When three Bethnal Green schoolgirls left the UK to join ISIS earlier this year, I was appalled. They had lived and gone to school just over a mile away from where I was brought up and, like so many others, I found it incomprehensible that modern British girls would be attracted to a belief system…
David Cameron has said it is time for the Muslim “silent majority” to stand up and tackle Islamist extremism in their communities. The Prime Minister said those who have so far failed to confront the fanatics’ ideology can “make all the difference” and must speak up. He said they were central to challenging their warped…
It’s official. Nadiya Hussain has been crowned as our Great British Bake Off queen. The grand finale delivered dramatic camera angles, priceless one-liners and a healthy dose of blubbering. One of the highlights was when Mary Berry gently wiped away Nadiya’s tears and described her as “sheer perfection”. It’s difficult to escape the current national…
The government’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism strategy is proving counter-productive, engulfing British Muslims further in the political rhetoric of the global “war on terror”. It has contributed to a growing moral panic between a British “us” and a Muslim “other”. A hostile attitude towards Islam and Muslims and a tendency to associate Islam with intolerance and extremism,…
A 22-year-old woman was arrested at Madrid’s Adolfo Suárez-Barajas Airport on Monday night, on suspicion that she was planning to fly to Turkey to join the militant group Islamic State (ISIS), Interior Ministry sources have told EL PAÍS. The woman is originally from a village in Huelva, in southern Spain, and had converted to Islam…
