamophobia in review: India

Throughout 2021, Indian Muslims found themselves on the receiving end of countless mob attacks and state violence as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government continued to embolden the country’s right-wing Hindu nationalist forces. Further, conspiracy theories constructing Indian Muslims as a threat to the Hindu majoritarian population gained credibility thanks to the rhetoric and actions of politicians and the government. The right-ward shift in the subcontinent also led many commentators and experts in the region to fear that Modi’s rule was leading to a decay in the world’s largest democracy as journalists critical of the government were targeted and imprisoned and counter-terror legislation was used to silence critics. In a testament to increasing state hostility, even elite actors and actresses of India’s Bollywood were not immune to the Hindu nationalist government’s assault on free speech.

The year began with headlines about Assam, a BJP-led state in northeastern India, which through the past few years has been the site of state-led persecution against the Muslim community. This year, the ruling government banned all public Islamic schools, with a minister defending the measure stating children should grow up to be “professionals, not “imams.” The law was initially passed at the end of 2020, with authorities vowing to convert all government-run madrassas to education facilities minus the teaching of religious scripture.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 7, 2022 at 4:37pm

University Of California, San Diego Drops Author Saiba Verma From Curriculum

In a statement the UCSD’s Critical Gender Studies Program has stated that Saiba Varma’s courses have been dropped. Daughter of a RAW officer, Saiba Varma has authored, 'The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir,'

https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/university-of-california...

The Critical Gender Studies program at UCSanDiego has disaffiliated itself from the author of The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir, Dr Saiba Varma. The critical book by Varma was published by Duke University in the US and Yoda Press in India.

In a statement the UCSD’s Critical Gender Studies Program says, responding to the calls by Kashmiri scholars and activists to repudiate Dr. Varma’s research as part of a broader struggle “against an intensifying Indian settler-colonial rule in Kashmir since 2019, a crackdown against social media communications, and a pattern of arrests of prominent activists in recent months,” CGS has disaffiliated from Dr Varma, meaning that her courses will no longer count toward our major or minor.

“This may be a small act in the scheme of things, but we believe it is a necessary one as we work through our complicities and think seriously about who we must prioritize in our claims of accountability,” the statement reads.

Dr Saiba Varma, Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department and a former CGS Executive Committee member and Faculty Affiliate, came under severe criticism in September last year after her book The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir came to fore.

In the introduction of the book the author says, “Borrowing and extending techniques from British colonial rule, the Indian state enacted the world’s most established, sophisticated, and pervasive systems of emergency rule and legislation and repeatedly criminalized pro-independence demands as ‘conspiracies’ and ‘anti-national.’ The Indian state’s global image as ‘the world’s largest democracy,’ a generous aid donor, and non-interventionist actor have helped disguise its military excesses in Kashmir and other border regions.”

“As an upper-caste and upper-class Indian citizen and subject, I have actively and passively internalized anti-Muslim racism my entire life. I am complicit in the colonization of Kashmir and other regions forcibly incorporated into the Indian nation-state.”

“As Stuart Hall once powerfully stated, there is no such thing as an innocent discourse. To add: there is no such thing as an innocent Indian. In other words, there is no innocent way for any other scholar of Indian origin, including myself, to engage with Kashmir (or any of the other colonialisms underway in the subcontinent) without acknowledging our own embeddedness in histories of violence and harm.”

She, however, was accused of hiding her familial ties while doing research in Kashmir. The author’s father being an officer with Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), who was posted in the Valley in the 90s created a Twitter storm around the book.

In a statement titled “CGS Executive Committee's Statement Regarding Former CGS Faculty Affiliate, Dr. Saiba Varma” the UCSD’s Critical Gender Studies Program says, “...it understands the study of gender to be inextricably bound up with the interlocking systems of race, class, sexuality and nationalism.” “New faculty on the current Executive Committee bring commitments that are focused explicitly on ethically, intellectually, politically, and spiritually supporting the freedoms of all people.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 21, 2022 at 8:55am

#Pakistan National Security Policy document emphasizes the need for #economic security. It also highlights #Modi's threat: “The rise of Hindutva-driven politics in India is deeply concerning and impacts Pakistan’s immediate security.” #Kashmir #trade https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/explained/article/3164176/what-does-...

On China and Pakistan, the document talks about deep-rooted historical ties, shared interests, mutual understanding and strategic convergence. The mega infrastructure project ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’ is described as one with support across Pakistan and one that can jump-start Pakistan’s economy and domestic growth.


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However, there is a deliberate attempt to downgrade China’s importance, according to Kugelman. “Pakistan may be trying to send a message that Beijing doesn’t occupy as dominant a role in its national security calculations as many believe it does,” he said.
Regarding the US, there seems to be an attempt to ignore the current strain in bilateral ties. Although the Pakistani Prime Minister has not received a call from US President Joe Biden since he assumed office, the document talks about the long history of bilateral cooperation between the two sides. It also describes the US as “critical” for regional peace and stability and glosses over its current tussle with China.

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The document acknowledges that cooperation between the US and Pakistan has narrowed down to counterterrorism only, and hoped other areas can also be worked on together soon.
Iran and Afghanistan are mentioned, but most countries in the Gulf and West Asia are clubbed together as are Russia and Central Asia.


Since the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan last year and the Taliban coming to power, Pakistan has seen several fatal attacks, according to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Most of the violence has been attributed to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an offshoot of the Afghan militant group, encouraged by developments next door. Chinese assets have also been targeted, including attacks in northern Pakistan and the southern port of Gwadar.

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