Setting out the concept for IHRC & SACC’s annual Islamophobia conference, Saeed Khan argues that charging opponents and dissenters as extremists has a long pedigree.  Ignoring the cynical definitions of governments must be the rallying call for activists everywhere.

The pantheon of western heroes is replete with individuals who risked their livelihoods, liberties and lives for the higher calling of greater rights, freedoms and virtues to benefit not just themselves, but society broadly. Those who come from marginalized communities are regarded as the mavericks, the risk takers and the trailblazers, elevating their voices for the others who have no voice or representation and gaining a better life. Equally, due credit is given to people who come from elite and privileged backgrounds who appear to set aside a life of ease, not complacent to accept their station in life, to seek social amelioration even for those with whom they share little, if anything, in common. For the lucky ones, society bestows them with recognition and gratitude for their achievements, although such acknowledgment may not be immediate. Rather, a process of rehabilitation may be required, one that could take years or decades, before the individual or the movement he or she is championing will be accepted and lauded. This, of course, presumes, that such a movement ever receives due recognition and legitimacy. Often, these strides of conscience are disparaged and demonized as cases of extremism, radicalism, anti-social behavior, even a threat to society or the state.

The word, conscience, has an interesting and highly relevant etymology to the issue at hand. It comes from the Latin word, conscientia, which means, “shared knowledge” or “with knowledge.” It is therefore unsurprising that those who are asserting their conscience are branded as extremists, as the current climate holds in contempt the very idea of sharing knowledge to correct and clarify misinformation, or to highlight atrocities and injustices. The treatment of those exercising their conscience do so as a means to speak truth to power, a purportedly well-established tradition and virtue within western societies. Yet, evidently, such an exercise has its limits and rules, which are invariably determined by those in power and who feel threatened when their conduct and policies are challenged and checked.

It is an indisputable reality that many prisoners of conscience and others who exercise their conscience only to be branded extremists are people of colour. Nelson Mandela and members of the African National Congress were vilified and branded a terrorist organization, not just within South Africa, but among a litany of western capitals. While there were certainly members of the anti-apartheid struggle that were white, the overwhelming majority of those who suffered most severely, and, of course, the very targets of the reprehensible apartheid policies, happened to be people of colour. Western leaders unsurprisingly trained their venom and acerb on these leaders, with the inescapable issue of race forming part of their attitudes and policies. Republicans within the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations regarded Mandela as a sinister, subversive character, besmirching his reputation and painting him as a dangerous, violent individual, despite languishing in South African prisons for nearly three decades. Similarly, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher echoed such sentiments, offering the Pretoria government resources to suppress not just the ANC, but the liberties of millions of South Africans under the apartheid regime. It is telling that even after, and despite the end of apartheid by negotiation between Mandela and then South African Prime Minister F.W. DeKlerk, Washington and London maintained their disdain for the former prisoner of conscience, if not the end of apartheid as a system and policy. Years, after, figures like former American Vice-President Dick Cheney remains unrepentant in branding Mandela a terrorist, despite the near universal adulation the late South African freedom fighter and statesman enjoys now. For Cheney, once a purported extremist (in his definition), always an extremist.

The British government’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was procured to allow the state to “legitimately” criminalize protest, irrespective of whether such activity was peaceful or not. Images of the elderly and disabled being accosted by a half dozen police officers equipped with flak jackets, masks, helmets and truncheons brings no shame to the state, which leans into its aggressive and oppressive conduct, continuously rationalizing the necessity to prosecute in this manner for fear of anarchy, lawlessness or worse, the assertion and highlighting of issues that reasonable people will condemn as unjust and morally reprehensible.

British government clampdown of Palestine Action protests appears to be an inevitable consequence of the frustration the state has felt in witnessing the constant schedule of demonstrations around the Gaza conflict for the past two years. Every effort had been made to delegitimize the efforts, resorting in distortions and outright defamations, including false accusations of violence, support of terrorism and calls for criminal activity. When none of these allegations could be proven, as no such conduct occurred despite numerous provocations by both state and societal actors, the government took the audacious measure of policing ideas instead of actions. None of the arrested and incarcerated has ever claimed membership of Palestine Action, even if one acknowledges the state’s designation of it as a terrorist organization. But now, a placard in support of a ceasefire in Gaza or calling Israel’s activity a genocide, something that the majority of genocide scholars, including Israeli academics declare, is sufficient for the state to contend is tantamount to “lending material support to a terrorist enterprise,” thus eligible for prosecution.

Activism borne of conscience is a manifestation of agency; individuals and groups strive to bring attention to issues, causes and conflicts. The branding of such efforts as extremism requires a rebranding of their rhetoric and impetus. There is nothing more egregious and effective than usurping and redefining the terms and the motivations for conscience-driven campaigns. During the past two years, several slogans and chants among pro-Palestinian protesters have been reframed as terroristic, anti-Semitic and a threat to public safety thousands of miles away from the conflict in question. The phrase, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” is an aspirational statement that bears no ambiguity. It simply states that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will one day enjoy liberation and self-determination for all its inhabitants, be they ones who already possess it or those who seek it and have been deprived of it for decades. It makes no claims, explicitly or implicitly, of displacement, replacement, occupation or annihilation of any people; in fact, it doesn’t mention or single out any specific group. Yet, the phrase has been demonized as a categorical example of anti-Semitism. It is claimed to be an uncoded threat of violence against supporters of Israel to justify its proscription from demonstrations and even university campuses under the pretext that it makes some students “feel” unsafe. The proverbial bar has been reduced from being unsafe to the more nebulous standard of feeling as such.

The rebranding of “From the River to the Sea…” from a peaceful, inspirational chant to a threatening screed would be risible enough were it not highly hypocritical as well. The irony is not lost that in its 1977 platform, the Israeli Likud party explicitly stated that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Moreover, the Likud Party was created under the leadership of Menachem Begin, who became Prime Minister of Israel that year. Begin was the leader of the Irgun (Etzel), the Zionist paramilitary outfit that targeted British rule in Mandate-era Palestine as well as the Arab community resident there. The Irgun was responsible for the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 people, including British, Arab and Jewish civilians. The Irgun was also responsible for the 1938 attack on an Arab market that killed 18 people, and the hanging of two British sergeants in retaliation for the British execution of Irgun members. In addition, the Irgun was responsible, along with another Zionist group, the Lehi, for the murders in and deracination of the Arab village of Deir Yassin in 1948.

Condemnation of agents of conscience is also countered by rehabilitation of the reprehensible. Perhaps no one typifies this reversal better than Menachem Begin himself. His Irgun was designated a terrorist organization by the British during the Mandate era. He authorized and led campaigns that targeted and killed British officials, British soldiers and British civilians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Arabs he and his group murdered and displaced. But within thirty years of Begin’s classification as Public Enemy Number One, he became Prime Minister and was recognized and feted by Whitehall and other Western capitals alike. The “former” terrorist was now not only regarded a legitimate world leader but also awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Egyptian President Anwar Al Sadat after signing the Camp David Accords. Doubtless, it will be bewildering to those whose conscience is mocked, belittled, delegitimized and even criminalized to see the abdication of conscience by those who will transform extremists into heroes, but cynicism is an unavoidable part of the equation.

In some cases, the conversion of villain to hero, extremist to paragon of conscience, is a function of time as much as it is a matter of agenda. During the early 1960s there was perhaps no individual that was seen by the state as a bigger threat to society than Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbaz). Arguably the most visible and prominent member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was highly influential in greatly expanding membership into the Nation and encouraging black liberation and dignity in the face of systemic and societal racism. But Malcolm was not only critical of America for its bigotry and the dehumanization of his community. He also directed his opprobrium toward the mainstream civil rights movement that was personified and led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm contended that King and other black leaders in that space were accommodationists and were guilty of sanitizing the institutional nature of anti-black racism. Malcolm argued that any progress that King would make, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, would be a pyrrhic victory as it would address and rectify the underlying cultural, political and economic causes and deployments of racism.

Despite his efforts to empower his community and imbibe it with a sense of dignity in the pursuit of justice and equality, neither the state nor society saw him as an agent of conscience. Even the mainstream black community saw him and his views as extremist, perhaps because he did not identify with the heavily Christian conventional civil rights movement that was led by Baptist preachers like King and Ralph Abernathy, among others. Malcolm proffered that their Christianity was imposed upon them and their slave ancestors as a means to sever blacks from their cultural and religious roots in Africa, and as a means of social control, a perspective that was ill received by many Blacks for whom the Church was a central social and spiritual institution.

Interestingly, the other Black civil rights leaders were also, at least initially, regarded as extremists, despite purportedly preaching nonviolence and civil disobedience. Like Malcolm, King was surveilled, beaten, imprisoned and deemed a threat. While both Malcolm and King were assassinated, their legacies have diverged considerably. Malcolm, murdered in 1965 by members of the Nation, with a strong suspicion by many that the US government was involved, has had a glacial metamorphosis of his image and memory. Thanks in part to a corpus of literature and the 1992 eponymously titled movie, Malcolm has moved beyond the reductive trope of dangerous firebrand to a highly complex, thoughtful, significant figure in the civil rights movement. While still regarded by many as an extremist, Malcolm now is seen by some as an agent of conscience.

By contrast, the rehabilitation by the state of King occurred more quickly, robustly and completely than that of Malcolm. King almost immediately became a martyr and was lauded as a man of peace, nonviolence. He offered a convenient juxtaposition to Malcolm, who was categorized as the “violent” one, despite Malcolm never calling for violence; all he said was for the ability and right of blacks to defend themselves if confronted with violence, rather than employ the unrealistic- and purportedly Christian- notion of “turning the other cheek.” King was given the significant honour of having his birthday in January recognized as a federal bank holiday. In addition, King is the recipient of a second major recognition by way of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Ostensibly meant to be a monument to the entire civil rights movement, the statue is only of King, and the reduction of the movement to a single individual is inescapable. There were thousands that perished in the civil rights struggle and hundreds that played a significant role, including Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, as well as others that are still branded as perhaps unredeemable, yet critical figures in the movement, such as members of the Black Panther Party like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and H Rap Brown. The legacy of King has been laundered by the very power structures that vilified him before, but for whom he is now the acceptable face of the civil rights movement and the gold standard for behaviour in their estimation: peaceful, safe and willing to work with and within the system, without questioning its validity and legitimacy. It also begs another important, understandably cynical, question: whether the acknowledgment by the power structure of a person of conscience and the concomitant retraction of the “extremist” designation has any value, as the very system being challenged is being given recognition for its reversal. The system that labels someone an extremist arguably should not be presumed to have gained some enlightenment in changing its perspective since in both cases, it is exercising an agency that it deprives of the person of conscience throughout.

The large-scale Gaza demonstrations have continued unabated in several cities around the world, but perhaps none as consistent, frequent and massive as the regular marches in London, UK. These protests have been overwhelming in both their size and in their peaceful nature, serving as a constant reminder to the atrocities occurring in Palestine and demanding a suspension of arms sales and distribution to Israel, a ceasefire and an end to the genocide. The crowds, in the hundreds of thousands are armed only with placards and their voices and are comprised of a diverse mosaic of religious and ethnic backgrounds. They include Palestinians whose families are under siege or have been annihilated, as well as Holocaust survivors, all calling for Israeli accountability and British government intervention to end the destruction rather than to provide further complicity with it.

The British government over the past two years, irrespective of political party in power, has been consistent in its demonization of people of conscience who are exercising their lawful right to protest an atrocity. It shows that political affiliations, barely able to maintain civility in parliamentary proceedings, have shown unique unanimity in condemning and even criminalizing the protesters for their advocacy and activism. Conservative Home Secretaries like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman accused the demonstrators of being terrorists, or at least, terrorist sympathisers, and considered deportation even for British citizens engaged in these marches. The matter not only did not abate under a Labour government; it arguably intensified, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper designating a leading organizer in the protests, Palestine Action, a terrorist entity, threatening to arrest anyone showing support for the group. To date, hundreds have been arrested by British authorities, merely for carrying signs or voicing support for Palestine Action, including the elderly and disabled, and pensioners including Holocaust survivors. The number of such arrests is far greater than recent demonstrations in London by far-right, anti-immigrant groups, despite such rallies being riddled by violence and even injuries to security and police forces. These incidents serve to affirm that the state, while relatively silent on fascist, racist and violent protesters and their bigoted message, is reluctant to categorize them as extremist, while it condemns people of conscience with incarceration.

