Yassmin Abdel-Magied claims she was humiliated in British customs queue

Yassmin Abdel-Magied says she was told to ‘go back where she came from’ in an inflammatory column in a London paper.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied a show about Australia's hijab fashion scene. The show, to be aired on ABC iView on May 1, had its trailer released yesterday showing Abdel-Magied in a variety of Islamic headwear. Twitter

Controversial Australian activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has claimed she has been humiliated at the border and told “to go back where I come from” in an inflammatory full page column in London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

Ms Abdel-Magied wrote about racial bigotry insisting she has been exposed to various prejudices because of her Muslim faith and Sudanese birth.

She wrote about standing in the customs lines in Britain and Europe, saying the experience reduced her from being a real person to someone who apparently poses a threat to a nation’s social fabric. She frets about customs officers seeing Khartoum, Sudan as her place of birth, believing they will decide it’s enough to warrant suspicion and pulling her aside for further interrogation. She doesn’t give any example of this happening.

“Am I being paranoid,’’ she wrote before adding: “But it wouldn’t be the first time I had been turned away at a country’s border, humiliatingly told to ‘go back to where I came from’.’’

In April this year Ms Abdel-Magied was refused entry to the United States and put back on a plane to the UK, where she is now living. US Customs and Border Protection officials said she did not have the correct visa to enter the US. It is unclear if this was the situation where she was insulted as she didn’t elaborate in her column.

Instead in broad sweeping statements, Ms Abdel-Magied complained about having to spend an hour to get through the non-EU queue, alluding it had to do with her skin colour rather than not being a citizen of the European Union.

She also protested about additional steps to obtain a US visa because she had visited Sudan since 2011, and that country, along with Iran, Iraq or Syria was not on the US visa waiver program.

Ms Abdel-Magied didn’t mention that only 38 countries benefit from the visa waiver program and citizens of many other countries, including non-Muslim countries and countries with majority white populations also have to have the extra vetting.

Ms Abdel-Magied began her column saying she had always proudly considered herself Aussie, but then added “with the obvious caveats around our treatment of First Nations people, asylum seekers, performances at the World Cup etc’’.

She added: “Customs lines at airports see me a little differently. There I am less ‘Aussie’, more ‘Muslim’, less ‘larrikin’, more ‘African’ and less ‘life of the party’ and more ‘danger to national security’.’’

Seven hours after the column was published there was a sole comment underneath it on the paper’s website.

Hedgerider wrote: “Well isn’t that tuf. I was bailed up by the police the other week because I was white, old and had a trundle bag. That’s what they were looking for and I looked the part. (It wasn’t me but I got frisked on the pavement). Girl you is not special just cos u is black. It’s called security.”