{"id":8023,"date":"2014-02-25T16:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/?p=8023"},"modified":"2014-02-25T16:39:41","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:39:41","slug":"winners-of-islamophobia-awards-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/winners-of-islamophobia-awards-announced\/","title":{"rendered":"Winners of Islamophobia Awards Announced"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raheem Kassam, the Managing Editor of the website \u201cBreitbart London,\u201d has been named \u201cIslamophobe of the Year\u201d after a public vote organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kassam made his name with the \u201cStudent Rights\u201d organisation which has lobbied British universities to keep \u201cextremist preachers\u201d off campus. He has been described as a \u201cneo-conservative\u201d and is self-confessed admirer of Israel and Margaret Thatcher and a harsh critic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and \u201cMuslim extremists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kassam beat off stiff competition from the right-wing commentator Douglas Murray and Home Secretary Theresa May to win the accolade.<\/p>\n

In comments following his victory Kassam called the IHRC a \u201cKhomeiniist\u201d organisation and said he would celebrate his victory with \u201cwine, scotch and women.\u201d<\/p>\n

The winner for \u201cOverall Islamophobe of the Year\u201d went to US president Barack Obama. The IHRC said: \u201cObama had been nominated by the public for just about everything \u2013 a charge that covers his continuation of drone strikes in the Muslim world as well as the failure to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre, and the introduction of the National Defense Authorisation Act that effectively \u2018Guantanamises\u2019 the whole USA.<\/p>\n

\u201cObama came in streets ahead of a gallery of fellow rogues which included other prominent politicians including French President Francois Hollande \u2013 cited for his country\u2019s invasion of Mali \u2013 and the British Home Secretary Theresa May for a host of sins including extraditing Asperger\u2019s sufferer Talha Ahsan to the United States, stripping Muslims of their citizenship, and most recently thinking about applying anti-terror ASBO-style punishments for British Muslims who are merely suspected of so-called terrorist activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

First prize in the\u00a0Europe\u00a0and Central Asia category went to the Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders. Wilders is the leader of the Netherlands\u2019 Freedom Party, which continues to campaign on an anti-Muslim platform and propagate fears of an impending Islamic takeover of Europe.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the\u00a0Americas\u00a0the winner was Pamela Geller. Geller made a name for herself by her opposition to the planned construction of a mosque near the site of the Twin Towers destroyed in the Sept 11 attacks in the USA.<\/p>\n

In Asia and Australasia, the top prize went to the unlikely figure of Burmese freedom and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the IHRC the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner \u201cwas nominated for her continuing refusal to back citizenship calls by the country\u2019s oppressed Rohingya Muslim minority.\u201d<\/p>\n

The clear winner in The\u00a0Middle East\u00a0and\u00a0Africa\u00a0was Egypt\u2019s General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army general \u201cwho conducted a bloody campaign to remove and then ban the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood and put the Arab world\u2019s most populous nation firmly back on the road to military rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

The IHRC says that although the Islamophobia Awards are intended to be a tongue-in-cheek poke at public figures of all stripes, they do carry a serious message. Islamophobia is on the rise all over the world, particularly in the West, and the event serves to focus attention on the problem.<\/p>\n

Islamophobia can be described as stereotypes, bias or acts of hostility towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia leads to viewing Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level and perceiving their views to be intrinsically problematic, violent or unethical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raheem Kassam, the Managing Editor of the website \u201cBreitbart London,\u201d has been named \u201cIslamophobe of the Year\u201d after a public vote organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). Kassam made his name with the \u201cStudent Rights\u201d organisation which has lobbied British universities to keep \u201cextremist preachers\u201d off campus. He has been described as a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[162,202,200,201,204,203,163],"class_list":["post-8023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-islamic-research","tag-headline","tag-islamic-human-rights-commission","tag-islamophobe","tag-islamophobia","tag-obama","tag-raheem-kassam","tag-ticker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8023"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8028,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions\/8028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}