My weekly Guardian column: Nav K. Samir converted to Islam two years ago. He’s a young Sydney-based writer from an Indian background who recently featured in the successful new Facebook campaign, Australian Muslim Faces. Born into a Hindu family, Samir was attracted to the spiritual and intellectual life of Islam. At the age of 23,…
Showing all posts tagged Islam
Inside the mind of ISIS
I’m currently in America, investigating disaster capitalism in privatised immigration detention for my 2015 Verso book. I’ve been watching a lot of cable TV (lord knows why but I’m a masochist) and it’s been ISIS day and night (apart from mostly awful coverage of the killing of Michael Brown and white blindness on racism). Fox…
Public talk on From Iraq to Gaza: The Politics of Fear
Last Friday I gave the following speech at Sydney’s… Lebanese Muslim Association forum on terrorism, Gaza, ISIS and Western governments spreading fear and anger towards the Islamic faith. Labor MP Tony Burke and Liberal MP Craig Laundy both pledged to bring harmony to the community and yet both their parties have flamed bigotry. Government surveillance is…
Israel a key source of global rise in anti-Semitism
Stinging Gideon Levy in Haaretz: Israel is today the most dangerous place in the world for Jews. Since its establishment, more Jews were hurt in wars and terror attacks that took place in Israel than anywhere else. The war in Gaza took this one step backward – it endangered world Jews as well, as no…
My Sydney speech on Gaza and a different Jewish identity
Today I spoke at a large Sydney rally in support of Palestine, Gaza and a dissenting, non-violent Jewish perspective. I think there were only a handful of Jews in the predominantly Muslim and Arab crowd. I hope that more Jews begin to find their voice on this vital humanitarian issue and refuse to allow Israel…
On Utoya: book on murder, far-right, racism and hate
In 2011 Norwegian… Anders Breivik murdered dozens of his countrymen and women in a rampage of hatred.… Soon after, three Australians, Tad Tietze, Liz Humphrys and Guy Rundle, edited a collection,… On Utoya, about the event. My chapter was about the growing connections between the far-right and Israel. The e-book has now been released as a free…
The toxic Greek brew of racism, fascism and hatred of refugees
My weekly Guardian column: On a searing hot day last weekend I took the train an hour out of Athens to the Greek city of Corinth. There, one of the country’s largest detention centres sits behind high walls. It was the recent site of a mass hunger strike by asylum seekers, whose protest has now…
ABC Radio discussion on faith, belief and politics
Last weekend I spoke at the Sydney Writer’s Festival and one of my panels was this fantastic event (recorded and played on ABC Radio’s Sunday Nights yesterday): A Muslim-Christian-Muslim, a Jewish-Atheist and a Scientist-Atheist-Humanist walked into a room… for a conversation with John Cleary of Sunday Nights. Writers Reza Aslan, Antony Loewenstein and Jim Al-Khalili…
Fighting the far-right is a duty for us all
My weekly Guardian column: It was a pitiful sight. In Brisbane last Friday, the far-right Australia First party… announced… that it would rally on the streets in solidarity with Greece’s neo-Nazi aligned political organisation, Golden Dawn.… In the end, less than 10 supporters arrived and faced off with around 200 unionists and members of the Antifa group shouting…
We know too little about US drone attacks
My weekly Guardian column: The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was… announced… in mid-April.… Christopher Havard… and “Muslim bin John”, who… also held… New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year. Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed…