OPINION: Paul Sheehan’s mess at Fairfax is just another reflection on the growing normalisation of Islamophobia, writes Mostafa Rachwani from the Lebanese Muslim Association. Upon reading Paul Sheehan’s article, about the extraordinary story of “Louise”, I have to admit, my first thought was one of resigned exasperation. Not because his column was full of enormousMore
Source: Paul Sheehan: Another Empty Voice In A Cacophony Of Hatred – New Matilda
When irrational emotions are driven by fear and ignorance, somebody gets hurts.
Source: Danny Levi Bryce-Maurice incident and EJ Whitten crash: fear and loathing in Melbourne
Accusations, beatings, even death threats—that’s life for Muslim kids in America.
Source: The Chilling Rise of Islamophobia in Our Schools | Mother Jones
Show your support for freedom of speech and Professor Hawkins by signing a petition to reinstate her.
Source: College Fires Christian Professor For Saying Christians And Muslims Worship Same God (VIDEO) «
A Muslim schoolgirl who was labeled a terrorist after the Paris attacks has spoken out against Islamophobia in a school assembly. Footage of the speech has been viewed thousands of times online.
Source: Muslim schoolgirl explaining Islamophobia after Paris attacks goes viral (VIDEO) — RT UK
By Jamie Roberton: ITV News
Countries rejecting Syrian refugees because they are Muslims are supporting armed groups, UN refugee chief says.
Source: Blocking Muslim refugees fuels ‘terrorism’: UN official – Al Jazeera English
The Member for Gellibrand Tim Watts was at it again, turning the words of security officials against a renegade group of Coalition MPs.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has said Islam must change and called for a “hearts and minds campaign against the versions of Islam that make excuses for terrorists.”
Source: Tony Abbott: Societies can’t ‘remain in denial about the massive problem within Islam’
Islamic groups felt they needed to speak out after the attack, even though doing so perpetuates the “false linkage between Islam and these acts of violence.”
Source: Muslims Shouldn’t Have To Condemn San Bernardino Shooting
Co-ordinated Reclaim Australia rallies in capital cities around Australia have met with counter rallies from anti-racism demonstrators, resulting in violent confrontations and arrests.At Melton Ci
Something that needs to be addressed.
A mosque in the New South Wales city of Newcastle had a handwritten message of hate taped to its entrance.
As journalists, it is our duty to dispel myths and counter misinformation — not perpetuate them.
Source: Islamophobic Media Coverage Is Out Of Control. It Needs To Stop.
If wanting to keep the radical Islamists out of our nation makes me an extremist — then so be it.
Source: We’re not Islamophobic, Mr. Obama, we just don’t want to get blown up | Fox News
A man has allegedly tried to rip the hijab off a young Muslim woman after tripping and twice punching her in front of the Melbourne State Library.
Source: Muslim woman ‘viciously attacked’ outside State Library of Victoria in Melbourne
Mosques around Australia will host an ‘open day’ this weekend, in an effort to demystify and destigmatise the meeting places for Muslims.
Muslims in Sydney are more likely to be targeted by negative public sentiment than in any other Australian city, with Melbourne most positively disposed towards Islam.
Source: Sydney more hostile to Muslims, but Australia embraces multiculturalism: survey
An anti-islamic political party will be launched in Perth on October 20 after controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been granted a visa to Australia.
Source: Controversial dutch politician Geert Wilders will launch political party in Perth
Fairfax media is at it again, bashing Islam and Muslims in the name of selling papers.
Source: Muslim Bashing: The Facts That Didn’t Get In The Way Of An Appalling Story – New Matilda
Many of the protesters who demonstrated against a proposal to build a mosque in Bendigo were not locals and had travelled interstate to protest.
As shown recently, Australia does actually have a few ‘worries, mate’ — such as our fear of the
Source: Racism? Bigotry? Discrimination? No worries, mate, she’ll be right!
The discourse over Muslims today resembles the manner in which Jews were vilified around a century ago.
Source: The belief system of the Islamophobes – Al Jazeera English
A Muslim woman left severely shaken by a physical and verbal assault on a packed Sydney train on Monday night believes she was targeted because of her religion.
Hina, who wanted to be identified only by her first name, was on a train home from the city’s Town Hall station to Parramatta when she said she was assaulted.
She said she boarded the train about 5:30pm, but found there were no seats available so stood near the stairs, and noticed “a guy come in”.
“He was tall. He looked angry,” she said.
He moved even closer to me and hit me three or four times with his shoulder, his bag. He kicked me with his foot. Then I realised he [was] intentionally attacking me so then I shouted.
Hina
The 30-year-old said the man appeared to want to use the stairs before hitting her with his shoulder.
“I thought maybe it’s a mistake so I just stepped back,” she said.
“Then he moved even closer to me and hit me three or four times with his shoulder, his bag. He kicked me with his foot. Then I realised he [was] intentionally attacking me so then I shouted.
“He said excuse me, then he pushed me, then he said ‘get off’, then f-words,” she said.
“He said ‘you kind of people, you block our way’. I was in deep shock.”
She said she became even more frightened when no-one tried to defend her, except for a woman who yelled at the man after the assault.
“It was a fully crowded train but nobody said anything. People were just listening. I know they were scared,” Hina said.
She tried to get off at Redfern to notify the station manager but the man got off at the same station.
“He passed by me and abused me verbally and went away,” she said.
Hina reported the assault to Parramatta police, who are now investigating.
Police said the man was of Caucasian appearance, about 175cm tall, aged in his mid-30s, with a medium build, bald head and facial stubble, and wearing jeans and black and white shoes.
Hina wears Islamic head covering and said she felt the man targeted her because of her faith.
“The moment he entered he was looking angry at me,” she said.
“I was the only one on that train that was wearing the hijab [Muslim headscarf]. It was a forceful attempt to attack me.”
She said she did not go to work today because she feared travelling on a train.
“I didn’t have the courage to go to the station,” she said.
“I’m scared because I’m a single woman living alone. I can’t step out of my home. This one incident has shaken my confidence.”
She said she wants more women, Muslim and non-Muslim, to be vigilant when travelling alone.
Hina contacted the Islamophobia Register Australia, an online service that records incidents of anti-Muslim abuse.
Lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh, who founded the register, said Hina was clearly traumatised by the incident.
Ms Veiszadeh said Muslim women who wear the hjiab are more vulnerable to attacks.
Unfortunately, it seems to be women who are visibly Muslim, in this case who wear the hijab, who seem to be targeted more.
Lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh
“They do happen to be the flag-bearers of their religion,” she said.
“Unfortunately, it seems to be women who are visibly Muslim, in this case who wear the hijab, who seem to be targeted more.”
She said the register has received dozens of reports of attacks against Muslim women and the frequency of incidents increases when there is community tension.
“It’s becoming more common,” she said.
“We are hearing anecdotal reports and also reports directly from victims.
“When Muslims are thrown in the media spotlight, whatever the case might be, it just so happens that the next few days or that day, we do hears of incidents where Muslim women or visible Muslims are being verbally or physically attacked.
“It leaves them with anxiety that is quite crippling. The fact that women are feeling these things in Australia is deeply disturbing.”
She said community awareness and strong action from the police against perpetrators were key.
“It’s really important that we protect each other,” she said.
Hatem Bazian is a lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
“Vaccinate” against Sharia; demands to “publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws”; and Islam “is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out” are a few recent statements by US political leaders pointing to the level of toxicity and bigotry directed at Muslims in the country.
As American Muslims mourn the loss of Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, important questions arise as to the link between the vitriolic rhetoric directed at Muslims in western civil society and violence targeting members of this religious and powerless minority group.
How to understand what is taking place and should we be more alarmed about the violent turn of events or is this only an isolated incident by a mentally unstable person and no further conclusions should be deduced from it?
The isolated incident, as the media and political leaders emphasise, has to be dispensed with immediately as the trail of hate motivated attacks is evident in Wade Michael Page mass murder at the Sikh Gurdwara (house of worship) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012, and the Anders Breivik’s Norway slaughter in July 2011.
Bigoted atmosphere
More alarming on the individual level is the readiness of a 31-year-old New York woman on December 27, 2012 to push Sunando Sen, a 47-year-old immigrant from India, in the path of an incoming train. The woman admitted to purposely pushing Sen off of the subway platform stating: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims.”
Make no mistake about it. Wade Michael Page, Anders Breivik, Craig Stephen Hicks and Erika Menendez are all responsible for the actual murders; however the political leadership and media talking heads provided the racist and bigoted atmosphere by daily engaging in problematising Islam and Muslims.
Yes, we can speak of crimes committed by terrorists in the name of Islam around the world; however, the media and western political elites have constructed a propaganda machine that epistemologically “otherises” Muslims while relegating them to sub-humanness status and as savages at the gates of civilisation.
The status and position of Muslims within American and European civil society is deteriorating rapidly and immediate remedies are needed to counter it.
Without doubt, events involving Muslims in various parts of the world have contributed to the collapse of the Muslim status but there is much to be said about the role of right-wing politicians whose careers depend upon racist and “otherising” xenophobic rhetoric.
The list of political parties and figures that employ Islamophobia to gain votes include Austria’s National Freedom Front, France’s Le Pen-National Front, Netherlands’ People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, Germany’s National Democratic Party, Norway’s Progress Party, Britain’s Independent Party (UKIP), Switzerland’s People’s Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn Party, Poland’s Congress of the New Right Party and the US’ Tea Party.
The politically sanctioned bigotry towards Muslims living in the aforementioned countries stems from leaders and established parties who have made strategic calculations as to the documented success of this messaging and the ability to win votes at the ballot box. Events involving Muslims, such as terrorist attacks at home and abroad, are packaged into racist campaign advertisements.
