Islamophobia: A Tool of the Right
Session Type(s): Panel
Starts: Thursday, Jun. 20 7:30 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Thursday, Jun. 20 8:45 PM (Eastern)
President Obama’s middle name is Hussein and many Americans know this because the right has made Muslims the villain of America. Come to this panel for a conversation about how we can combat Islamophobia and deconstruct the fear mongering machine of the right.
Moderator
Tanzila Ahmed
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded her #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast at the White House and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and numerous online publications. In Spring 2019 she was UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and in 2016 received an award from President Obama’s White House as a Champion of Change in Art and Storytelling.
Other sessions: Engaging New American Voters and Voters of Color
Panelists
Zahra Billoo
Zahra Billoo serves as the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA) office, the oldest and one of the largest CAIR chapter offices. Since joining in 2009, Zahra has led the organization through a period of six-fold growth. Today, she manages one of the largest CAIR offices in the country with a team of civil rights and social justice advocates dedicated to the empowerment of American Muslims through legal services, legislative advocacy, and community organizing.
Under Zahra’s leadership, CAIR-SFBA has filed lawsuits against the United States Department of Justice, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Southwest Airlines, representing American Muslims facing discriminatory treatment. CAIR-SFBA has also significantly expanded its capabilities to provide know-your-rights sessions on a nearly weekly basis to mosques and community members in the San Francisco Bay Area, while also providing direct legal representation to Bay Area residents facing numerous civil rights violations, including FBI interviews, employment discrimination, airport harassment, school bullying, and hate crimes.
Zahra earned her undergraduate degrees from the California State University, Long Beach, and her Juris Doctorate from the University of California, Hastings. She is licensed to practice law in California.
Other sessions: Challenging Drones, from Pakistan to Oakland
Dustin Craun
Dustin Craun is a writer, educator, community organizer and a communications strategist who has worked with more than twenty-five different non-profit and social movement based organizations over the last twelve years in the United States, Mexico, and Ghana. Dustin works on the clergy organizing team for the PICO National Network building Muslim Community organizing into the largest faith based community organinizing network in the United States. His writings have been featured in publications such as Adbusters, and he is working on publishing his first book titled Decolonizing Whiteness.