While the state has demonstrated its contempt for and willingness to police and stifle conscience-based advocacy, non-governmental entities have proven to be no less complicit or vicious in their efforts. Journalists like Asa Winstanley have been the targets of campaigns to cancel his coverage of Israel’s atrocities and the frequent weaponization of the charge of anti-Semitism to silence Zionist activities. Academics have also been affected, including David Miller and the termination of his faculty appointment at the University of Bristol. Justice came at great cost and after great effort to reverse a deeply troubling decision by the university’s administration. And in the United States, activists like Mahmoud Khalil have been branded extremists, terrorist sympathisers and supporters and even detained for deportation simply for organizing demonstrations for Gaza. Khalil has been released from detention, but the Trump administration has persisted in searching for some way to remove him from the country.

Before mid-September, 2025, many people around the world, and many Americans over the age of 30 and/or politically liberal, would be excused if they did not know the name, Charlie Kirk. But his rather public and graphic assassination has inadvertently and ironically made him a far more prolific, household personality. The 31 year-old self-described conservative activist founded the powerful Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an organization designed to advocate right-wing ideas and ideology primarily to university-aged people. With thousands of collegiate chapters across the United States, TPUSA has grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise, with a stated mission to, “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Kirk often aggressively asserted Christian principles, which made his and TPUSA’s message appealing to Christian nationalists and others who see Christianity as synonymous with right-wing politics and especially President Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. Kirk’s statements, promulgated in person on college campuses and by way of a highly popular podcast, have been regarded as racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ and Islamophobic, perhaps explaining his nearly cult-like following among conservative Americans. At a September event at a Utah university, Kirk was assassinated by a sniper’s single rifle shot.

The reaction to Kirk’s murder was understandably sharp and at the same time menacing. Almost immediately, his adherents presumed that the killer was from the political left; even President Trump reflexively, and bereft of any supporting evidence, charged that the radical left was behind this despicable act. A two-day manhunt that involved the FBI and several other local, state and federal agencies finally yielded the suspect, who was identified by his own family and who turned himself over to authorities himself. His identity came as a shock to many due to his demographic and ideological orientation. Tyler Robinson is a white, 22 year-old from a conservative family, whose father was both a police officer and Christian minister, and who identifies with a far-right wing political group, the Groypers. It appears, therefore, that there is an emerging schism within the so-called MAGA movement, or, put in another way, Kirk was more a casualty of political cannibalism than a victim of some broader, polarized culture war between right and left.

Kirk was quick to brand protesters of conscience as extremists, terrorists, and anti-American. His views on Gaza were fully aligned with the Israeli narrative, including the denial of Israeli actions being a genocide, and accusing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, including women and children as being the fault of Hamas. He made his assertions under the guise of being a champion of free speech, and engaged students, particularly detractors in a quasi-debate format that generally involved in him cutting off his interlocutors mid-sentence and engaging in smug and snarky one-word retorts, to the adulation of his supporters. Yet, his fans, including most of the Republican leadership in the country, lionized him as an intrepid defender of free expression and American (read: Christian conservative) values. And in death, Kirk has acquired a hagiography unmatched among non-politicians or leaders. Republicans have expressed a public sorrow that includes lamentations and histrionics, and have proposed honouring Kirk with such unprecedented gestures as having his body lie in state at the US Capitol rotunda in Washington. President Trump ordered all flags throughout the country to be flown at half-staff, and Vice-President JD Vance personally authorized his airplane, Air Force Two, to fly Kirk’s casket from Utah to his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Most significantly, however, is the categorical sanctification of Kirk’s memory and legacy as a man of conscience, despite ample evidence that his perspectives and pronouncements could be construed as extremist.

