17 December – 23 December Islam in Media Roundup

Are Muslim-owned accounts being singled out by big banks?

Are Muslim-owned accounts being singled out by big banks?

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Customers of Bank of America and other major national financial institutions are being asked to prove their citizenship in order to maintain their accounts, a policy with particular impact on Muslim Americans.
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The Secret History of Muslims in the U.S.

The Secret History of Muslims in the U.S.

The New York Times

An animated video details the presence and influence Muslims have had in the US from Columbus’ arrival in America to the present.
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Locked away, forgotten: Muslim Uighur wives of Pakistani men

Locked away, forgotten: Muslim Uighur wives of Pakistani men

AP News

Chaudhry Javed Atta is a Pakistani businessman whose Uighur wife is one of millions in Chinese “re-education camps”; he has seen neither her nor their sons in over a year.
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The U.S. Is ‘Working On’ Extraditing Gulen, Top Turkish Official Says

The U.S. Is ‘Working On’ Extraditing Gulen, Top Turkish Official Says

The New York Times

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Presidents Trump and Erdogan discussed the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, the cleric who has lived in exile in the US for more than three decades and is blamed for the 2016 failed coup against Erdogan’s government.
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Why India's BJP wants to rekindle the Babri mosque dispute

Why India's BJP wants to rekindle the Babri mosque dispute

Al-Jazeera

The Hindu nationalist BJP fears a loss of support, leading the party to feel a need to ignite another communal conflict to stay in power.
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Muslim Amazon workers say they don’t have enough time to pray. Now they’re fighting for their rights.

Muslim Amazon workers say they don’t have enough time to pray. Now they’re fighting for their rights.

Vox

The East African community in Minneapolis has provided many of the workers in Amazon’s local warehouse; like many other Amazon workers across the country, they are calling for better working conditions.
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China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor

China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor

The New York Times

New research and accounts from western China indicate that its vast system of internment camps are being used to provide forced labor for factories in the region.
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Prevent counter-terrorism strategy remains unfair to British Muslims, despite Home Office efforts

Prevent counter-terrorism strategy remains unfair to British Muslims, despite Home Office efforts

The Conversation

Analysis of new data made available by the British Home Office on its Prevent counter-terrorism strategy shows an important openness to public engagement and criticism, but the strategy and its implementation remains controversial and needs to be refined further.
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Erasing the Rohingya: Point of No Return

Erasing the Rohingya: Point of No Return

Reuters

Having fled waves of violence, more than 900,000 members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority now languish in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. A Reuters investigation has found the Myanmar government is taking steps that threaten to make the purge of the Rohingya permanent.
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Muslim superhero returns after 70 years – just in time to take down a few Nazis

Muslim superhero returns after 70 years – just in time to take down a few Nazis

Religion News Service

Debuting in 1944, the Algerian, fez wearing, Nazi bashing superhero Kismet was one of few identifiably Muslim characters in the “golden age of comics” to be treated with dignity; noticing a similar trend decades later, author A. David Lewis rebooting Kismet in his graphic novel set in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
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Human rights court rules against Greece in Sharia law case

Human rights court rules against Greece in Sharia law case

AP News

Greece violated a prohibition on discrimination by applying Islamic religious law to an inheritance dispute among members of the country’s Muslim minority, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Wednesday.
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Deciphering the extremism narrative

Deciphering the extremism narrative

Al-Jazeera

The language of terrorism, radicalization, and extremism has become racially charged across different media outlets. Western mainstream media tends to shy away from using the word terrorism when the perpetrator is not a Muslim, while relying heavily on it when acts of violence can be linked to Islam.
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Facebook takes down more Myanmar accounts over military links

Facebook takes down more Myanmar accounts over military links

Reuters

Facebook has removed hundreds of additional accounts, pages and groups in Myanmar from its social networks after discovering “coordinated inauthentic behavior” against Rohingya Muslims which was linked to the country’s military.
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Cox's Bazar: Rohingya camp to be hardest hit by climate change

Cox's Bazar: Rohingya camp to be hardest hit by climate change

Al-Jazeera

Deforestation and degradation will see the Bangladeshi lands that hosts refugees suffer further from temperature rise.
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Trump willing to look at extraditing Turkish cleric, but noncommittal

