August 20
GUEST: Sijal Nasralla, Campaign Director of the MPower Change, an organization that promotes human rights for Muslims both in the US and around the world, talks about growing up in Palestine and trying to change the racist narrative about Muslim immigrants living in our country.You Can't Reform Haram
Muslims in the US face racism because it comes from the top. Trump, like most destructive tyrants, uses racial hatreds to gain power. Republicans have been dong that for decades to win elections. Democrats have a more subtile racism, as practiced by the grifter Clintons. Bill and Hillary used phrases like "super predator" when they wanted to play the race card.
But subjugated peoples have always had the courage and persistence to demand equality. Sometimes this courage ends in genocide, as with America's indigenous peoples. Muslims are torn between these two extremes: stay safe and internalize the hatred around them, or speak out and demand to be a full citizen of this supposed democracy.
MPower Change is all about having the courage to be a Muslim in a toxic society. Toxic because the US has killed millions in the Middle East, occupied land through illegal invasions, and stolen the oil and natural resources that belong to the peoples who live there. We are a predatory state, a privateer enterprise and only the American people don't know. Muslims living the US, however, do know. Like Blacks, they realize the viscousness of a state run by neoliberal madmen, intent on enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else in the world.
Like Black people, Muslims are figuring out how to preserve their identity and resist.