Rising fascist state
The rhetoric has led to the externalisation of Muslims, while demanding greater levels of state intrusion into their religious and private space, supposedly to secure the motherland from their collective harm. Consequently, a comparison must be made as to the early formative period of Nazi Germany campaign against the Jews and whether the right-wing machinery is rewriting the history today but with Muslim names and faces attached to it.
In Nazi Germany, starting immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933, Dr Joseph Goebbels was appointed minister of propaganda and national enlightenment in charge of constructing the “civilised” image for the rising fascist state.
Months after coming to power, the Nazi Party was emboldened to organise public burning of books that did not correspond to Hitler’s racist and distorted Aryan ideology. Goebbels set up an infrastructure that on the one hand monitored anything that strayed from the prescribed nationalist narrative while on the other hand worked to produce “literature, music, films, radio programmes and newspaper” articles that promoted the Nazi ideology.
These tactics had devastating consequences by 1938. A straight line can be drawn linking nationally produced racist political propaganda and the death and destruction visited upon the Jews and countless others in the Holocaust.
| Germany’s Nazi history and what it unleashed on the world with its well-oiled propaganda machine is well documented but unfortunately the lessons … are downplayed, forgotten or completely obfuscated. |
Germany’s Nazi history and what it unleashed on the world with its well-oiled propaganda machine is well documented but unfortunately the lessons from the racist and xenophobic rhetoric directed at minorities are downplayed, forgotten or completely obfuscated.
There are clear parallels to the experience of Muslims living in western countries today and Nazi Germany.
Islamophobic rhetoric
Let’s be clear that we are not at a “1938 moment” of Hitler’s Nazi Germany but the basis of comparison today is one of approach and structure to the rhetoric deployed against Muslim citizens of western countries. Certainly, Islamophobic rhetoric has become normal, pervasive and even “dignified” in public discourse.
One can hardly pick a newspaper without reading negative stories involving Muslims. Likewise, radio and TV programming are filled to the brim with Islamophobic content masquerading as “real news” or “informed opinions” with an avalanche of bigoted and essentialist content focusing on Muslims.
The link between bigoted speech and violence is well established but forming the right policies and setting up the preventative infrastructure is difficult to come by at a time when the political elites are themselves producing it.
Currently and at the federal level, a hate crime law is on the books but Daryl Johnson, author of a DHS report on right-wing extremism, illustrates the challenge faced by his office: “In the face of enormous media and congressional criticism, DHS made the decision to cancel all of its domestic terrorism-related reporting and training for law enforcement.”
The lack of institutional support because the political leadership itself and the national media are intent on otherising Muslims and minorities, leave the possibility of racist and bigoted attacks a possibility in the future, with communities left to fend for themselves.
Hatem Bazian is co-editor and founder of the Islamophobia Studies Journal and director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, and a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
Attacks that ANDREW BOLT fails to mention in his blogs as BIGOTS & RACISTS AREN’T THE PROBLEM
A Muslim woman is nursing a broken arm after being pushed onto a road in an unprovoked racist attack in Melbourne’s north.
The attack occurred outside a Lalor shopping centre in the middle of a weekday earlier this month.
The 48-year-old woman, who was wearing a hijab and a “long Islamic dress”, had been shopping at Lalor Plaza and was on her way home when she was attacked.
The woman’s daughter, Abrar Ahmed, saw the incident unfold from her car.
“A man approached my mum and said, ‘You Muslims, go back to where you came from’,” Ms Ahmed said.
“As my mum turned around to see who was yelling at her in such a disgusting way, she saw this really big guy.
“He pushed her on the ground, she landed in the middle of the road. When she fell on the ground she broke her arm. She heard her bone crack.”
Ms Ahmed, who organised a recent protest against racism in the CBD, said attacks like the one on her mother were not uncommon.
“A lot of other Muslim women, they have been going through worse assaults, they are being attacked in very different ways and they don’t have the courage to speak out.”
In Carlton, Quman Ali was pushed down the steps of a tram earlier this month, falling into the metal barricade on the street.
She said the incident occurred about 6.30pm on a weeknight on a packed No. 1 tram travelling to East Coburg.
As she tried to exit the tram, a man whom she was passing pushed her down the stairs.
“He pushed me out of the tram. When I looked up he was mumbling something. I was so shocked, I could not even say anything.”
Ms Ali hit the metal tram barrier, injuring her knee. She believes the attack was racially motivated because she was wearing a hijab.
Neither woman reported the attacks to the police.
Federal member for Melbourne Adam Bandt said the current political climate is contributing to an increase of attacks on Muslim women.
“It can divide our community and some people end up on the receiving end of abuse. In this case, Muslim Australians – and especially women – tell me they are being harassed and assaulted,” he said.
Brunswick police Acting Senior Sergeant Ben Davies said police take all reports of racist attacks seriously.
