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MSP Humza Yousaf receives anti-Muslim abuse after posting pic from swearing in ceremony

MSP Humza Yousaf receives anti-Muslim abuse after posting pic from swearing in ceremony

Categories: Latest News

Monday May 16 2016

The Independent prints tweets that have been posted abusing Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s former Minister for International Development, who re-took his oath this week following the Holyrood elections on 5 May.

Yousaf took his oath in English and Urdu while wearing a kilt. Posting a photo of himself with his family at his swearing in ceremony, Yousaf also posted the barrage of anti-Muslim abuse suffered he received from online trolls.

Tarek Fatah, a Canadian journalist, posted messages stating:

“The new face of leftwing Scottish National Party @theSNP. @Humza Yousaf with his Islamist family of Sharia-Bolsheviks.”

“Scotland MP @Humza Yousaf refuses Oath in English. Takes it in Pakistan’s official language Urdu. Britain = Bakistan.”

” I’m so glad Pakistanis are rallying around their boy in Glasgow as he pulls the Burka over @theSNP.”

Further messages posted included trolls who wrote:

“F*cking disgrace this is not Pakistan.”

“Abu Humza is nothing to do with Scotland. Only a tiny minority are as big pillocks as him and they probably never even read “Tam o’Shanter”.”

Yousaf was quick to point out that his oath was taken in English and Urdu and that he wore a kilt to his ceremony. Not that this is likely to deter anti-Muslim racists from engaging in abuse of Muslim politicians.

Tarek Fatah’s haranguing of Muslims and disparagingly labelling them ‘Islamists’ is also nothing new. Hilary Aked in an essay for AlterNet highlighted Fatah’s collaboration with the US based Gatestone Institute in an advert published in the New York Times days after the Paris attacks in January 2015. Gatestone is funded by Nina Rosenwald, the woman called the “sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate”. Among signatories to the advert, which “advocat[ed] a mono-causal explanation for [the terrorist attacks] and put the spotlight firmly on Islam”, were Fatah and the Quilliam Foundation.

Another tweet Fatah shared around the time was this: “If you are a Muslim on social media & have not yet tweeted ‘I am #CharlieHebdo’, than you are an Islamist and our enemy.”

The travesty is not just that Islamophobes indulge regularly in this sort of anti-Muslim hysteria but that they have successfully been able to pass themselves off, to politicians and media outlets, as ‘arbiters’ of counter-extremism.

In response to Fatah’s tweets, SNP MP Angus MacNeil wrote: “This guy apparently is for real ..is he like Canada’s Katie Hopkins?”

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