By Ibrahim Moiz for Muslim Matters

Previous Parts: Part 1

Harvard Was The Dumpster Fire And Columbia Was The Villain

After the tumultuous 2023-24 school year, where American students protesting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza were vilified and repressed across the country, MuslimMatters interviewed chaplains Omer Bajwa of Yale University and Abdul-Muhaymin Priester of Grinnell College for their thoughts on these momentous events. In this second part of a five-part interview, the imams relate their personal experiences of institutional responses to the student protests and Zionist counterprotests.

Ibrahim Moiz: You mentioned that Yale has generally not been like Columbia with the crackdown. How has your overall experience been with the administration, for example? Have they tried to suppress anything or try to put pressure on you to say this or do that, anything like that?

Omer Bajwa: I think that many people understandably lump the Ivies together, and the Ivies are a preexisting cohort and consortium… But having said that, the Ivies are also quite different, in that Columbia is nothing like Yale, which is nothing like Harvard. I think the point is that they’re definitely watching each other’s moves, right, so…they’re definitely comparing notes, like what’s going on down the road, what’s going on at this school, on that campus, etc. And what they want to do is they want to learn from each other’s mistakes, right?

So in that way, Harvard was the dumpster fire of the fall, when Harvard made all these horrible mistakes. And Harvard became a huge target because they have these real, you know, shaitanis like Bill Ackman on their board…and then Columbia became the villain of the story in the spring because they have, you know [Minouche] Shafik the president there, got called before Congress…So all that’s to say, Yale was kind of, “Yo, don’t be Harvard in the fall, don’t be Columbia in the spring”. This, I can tell you from behind the scenes, is definitely the chatter up at the top.

I Can Talk To The Top

(Omer Bajwa continues…) Now to answer your question directly. Alhamdulillah, after sixteen years of investing in relationships…you know, people take your word seriously, they want to know what you have to say, they know that you have that vertical [relationship] like I can talk to the top. I mean, Alhamdulillah, for what it’s worth, I had very direct blunt conversations with the senior administration, like literally the three most important people – the president, the vice president, the provost. They know where I stand, they know where my community stands.

I don’t know if Imam Ebad [Ebadur-Rahman, the Columbia Muslim chaplain] is able to have that at Columbia, I don’t know if my colleagues at other schools are able to have that. That’s just – each school is structured differently, but I think it’s also because of the relationships that you build over time…“You have the mike now, tell us what you want to say.” You have to be honest, right? This is the moment of speaking truth to power.

The second part of your question is, do they always listen? No, I give recommendations, I say, “Look, what you’re doing is XYZ wrong for these reasons, don’t do this.” Then the committee goes and they talk about it, and then they take some of what we say, theoretically, and then they also make other missteps. But I can keep going back and be like, “Didn’t I tell you? We talked two weeks ago, I told you not to do this, now look at the consequences.”

Now, the difference is that the president doesn’t answer to me, and the vice president doesn’t answer to me, they answer to the board of trustees. And that’s ultimately the problem…the way these modern institutions work – it’s about donors, it’s about influential trustees who can twist the arm, etc.

But they have not censored me, to answer your question, personally at Yale. I mean…the vice president’s come to my Jummah, right, I’m going to say, “This did not start on 10-7, this is seventy-six years of occupation, right? This is a settler colonial apartheid system that we’re seeing.” I can say that, Alhamdulillah. Does that infuriate the Hillel and some of the rabbis and Zionist students? Of course it does! And God knows what they’re saying about me on their channels. But, for what it’s worth, I’m able to say that and the administration isn’t going to stop me from censoring it.

Strategically There’s A Better Way

(Omer Bajwa continues…) I think one thing that I will add to it, and I hope this comes off the right way and not the wrong way, is that – you know…I was a grad student when 9-11 [11 September 2001 attacks on the United States] happened. We all marched in grad school against the Iraq invasion in ‘03, right? You learn, life experience teaches you, there’s a strategic way of reading the Sunnah and of implementing this, that the jazba, the twenty-one-year-old today, who’s screaming at the rally – you’re just like, “Strategically, there’s a better way to do this, right?”