“I think sometimes people have a fear of reporting or think there is no point in reporting, so we are engaging with the community to encourage them.”
Three mosques were vandalised on the weekend, attacks that are “disappointing”, says a WA Imam.
Abusive graffiti was painted on walls at two sites, while bottles of beer were left smashed in the car park at a third venue sometime on Sunday.
Imam Burhaan Mehtar said the graffiti “handwriting” at the two mosques was very similar and the attacks had been reported to police.
He said while life carried on, there was always a fear there would be other attacks.
Imam Mehtar said WA Muslims were disappointed by the vandalism and it was not in the spirit of being Australian.
“Being Australian, our values are to respect and tolerate everyone and all religions,” he said.
“WA Muslims feel it is unfair that we are being terrorised in a fair country for wrong we haven’t done.”
He said Imams had made it clear that Islamic State was not representative of Islam.
A police spokeswoman said there has been no recent reported increase in racial vilification or racial-based assaults reported to police in the wake of vandalism at three WA mosques.
Police said they were investigating the vandalism, which happened at overnight Saturday, after receiving complaints.
“Western Australia is a tolerant and inclusive state, and people should respect the diversity in our community,” the police spokeswoman said.
Asme Sahimi was outside her work in the Sydney CBD when a man grabbed her hijab from behind, put his legs between hers and flipped her on to the ground.
As he did so, he repeatedly screamed: “You crazy terrorist.”
The man’s weight rendered her powerless, she said.
Asme Sahimi was attacked outside her place of work.
But what was even more hurtful was that no one asked how she was.
“They kind of watched and went about their day,” she said.
At the time, Ms Sahimi, 33, was a project co-ordinator for the NSW government. The attack happened in full view of her workplace.
“Not even the people who I bought coffee from every day said anything,” she said.
“They were right in front of me and I was visibly distraught. He was spitting on me.”
Ms Sahimi’s traumatic experience occurred last year, but a recent spate of attacks on Muslims, and vision of a racist attack on a Brisbane train guard on Sunday, have prompted questions about when to step in if you see someone being physically or verbally abused.
In the past three weeks at least 30 Muslims have been attacked.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/you-could-have-helped-australia-20141016-1140i3.html#ixzz3GMKmiZAl
Many incidents of violence and harassment directed at Australian Muslims have been reported recently. These are visible confirmation of fears expressed by their community, that support for the government’s…
Many incidents of violence and harassment directed at Australian Muslims have been reported recently. These are visible confirmation of fears expressed by their community, that support for the government’s new security laws and military action in Iraq would be rallied with “racist caricatures of Muslims as backwards, prone to violence and inherently problematic”.
Policing and intelligence operations have focused exclusively on members of the Muslim community. This has contributed to a public backlash against Muslims and supposed Muslims. The immediacy and scale of this outbreak of Islamophobia is alarming.
Australia has emerged as a fertile environment for Islamophobia. Stereotypical representations of Muslims in the early years of the “War on Terror” – which linked terrorism, violence and Islam – gained wide currency by the mid-2000s.
Sections of the news media, politicians and social media have re-activated these stereotypes. Muslim Australians are made to feel they are targets – for everything from the everyday racism encountered in schools and on the streets, to draconian counter-terrorism legislation that restricts civil liberties, to war and the preparations for war.
Social psychological research has shown that when public figures and media endorse negative stereotypes this legitimises prejudicial attitudes. This can influence the translation of such attitudes into discriminatory actions, as we have seen in the recent spate of attacks.
Australia now has several openly Islamophobic far-right social movements and political parties. Until recently these were generally small and operated largely in isolation. However, such groups have begun to collaborate on campaigns.
These groups also appear to be attracting more support from the wider community. The re-emergence of anti-Muslim rhetoric in public discourse has provided legitimisation for their views.
The government also appears to be a political beneficiary of the resurgence in Islamophobia. As national security concerns top the news agenda, pressures on the government on a range of other fronts, particularly the deeply unpopular May budget, have faded into the background.
The increased “terror threat” was followed by rises in the approval rating of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Coalition voting intentions.
The amplification of threats to national security has worked for struggling conservative governments before. In 2001, the Howard government was polling poorly, yet managed to snatch victory later that year. The Coalition election campaign played on racial anxieties and national security fears following the “children overboard” affair and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
In 2010, with the Coalition again languishing in the polls, then opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison sought to replicate this strategy. He urged the shadow cabinet to “capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration” and Muslims’ “inability to integrate”.
The Prime Minister has not been nearly as forthright in condemning acts of Islamophobia as he has been in denouncing Islamic extremists. He even weighed into the debate to dismiss Muslim community concerns. And Abbott failed to condemn the inflammatory push from within his party for a “burqa ban”.
This is in contrast to the firm and admirable stance taken by Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett. He emphasised that “Australia as a country has a history of respecting different cultures and faiths”. The reported taunting and terrorising of Muslim women and children in Perth was “unacceptable”.
