Emboldened by their move from fringe to center of power, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir deepen their direct control over settlement expansion.

A poem written amid the Gaza genocide by Nour Khalil Abu Shammala.

A cocktail of anti-immigration politics and misinformation about viscerally upsetting news has led to riots

It is only six days since three girls aged under 10 were killed, and several other women and children injured, by a knife attacker at a dance class in Southport. It is hard to overstate the horror of these events, and hard also to imagine the additional strain brought by the wider violence that has followed. The families of the three dead girls – Alice Dasilva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe – and others who remain in hospital, can hardly have begun to process their losses as the ugliest of reactions set in.

A teenager, Axel Rudakubana, has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder. As Farah Nazeer, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, and others wrote to the home secretary on Thursday, the attack must be viewed in the context of what police chiefs described last month as a “national emergency” of violence against girls and women. Partly because the suspect’s 18th birthday is on Wednesday, and also in an effort to tackle misinformation, a judge decided to name him.

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Exclusive: Monitoring organisation Tell Mama reveals surge in threats, including of rape and death

The surge in extreme rightwing activity in the past week has led to a fivefold increase in threats to Muslims, such as of rape and death, and a threefold increase in hate crime incidents, a national monitoring group said on Sunday.

Muslims in Britain have been left “terrorised” by the increase in extreme rightwing activity since Monday, which is directly linked to a large increase in anti-Islamic hate crimes, according to initial analysis from Tell Mama.

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University issues apology for rejecting an article on the Israel lobby.

A father with a severely autistic son dreams of going to Hajj, but will it ever happen?

Previous Chapters: Part 1 | Part 2

Ulterior Motive

Abu Ali gaped at him in consternation. “What do you mean no? You just said that this is your dream, the thing you yearn for. Take the money, go to Hajj.”

Murid tipped his head back. The sky was darkening, and he could see the Big Dipper clearly. The sea breeze had strengthened, and goosebumps rose on his skin. He would need to pray Maghreb soon.

“No one gives away money,” Murid pointed out. “There are always strings attached. That’s a heavy envelope. More than I would need for Hajj.”

Abu Ali did not reply immediately, and Murid was surprised to see a blush darken the big man’s face.

“Well… You see… I do have an ulterior motive. My daughter Hiba is interested in you. I would even say enamored. After talking to you, I see that you are a man of principle. The fact that you stem from noble lineage does not hurt. So whatever money remains after you complete Hajj, I ask that you use it as a mahr to marry Hiba. This is just between me and you, she does not know.”

Murid could not have been more surprised if Abu Ali had picked him up by his ankles and swung him upside down like a pendulum. He opened his mouth, then closed it. That smart, lovely young woman wanted to marry him? Why?

“She understands about my son, right?”

“Of course. I argued against marrying you for that reason. I’m a pragmatist. As fallen royalty I have to be, it comes with the territory. But she is a romantic, she says that you are special. And I respect her desires.”

Emotions battled in Murid’s chest: amazement that this young woman, who barely knew about him, was apparently in love with him, or at least impressed enough to consider him for marriage. The yearning to meet Allah in the land of the two sacred precincts, and surging hope that this was now within his grasp. But also honor, and pride. When he finally went to Hajj, he wanted it to be the product of his own labor and sweat, as well as Allah’s help. When he married he wanted to pay the mahr himself, as a gift from himself to his future wife, not a “wink wink” runaround.

Furthermore, he could not marry Hiba just because of the surface qualities he had observed. He had to know her better, and introduce her to his kids so he could see how she behaved around them. It didn’t matter that her family was rich, or royalty, or whatever. Whatever choice he made, it had to be good for his kids. That was the bottom line, and was one of the two criteria by which he weighed every decision in life: one, does it please Allah? Two, is it good for my kids?

“Jazak Allah khayr,” he said at last, “but I must make Hajj under my own steam.”

The Deal

Abu Ali pursed his lips. “Do you know the story of the old woman who prayed to Allah to be saved from the flood?”

“That’s not this.”

Abu Ali sighed heavily. “Then I have another request. And it is not another strategy to convince you.” He jabbed Murid in the chest heavily with one finger, rocking him on his heels. “Go for me.”

“Explain.”

“I can never go to Hajj, brother. My family warred against Aal-As-Saud, and lost. Furthermore, one of my uncles is active in the Saudi democracy movement. If I ever set foot in my homeland I would be arrested and executed. So I will pay you to go to Hajj, and you dedicate it to me. I will receive the reward, not you. But here’s the thing. Aside from the completion of the required rituals, your time is yours. When you stand on Arafah, make dua’ for me and for yourself as well. When you stand beside the grave of Ar-Rasool, sal-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, convey salam to him from me and from yourself as well. This is neither sadaqah nor a loan. It is a gift you would grant me.”