While it is understandable, perhaps even expected, for Charlie Kirk’s followers and fans to consider his ideology and approach to be the antithesis of extremism, the extent to which there is a demand for others to conform to such a conceit is unprecedented in recent American cultural and political history. It is insufficient for people to be silent about Kirk’s right-wing perspectives; it is expected that they accept them as dictum and even grieve him as a martyr in the same emotion and depth of sorrow as his most ardent supporters. The mode of mourning has become a litmus test of American allegiance and even a talisman against potential reprisal and recrimination. For those who are neither silent nor full-throated in their commiseration, internally sincere or not, have been recipients of an opprobrium that defies the long-held tradition and right to free speech, ironically, the very principles Kirk purportedly championed himself.

Those who either have offered their criticisms of Kirk’s highly problematic rhetoric and views, even if not having expressed their happiness that he was killed, a questionably appropriate yet constitutionally protected opinion to hold, have faced scorn, threats and even professional retribution. Commentators like Matthew Dowd were terminated from their position on MSNBC as a panelist and analyst merely for delineating the irony that Kirk had been on the record for stating that gun deaths were an unfortunate but necessary price to pay to maintain the Second Amendment of the US Constitution that ensures the right to bear arms. Others have faced similar reprisal for social media comments, and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has demanded that anyone at the Pentagon that is critical of or insufficiently mournful of Kirk’s murder will face punishment. It is irrelevant whether criticism of Kirk is being offered as a matter of conscience or to provide a rejoinder to the uncritical image being proffered by both media and ideologues alike. In today’s cultural climate, refusal to accept the extremism of an ideologue runs the risk of being branded an extremist oneself.

The reaction to Kirk’s murder also exposes another, arguably more nefarious phenomenon. For some who strive to have their conscience guide their politics and highlight issues and causes of concern, there is often the naivete that only one side of the political or cultural aisle is involved in normalizing extremism and worse, branding conscientious activism as extremist. The Kirk episode has shown how quickly the other mainstream sources of political and cultural power capitulate in the face of pressure, real or perceived, from more authoritarian sectors. While it is difficult to assess the motivations as to why there has been such an abdication of the duty of opposing the unilateral assertion of the Kirkian conservative ideology, be it for financial or other reasons, there is an indisputable chilling effect of the ability for people to oppose such right-wing extremism. Media outlets that have defined themselves as centrist or left-leaning have been as complicit in parroting the conservative point of view as those voices from where it can be fully expected. Even sports teams and musicians have interrupted their events to recognize and offer condolences to Kirk and his family. Several American football teams, for example, reserved a moment of silence before kick-off on the Sunday following Kirk’s assassination, and even Chris Martin of the band Coldplay, an artist well known for supporting progressive causes, made sure to acknowledge Kirk’s passing at a concert soon after the murder.

The current political climate has exacerbated the typecasting of anyone seeking to challenge the status quo as being an extremist. In Great Britain, politicians of principle like Jeremy Corbyn were brought down for daring to advocate for Palestinians. Most disturbing, but perhaps without surprise, Corbyn was removed from his position as opposition leader not by the Tories but by others within the Labour Party in what could best be described as a case of treachery and mutiny. It was accompanied by a continuing purge of any Labour member that shares Corbyn’s humanitarian concern for Gaza or Palestine as a whole.

Corbyn’s treatment demonstrates that there is no immunity from ostracization and removal, even for those who seek to work within the structures of power. The race for mayor of New York City has taken on an unusual amount of controversy and has garnered attention on an international scale, in part because some attribute to it an international dimension. New York is not only America’s largest city; it is also home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman has catapulted in the polls to become the clear frontrunner ahead of the November 2025 elections. He won the Democratic primary in the heavily Democratic city, topping the incumbent Eric Adams, a politician addled with corruption allegations before being absolved by President Trump, who ordered his Justice Department to drop investigations into possible criminality by Adams. Mamdani also bested Andrew Cuomo, the former New York state governor who had to resign that post amidst multiple accusations of sexual harassment against him. Mamdani has campaigned on a platform to bring affordable housing, free to heavily discounted public transportation and reasonably priced groceries to New Yorkers as issues of conscience.

