Professor Removed From a Southwest Flight Is Symbolic of a Pattern of Airline Islamophobia

Co-authored with Khaled A. Beydoun, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy. Millions of people have now watched the video of Anila Daulatzai, a pregnant 46-year-old college professor, getting dragged off a Southwest Airlines plane on September 26 at Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore. After it happened, the airline put out a statement alleging that…

Recharging the Batteries of Whiteness: Trump’s New Racial Identity Politics

The US intellectual class has failed to understand the racism at the core of Trump’s political project. The discussion is focused on two questions: Are Trump voters decent, salt-of-the-earth workers protesting their economic insecurity, or hate-filled Archie Bunkers? Are his transition appointments hateful bigots or mainstream conservatives? What both questions obscure is that white supremacy…

The right-wing populism that drove Brexit can only be fought with a genuinely radical alternative

For the first time in British political history, a far-right political movement, fuelled by Islamophobia and nativism, has won in a national poll. Yet more than a week after the Brexit vote, Britain’s mainstream political commentators have been unable to state that simple fact. Instead, they see the vote as either a legitimate protest against…

Violence comes home: an interview

ISIS’s recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology. More radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem. After the Paris attacks, what are the logical and tragic consequences of war with no geographical limits? In this interview, published by openDemocracy, the ramifications of the…

The belief system of the Islamophobes

The discourse over Muslims today resembles the manner in which Jews were vilified around a century ago. Since the 1970s, Muslims have repeatedly been stereotyped in the US as dangerous terrorists. But, over the last six years, a new fear of Muslims has gradually entered the conservative mainstream: that Muslims are taking over the United…

Some of Europe’s politicians are doing ISIL’s work for them

On June 26, an ISIL-supporting gunman trained in Libya carried out a massacre on a Tunisian beach. Over the course of 47 minutes, Seifeddine Rezgui shot and killed 38 holidaymakers, including 30 British tourists. It was the worst terrorist attack targeting British civilians since the 7/7 bombings on London’s transport system a decade ago. As…

Will the UK government’s counter-extremism programme criminalise dissent?

A post-election analysis of the UK government’s new proposals to tackle extremism.   From 1 July, a broad range of public bodies – from nursery schools to optometrists – will be legally obliged to participate in the government’s Prevent policy to identify would-be extremists. Under the fast-tracked Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, schools, universities and health service…