Photo credits to NUS Alumni Relations 2019
SMU’s second year social sciences student Victoria Ivory Birrell emerged as the top student winner for the NUS U@Live 2019 essay competition on the set topic “Islamophobia – Do Two Wrongs Make a Right?”. Ms Birrell’s essay was on how global prejudice against Islam and the subjugation of Muslims is manifestly unjust. She argued that Islamophobia nourishes Radical Islam’s anti-West sentiment and ideology, explaining how both Islamophobia and Islamic radicalism share the similarity of thriving on fearmongering by relying on grossly unsubstantiated mistruths about the other. She opined that mass media representation of Islam must avoid augmenting the false terrorist narrative and that greater government-backed inclusion of and education about Muslims will mitigate disinformation and shift public sentiment towards them. Ms Birell concluded that if we are to pave a way for a progressive and cosmopolitan world, we cannot allow irrational fear to subsume us.