BY
SARAH STEPHEN
SYDNEY — “Student protest hijacked by hatred”, Sydney’s tabloid rag
the Daily Telegraph declared, the day after the March 26 10,000-strong
student anti-war protest. The newspaper argued that the rally was “ambushed”
by a “mob of violent troublemakers” who led a “vicious rampage through
the streets of Sydney”. The word “mob”, of course, was used to describe
Muslims and Arab-Australians.
The article quoted assistant police commissioner Dick Adams saying it
was clear a large proportion of protesters — he repeatedly used the term
“Middle-Eastern males” — had come to the rally “for the express purpose
of fighting the police”.
The following day, the Australian ran a story arguing, falsely,
that it was in fact the organisers who had manipulated Muslim students:
“Playing the race card: protest organisers enlisted Muslim students”, it
was headlined. A letter to the paper the following day [from Roy Stall
in Mt Claremont WA], commented on the choice of words in the article’s
headline: “That’s interesting ... I always thought Islam was a religion,
not a race.”
It was evident at the March 26 protest, and the subsequent April 2 student
anti-war protest, that the racism of the NSW police and media has not 
endeared
them to many young people. “Fuck the police” was a popular chant at some
points during the April 2 rally, as young people expressed their anger
and frustration at being penned in to Town Hall Square by close to 1000
police.
I asked Rihab Charida, a Palestinian activist involved in Sawiyan —
Coalition for Palestine, what she thinks this anger reflects. She replied:
“Anger towards police is not just something that happened at a rally, it’s
built up over time. People have to remember that in the areas where most
Arabs live, police harass young people all the time. Groups get humiliated
and harassed all the time where I live, in Bankstown, for no apparent reason.”
Scott Poynting, a sociologist from the Centre for Cultural Research
at the University of Western Sydney, told GLW: “[The police] have
been repeating the allegation that the worst troublemakers are Middle-Eastern
males, yet arguing that it’s not an ethnic descriptor but a geographic
descriptor. If it was a geographic descriptor, then all the young people
being chased by cops on April 2 [following the Books Not Bombs rally] were
residents of Sydney!”
NSW is the only state that officially uses “ethnic descriptors”, a form
of racial profiling, in police work. Describing this practice as “reckless
and damaging”, Poynting said, “The targeting of young people on the basis
of physical appearance for political attention is discriminatory and racist”.
Poynting, who was at the April 2 protest, said he saw “no violence,
no bad behaviour, no confrontations with the cops. The police presence
was intimidating, overwhelming, and deliberately so. They were deployed
in such a way as to be able to trap people in, as they did on March 26
in Philip Street [outside John Howard’s office], something which was potentially
dangerous and provocative.”
In Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime, Poynting and co-authors Jock
Collins, Paul Tabar and Greg Noble, write that the terms “Asian appearance”
and “Middle-Eastern appearance”, “not only lack geographic specificity,
they imply that people from these places all look enough alike to allow
another person to immediately identify a stranger’s background”.
Charida described the use of the term “Middle-Eastern appearance” as
racist. “So many times I’ll read an article where its use is so irrelevant
... for example, a Middle-Eastern boy who didn’t pay his fines and lost
his licence will be a full-page article in the Daily Telegraph.
How is that relevant? The more they use it, the more they reinforce the
negative stereotype of Arabs. If you say something enough, it does have
an impact on people’s views.”
Kuranda Seyit, a Muslim writer who was filming the April 2 protest,
did an impromptu survey of a group of young migrant men, discovering that
only a few identified as Muslim, and while some were from a Middle-Eastern
background, not all were. Yet they were equally involved in chanting Arabic
and religious slogans, burning US flags, condemning the police and the
media — no doubt unified by their experiences of racism and their common
opposition to the war.
The Bankstown area, in Sydney’s south-west, is home to one of the highest
proportions of Arabic Australians — in 1996, one in five of all residents
spoke Arabic.
Sarah Halebi is 13 years’ old, lives in Padstow and goes to Bankstown
Girls’ school. Her family is Muslim, and Sarah wears a veil. Sarah believes
there is racism in Australia. She told GLW how her neighbours turned
against her family after September 11. “Our neighbours used to be friendly
to us. We used to always talk to them, be friendly, but after September
11 and the Iraq war they stopped talking and waving to us, even though
we had nothing to do with it ... When you walk in the street, people give
you dirty looks and make you feel like you’re not wanted.”
With the support of their mother Hannah, Sarah and her younger sister
participated in the Books Not Bombs student anti-war rallies. Hannah told
GLW of her disgust at the war in Iraq, where the invasion forces
kill Iraqi people “like they are spraying flies with Mortein”.
Sarah was outraged by the treatment of some of her friends by the police
at the BNB protests. “In last couple of protests, there were seven girls
who had their scarves ripped off, which is what aggravated the Arab boys”,
she said. “My friend got her scarf ripped off by the police. She was arrested
and they kept her in the station for seven hours, for doing nothing.”
More than 60% of the students at Bankstown Girls’ are from Muslim or
Arabic backgrounds. “As young people we’re one community”, Halebi explained.
“Most students agree there shouldn’t be a war. We go to school and do stuff
together. It doesn’t matter what culture or background you’re from.”
Charida explained that in Sydney’s west, there had been a rise in racism
since the late 1990s, after the hysteria about gang rapes being carried
out by young Lebanese men. It has gotten worse since. “People didn’t all
of a sudden become racist when the war started. It’s almost as if, in the
last few years, the racism that was there below the surface, a hatred of
Muslims and Arabs, has been given a green light.”
“I was sitting on the train a few days ago, reading. There were four
or five Arab boys standing next to the door, talking and laughing loudly,
as boys do. Nobody else on the train seemed bothered by it — they weren’t
disturbing anybody. Two police officers got on the train and started yelling
at them, using a humiliating tone. They were asked to show their tickets,
chastised and told to `Sit down and keep your mouths shut’. It was completely
uncalled for.
“I remember a recent incident in a Bankstown carpark where an Arabic
woman was trying to find a parking spot during the day. It was busy, chaotic.
An Anglo male was in a car behind her, and he was getting impatient. He
beeped and swore at her, then said: `Go back to your fucking country’.
A few people yelled back and told him to go back to England first.”
According to Charida, the media is partly to blame. “The media tries
to portray Arabs as aggressive, belligerent, barbaric; to make violence
and aggression synonymous with Arab.” She pointed out that Palestinians
are often portrayed as aggressive and violent, in order “to justify Israel’s
attacks as self defence, which is untrue.”
“If one Arab does something wrong, for example the guys involved in
the gang rapes, the whole of the Arabic community gets vilified. But if
one Australian does something wrong, the same thing doesn’t happen. Take
the example of Martin Bryant [responsible for the Port Arthur massacre].
Everyone could understand that there was something wrong with him.”
It’s become more common for governments and the media to use “Muslim”
as an ethnic descriptor rather than a religious identifier, to the point
where all Arabs are — incorrectly — seen as Muslims and vice versa.
“The classic case of that is Palestine”, Charida said. “It’s portrayed
as a religious conflict, but it’s about colonialism and occupation, it’s
a struggle for a homeland. The fact that many Palestinians are Muslim is
not important. [The media] do it for a reason — they are trying to portray
Israel as a victim of Muslim fundamentalist aggression, and link it to
terrorism. Putting religion at core of it [exploits] people’s fears of
Muslim fundamentalism.”
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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