Murid thought about this. A smile spread across his face. “It’s a deal. But the thing with Hiba is separate. I make no promises in that regard.”

Abu Ali extended his hand and Murid took it, bracing himself for the crushing of his fingers, but Abu Ali was gentle, and when Murid looked up he saw tears on the man’s cheeks.

Before Murid left Abu Ali reached into his valise and brought out a letter. “This is from Hiba. I don’t know what it says. Hopefully nothing inappropriate.”

A Song of Hope

He arrived home to find Juliana and Mina playing cards on the floor, while Junaid lay beside them on his stomach, drawing with colored pencils on a pad of white construction paper. His drawings were scribbles really, although sometimes Murid wondered. The colors flowed from one into another, with shapes that vaguely resembled clouds, rivers or trees. The drawings were abstract but compelling. Murid sometimes hung Junaid’s drawings on the walls and gazed at them. They made him feel… some kind of way. Hopeful, perhaps.

Mina ran to him, throwing her arms around his waist, while Junaid continued drawing, not even looking up. But did his ears move? Did his head turn imperceptibly?

Mina pulled away. “What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem discombobulated.”

“Alhamdulillah. All is well.”

Later, when Juliana was gone, Murid and Mina prayed together as Junaid lay on his back next to them, making shapes with his fingers. When they were done, Junaid climbed into Murid’s lap and put his arms around him. The fourteen year old boy was a bit large for that, but Murid shifted positions and made it work. Junaid nuzzled his nose against his father’s cheek. The boy smelled of applesauce. At that moment, Murid felt completely happy and at peace. Junaid had that ability. His embraces were so sincere and pure, that being loved by him was like lying in warm sunshine in a mountain meadow, breathing air as sweet as sugar, and listening to the birds sing songs of renewal and hope.

“Do you ever make duaa’ for Dana?” Mina asked, referring to her mother by name as always.

“Never.” It probably wasn’t what Mina wanted to hear, but it was the truth. “Do you?”

“Always. Do you think she is dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what does your heart say?”

“What does your heart say?”

“Answering a question with a question is called rorical affirmation.”

“You mean rhetorical affirmation? I didn’t know that.”

After a few minutes of silence, Mina said, “My heart doesn’t know what to think. Sometimes it is sad.”

Murid reached out and pulled the girl to him, and the three of them sat like that, in a huddle, as the clock ticked on the mantle. The wind gusted outside, and somewhere down the block a dog began to howl.

The Letter

The children were asleep. Murid sat on the sofa and clicked through the channels to the football match. Settling in and crossing his arms, he felt something in his pocket. Hiba’s letter. He’d forgotten about it. Opening it, he found a single sheet of light blue paper that smelled like lavender. On it was a short paragraph followed by a poem:

Dear Murid, as-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.

I’ve often seen you at the masjid. I’ve noticed you, and especially how kind you are with your children. Mina is feisty, and Junaid is adorable, and you are their steadfast angel, placed on this earth to take care of them. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to do the job alone. There must be times when you yearn and pray for a helper, or even better a partner.

Time stopped, and Murid forgot to breathe. It was as if this young woman had opened a window into his head and peered inside to read his thoughts. As if she had a map of his heart, and had only to look at it to call out the names of his hopes and prayers. He read on:

I am not someone anyone would notice. I’m plain and quiet. But perhaps, if Allah wills it, and if you could look past my plainness and see the vibrant soul beneath, I could be the partner you need. Who knows? Stranger things have happened beneath the sun.

I took a poetry class in college, mostly to fill the English requirement, but something about it snagged my soul. Ever since then I have found poetry to be a way to organize and distill the chaotic emotions that swirl within me. I wrote this one for you:

I envy the road you walk on
because it travels with you.
The road feels the blisters on your feet,
catches the tears you weep,
is stained by your blood as it spills,
sees you collapse then rise
by fierce and joyous will.

The road witnessed
when you were betrayed and burned.
It followed as you turned,
rose as you rose,
knows only what you know
yet is with you every footfall.
Like a beating heart,
the road feels it all.

I am jealous of the road
when it hears your song
like the dove at dawn.
I envy the road
that you crouch upon
in the fading light
not knowing if you can fight
another day.

The road forgives,
welcomes again,
witnesses victories and pains,
sees you embrace enemies
and exile friends
yet never in judgment weighs.

The road falls like a stone
and rises like a wave
and is with you all your days.

Darkness Into Light

Murid’s face was hot with shock. No one had ever said such things to him. Certainly not Dana, his vanished wife, who had been intelligent and attractive, but very focused on her own dreams. She had not been especially loving, and Murid had often felt lonely within the marriage, which is the worst kind of loneliness.