Princeton pro-Palestine protesters

But now they’re going to be like, “Listen boomer, we appreciate your khutbah calling out genocide and murder and all that, but, like, we’re going to do what we’re going to do.” And I’m like, “It’s all good, man.” You know, like, “you do you”…Because you’re the student, and you know you have a positionality, and …I’m a staff member of the university, I’m on the level of [talking to the] dean and director…we’re all adults, and you know we understand what Allah Taala gives us through, just, life experience over time.

Many of them have this conception that if you’re not making noise all the time in the most in-your-face, aggressive way possible, then that means, “We question your loyalty to the cause.”

And so what happens then is they cast aspersions, not just at Yale but other schools as well, they’ve cast aspersions against faculty and staff and administrators – Muslims, presumably allies – that are quiet. And what we gently, gently, lovingly, tenderly try to bring them to the awareness [of] is – just because they’re not making noise on the picket lines or the protest lines doesn’t mean that they’re not working very effectively and secretly behind closed doors. Some of the most powerful people are doing their work behind closed doors, pulling levers of power, and consequential conversations that are not going to be on the picket line.

And that’s what I think faculty can do is you have a tenured faculty member that has a lot of respect, hard-earned respect. The administration takes what he or she says very seriously. And they can literally pick up the phone and scream – and I’ve seen this – scream at the president, and be like, “You’ve completely screwed up how you’ve handled this situation.” Now students don’t know that, but I know that, because I’m privy to a whole series of behind-the-scenes movements. So that’s, I think, a nuance that is worth noting.

Abdul-Muhaymin Priester: I think one of the things that made the larger schools as amplified as they were – outside of the fact that they were larger schools, Ivy League schools, top-league schools – is the fact that there’s a lot more money going into these institutions.

The voices that can threaten their independence, if you will, are much louder than what we come to at Grinnell. Somebody’s giving you as many millions of dollars a year and you have an endowment that’s probably tied into their hedge fund or something like that, they can be like, “Hey, we’re not going to have any of your business no more.”

So it makes it much more difficult for them. They can have a much more positive response [to pressure].

[Next in Part III: Why Zionists Were Given the Land Of Filastin]

 

Related:

American Muslims, Gaza, and the White House Iftar: Do Protests Matter

Podcast [Man2Man]: From The Frontlines Of Gaza | Dr. Jawad Khan And Omar Sabha

 

The post University Chaplains’ Perspective On Campus Protests [Part II] – The Moment Of Speaking Truth To Power appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The end, when it came, was swift. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s latest, longest, and most lethal stint in power (2008-24) ended with an ignominious flight, after months of student-led protests that had lasted the summer against a violent crackdown. Having long milked, and abused, the legacy of her family and party in Bangladesh’s foundation, in the end, it was Hasina who was forced into flight after overplaying her hand.

In her latest tenure in power, Hasina had often exploited both her Awami League’s role in Bangladesh’s foundation and its secularist nature to crack down on dissidents. The latest trigger was a law that reserved quotas for the families of the “freedom fighters” of Bangladesh’s independence over fifty years ago; in essence this institutionalised economic privileges for a long-abusive Awami League that had already systematically and often viciously dismantled organized political opposition. Particularly to a younger generation that lacked their parents’ and grandparents’ emotive attachment to the Awami League’s role in independence and linked it to Hasina’s corrupt regime, the “liberators” of yesterday had become the tyrants of today.

A Long History Of Student Protest

Bangladesh has a long history of student protest that predates even the country’s foundation: students mobilised what was then called East Bengal against the British Raj, against discrimination and inequality in the subsequent era as East Pakistan, and even after Bangladeshi independence against successive predatory rulers. Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur-Rahman had himself led student protests against Pakistan, whose brutal crackdown in 1971 precipitated Bangladeshi independence. Assorted economic and linguistic injustices by a centralist Pakistani regime that tended to view Bengalis with disdain had led to a number of Bengali student protests. Opposition to Pakistani policies came from Bengali ethnonationalists – who varied from wanting the Bengali language institutionalized, to calling for a decentralization to calling for an irredentist union with the West Bengal of India – as well as from leftist, religious, and populist circles.