Yet, Mamdani has consistently been branded an extremist for espousing such pledges, including by members of the Democratic establishment, many of whom are either backing Adams or Cuomo despite both candidates claiming they would accept assistance by President Trump for a possible victory. Such Democratic leaders, with barely two months remaining before the election, refused to endorse Mamdani, the winner of their primary and the clear front runner in the race. New York is well represented at the national level, with the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jefferies, both hailing from the state. But neither is willing to endorse Mamdani yet because despite the Democratic Party’s rhetoric of being the party for the common man, they see Mamdani’s plans as radical, extremist and a threat to the status quo which the establishment appears to share with Republicans and Trump.

Of course, it would be difficult for Democratic Party leaders to admit their own hypocrisy by voicing objections to Mamdani’s stated platform and pledges. Instead, they have tried to paint Mamdani as an anti-Semite, anti-Israeli danger for being the sole outlier among obsequious New York City candidates who feel the reflective need to establish their pro-Zionist credentials by offering uncritical support for Israel. When Mamdani tried to assert that he was running to be the mayor of an American city and thus felt no need to travel to Israel, a vow made by all his political rivals in the primary debates, he was accused of being unfit to represent New York City, a metropolis with a large, but hardly majority Jewish population. In fact, the Jewish community is rather divided on the issue of Israel with a majority of young Jewish New Yorkers supporting Mamdani and either sharing his views that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or subordinating Israel as a campaign issue in favor of local political concerns.

In the United States, the extent by which the state seeks to stifle conscience and claim it to be an extremist position has reached unprecedented levels. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has audaciously proposed the revocation of American passports from US citizens should they express criticism of Israel, including speaking out about purported war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza and elsewhere. While an obvious violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment and its guarantees of free speech, not to mention an unlawful restriction on a citizen’s right to travel, the audacious lengths being taken to prohibit certain streams of activism further blurs the line between purportedly liberal democracies and those governments traditionally labelled authoritarian regimes.

Those who are guided by their conscience to bring to light crucial issues and causes face tremendous challenges, not only in their efforts to change public opinion and policy, but also in their demonization. Being branded as extremists simply for asserting and defending human rights is both demoralizing and potentially dangerous. While it might not deter the resolute from persisting in their struggles, the designation of extremism is invariably accompanied by societal and state recriminations. Ostracization, economic privation and reputational harm are the relatively minor consequences that are deployed. The state has the full force and authority at its disposal to surveil, securitize, criminalize and punish people, either into capitulation, conformity or worse, erasure. For those that persevere and manage the actions taken against them, there is the added and ironic consideration that their efforts may effectuate the desired shift in perception and even policy. In doing so, activists may also experience a shift in attitudes toward them by renouncing the moniker of extremism, even gaining them societal and state recognition of being heroes. As activists are not dissuaded by being branded extremists, as this does not impede their motivation to exercise their conscience, similarly, they will not be concerned to receive the equally arbitrary approbation from the very same source. If anything, such recognition may prove confusing as the motivations of the brander are fundamentally problematic and circumspect. The power structures already demonstrate their capriciousness, contradictions and moral bankruptcy by being the purveyors of the injustices and iniquities in which they engage. As their condemnation is thus empty, so too is their approval. History is replete with heroes that were once villains, and there are villains that are being marketed as paragons of virtue and moral rectitude. Neither dynamic is particularly helpful, constructive or ultimately relevant for the conscience-driven activist. Strategically, the priority remains effectuating the change to the conditions being challenged. Such focus is the mark of the truly conscientious.

Saeed Khan is Professor of Near East & Asian Studies & Global Studies and Director of Global Studies at Wayne State University, Detroit, USA.  He will be co-chairing the 2025 IHRC and SACC Islamophobia Conference ‘From Freedom to Comfort: How the State Redefined Conscience as Extremism’  which will be held on 6 December 2025.  Find out more on the IHRC website, and find the proceedings of the previous ten years conferences here.  Khan is a regular contributor to The Long View.  His most recent publications include “What’s Going on Here? US Experiences of Islamophobia between Obama and Trump“, co-authored with Saied R. Ameli for Islamic Human Rights Commission publications.