After attending a Palestine rally in the city, Palestinian Australian Shamikh Badra and his brother Majed were returning home by train on August 31.
That same day, an anti-immigrant “March for Australia” rally was organised in the city.
“We were wearing our keffiyehs [Palestinian scarves],” Badra told Green Left. “We were wearing our identity with pride but, suddenly, that made us targets.”
“We were told to leave this country. We were pushed, threatened, attacked. The hate from a racist rally had followed us into a train carriage.”
With ample video footage of the attack, recorded by the other passengers and the Badra brothers, the police were able to identify and charge the attackers. One of them admitted what he did and received a 12-month conditional release order, with no criminal conviction recorded.
“When it came time to hold our attackers to account, the racism disappeared,” said Badra. “We were expecting the police to charge the attackers with hate crime but unfortunately the police ignored the racist insults … and charged [one of our attackers] with common assault.
“This is not fair. They attacked us because my brother and I were wearing keffiyehs. They attacked us just because we are Palestinian, because of our identity … but despite the video [of the attack], the police ignored all the evidence that it was racist and said it was a common assault.”
Members of Badra’s family in Gaza have died in the more than two-year long genocide and all have been displaced.
“It was as if our pain didn’t matter, as if our identity was irrelevant,” Badra told a Palestinian solidarity rally on December 7.
“That hurt more than the attack itself. Because when the system erases racism, it tells the attackers: ‘You can do it again’.
“This is not just my story: This is the story of every Palestinian child wearing a keffiyeh; every Muslim woman wearing a hijab; every person whose identity makes them visible. If the system ignores racism, then no one is safe.”
A report in March by Charles Sturt University associate professor Dr Derya Iner found a 70% rise in Islamophobic attacks between 2014 and 2021 — mostly carried out by men against women in public places.
It also found that their reporting, by members of the public witnessing these attacks, had halved.
Badra told GL it was important for this gross double standard to be challenged, especially as racist attacks against people identified as being from Muslim or Arab communities are rising sharply.
He said that he and his brother, who had recently produced the film Gaza Nippers: Hope Amid Devastation, were determined to wage a campaign to make sure that the law against hate crimes was applied equally for all sections of the community.