Children on the premises of the Ganabhaban on the occasion of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s birthday on March 17, 1975 [PC: Scroll.in]

Mujibur-Rahman had shot to fame through these protests, but no later than the late 1960s he had also secretly opened links with India at which many Bengali dissidents would have baulked. These links were partially facilitated by the minority Hindu business class, which has often been a strident supporter of the Awami League since. Nonetheless, his popularity forced the junta to permit him to run in the 1970s, and with virtually the entire East Pakistani electorate rallying behind him he won. This put the Pakistani junta, which had bet on a split Eastern vote, in a quandary: eventually, they arrested the election winner and savagely cracked down on much of the Bengali populace, students and Hindus in particular, in a campaign where thousands were killed. Large numbers of Bengali soldiers deserted to join a mounting insurgency. In late 1971 India seized the opportunity with a full-scale invasion to “liberate” Bangladesh, with Mujibur-Rahman as its leader.

Few Bangladeshis mourned the end of the dysfunctional marriage with Pakistan. However, Bengali Islamists, particularly the Jamaat party, who were otherwise critical of Islamabad had nonetheless refused to break up a Muslim country and had fought on the Pakistani army’s side in 1971. This made them ripe targets after independence, but they were not the only ones. Faced with the natural disasters that had also imperilled the late Pakistani period and with a large number of armed militias over which he had little control. The Bengali nationalism that he had ridden often manifested itself in ugly ways: as early as 1970-71 his Awami League’s armed wing had ethnically targeted non-Bengalis, who with the exception of the southeast hills were almost expelled outright from Bangladesh. He also faced the same natural disasters with which his Pakistani predecessors had suffered.

But perhaps most damaging was Mujibur-Rahman’s increasingly obvious vassalage to India, which outfitted and supplied a thuggish personal militia that his family used, supposedly to maintain control. This vassalage pleased neither Bangladeshis who wanted meaningful independence; nor irredentists, who wanted the unification of Bangladesh with India’s West Bengal province; nor Marxists, who tended to support India’s rival China; nor Islamists; nor the critical military defectors from the Pakistan army, who had fought against India just a few years earlier. Mujibur-Rahman’s progressively repressive regime ended in a brutal assassination that wiped out much of Hasina’s family. In the power struggle that followed, military factions led by army commander Lieutenant-General Ziaur-Rahman and his successor Hossain Ershad would take over.

Though military rule stabilised Bangladesh and generally lacked the brutality of Awami rule, a small elite continued to rule: Ziaur-Rahman’s Jatiyabadi Party and Ershad’s Jatiya Party are both led by their families to this day. When Hasina and Ziaur-Rahman’s widow Khaleda Zia rode a populist wave to end Ershad’s military rule in 1990, the succeeding democratic period continued to alternate rule among parties defined by patrimonial politics. Hasina, who returned to power in 2008 after a brief military rule had ousted the increasingly popular Khaleda, added brute force to this elitism.

A Venomous Elitism

The Awami League’s strident secularism, in the age of “the war on terror”, was particularly useful in beating down dissent. An early paramilitary mutiny was tendentiously blamed on Islamist infiltration and supposed Pakistan links – claims that were eagerly parrotted and repeated worldwide by Hasina’s Indian suzerains. She also proceeded to reverse her own father’s rehabilitation of the Islamist Jamaat, which was essentially vilified for having picked the Pakistani side during the 1971 war and banned, its elderly leadership executed as “war criminals” during a spree of show trials in the mid-2010s. Khaleda’s Jatiyabadi party, as Hasina’s main contender, was also persecuted. The worst episodes came during a series of massacres in the spring of 2013 when protests against these dubious sentences were bloodily crushed. Rather than focus on the actual bloodshed, much of the international media focused on the claims of government-friendly liberal bloggers who claimed intimidation by “radical Muslims”: this in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

The now-ousted ex-PM of Bangladesh [PC: AFP/Getty Images]

It became fashionable at one point to highlight Bangladesh’s economic growth under Hasina. But this masked the reality that the state, particularly its security, had been outsourced as a barely concealed client of India, and that the economic and social benefits were reaped by a small and increasingly ruthless elite. Disappearances, abductions, and murders were frequent and rarely discussed. State institutions, including even an army that had historically had a sizeable number of opposition sympathisers, were purged in favour of the prime minister’s men: her last army commander, General Wakerul-Zaman, is a relative by marriage. Perhaps most notorious was the ruling party’s student wing, which was infamous for its brutality and impunity. Bangladesh’s political scene only narrowed, with Hasina’s election wins coming against either Jatiya members – Ershad’s widow Rowshan and brother Ghulam Qader – or by disgruntled Awami League leaders, such as former foreign minister Kamal Hossain. Whatever their respective merits and flaws, the process was hardly representative or participatory.