The media is not blameless either, as some journalists have acknowledged. Australian Muslims have consistently identified the media as a central social institution that contributes to their marginalisation and exclusion.
Media reporting has frequently perpetuated stereotypes. It has also failed to reflect the diversity of origins, outlooks and aspirations of Muslim Australians. Journalism of this sort negatively affects other Australians’ perceptions of Islam and the Muslim community.
My research has shown that articles with lower levels of Islamophobia feature the voices of “ordinary” Muslim men and women. They humanise them. Such articles contextualise conflicts and avoid simplistic frameworks such as “good versus evil” or “War on Terror”.
The media can do more to highlight positive efforts by individuals and groups to resist and respond to oppression and conflict. More balanced perspectives can reduce the reinforcing and perpetuation of Islamophobia.
The “newsworthiness” of stories related to Islam and conflict, and the concentration of negative reporting patterns, suggest that adoption of conflict reporting standards could be another key way to curb Islamophobia.
The mass media and our politicians will be central to either exacerbating or stemming Islamophobia. Gestures of support and solidarity from the non-Muslim community, and standing up to racism, are also important.
Combating Islamophobia is vital to the wellbeing of the Muslim community, to wider community cohesion and to limiting recruitment for groups such as Islamic State (ISIS)/Da’ish. To curb Islamophobia, we must contest the political spectacle that gives rise to discriminatory and violent treatment against Muslims by the state and some non-Muslim Australians.
Until recently, surfer-eating sharks, kangaroos disrupting air traffic and Naomi Watts have been the main topics of bulletins about Australia.
But in recent months Australia has been in the news for its highly visible sexism, racism and climate denial.
The world has reading in recent days damaging reports of a Muslim woman assaulted on a Melbourne train a week ago. Unfortunately for the Abbott regime this is being linked to government actions.
New York-based International Business Times headed its item:
‘Alleged Muslim Woman Attacked on Train Raises Questions of Anti-Muslim Views in Australia’
The story quotes Scanlon Foundation survey findings that “19 percent of Australians struggle with some form of racial or religious discrimination”. It claims “racism is at its highest level since Scanlon Foundation began the survey in 2007”
The cumulative effect of these news events and other conspicuous recent actions of the Abbott Government has been to shift the perception of Australia from a progressive, confident, independent nation keen to shed its colonial baggage – including white, Anglo, male supremacy – to a more insular, fearful place in need of a powerful ally.
The prestigious New York Times last Wednesday ran an extended piece about Abbott’s puzzling enthusiasm for engagement in the Middle East:
“Though he has been in office only a year and has had meager experience in foreign affairs, Mr. Abbott moved quickly to send a squadron of fighter jets and 600 military personnel to the Middle East to be ready to join the fight against the militants in Iraq and Syria, even before President Obama formally rallied American allies.”
The Times questions the benefits of this for Australia, and quotes former defense official professor Hugh White, now at the ANU:
“Abbott thinks of brave little Australia standing up with the United States for what is right. The only things that keep the world swinging on its axis, in his mind, are the men and women — mostly men — who speak English as a first language and who are willing to go out there and do the hard yards.”
From media reports abroad, this shift is not perceived positively. Especially as it appears to impact vulnerable Muslim women in Australia.
IS flags have also been seen at street rallies in Indian-administered Kashmir. The trend has been of growing concern to global powers struggling to keep up with the fast-changing nature of the international Islamist insurgency.
The Pakistani Taliban have been beset by bitter internal rivalries over the past year, with the influential Mehsud tribal faction of the group refusing to accept the authority of Mullah Fazlullah, who came to power in late 2013.
IS, in an effort to extend its global reach, could exploit these rivalries to its advantage, wading into a region ripe with fierce anti-Western ideology and full of young unemployed men ready to take up guns and fight for Islam.
Tony Abbott has not asked for burqa ban to be reversed, Speaker’s office says PM says he has asked Speaker to ‘rethink’ ban on facial coverings, such as the niqab, in parliament’s public galleries, but Speaker’s office denies such a request has been madeThe prime minister and the Speaker’s office appear to be at odds over the burqa ban, after Tony Abbott said he had asked the Speaker to “rethink the decision” while the Speaker’s office suggested that they had received no request to overturn the ban on facial coverings.
“No request has been received by the PM or his office,” a spokesman for the Speaker said at midday.
“I asked the Speaker to rethink the decision,” Abbott said. “My understanding was it was an interim decision, that it would be looked at again the light of security advice that will come in coming days and I am sure the matter will be fully resolved before the parliament comes back in a fortnight.”
Parliament’s presiding officers – Speaker Bronwyn Bishop of the House of Representatives and president of the Senate, Stephen Parry – made an interim ruling on Thursday that people wearing facial coverings, such as the niqab, could watch proceedings only from glass-enclosed public galleries.
It drew widespread condemnation from human rights commissioners, politicians across the divide and the Muslim community.
Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has condemned the interim ban, warning that “demonising and alienating” the Muslim community was “doing the terrorist’s work”.
Turnbull said in his 10 years in parliament, he had seen one woman wearing a full facial covering in the public gallery.
“The response I have got from that has been pretty terrifying, being linked to terrorism just because I have chosen to wear a piece of fabric on my head.”
“We’re all people, we’re all human and it doesn’t matter what we wear, what colour our skin is, what we believe in – we’re all human and we’re all equal. We should be able to live our lives with our differences.”
“I would love to see some of our politicians who perhaps are a little bit obsessed with discussing Muslim women’s dress, for them to perhaps don a hijab and get behind this campaign.”
Two Muslim men who have experienced the rising tension in the community since the terrorism threat level was raised said it is affecting everyone, from their wives and children to the elderly.
Steve and Adam from south-west Sydney said they “can feel the tension in the air when you take your kids to the park” and there is also a visibly increased presence of the authorities which was making people feel uneasy.
In the past week, there have been a string of incidents involving Muslim women being verbally abused in the street, cars being vandalised and mosques and religious buildings sprayed with graffiti. Muslim community members have said they feel they are the ones being terrorised.
Thousands of people have joined efforts to promote social harmony, including a social media campaign called Women in Solidarity with Hijabis (WISH).
The campaign, which was inspired by a non-Muslim woman named Ruth who put on a hijab and posted her photo online, took off last week and within three days the Facebook page had more than 7000 likes.
Muslim women commenting on the page were grateful for the gesture saying it was appreciated especially given that women wearing the hijab are bearing the brunt of public anti-Muslim sentiment.
In other initiatives a new Facebook page called Australian Non Muslims supporting Muslims, which began last week, already has almost 6000 members. The organisers said the “Islamophobia and discrimination encountered every day by Muslims living in Australia is unacceptable”.
Sally Balkan, a Buddhist, is co-ordinating a solidarity march to take place in each state early next month where people from different faiths and backgrounds can march in support of the Muslim community.
“We refuse to hate each other,” she told Fairfax Media.
Community Relations Commission chief executive Hakan Harman said people “need to stand by each other, speak out against hate and violence and report any incidents of harassment, intimidation or vilification”.
Mr Harman said the actions of a few dangerous individuals should not prevent people from treating each other with respect and humanity.
His comments come as 250 mosques around the country delivered a united message through their Imams.
Organised by the Australian National Imams Council, the message to the congregations was that the “protection of human life is one of the five basic rights in Islam and as a Muslim we have a duty to protect humanity”.
ANIC general manager Samir Bennegadi said the sermons denounced the so-called fatwa from overseas targeting Australia, saying it has no religious authority and reiterating that the horrors conducted overseas in the name of religion are crimes against humanity and sins against God.
“ISIL will claim that our involvement in this international effort is the reason they are targeting us, but these people do not attack us for what we do, but for who we are and how we live.”
Despite this narrative’s denial of the truth, the harsh reality is Australia has caused the threat to itself by striding clumsily with guns blazing and meddling in Middle Eastern affairs — something that began with military action in Afghanistan in 2001.
Last Monday, in a call for action against it enemies, ISIS urged its members to kill civilians and soldiers of the nations aligned against it, naming Australia.
They did this not because Australia is a liberal democratic country, but rather because Australia has allowed itself to become embroiled in Middle East politics and line up as an ally and soldier on the battlefield with the United States.
Why then would the PM come out and claim differently?
The prime minister is playing a political game, attempting to frame the threat to Australia in a way that absolves Australia as the cause of the threats itself.
Government needed to own the intervention and breakage it made, respectively, in 2001 and 2003 to show good faith with voters and to reduce the vicious Islamophobia we are now, unfortunately, seeing spread like wildfire through the community.
Our values define us not our race or religion
When Muslims are threatened and mosques defaced NSW Commissioner sees it as bigotry that requires no extra effort by police. When a 14-year-old Muslim boy yells abuse and waves a black flag it’s a hate crime. A concerted effort is made and arrests follow.
Date
September 30, 2014 – 12:00AM
Tim Soutphommasane
Political philosopher and regular columnist
View more articles from Tim Soutphommasane
We must be vigilant on more than one front. We must be united in countering terror. We must not allow fear and suspicion to triumph.Nothing would please ISIL extremists more than to see Muslim Australians being alienated or ostracised. Were this to happen, ISIL’s job becomes easier – it would help them recruit disaffected Muslims to their heinous cause.
At the same time, there are xenophobic factions that see an opportunity to spread their messages of hate. Muslim communities have reported an increase in hate attacks. There has been abuse of Muslims on streets and graffiti on mosques. There have been violent threats: last week a man armed with a knife entered an Islamic college in south-west Sydney.Anti-Muslim bigotry is now contaminating community harmony at large. For example, Sikh Australians say they are becoming targets of racial abuse because people are linking turbans to terrorism.
