🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Republic of Ireland players lowered their heads during the National anthem of Israel.
The Irish players are also wearing BLACK armbands in recognition of all lives lost in Gaza. 🇮🇪🙏🏻
In 1993, while Sarajevo was under siege, my mother (rahimahallah) wrote a poem for a city she had never seen. It began: “O Sarajevo, I have wept for you, and in my hands remains nothing but tears.”
Over the last few years, I’ve read her poem in different settings in Bosnia. Someone suggested placing it in a memorial to her and planting a tree as a sadaqa jariya for her. Today, alhamdulillah, that happened in Alija Izetbegovic Park, in front of Istiklal Mosque.
The mosque was built by Indonesia in the 1990s as a gesture of solidarity with the people of Bosnia. It means so much to me that my mother’s words now have a place there. A Palestinian woman who saw her own people’s pain, and the Bosnian cause, as her own.
Standing next to me in the first photo is the only son of Shaheed Safet Hadzic (rahimahullah), a Bosnian hero who was martyred defending this area.
Thank you to Mayor Semir Efendic and everyone who helped make this possible, and to my brothers at Islamic Relief Canada, especially Emir Cacic and Tufail Husain, who followed through on this with so much care. Thank you also to Imam Edin and the community of Istiklal Mosque for welcoming my mother’s words.
If you go to Bosnia, and you should, please visit the park, read her poem, and make dua for her and all of the martyrs of Bosnia that she shed those tears for.
Zohran Mamdani responds to Netanyahu:
“As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians. Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”