It was in an attempt to reward her supporters, by cementing quotas for the families of “freedom fighters” – in other words, for loyalists – that Hasina overstepped. The protests against this, led by Naheeb Islam, were quickly subjected to violent crackdown on her orders until it became clear that violence would no longer work. Hasina had misread the discontent of Bangladesh’s public, particularly its youth: appeals to the Awami role in the “freedom struggle” would no longer work. Having milked its role in 1971 for so long, the Awami League was utterly unaware that to a critical mass of the population, it had become the oppressor of the day.

What Now?

India, where she fittingly fled, has been most obviously dismayed by Hasina’s ouster, masking their loss of a pliant vassal with tendentious claims of threats to Bangladeshi Hindus – who themselves have largely dismissed these threats, and whom the opposition has vowed to safeguard. But its frequent rival China, which has always favoured stability even at the cost of repression, is not particularly enthused for its part. A surprisingly positive note came from India’s close ally the United States. Having long turned a blind eye to Awami misrule, Washington had been particularly concerned since Hasina cracked down on an opposition leader, Muhammad Yunus, who had a long track record of working with Washington and in particular the Clintons. Today Yunus sits as, effectively, prime minister of an interim regime.

The interim government, where Awami leader Mohammad Shahabuddin still maintains the titular presidency and Hasina’s relation Wakerul-Zaman leads the army, is by no means thrilled at the prime minister’s ouster. It may be, as in so many countries over the last decade, that the establishment will make a comeback. Or it may be that one particularly predatory party is exchanged for another, or another power finds a willing vassal at the expense of the Bangladeshi populace in Dhaka. Nonetheless, Bangladesh’s youth has done what years of repression had rendered unthinkable: caution need not be mutually exclusive with a justified celebration.

 

Related:

– Over Five Decades On: Bangladesh’s Crisis Of Islam, Politics, And Justice

– From Cairo To Dhaka: Exploring The Impact Of The Arab Spring On Bangladesh

 

The post The Downfall Of A Tyrant: Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina Forced Into Flight After 15-Year Reign appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Hamas calls Washington a “full partner” in Israel’s crimes.

The party sowed division during the Blair years – and according to its Muslim members, the stain of prejudice remains

“If we don’t make the white vote angry, he’s gone,” wrote the campaign staffer. “Go strong on the militant Moslem [sic] angle,” while making Tory voters fear “they are being used by the Moslems”. You may think the above writings are an example of a particularly vicious British National party intrusion into our democratic process. But this was the 2010 campaign of Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister under Gordon Brown.

The result? A leaflet asking voters to stand by their candidate, claiming the Lib Dems wanted to “give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay” and warning of the “extremists” winning, accompanied by images of angry Islamist protesters clutching banners such as “Behead those who insult Islam”.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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.

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Rector’s role reversal | Singing Greggs’ praise | Useless Robert Jenrick

You report (1 August) that the university court at St Andrews justified its decision to dismiss the rector from two other roles because she had repeatedly declined to accept the conclusions of an independent report, thereby refusing to accept the conclusion of that report that to dismiss her would be disproportionate. Not catch-22, but from the same stable?
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• Perhaps oddly, given where I live, I am no fan of Tottenham cake (sold in Greggs’ London shops). I do, however, frequent Greggs (Zoe Williams, 6 August). I enjoy its sausage breakfast baps, and – unlike some fast food chains – it is fully unionised. That definitely makes the food taste better.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London

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As violent unrest erupted across the country last week after the killing of three girls in Southport, about 50 people turned up to a far-right rally outside the Abdullah Quilliam Society mosque in nearby Liverpool. Hundreds more turned up to support the mosque, which is the oldest in the country.

But the imam Adam Kelwick decided not to stay inside. He and other members of his community stepped out with hot food and crossed the police line, determined to speak to the people on the other side.