Trump willing to look at extraditing Turkish cleric, but noncommittal

Reuters

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said that President Trump “would take a look at” the possibility of extraditing Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara suspects of being behind a 2016 coup attempt, but made no commitment on the matter.
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America’s Foremost Muslim Judge

America’s Foremost Muslim Judge

PBS

Justice Halim Dhanidina, who was elevated to the California State Court of Appeals in the summer of 2018 and is believed to be the highest ranking judge from a Muslim background, says that his parents and his religious upbringing play a key role is his decision making because honesty, integrity, fairness, justice, mercy are universal American values shared by all religious traditions.
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Detroit congresswoman to use Jefferson's Koran for swearing-in ceremony

Detroit congresswoman to use Jefferson's Koran for swearing-in ceremony

Detroit Free Press

Rashida Tlaib will be using President Jefferson’s Qur’an when she is sworn in as the first Palestinian-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
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US sportswear traced to factory in China’s internment camps

US sportswear traced to factory in China’s internment camps

AP News

The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from a factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult stopping products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S.
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Newspaper coverage of Muslims is negative. And it’s not because of terrorism.

Newspaper coverage of Muslims is negative. And it’s not because of terrorism.

The Washington Post

Last week, an Islamist attacked the Strasbourg Christmas market in France and, once again, news outlets were filled with stories about Muslims and violence. Many observers believe that’s typical. Researchers have found again and again that coverage of Muslims in the American and global media is predominantly negative.
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Denmark, With an Eye on Muslims, Requires New Citizens to Shake Hands

Denmark, With an Eye on Muslims, Requires New Citizens to Shake Hands

The New York Times

Denmark passed a law that will require anyone who takes Danish citizenship to shake hands at the naturalization ceremony, a change lawmakers say is directed at Muslims who refuse to touch members of the opposite sex on religious grounds.
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China blasts US media reports of forced work at Muslim camp

China blasts US media reports of forced work at Muslim camp

AP News

Accusing American media of displaying hateful and fabricated information, the Chinese government has reacted strongly against recent reports describing forced labor of mostly ethnic Muslim detainees in China’s far western Xinjiang region.
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From Terror to Triumph

From Terror to Triumph

Reuters

A Rohingya girl has made her dream of going to college a reality despite resistance in her community and deadly violence and repression in Myanmar; her success came at a great cost as her sister, who had the same dream, was left behind.
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India: Eight get life sentence for lynching Muslim cattle traders

India: Eight get life sentence for lynching Muslim cattle traders

Al-Jazeera

The families of two victims who were murdered by Hindu cow vigilantes say they won’t give up on justice as those convicted of the killings plan to appeal.
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Indonesian Muslims protest China’s detention of Uighurs

Indonesian Muslims protest China’s detention of Uighurs

AP News

Several hundred Indonesian Muslims protested outside of the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, calling for an end to the mass detention of Uighur Muslims.
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How are black Muslims reinvigorating poetry in the US?

How are black Muslims reinvigorating poetry in the US?

Al-Jazeera

Young Black Muslims used the emotional power of poetry to highlight their personal experience and the challenges they face in the US on a daily basis.
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Boris Johnson cleared over burqa comments

Boris Johnson cleared over burqa comments

The Guardian

Boris Johnson has been cleared by an independent panel after charges that he broke the Conservative Party’s code of conduct by writing in an August column in the Daily Telegraph that women wearing the burqa looked like letterboxes or bank robbers.
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Israeli Lawmaker Lauds Chinese 'Re-education' Camps for Muslim Minority as Tool to Combat Terror

Israeli Lawmaker Lauds Chinese 'Re-education' Camps for Muslim Minority as Tool to Combat Terror

Haaretz

Likud MK Oren Hazan says that with camps holding Uighurs, China ‘found the right legal outline to combat terrorism.’
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Muslim cleansing: A global pandemic?

Muslim cleansing: A global pandemic?

Al-Jazeera

Muslims across the world are persecuted, abused and murdered by Muslim and non-Muslim regimes, writes Professor Hamid Dabashi.
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Maydan editors selected some of the most thought-provoking news items on issues around Islam, religion and public-life for you. Let us know what you have been reading. Drop us a line at mediaroundups@themaydan.com!