From the 2016 IHRC Islamophobia Conference, The Environment of Hate and the Police State. IHRC and SACC held the third annual Islamophobia Conference entitled The Environment of Hate and the Police State on Saturday 3 December in Edinburgh with a parallel conference held in London at the P21 Gallery on Saturday 10 December. Find
Arzu overviews events relating to Islamophobia in the UK in 2016 for SETA. Read the report (p550 onwards) here. Executive Summary The UK faced a difficult year, marked by what many perceived as a downward turn in race relations, seeing in particular, a demonstrable rise in Islamophobia.The general election in May saw
Arzu Merali argues that years of reports have done little but push the UK further towards Victorian victim shaming and ever widening socio-economic divides* There was that time Louise Casey did her report into homelessness. Remember that? Maybe not. Or her foray into crime and punishment? Or troubled families or anti-social behaviour? Maybe, or maybe not still,
I spoke at the SACC and IHRC conference in Edinburgh in 2016 about how education, the legal system and the Prevent / Counter-terrorism regime coalesce to create an environment of hate that facilitates the operation of a de facto Police State. In this state citizens are either living in fear and self-censorship,
Arzu Merali signed this letter, published in The Independent. The full list below is courtesy of The Free Speech on Israel website. The letter protested the scurrilous, Zionist led attacks on then NUS president Malia Bouattia. We, the undersigned, unequivocally support Malia Bouattia, the current NUS president and applaud her impeccable
Islamophobia is undeniably on the rise – and that’s a problem for us all as all forms of racism are relegitimised in the process* More than 20 years working in human rights and anti-racism work can leave you both pessimistic about the future and inured to rising and raging hatred, let alone
At the Launch of the Counter Islamophobia Kit (CIK) at the European Parliament in Brussels in September, Alfiaz Vaiya interviewed Arzu Merali, Jean Lambert MEP and Professor Salman Sayyid on European Parliament TV. From 2017 – 2018 the Counter-Islamophobia Toolkit* team looked at narratives and counternarratives to Islamophobia in 8 European countries:
Presented by Arzu Merali at the final plenary of the Prevent, Islamophobia and Civil Liberties national conference in June 2016. In it Arzu looks at how the narratives that fuel Islamophobic street level violence and establishment attacks on Muslims are concretised by the narratives of Prevent. She argues that the capture of
The British premier’s policy announcement of funding to teach Muslim women English has made me want to stop speaking the language I love* There’s the personal and public – a reimagining of the feminist standpoint if you like. It’s the way I see David Cameron’s speech announcing the need (and coincidentally the funding) to
In the wake of the publication of a landmark report documenting a rise in anti-Muslim racism in the UK, one of its authors, Arzu Merali, argues for a deeper understanding of the systemic roots of Islamophobia.* “While the media has always been identified as a problem area when it comes to rising