The most senior Asian police officer in the UK says he has been the target of “death threats”. Tarique Ghaffur has filed a claim of racial discrimination against his superiors in the Metropolitan Police Service.
The Met is already being sued by another officer, Shabbir Hussain, on similar grounds.
The Guardian has some background on the Met’s troubled race relations.
A Muslim man, who endured years of racial abuse from a British National Party activist neighbour, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for killing him.
Related: A (very) brief note on race and crime in the context of another murder involving ‘race’.
Police say the murder of Mohammad al-Majed, a 16 year old Qatari studying English in Hastings, was racially motivated. The uncle of the murdered student has said his nephew had complained of ‘hostility towards Arabs’.
The Independent claims Hastings, which has a large number of foreign students, has an “inordinately high number of race-related attacks” (although no source is cited). Recording ‘race crimes’ will always be difficult.
Racialicious is undergoing a Muslim invasion! 
Jehanzeb writes about Muslim women in comic books (part 1, part 2), which MMW also featured a few months ago.
Shawna shares her experiences growing up as a Muslim in the Bible belt.
A couple of Darfur stories:
Where are the white heroes?
“Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project… where are the white heroes?’” he told AFP during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film.
“I couldn’t get the money here, I couldn’t get the money in Britain. I went to everybody. You wouldn’t believe the number of producers based in Europe, and in the States, that I went to,” he said.
“The first question you get, is ‘Is it a black film?’ All of them agree, it’s not going to do good in Europe, it’s not going to do good in Japan.
Racism is the “only reason” John McCain might beat Barack Obama.
Why I hate Murdoch’s nasty newspapers.
Counting people in the US: “White people” may be a minority in the US by 2042. And apparently it is difficult to count the number of Jews, Muslims and other smaller religious groups who live in the Land of the Free.
All right, let’s go there. In another thread Andrea suggested we devote a discussion to white converts–what we mean, what we hijack, how we’re useful or not. I will observe something that will make me unpopular among others of my ilk: a lot of educated white converts (in other words, ones who grew up with a certain amount of implicit cultural authority) use their conversion as an excuse to analyze subjects with which they have no experience: honor killing, arranged marriage, poverty. They function, and to a certain extent see themselves, as religiously privileged anthropologists. There is a reason for this that is understandable: one wants to simply tack a Muslim identity on to one’s existing identity, which gives one a comfortable cushion of implied expertise.
The problem, besides a level of inherent obnoxiousness, is that this muddles up existent identity politics. In the West, Islam is deeply tied to ideas of race, cultural identity and immigration. When white converts come in, rhetorical guns blazing, to talk about Who Muslims Are and Are Not, the narrative gets skewed. Thirty years of postcolonial activism, meant to take the Muslim/non-western narrative out of the hands of white scholars and put it back in the hands of the people who live it, becomes confused. The unspoken bottom line is this: to some people, the fact that white Muslims exist is very inconvenient.
My solution: we, educated white converts, have to accept that we don’t get a unified cultural identity. We just don’t. Not this generation. If we work hard, our kids will. We no longer fit seamlessly into the white majority and we can’t tack ourselves on to the immigrant/emergent American/British community, because *we’re not from there*. (Hello? White dude in the thobe with the fake foreign accent? I’m talking to you.) We are, for now, identity-less. Rather than denying it, moaning about it or getting a martyr complex about it, we should accept it, poke our heads up and see how this can be useful.
Next: How to Be White, Muslim and Vocal Without Co-opting Everything
Another reason why France is a failed society:
Giles Fraser looks again at Richard Lynn’s claim that intelligent people are less likely to believe in God.
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