The Independent and Daily Mail today both cover the twitter messages posted by a Fox News presenter, Erik Rush, in response to the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon on Sunday.

Rush, in a reactionary move, appeared to be blaming Saudis for the attack tweeting:

“@erikrush Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let's bring more Saudis in without screening them! C'mon! #bostonmarathon.”

Responding to a tweet asking if he was blaming Muslims, Rush replied:

“Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.”

Rush also responded to tweeters whom he considered ‘Islamist apologists’ writing:

“It's nice to see all the Islamist apologists standing up for those who would waste them in a heartbeat.”

The Independent draws attention to other articles written by Rush, including one titled ‘Yes, Islam is an enemy’ from September 2012 in which he wrote:

“Islam has never played well with others, and this is because it is a worldview with a creed, dogma and religious aspects, rather than a religion per se. All of these militate against its tolerance of divergent societies and cultures.

“This is truth: Both the political left and Islamists in America have been exploiting the First Amendment and Americans’ generous nature in order to conquer us.”

CAIR has urged its readers to contact Fox News urging that Rush be dropped from their scheduling. That Rush has continued in his post so long is perhaps an indication of how diligent Fox is in screening individuals invited onto its channel.

In the aftermath of Anders Breivik’s attacks in Norway in 2011, media coverage – including a Sun front page declaring ‘Norway’s 9/11’ – was quick to point the finger of blame at Al-Qaida linked terrorists. The hashtag ‘blamethemuslims’, created by Sanum Ghafoor, partly in response to media coverage of Breivik’s attacks, intelligently mocked the rush to presume Muslims as guilty of all such atrocities.

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian referred to the “rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence.

“The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post's insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend ("We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to"). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was "Jihad in America". Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).”

Noting that the perpetrators could well turn out to be Muslims, but just as well not, Greenwald makes a pertinent point in raising the lasting consequences of uninformed, finger-pointing for Muslim communities:

“[T]he damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures”.

In research published last year, Tung Yin explored the tendency to ‘blame the Muslims’ for terrorist incidents in knee-jerk fashion. Yin argued that the “undue temptation” to assume that perpetrators of any new apparent act of terrorism are probably Muslims reinforces racial profiling prejudices and leads to Muslims paying a “racial tax” as a result of such biased perceptions.

Terrorism is not owned by any one ideology or creed, as the facts and successive analyses makes clear. Perhaps it is time for those responsible for shaping public discourses and policy on terrorism to question the dangerous implications of their simplistic, biased assumptions.

You can contact Fox News with your views on Erik Rush via email on - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ben White on Liberal Conspiracy writes of the recent judgment by an employment tribunal in the case of Ronnie Fraser vs University and College Union (UCU).

Fraser challenged UCU over its refusal to adopt a particular definition of anti-semitism and was claiming ‘unlawful harassment’, claims which were roundly dismissed by the employment tribunal.

The tribunal saw a roll call of witnesses for the plaintiff, Fraser, including a blogger from Harry’s Place, Booker Prize winner and Independent columnist, Howard Jacobson, as well as representatives from the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust.

Chair of the APPG on anti-semitism, John Mann also appeared, as did former MP Denis MacShane. Of their testimony and the tribunal’s ruling, Jews Sans Frontieres observes, “I hope other MPs take note that false allegations of antisemitism don't fare so well in a forensic environment.”

A point of great significance in the ruling is the judgment that "a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel" is "not intrinsically a part of Jewishness" and therefore should not be conflated with claims of anti-semitic behaviour.

In a statement, UCU’s barrister, Anthony White QC, argued:

"The respondent [UCU] is a democratic organisation with a campaigning role. Internal debate on political issues of interest and concern to its members is central to the existence and functioning of the respondent.

"The fact that he [Fraser] (and others) disagreed with a number of motions which were passed by the respondent's congress, or with statements made by participants in the debates, or with certain opinions expressed by members of the respondent, does not mean that those motions or statements or expressions of opinion amount to harassment."

The tribunal in its ruling on the case stated:

“Lessons should be learned from this sorry saga. We greatly regret that the case was ever brought. At heart, it represents an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means. It would be very unfortunate if an exercise of this sort were ever repeated…

“We are also troubled by the implications of the claim. Underlying it we sense a worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression.”

You can read the full judgment here.

The Independent on Saturday published a feature article interviewing the parents of Mohamed Sakr, a British-Egyptian citizen who was stripped of his British citizenship and subsequently killed in a drone attack in Somalia last February.

The paper earlier published the findings of a Bureau of Investigative Journalism study on the revocation of British citizenship from dual nationals suspected of “involvement in terrorist activities”. The Bureau found that “Home Secretary Theresa May has ramped up the use of powers allowing her to strip UK citizenship from dual nationals without first proving wrong-doing in the courts.”

Sakr’s parents question the evidence proving their son was "involved in terrorism-related activity".

"Do they have any evidence against them that they have been involved in this or that? I haven't seen it. And they haven't come up with it," says Mr Sakr.

"This is the hardest time we have ever come across in our family life,' Mr Sakr said in tears.

"I'll never stop blaming the British Government for what they did to my son. They broke my family."

"It never crossed my mind that something here in Britain would happen like this, especially as Mohamed had no other passport, no other nationality. He was brought up here: all his life is here," his mother said"

Marco Scalvini, in an essay for Open Democracy, writes of the concerns expressed by human rights groups on the ‘arbitrary’ powers to strip citizenship including:

1) deprivation of citizenship is exercised by the Home Secretary on the grounds of the “the public good” without proving a breach of law; 2) the revocation is carried out without any sort of due process or transparency; 3) those who are deprived of their citizenship have only 28 days to appeal to a court before being deported; 4) deprivation is also applied to those who were born and raised in the UK and have never been charged with any crime.

Noting the use of the powers in particular against those who hold dual nationality, Scalvini notes:

“Before 9/11, those immigrants who were naturalized and suspected of being disloyal could be stripped of their passport, while native-born nationals have been always considered safe. In fact, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that 5 of the 21 people deprived of their citizenships were actually born in the UK. At the same time, citizenship deprivation can be only applied to dual nationals in order to avoid statelessness, as the UK adopted the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.”

BBC Radio 4 in the programme, Law in Action, last Thursday explored the issue in relation to Mahdi Hashi, another British citizen stripped of citizenship and facing trial in the US on terrorism charges.

"My son has been abandoned by the British authorities," his father, Mohamed Hashi, told Law in Action.

"It's easier for them just to pass him to the Americans instead of extraditing him later on."

"There has been no public outrage at the introduction of simple, near-arbitrary deprivation of British citizenship, even for the British-born," says Caroline Sawyer, a senior lecturer in law at Victoria University of Wellington, in the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law.”

You can still catch the Radio 4 programme here.

BBC News reported on the exhibition, London Veil, featuring hijab-wearers of all colours and styles, which was on display at London's Festival Hall last Friday and Sunday, 8th and 10th March.

As part of the Women of the World Festival at London's South Bank, the exhibition "[gave] prominence to young Muslim women in London by documenting and celebrating the expression of their individual identities as interpreted through their vibrant and varied hijab styles and adornments."

You can watch the BBC News report here.