UPDATE: Somali girl RESPONDS to dailymail article

[Cinnamon Spice]

The tabloids published my teenage tweets and implied I'm a fanatical Muslim – so let me set the record straight

The headlines started rolling in when tweets that I wrote as a teenager, at the beginning of sixth form college, caught people’s attention. The adolescent comments of a young girl were twisted to make them seem far more sinister than they ever were intended to be.

For almost all teenagers who have gone through and will go through the same struggles and growth as I did, they will have the luxury of never having to worry about comments they made being dragged up years later.

For Muslims who take public roles in society – specifically, in this case, a black Muslim woman – it's not so simple.

It feels like the aim of this sort of article is to make politically active Muslims feel unwelcome in the public sphere. And it’s working. For 48 hours, I have had to sift through comments of hate, rape and death threats and attempts to intimidate me out of the public discourse. But I won’t be silenced.

I said these things when I was young, impressionable and still developing my personality and opinions. In trying to paint me in this way, they failed to mention so much of who I am and what I do. In the past two years, I have done a wide variety of work on my campus and in the community in the hope for equality.

Young Muslims like me, who want to get involved in our communities and be politically active, are all too often shown that the minute we edge our toes out of private spheres, people will begin to riffle through everything we have ever said, done or thought just to discredit us. It’s a scary place to be when you’re at the beginning of your career.

Full article - http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...dent-politics-this-is-the-truth-a7821591.html