The United Kingdom’s Commission for Countering Extremism released their report this month on challenging extremism in England and Wales. The report is based on visits to20 towns and cities and responses from 3,000 organisations and individuals. The report argues that the failure to properly define ‘non-violent extremism’ has stymied efforts to counter it, meaning that…
“Not here, not today”. This is what a local elected politician from the Rassemblement National(a far-right party) told to a veiled mother, who accompanied her son’s class for a school visit in the regional parliament in Burgundy (eastern France) the 11thof October. The politician urged the mother to remove her headscarf or to leave the…
In a comment piece by Claudia Mende in Qantara.de, Mende complains that the “Stereotype of the oppressed Arab woman continues to dominate public discourse”. Mende highlights that the lives of women in the Islamic world are often reduced to forced marriage, honour killinngs and male violence, and often implied in the media and literature is…
North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), the most populous of Germany’s 16 federal states, has rolled out a new anti-terrorism programme: a satirical YouTube channel called Jihadi Fool. Run by the state’s domestic intelligence agency, the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the channel’s videos are supposed to “fight fire with fire” and drive home “the absurdity of radicalisation, terrorism and…
The leader of the National Union of Students, Zamzam Ibrahim, has decided to withdraw from speaking at two sessions of the Conservative Party conference, taking place this week, after a fringe event of the conference, called “Challenging Islamophobia”, that took place this past Sunday contained “disturbing, downright Islamophobia”. She wrote on twitter: I came to…