Looking at this letter, reading it over again, he didn’t know what to think. Was this for real? Did Hiba truly feel such passion for him? And such fondness for his kids? It seemed too good to be true. At the same time it was a little creepy. How long had she been watching him? It didn’t seem normal, and it frightened him a little. What did she mean about him being betrayed and burned? Was she referring to Dana abandoning him? Murid was a private person and almost never spoke about his past. It was disturbing to have someone he barely knew writing about his life in such an intimate way.

On the other hand, it seemed that Hiba somehow understood him deeply. Maybe more deeply than anyone ever had. Her poem saw as deeply into him as an electron microscope. While it might be creepy, being understood so profoundly was incredibly validating.

He put the letter in the envelope. He didn’t have time for this right now. Tomorrow was Junaid’s party. These get-togethers with his family never went well. After that Murid would plan his trip to Hajj, inshaAllah. SubhanAllah. It was amazing how Allah opened doors in what appeared to be a solid wall. How Allah changed darkness into light. It was true that Allah had power over all things, Murid saw that.

Part 4 will be published next week inshaAllah

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

 

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A Ramadan Quran Journal: A MuslimMatters Series – [Juz 3] What Is True, And What Matters

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The post The Things He Would Say – [Part 3]: Ulterior Motive appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The expected Democratic presidential candidate, like Biden, will arm apartheid Israel.

Sharing of food and concerns about extremism helps dial down tension outside mosque after Southport deaths

• Police brace for more disorder – latest updates

It was to be one of the first major demonstrations by the far right this weekend and fears were high of a violent outburst posing a danger to communities.

On one side of the road, with their backs to the mosque, was a diverse group of about 200 anti-fascists – equal numbers men and women and a mixture of ages, from students to retirees, including one woman with a “Nans against Nazis” placard.

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A family came under attack as they sheltered in a tent.

Nearly a year into their genocide of Palestine, Israel managed to assassinate their highest-profile target, the Hamas leader and former Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, when he was on a courtesy call in Iran. The assassination marks another roadblock to the stuttering negotiations, where a progressively brutal and brutalist Tel Aviv has played a major spoiling role, and in which Haniyeh was a key negotiator as Hamas’ principal political leader.

In his early sixties, Haniyeh was assassinated by an airstrike on his residence after arriving in Iran to attend the inauguration of Mahmoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister recently elected to replace the recently killed Ebrahim Raisi in the Iranian presidency. The assassination marks part of a pattern both of Israeli assassinations of its opponents as well as of Iranian security lapses.

Given the indiscriminate brutality with which Israel has long targeted Palestinians at large, it can hardly be expected that a political-cum-military foe such as Hamas would lose leaders. Since the 1990s Israel has been targeting Hamas leaders on and off for assassination: lethally inventive engineer Yahya Ayyash, was killed in 1996, Haniyeh’s predecessor Khaled Mashaal was unsuccessfully targeted the following year, before during the 2000s Palestinian uprising top negotiator Ismail Abu-Shanab, widely respected preacher Ahmad Yasin, military commanders Salah Shihadeh and Ibrahim Muqadmeh, and founder Abdul-Aziz Rantisi were killed. In the years that followed Palestinian interior minister Saeed Siam and military commander Ahmad Jabari were among other major Hamas leaders killed by Israel. The process has only accelerated in Israel’s frenzied bloodshed of the past year, which has killed military commanders Marwan Issa, Raed Attar, and Ahmad Ghandour among many others. Haniyeh himself reacted with sober resolve to the targeted killing of his family members this spring, stating that his family was hardly exceptional to countless other Palestinian families wiped out by Tel Aviv: typically, even such a stiff upper lip by a bereaved father was greeted with wild attempts at vilification by pro-Israel media.

Haniyeh’s Career

In a way, though, Haniyeh’s assassination is unusual in that he engaged diplomatically to an extent well beyond most of Israel’s other Hamas targets since his days as an aide to the group’s influential founder Yasin. Haniyeh was a key leader in Hamas’ transition from the guerrilla attacks of the early 2000s to participation within the American-insisted Palestinian political process; a process where Hamas confounded neoconservative American expectations in particular by handily winning the 2006 election. This forced the American-backed leader of the “Palestinian Authority” statelet, Mahmoud Abbas, to form a coalition government with Hamas, with Haniyeh as prime minister and an assembly led by another veteran Hamas leader, Abdul-Aziz Duwaik.

Yet behind the scenes, the United States, galled at a government with Hamas at its center, worked frantically through its liaison, Keith Dayton, to sabotage the coalition. Their principal conduit was unscrupulous militia commander Muhammad Dahlan, a ruthless opponent of Hamas since his promotion to security affairs in 1994. When Haniyeh survived an attempt on his life, Dahlan sneered that “the honor of assassinating” the Palestinian prime minister was one he could not claim. The sabotage eventually ruptured the Palestinian coalition entirely in the summer of 2007, when Hamas expelled Dahlan’s militia from Gaza in what was widely described as a “Hamas coup” – though further investigation showed, even to the irritation of dissident Fatah leaders, that it was in fact Dahlan whose attempted coup had forced Hamas to react.