Bigotry has no place in our society. There is no right to be a bigot. Every person in Australia should be free to live without being subjected to harassment or humiliation. As a liberal democracy we uphold the freedom to practise your religion.
Indeed, while a small number subscribe to their abhorrent ideology, the overwhelming majority of Muslim Australians do not.Why would they support a group whose actions are certain to make their life more difficult?
Earlier this month in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba I attended a community barbecue organised by Lebanese community leader Dr Jamal Rifi. Thousands from the community attended under the banner of “Muslims Love Australia”. They are evidently patriotic.The patriotism I saw in Lakemba was a particular kind. It’s the patriotism of migrants, a love of country that comes not from ancestry but from citizenship.
Such patriotism is typically a pride that lies within. But it’s the right kind of pride for a multicultural Australia – a modern Australia that has been built on immigration. We are a country that is today defined by our values, and not by race or religion.
Everyone should feel relaxed and comfortable in their own skin. Everyone should enjoy the right to express their heritage or practise their faith. Where religion or culture clashes with any of these things, the demands of citizenship must prevail. Our civic identity is paramount.
“I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”
Most of all, we must remember that national security can never be divorced from cultural harmony and social cohesion. And we are always better placed to combat threats when we are united rather than divided.
Tim Soutphommasane is Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner
As fact is sorted from fiction about recent incidents involving members of Australia’s Muslim communities. The media is not making any effort to minimise the hysteria that is developing. To constantly speculate about aspects that have no foundation will cause great harm.
Publishing the wrong photo of the man who attacked two police officers in Melbourne’s South-East by the Fairfax media this week was disgraceful. The ramifications of such an error could have been enormous if any subsequent harm came to the innocent man concerned.
Prior to the 1990s, there was no issue in our country with Muslims. There may well have been an underlying, simmering degree of discontent in certain quarters.
There are people among us who continually harbour a suspicion that those who are different and culturally unusual, are somehow a threat to our way of life. Ignorance breeds contempt. Many in the community are already spooked enough.
A man paying too much attention to his iPad causes Sydney Airport’s Terminal 3 to go into lockdown. A Virgin Airlines low level fly over at the MCG on Saturday, caused an AFP officer to reach for his gun.
What has made our country so tolerant and so successful at peaceful integration in the past has much to do with our egalitarianism, the absence of a class structure and our layback approach. Up until 1996, immigration was always managed on a bipartisan policy agreement.
It enabled a post-Vietnam War exodus of refugees to seek a safe haven here with not so much as a whimper of opposition. They came in their thousands and in a matter of a few years had established themselves as hard working, diligent members of society. It was just what we needed.Our already broad cosmopolitan make-up was richer for the experience.
Prior to the 1996 election Pauline Hanson tapped a racial intensity of feeling in the electorate and won her seat even after the Liberal party disowned her.
When her One Nation Party had won over a large chunk of Liberal voters in a Queensland State election, that was the beginning of the end of immigration bipartisanship in Australian politics.
Just 5 years later, John Howard seized an opportunity to win an election with the Tampa incident by appealing to the same racially minded mentality. From that point on, to our national shame, the issue of immigration and management of refugees has become a game of political football.
But it wasn’t Asians that bore the brunt of this new degenerate attitude. Greatly assisted by our engagement in a falsely contrived war in Iraq, the fear of Muslims became a dark, festering disease covertly encouraged by certain sections of the media. Its nakedly, aggressive manner is a blight on a once welcoming nation and is covertly urged on by vested political interests.
In 2011, Scott Morrison, as Opposition Immigration spokesman, “urged the shadow cabinet to capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and the “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate.”
Democracy does not serve us well when elected representatives act in a manner that creates division. It is counterproductive. It may suit the interests of some but in the long term, everyone pays.
Australia is one of the safest countries in the world. Until last week we didn’t particularly fear “terrorism” or war on home soil, because these horrible events are far removed from our daily reality, encased in 30-second soundbites we ignore over our dinners.
We’re more likely to fear bushfires and the holiday road death tolls along with our world-beating killer spiders, snakes, sharks and occasionally, crocodiles.
But we don’t fear these things regularly. We’re unlikely to come into contact with them on a daily basis. We do, however, come into contact with people. And if you live in western and north-western Sydney, where the majority of the “anti-terror” raids occurred last week, you are likely to run into *shock horror* a Muslim.
Last week, Australia woke to the front pages and shrill cries of breakfast radio and TV anchors acting as a government mouthpiece, trying to convince Australians that the war against the Islamic State, the militant Sunni group which has taken over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, had arrived on our shores.
And not just on our shores, like the “hordes of boat people” who apparently threaten the freedoms we enjoy, but also flourishing in our suburbs – near hospitals and schools and shopping centres.
Every day places so far from the dusty battle fields in the Middle East.