'The reason it’s so important to talk right now is because we see what the other option is,' says Kelwick, who believes that talking to people, even in extreme circumstances, can help heal divisions

• UK politics live – latest updates

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A man clutches his groin after being hit by a brick thrown by fellow rioters during the Southport mosque attack. Source

Last week, following the murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside, who attacked a number of other girls and their teachers at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, gangs of racist hooligans have been on the rampage in a number of towns and small cities across the UK, particularly the north. In Southport itself they attacked a mosque (injuring 39 police officers), in Liverpool they set a library and community centre on fire, causing serious damage; in Sunderland and Rotherham they besieged hotels housing asylum seekers and started fires. In other places they attacked shops (some but not all perceived as ‘ethnic’), looting some and burning others, smashed house and car windows, and attacked random Black and Asian people both walking and in their cars. During all this, we have had politicians, columnists (notably Nigel Farage, Matthew Goodwin and Isabel Oakeshott) and an elected police chief in the UK tell us that these thugs are a “protest against mass immigration” by “the people” who are “sick of being gaslit” and that while of course they don’t condone violence, especially against police officers (naturally), these people are not “far right thugs” at all but ordinary people protesting, and the solution is to crack down on “mass immigration” as they want, rather than on violent hooliganism and the organised gang behind it.

The way the violence erupted last Tuesday should disabuse anyone of the idea that this wasn’t racist violence. After the Southport attack last Monday, rumours began to spread (allegedly sown by Russia, although people seem to blame them for any misinformation that goes around these days) that the attacker was a Syrian asylum seeker or refugee, a group widely blamed for all sorts of things from “stealing people’s houses” to sexual harassment; when the media did not report the attacker’s name, which is normal as he was under 18 (though only just) and had yet to be charged, accusations started to be made that the authorities were sitting on the information to protect asylum seekers or to hide the ‘link’ between asylum seeking or mass immigration and this tragedy. Finally last Thursday the courts did issue his name; he is in fact the British-born son of refugees from Rwanda, born in Cardiff though raised in Southport. By that time, there had already been a mob attack in Southport itself; once any link with Islam or Muslims was disproved, the mobs continued to descend on one town and city after another, with their media crypto-allies continuing to spout the “mass immigration” excuse. The notorious serial hooligan Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), who founded the English Defence League whose slogans have been heard in the streets this past week, has been stirring the pot via Twitter from his sunbed in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, advertising locations of forthcoming ‘protests’ and claiming that Muslims were “roaming the streets in armed gangs” attacking random “whites”.

Various right-wing talking heads have been telling us since the violence started that we should not call the attackers “far-right thugs”, as the Prime Minister did, or dismiss them as racists when they are really voicing public disquiet about “mass immigration”. All this is nonsense. A thug is a person who uses violence, or willingly gives the impression he is able and willing to do so. This is quite an apt description of those who staged these riots. As for the “saying what people really think”, we have seen no large demonstrations against this, or against us accommodating asylum seekers (as we are bound to by international law), only violent, organised mob attacks. By comparison, an actual mass movement such as the campaign against the genocide in Gaza and ongoing western political and military support for it has organised demonstration after demonstration around the UK since last October, particularly in London, which have resulted in very little disorder and nothing on the scale of the past week. The most recent one resulted in two arrests, both for speech offences. The repeated partial defences of the rioters have come from the losing side in the recent election, namely the Tory party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK vehicle, which does suggest that, having lost a democratic election (progressive parties between them scored well over 50%, even if Labour’s vote share was only around 35%), that part of the political spectrum is resorting to violence to get their way.

Someone mentioned that the Zionists on social media had been quiet since the start of the riots, but on a closer examination it turned out that they were a bit quieter but not silent. Stephen Pollard penned an article for the Jewish Chronicle complaining that people who attended the riots but did not riot were condemned, but “those who attend the hate marches alongside antisemites are described as ‘decent’”. The “hate marches” he refers to are the marches against the Gaza genocide, of course, none of which have threatened or advocated any violence against Jews just because they are Jews, or have attacked synagogues, Jewish shops, individual Jews, Jewish graves or anything else Jewish; they call for a ceasefire in Gaza, or for western powers to stop arming Israel with weapons to use on civilians. Meanwhile, the fellow travellers with the racist rioters are still complaining about “their country” being taken over, or demanding that we shut the door to refugees; a different situation altogether. Melanie Phillips, on her Substack, mouths the usual disapproval of the violence itself, but complains of “public services overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration” when anyone involved in those services will tell you that they have been weakened by 14 years of the Tories starving them of funds. The same Tory government that refused to accept that the Far Right were a significant threat, despite intelligence warnings, choosing to focus on Muslims and environmentalists instead, also downgraded our ability to respond to a lethal contagious virus.

