It has been an insane week in world politics. Israeli Occupation forces admitted to gang raping Palestinian prisoners: men women and children, and the Knesset actually debated if sexual violence is a crime if it is committed on a non Jewish woman! (does anyone dare to call Israel the only democracy in the middle east ever again?) The assassination of Ismael Haniyah in Iran, Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity, the genocide Olympics continue in Paris with not only war criminals participating but a convicted child rapist (just not women in hijab – we’re still banned!). This weeks scandal: An Algerian female boxer, Imane Khelif, knocked out her competitor, Italy’s Carini in just 46 seconds and the latter’s white tears led to figures from JK Rowling to Elon Musk questioning the Algerians gender! Famine was declared in North Sudan. A landslide in the Indian state of Kerela killed at least 194 people. The humanitarian crisis in Congo deepens and in the UK three young girls were killed by a 17 year old British, Christian man, with Rwandan heritage and the streets of England have been set alight by the far right. They rioted, looted and terrorised a city still grieving its lost children, and caused damage to a local mosque, all because they assumed the perpetrator was a Muslim.

White rage is something of a phenomenon and yet predictably isn’t scrutinised in our press in the same way as any other group. We have intense debates about black on black violence, or extremism in the Muslim community, yet where are the conversations about white violence. Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering 7 infants in 2023 and attempting to murder 7 others. In fact, the history of serial killers in the UK is extremely white. Race riots didn’t break out in the UK when these infants were murdered, indeed many in the British press did their best to humanise Letby and continue to do so. Just this week Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children. Even after he had been arrested, the BBC decided to keep him on the payroll. The organisation that shielded Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Chris Langham, Stuart Hall, amongst many others, has faced very little consequences. In its 101 years of broadcasting the BBC has an incredibly high rate of hiring white predatory males, yet where are the calls from parliament to stop its funding. The UK stopped funding The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) with zero evidence that any of their workers were involved in any terrorist activities and during a time when UNRWA was literally one of the only means of getting humanitarian aid to a besieged population in Gaza. The funding was resumed in July as it transpired that Israel had lied. In April this year, 36 year old Marcus Arduini Monzo, killed a 14 year old boy with a knife and injured 6 other people, including police officers when he went on a violent rampage in Hainault. Again, there was barely a whisper from the far right. So when a grown white man goes on a knife spree its ok, but when a 17 year old child, of Rwandan heritage does it, the country must burn? What was World War ll other than white on white violence? 

In July we witnessed extremely brutal force from armed officers at Manchester airport. After tasering a man, and as he lay, face down on the ground, an officer stamped on his head. It was like a scene out of American History X, only this officer wasn’t acting. The far right were quick to jump to the police officers defence, especially as the victim was a Muslim or Pa** as they referred to him. Lee Anderson, Reform UK MP for Ashfield, in a BBC interview suggested that the police involved deserved a medal! It was a police officer who raped and killed Sarah Everard in 2021, and not a single far right group thought to show any support for the epidemic that is violence against women and girls in this country. So when the police act as thugs in uniform they are applauded, but when they attempt to disperse white terrorists, as they did in Southport, their vans are set alight. This selective outrage does nothing but show certain factions of the right to be nothing more than hypocrites.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been taking place across the country for 10 months, and not once has anyone set a police van on fire! In fact, with well over a million people taking to the streets the number of arrests have been minimal. These marches have been consistently called “hate marches” by the likes of Boris Johnson and Suella Braverman, and yet when the far right take to the streets, in their much, much smaller numbers, have hundreds of arrests, set things on fire and record themselves singing Islamophobic chants, they are applauded. It’s often hard to believe we are speaking the same language with the way words have been co-opted. Two women of colour were arrested at Pro-Palestinian marches for carrying “offensive” placards, one using the term ‘cuntry’ and the other depicting then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, as coconuts. Even more absurdly, three women of colour were convicted of Terrorism charges for displaying paraglider stickers and given 12 month suspended sentences. What then will come of these terrorists who are burning down libraries, Citizen Advice offices and hotels housing asylum seekers. They are literally walking through the streets of northern England setting cars ablaze and throwing rocks through windows, whilst shouting racist slogans. The English Defence League should be a proscribed organisation but as it is not there are others that are and these slogans could just as easily belong to them. If paragliders represent Hamas surely these racist slogans are akin to the values of proscribed groups such as Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) or National Action, both are white supremacist neo-Nazi groups encouraging race wars. The latter posted tweets in 2016 in connection with the murder of Jo Cox just as these terrorists are openly talking about “taking out” anti racist campaigners today. There are literally men walking around with Swastikas tattooed to their bodies, how are they not being charged under terrorism laws?

