The move against the boss of London’s Southbank Centre sends a forbidding message about who is and isn’t seen as fit to lead in UK culture

I met Tommy Robinson once. It was 10 years ago exactly, during one of his many failed attempts to mainstream Islamophobia in British politics with a new “movement” called Pegida – a copycat of Germany’s far-right Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West.

There was little memorable about this “launch”, which as a social affairs editor for Sky News I was sent to cover, only to discover a pitiful gathering of a few blokes at a pub near Luton. The thing that does stand out in my memory is what Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, said to me. “It’s the Muslims that are a problem,” he said. “But you’re all right. You speak English. You’re like us.”

Odai Shanah details being among the children forced to huddle in classroom during attack at Islamic Center

A nine-year-old boy has described witnessing Monday’s deadly shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, saying that he “saw bad stuff” and huddled in a closet during the attack.

Odai Shanah, whose mother emigrated from Gaza and settled in southern California two decades ago, told Reuters that he heard a barrage of gunshots coming from outside the walls of the mosque complex, which also houses an Islamic day school.

Our research has uncovered young entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka and Pakistan using AI tools to make deeply objectionable content – and money

• Niamh McIntyre is a senior reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Scroll through any Facebook feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you’re likely to come across an account with a union jack profile picture and a vague, generic name like Britain Today.

These accounts – and there are hundreds, possibly thousands of them – present themselves as the work of British patriots. In one typical, AI-generated video, a middle-aged man claims his local cafe “has stopped serving pork, bacon and sausages just to avoid offending people”. Another post from the same account includes a sepia-tinted set of images of Victorian London, mourning a time when the city “was English, first-world and beautiful”. Alongside this type of reactionary nostalgia, it’s not unusual to see memes that call Islam a “cancer”, decry Muslims praying in public as an “invasion of the west” or promote the “great replacement theory” (which claims that white populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants).

Niamh McIntyre is a senior reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

State-sponsored march through Muslim quarter of Old City saw protesters waving flags and chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ on anniversary of city’s annexation

Israeli nationalist demonstrators chanted “Death to the Arabs”, “May your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation.

The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city.

When Malcolm X arrived at Sheffield University in December 1964, it was a young Pakistani student activist, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, who had arranged his passage. That detail tells you much about my father, who has died aged 86.

Ghayasuddin went on to co-found the Muslim Institute, one of Britain’s earliest Muslim organisations, and the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, of which he became leader in 1996. Upon taking this role he threatened a campaign of civil disobedience unless the government passed legislation protecting British Muslims. The new Labour government of 1997 took on and implemented many of his demands – funding Muslim state schools and passing equalities legislation.

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network says criticism of Israel is routinely misrepresented as antisemitic – and that Palestinian voices are being excluded from debate

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Palestinian voices are being excluded from the debate on social cohesion, the peak body for Palestinians in Australia has said after it was refused leave to appear before the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (Apan) made detailed submissions on the issues of antisemitism – including how it is defined – as well as on racism and social cohesion, but was told it did not have a “direct and substantial” interest in the public hearings, which are under way in Sydney.

Exclusive: Push to register unaffiliated party with identical name to grassroots group follows Avi Yemini’s plan to use ‘Free Palestine party’ to funnel votes to One Nation

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Muslim Votes Matter (MVM) has complained to the Victorian Electoral Commission over an anonymous bid to register a political party under the same name ahead of the state election, accusing it of deliberately misleading voters.

MVM was established before the 2025 federal election as a grassroots advocacy and lobbying movement, responding to concerns about the lack of political representation for Muslim and minority groups in Australia.

According to the Australian National Imams Council, a man entered Masjid Taqwa mosque claiming to have an AK-47 firearm in his vehicle

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Australia’s peak Islamic body has condemned growing “anti-Muslim sentiment”, after a man allegedly threatened worshippers at a Brisbane mosque on Sunday, falsely claiming to have a gun.

The man is alleged to have attended the Masjid Taqwa in Bald Hills, Brisbane at about 10.46am on Sunday and threatened worshippers who were praying in the mosque.

Politicians and pundits in the UK are fuelling a moral panic around “the Muslim vote." Once seen as a reliable base for the Labour Party, the Muslim community’s growing support for independent candidates and the Green Party is now being framed as a threat to democracy. As the country heads towards the local elections, Taj Ali investigates whether a singular “Muslim vote” exists, and examines how these divisive narratives around sectarian politics are shaping public debate and impacting communities across Britain.

Mum taught us to stay kind and honest, even when things were hard. Now I feel her presence in choices that don’t feel easy, but feel right

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

Mum was kind and gentle in a way that felt so natural. She raised all five of us pretty much on her own after Dad passed away. Those were not easy years, and there were many moments when life could have pushed us in the wrong direction, but she never let that happen. She taught us to stay kind and honest, even when things were hard.

Her father named her Ţalā, which means gold in Farsi. But she was even more precious than that.

Charities bringing Jewish and Muslim people together say work to overcome division more important than ever

‘I feel punch drunk,” says Laura Marks, the co-founder of Nisa-Nashim, a Jewish-Muslim women’s network, referring to the alleged attempted murder of two Jewish men in north London this week: “Every day it feels like there is something else. It’s relentless.”

Nisa-Nashim was set up as a charity eight years ago to bring Jewish and Muslim women together through social events. The idea was to nurture relationships in UK communities that could help overcome the distrust, division and religious stereotyping exacerbated by Israel-Palestine tensions in the Middle East.