For most Australians, the information on IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL has been limited, filtered through sexed-up stories of “Jihadi war brides”, shocking images of beheadings and crucifixions and the sensationalist executions of three westerners – two journalists and an aid worker – filmed with all the suspense of a Hollywood drama.
The reality that nearly 60 Australians are estimated to have left the country to fight with IS forces has been abused constantly by the Abbott government to try and draw Australians into believing IS is a threat to the freedoms Australia has built off Aboriginal suffering and poverty for the past 200 years.
These events are undoubtedly shocking, but if your main source of information is the mainstream media, you’ve been sorely let down. There has been very little analysis on whether these threats are valid, and certainly no explanation of how it justifies an estimated $500 million a year “humanitarian” military intervention into a foreign country, and far-reaching, invasive laws which target one section of the Australian community.
Today, renowned American journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the Australian political class’ “unhinged, fear mongering orgy over terrorism”.
On the Abbott government’s concerning anti-terror laws he wrote:
“The Australian government wasted no time at all exploiting this event to demand ‘broad new security powers to combat what it says is a rising threat from militant Islamists.”
Even by the warped standards of the west’s 9/11 era liberty abridgments, these powers are extreme, including making it ‘a crime for an Australian citizen to travel to any area overseas once the government has declared it off limits’.
“Already pending in that country is a proposal by the Attorney General to make it a criminal offense ‘punishable by five years in jail for ‘any person who disclosed information relating to ‘special intelligence operations’; the bill is clearly intended to outright criminalise WikiLeaks-and Snowden-type reporting and the government thus expressly refuses to exempt journalists.”
Greenwald criticises Abbott’s recent speech to Parliament as a “shameless” exploitation of terrorism fears to “seize greater power”.
“Abbott assumed the grave demeanor and resolute tone that politicians in these situations don to convince others that they’re the modern incarnation of Winston Churchill: purposeful, unyielding, and courageously ready for the fight. He depicted his fight as one of Pure Good v. Pure Evil, and vehemently denied that his nation’s 10-year support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq plays any role whatsoever in animosity toward his country in that region (perish the thought! – ‘It’s our acceptance that people can live and worship in the way they choose that bothers them, not our foreign policy’). And, most impressively, he just came right out and candidly acknowledged his real purpose: to exploit the emotions surrounding the terrorist arrests to erode liberty and increase state power, telling citizens that they will die if they do not meekly acquiesce.”
Sadly, just as all over the world, the greatest victims of “terrorism” have been Muslims themselves. How you define “terrorism” is up to you, but I would suggest the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians killed by western forces would count as victims as well, just as the innocent children of Gaza who are still recovering from a murderous assault by Israel earlier this year.
And the people who are most likely affected by Abbott’s response to this purported IS threat are Muslim Australians, who represent diverse ethnic groups across the country and yet are being targeted as one homogenous mass.
I attended the Lakemba rally held on the day of the shocking raids last week. The anger was clear, but the mood was solemn. A 12-year-old boy whose home was the subject of one of the raids spoke of his experience and was so obviously traumatised it raised the question of how the Abbott government can expect to placate a community who are so used to being targeted and ostracised by mainstream society, and whose hurt only continues to compound.
Since the raids, a torrent of hate has been unleashed towards Muslims across the country. Last week, a Muslim woman in Auburn awoke to find her car spray-painted with anti-Muslim slogans.
A rally on the Sunshine Coast against a planned mosque descended into outright hate with 500 people turning up.
One man, quoted by the Sunshine Coast Daily said, “It’s a disgusting religion. I’m in the Catholic Church over the road and I’d hate to think it was opposite. It’s evil and I’m totally against it.”
The waves of abuse on social media has also highlighted how open bigotry has become, as if the disgust around the Islamic State has given a free pass to intolerance.
Secretary of Salam Care, Rebecca Kay told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this week that she had received a number of reports of intimidation across western Sydney.
“We had some Aussie ladies standing making gun movements with their fingers towards some Muslim ladies,” Ms Kay told the newspaper.
“It’s trivial… but it does affect people…. They seem to be more upset at first rather than scared. But then they do get scared that it might happen again, and they start worrying about whether they need to protect their children.”
While anti-semitic remarks and other racial attacks regularly attract condemnation in Australia – in fact can be used as justification to fire a popular newspaper columnist – the widespread vitriol against Muslims in the wake of these terror raids has been sadly underplayed.
Why is this so?
The biggest victims of this “terror threat” are not the suburban keyboard warriors afraid of random alleged beheadings, but Muslims, who should have the right to practice their religion free from persecution.
Sure, it’s easier to fear them than more immediate threats. It’s easier to take out our fears from a position of power, backed by a media that has been actively promoting Islamophobia. You can’t abuse a shark or crocodile or a holiday road death toll.
But that doesn’t make it ok. And it doesn’t smooth over the fact that this government is trying to exploit a foreign fear of terrorism to pass severely invasive powers over a targeted community just because you don’t feel safe.
olddogthoughts 
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