(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - UK authorities, media, and anti-Muslim campaigns have been inflaming anti-Muslim prejudice by criticizing and even declaring open season on Muslims. The so-called prejudice has apparently changed to systematic and open state discrimination in the country.
The sudden formation and rise of the racist and anti-Muslim group, English Defence League (EDL) that is against the spread of Islam and Sharia law, is the result of politicians and the media encouraging Islamophobia across Britain.
Consequently, insulting, ignoring, and caricaturing Islam and Muslim communities is considered as being acceptable, since they judge these defaming ways as part of culture, not racism.
Analysts say the spread of Islamophobia is directly related to the “war on terror,” and an apparently rational reason for the Western powers to invade the Muslim countries, and intervention across the Middle East region.
As a result, Stop the War Coalition, together with several Muslim organizations, have arranged a conference on 21 May in the heart of East London's Muslim community to discuss about Islamophobia and the possible ways to confront this dominating issue.
The Conference, titled “Confronting anti-Muslim hatred in Britain and Europe,” is expected to gather Community figures, campaigners, academics, experts and victims of Islamophobia from all over Europe to debate about the impacts of the current anti-Muslim hatred in UK and all over the world and the best ways to campaign against it.
Principal activists and experts from Britain, Europe, and the US, including Lindsey German, Marwan Muhammad, and Kenza Dridar will address the conference.
Kenza Drider, the courageous French Muslim who has received global media coverage for her confrontation against the French law on burqa-ban, will speak at the conference. The highly active critic of the French government's proposed burqa ban, revealed that in an anti-Islam country, “it is almost a crime to be a Muslim.”
She has frankly said, “I would rather go to prison than take off the face veil. Are they going to put a woman in prison because of a scrap of material? It's ridiculous and makes the country I love look stupid."
The conference organizers have insisted that all the campaigners and activists have to participate in this urgent conference to raise a challenge to the current threat of Islamophobia.
“We need to insist that attacks on Muslims are racist and unacceptable in public life. We need to respond to Islamophobia in the media, from the police, politicians, and racists on the street and we need to develop links with European campaigners to help spread our arguments.”
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