We all know that the followers of Reform and the English Defence League are not the sharpest knives in the kitchen. They are constantly egged on into violent retaliation and blaming Islam for all the ills in their lives by a handful of right wing pundits including Liam Fox, Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson and new fascist on the block Katharine Birbalsingh. What is consistent about this mix of hateful harbingers of racism, is that they will never pause to gather the facts or any information, they will simply whistle something about Islam and Muslims and their dogs will go out hunting. In under 48 hours far right thugs rioted in Sunderland, Hartlepool, Manchester and Aldershot as well as London and Southport. A Muslim man has been stabbed in Liverpool, and another Asian man was punched in the face in front of a mocking and jeering crowd. A Black man was attacked by a lynch mob of white fascists while walking through a park. Our media is also complicit because it amplifies the voices of the far right whilst dressing its racist rhetoric up as respectable and reasonable concerns. However it is too easy to blame these institutions and we will never solve the real problem of what is a deeply rooted hatred of the other without having honest opportunities to learn about the extent of the horror and destruction caused by the British Empire. Racism was invented by the Europeans in order for them to successfully colonise the world and have slaves. It’s true that slavery has always existed, and terms like “savages” was used against white populations such as the Irish in 1609. It was the rich, white, landowning population then that created the divide with their abuse of science and used poorer white communities to serve their system of oppression by creating a pseudoscience justifying their moral depravity. They convinced poor uneducated white people then that black people were somehow less human and deserved to be slaves. They changed tactics slightly in the twentieth century to convince Europeans that Jewish people were subhuman by using terms like cockroaches, and spreading lies about stealing jobs and not amalgamating into society (sound familiar?) Much of the British press stood on the side of the Nazis as did its leaders such as Winston Churchill, who although we know was a well documented racist, and considered Hitler someone he admired, continues to be praised by politicians across the board. What we are seeing today, against Muslims, is a repeat of the same pattern. So much for “lest we forget” it’s more appropriately, whoever dares to challenge white supremacy and its other manifestations such as Zionism, will be its next victim. Everything starts with education and we need to start by changing the history curriculum in this country so that it tells the truth about British History, slavery and colonialism and not just lies about building railways.

Please don’t for a moment think that what’s happening on the streets of the United Kingdom isn’t linked to what is happening in other parts of the world, namely Palestine. It is well documented that Tommy Robinson, Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, as is his real name, is funded by a Philadelphia based thinktank, The Middle East Forum, who have paid for all of his legal fees. The far right, with their history of antisemitism are not natural bedfellows with Jewish communities, that is unless you are able to see Israel as a white settler colonial project in the Middle East. Zionism has its roots in Evangelical Christianity, and I won’t bore you with repeating its antisemitic history. What connects all of this is White Supremacy. The consequences of these riots and acts of terrorism can’t lay solely with the halfwits that have committed the crimes. In almost every interview we have seen, they can barely string a sentence together and struggle to think of a single British value other than Christianity, which incidentally is the faith of Axel Rudakubana, the young British man who murdered three girls in Southport, the catalyst to this terror. At the end of July Lord Pearson made an incendiary speech in the House of Lords suggesting that ‘radicals will take us over through power of the womb’. he has previously organised a House of Lords screening of an anti-Muslim film and invited far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson to parliament. What we are seeing today is decades of drip feeding anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, and anti-other rhetoric by the rich and powerful, finally come to fruition.

Obviously as a Muslim I have skin in the game, but so do we all. The rise of the far-right won’t benefit anyone. Its crucial we organise and mobilise against this imminent threat. Counter demonstrations have been planned in all major cities, join groups and organisations fighting racism and fascism. Challenge narratives that are clearly designed to spread hate. Now is not the time to sit back as an impartial observer, no one has that luxury, either you join the fight against racism, or with your silence, you fight for it.