In any case, the 2007 Gaza battle gave Abbas a pretext to end the coalition government, unilaterally sacking Haniyeh without parliamentary approval. With Gaza controlled by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah, in effect, the Palestinian government had split down the middle. This left Haniyeh, in practice, the leader of an unofficial “emirate” in the Gaza Strip, over which Israel immediately stamped a crippling blockade punctuated with periodic mass assaults – in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and finally the genocide of 2023-24 – designed to intimidate the population and somehow force Hamas out.

Under this crippling blockade, Hamas was forced to find alternatives to keep the Gazan economy afloat: this involved a seemingly endless round of negotiations with a large number of international actors, including Turkiye, Qatar, Iran, Europe, and the United Nations, as well as various non-state actors. Haniyeh and Mashaal thus traveled widely – to the disparagement of Israel, which has sought to mischaracterize these diplomatic trips as evidence that Hamas’ leaders live in wealth abroad while their population suffers; a claim often aped like clockwork by Zionist media abroad. The United States, as Israel’s principal enabler, has parroted what it knows to be a false characterization of remorseless terrorists beholden to Iran – a claim in large part designed to undercut Arab support for Hamas, but which has had little public effect outside the courts of American-backed and frantically anti-Iran Gulf princes.

In fact, Haniyeh, and Hamas more broadly, had far more nuanced politics than these caricatures would allow. In Syria, for example, Hamas – and Haniyeh and Mashaal, personally – backed the 2012 uprising against an Iranian-backed regime, jeopardizing its ties with Tehran in the process. Even as its sympathies and ideological roots lay with the neighboring Ikhwan movement led by Mohamed Morsi, Hamas tried to maintain working ties with the subsequent Cairo dictatorship that ousted Morsi in the 2013 coup. Further afield, Hamas opposed both the September 2001 attacks on the United States, but also the subsequent American occupation of Afghanistan. Maintaining links with a large number of political groups, particularly though not exclusively of a consciously Islamic nature, the group also castigated the persecution of non-Muslims as inimical to Islam and has historically maintained good links with Christian Palestinians. While Hamas has been adamant that Palestine in its entirety belongs to its people, it has nonetheless agreed in principle to lengthy conditional truces with Israel.

Having played a key role in Hamas’ administration and foreign relations, in the latter 2010s Haniyeh was “promoted” to replace Mashaal as the group’s formal leader, his place taken in Gaza by the more militarily inclined Yahya Sinwar. Though there has frequently been speculation of a rift between Hamas’ “exterior” political wing and its “interior” military wing, in effect the group is disciplined enough that both wings have cooperated consistently on the group’s major issues: Haniyeh’s role in both the interior, as Gaza emir, and exterior, as Hamas emir is an indication of this collaboration. In his role as a former Palestinian prime minister, a diplomat, and an administrator, he will be hard for Hamas to replace – but if history is any indication, the loss will not be fatal to the Palestinian cause.

May Allah have mercy on His Slave.

 

Related:

– Israel Seeks Escalation For Latitude – The Regional “Conflict” Widens

– Debunking Beheaded Babies, Concert Rapes, And Human Shields: Hasbara Words That Work For Israeli War Crimes, Apartheid, And Genocide

 

The post Ismail Haniyeh Assassinated By Israel: A Life Dedicated To The Palestinian Cause appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Girl asks what happened to her uncle.

Gaza government media office says 165 reporters have been killed since October.

Ilan Pappé reacts to this week’s bloody news and talks about his new book.

My cousin Issa was killed by unexploded ordnance in the rubble of our home.

A polio outbreak is just a matter of time, according to the World Health Organization.

What can we, so powerless, so far away, do to bear witness and to take some kind of action for Gaza, for Palestine, for Palestinians?

From a headscarf ban for French athletes to social cleansing in the capital, these Games rest on a foundation of injustice

The Paris Olympics opening ceremony was a stunning spectacle for global audiences, projecting an image of a proudly inclusive and festive France – even if the awkward truth is that, just a few weeks earlier, our country was on the verge of putting a racist far-right party into government. The ceremony’s various tableaux were presented as a triumphant display of our different cultures performed by artists of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and genders, and fuelled by references to historical struggles against oppression.

But this unifying narrative introduced an Olympic and Paralympic Games that in reality are not all that inclusive.

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Israel aims to “burn the entire region” after failing in Gaza, Hamas’ Khalil al-Hayya says.

People ordered to evacuate have very few options.

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh is yet another throw of the dice by a state unhinged by impunity.