I am getting heartily sick of being subjected to low-level racist and Islamophobic abuse whenever I go out wearing my black Islamic State flag. It is a very beautiful flag, symbolic of freedom and love and bears the legend: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is His Messenger’, which I hand-painted in Arabic script. (On the other side it says: ‘Nothing to do with Islam’, just so as I can hedge my bets a bit.) Anyway, walking around London with it I can report that several people looked at me funny. That’s Islamophobia for you. Also, one fairly obese man shouted, ‘Fuck off to Syria, you wanker.’ That’s racist abuse, end of. I stopped a policeman to tell him about these incidents but by now the perpetrators were a very great distance away and avoided capture. The policeman admired my flag, I think. He did not tell me to take it off, at any rate.
Very often in the past people wearing a flag bearing the cross of St George, or the Union Jack, have been rightly told to desist by your police and even arrested — because those are flags of colonial oppression and imperialism and are intrinsically hurtful to Muslims like myself. We are a vulnerable community and find the waving of the Union Jack both threatening and irritating. But nobody could possibly object to my flag because it is a flag of liberation. Admittedly, sometimes the liberation of a person’s head from the rest of his body, but liberation all the same. Anyway, I found the stares I got and the occasional unpleasant comments discomfiting.
You kafirs think you are terribly tolerant, but let me tell you — walking around with my flag a few days after our brother had carried out Allah’s will on a Tunisian beach, I felt horribly excluded from British society as a consequence of those stares.
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