I’ve been speaking to Muslims across the country, many of whom are deserting Labour. They are as angry about potholes, traffic and litter as anyone else

• Taj Ali’s Guardian documentary, The Muslim Vote: Democratic threat or Islamophobic myth? | On the Ground, is out on Thursday 30 April

‘An establishment whitewash … a blooming disgrace. And I promise you that our democracy is not in a healthy state.” Nigel Farage was furious. Not just because the Reform UK candidate, Matthew Goodwin, had lost to the Green party’s Hannah Spencer in the Gorton and Denton byelection, but because a month on, after an official investigation, Greater Manchester police concluded there was no evidence of “family voting”.

The term family voting – a form of electoral fraud that refers to family members conferring, colluding or directing each other in the voting booth – seemed to come out of nowhere the day after that byelection result, circulating rapidly through the British political conversation before disappearing again. It became a talking point because the election observer group Democracy Volunteers raised concerns, saying it saw it happening in 15 of the 22 polling stations it observed. In the end, the police said they found “no evidence of any intent to influence or refrain any person from voting”.

Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. His book, Come What May, We’re Here to Stay: The Story of South Asian Resistance in Britain, is published in September. His Guardian documentary, The Muslim Vote: Democratic threat or Islamophobic myth? | On the Ground, is out on Thursday 30 April

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

EU leaders have normalised once fringe racist narratives in their migration, border control and even foreign policies

For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric – sentiments that endeared him to Donald Trump and his Maga base – offered his European counterparts the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury men and women. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Racism is not the work of one individual. It is structural. Racial logic is woven into our laws as well as our political, economic and social systems. It shapes access to jobs, housing, education and justice. It informs policing practices, border controls and foreign policy choices. Racialised biases are being stamped into our AI tools. A major scandal in the Netherlands arose because algorithms used to process childcare benefits wrongly flagged thousands of Dutch parents as fraudsters. A form of racial profiling left ethnic minority or migrant heritage families disproportionately impacted. The victims suffered devastating consequences including severe debt, forced evictions and wrongful prison terms and many are still struggling to recover.

Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

John Ashby, who subjected woman to prolonged assault in her home, a ‘deeply unpleasant racist’, says judge

A white man “filled with hatred” has been jailed for life after racially abusing a Sikh woman as he raped her.

John Ashby, 32, followed the woman home after spotting her on a bus in Walsall, West Midlands, in October last year, and subjected her to a 24-minute ordeal after breaking in armed with a metre-long stick.

Amid rising antisemitism and anti-muslim bigotry, community and faith leaders are stressing the need for unity

Maurice Ostro, founder patron of the Faiths Forum for London, has been engaged in interfaith work for decades. For much of that time, he said, he was teased by good-natured people who insisted there was little need for it in the UK.

“People used to laugh at me for doing this work,” he said, but now, amid record-breaking incidents of antisemitism and anti-muslim hatred, the jokes have stopped.

Muslim Council of Britain under Wajid Akhter wants to replicate Zohran Mamdani’s grassroots voting drive

Zohran Mamdani’s victory to become New York’s first Muslim mayor took place thousands of miles from the UK. But at the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the campaign was being closely studied.

“We actually spent some time with his campaign team to work out what the secret sauce was,” said Dr Wajid Akhter, who took over as secretary general of Britain’s largest and most diverse national Muslim umbrella body last year.

Time Hoppers: The Silk Road is a time-travel adventure whose child heroes must save the legacy of Islamic scholars who shaped modern science. Its makers reveal their inspiration, and reflect on their success

‘Some people said it doesn’t exist – that it’s a fantasy.” So says Flordeliza Dayrit of the silk road, the vast network of trade routes that once connected Asia, Africa and Europe – and the starting location for Time Hoppers: The Silk Road, the animated feature she co-created with her husband, Michael Milo.

Speaking from their home in Edmonton, Canada, the couple describe a project that started with personal intrigue and grew into something far more ambitious. With its theatrical release in UK cinemas, Time Hoppers turns this sense of curiosity into a fast-moving children’s adventure: a story in which four young protagonists travel back in time to the medieval Islamic world, meeting the scientists and scholars whose discoveries shape our current everyday lives.

Exclusive: Home secretary understood to have withdrawn authorisation for speaker at Unite the Kingdom rally in May

A US-based anti-Islam influencer who had been authorised to attend a far-right rally in London has been blocked from entering the UK by the home secretary.

Valentina Gomez, a self-styled Maga influencer, was given permission last week to enter via a UK electronic travel authorisation (ETA).

Religious and community leaders are urging the Australian government to take a harder stance on Israel as it continues to bombard Lebanon

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When Dr Saad Ramadan’s elderly parents and five siblings fled their village in southern Lebanon under raining Israeli strikes for Beirut, he thought they were evacuating to safety.

But safe has become “a relative word” these days, he says.

Christian nationalism has as little to do with the true values of Christianity as national socialism has to do with the values of socialism, says Rev Prof Nick Ross

Thank you for your editorial on the religious right (The Guardian view on Britain’s religious right: using and abusing faith in the pursuit of power, 5 April). The truth is that Christian nationalism has as little to do with the true values of Christianity as national socialism has to do with the values of socialism. It is a perversion of the faith … almost an oxymoron in its combination of opposites.

I serve in a church in the heart of Smethwick in the West Midlands, where our congregation reflects the area, being made up of those born and bred in the area, the families of the Windrush generation and new immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa and Asia.