The media also have been timid about naming the problem. The “new Right” TV stations such as GB News and Talk TV have been full of thinly-veiled egging on of the rioters (disapproval of the violence itself but continual harping on “mass immigration”, for example) and the BBC has persistently referred to the attacks as “protests”, including in headlines; some of their reporters were seen calling them things like pro-British or anti-immigration protests, as if the people attacked were not British (which in a lot of cases they in fact were); they make no distinction between British Black and Asian people and legal or illegal immigrants (not that either deserve to be lynched or burned to death, but it shows that it is racist violence, not protests against large-scale immigration). A letter in yesterday’s Guardian noted that when the thugs came to Bristol, they would attack people immediately; there had been “no slow build-up of tension” and “no attempt to make a political point”.

As for why these riots occurred when they did, the immediate reason is that an organised gang of racist hooligans used the Southport tragedy as a pretext, but without several years of politicians and the media using ‘immigrants’ as a scapegoat for problems that were of politicians’ making, the attacks could have been brought under control much more quickly and there would have been no debate as to what kind of problem we were dealing with. Brexiteer politicians capitalised on discontent about the large wave of immigration from eastern Europe that took place in the mid-2000s; in the few years after Brexit, politicians continually complained that they had not been able to bring the numbers down despite shutting the door on new worker migrants from Europe. The prime minister spoke from behind lecterns bearing the slogan “stop the boats”, referring to the refugees (and no doubt others) coming across the Channel in small boats, and the same slogan was heard being repeated during last week’s riots. The media, including the BBC, have amplified the voices of anti-immigrant politicians, including Nigel Farage who, despite persistent pleading that Brexit was all about sovereignty, invariably diverted any discussion onto immigration. There has been more subtle agitation on social media: people reminding us of “how things used to be”, with videos on YouTube and promoted posts on Facebook consisting of pictures or footage from decades past contrasted with today (such as a thriving shopping centre in the 70s contrasted with the same mall in a run-down state today) with a comments section full of people blaming the changes on immigrants (again, meaning simply non-white people) rather than, say, online shopping or the local council going bankrupt in large part because central government starved it of funds — something that did not happen before the Tories came to power in 2010.

Racist thugs are not the only kind of racists. The people stirring this up are wealthy or at least middle-class people in the media, politics and in some cases academia. They are the ones telling us that the goons who attacked police officers, shopkeepers and ordinary people and tried to destroy mosques and shops represent “ordinary people” or at least ordinary people’s fears, that it’s only the “metropolitan liberal elite” who do not share their suspicion towards Muslims, their xenophobia or their fear of “mass immigration”. None of these people want real solutions to people’s material problems; they just want to focus people’s anger on scapegoats so they can carry on enriching themselves. Most Muslims in this country are working-class people. We don’t hate or despise working-class people of any race. We regard racists as a threat to us, because of their behaviour as demonstrated this past week. It’s a choice to be racist, and a choice to be a thug.

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Israel gave us the misery of a caged life before 7 October. It has deprived us of any of the advantages of a simple life since.

Tory leadership candidate’s comments around far-right protests described as nasty, divisive and ignorant

Robert Jenrick has been criticised by a rival for the Conservative leadership and Muslim parliamentarians for saying police should “immediately arrest” any protesters shouting “Allahu Akbar”, the Arabic phrase that means God is great.

The former immigration minister was speaking on Sky News about the accusations that police have been treating far-right marches and violence more harshly than other protests.

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Adam Kelwick is an imam at England’s oldest mosque. He explains why, as far-right mobs launched attacks across the country, he invited the people targeting his mosque to come inside

At the Abdullah Quilliam mosque in Liverpool on Friday, the imam Adam Kelwick was looking out at a sea of people. Around 50 of them had targeted the mosque as far-right riots erupted across the country; but hundreds more had turned out to support the mosque. Rather than stay within the safety of those who had come to protect his place of worship, Kelwick was determined to cross the police line and speak to the people on the other side.

He tells Helen Pidd what happened as he handed out drinks, burgers – and even hugs – to those who had come to “protest” against the mosque. He explains what he thinks is behind the anger and fear that is motivating the rioters, and why he believes talking to people, even in extreme circumstances, can help heal divisions

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