BY SARAH STEPHEN
Prime Minister John Howard has been at pains to argue that the ASIO raids on Indonesian Muslims in recent weeks were not targeting Indonesians, nor Muslims, resident in Australia. He was even more affronted by the allegation that the raids were racist. The police were merely investigating those that they believed to have links to Jemaah Islamiyah, he argued.
It is no coincidence that the government's actions are inciting a renewed and unprecedented wave of racist hostility towards, and discrimination against, non-white Muslim Australians.
The Howard government is on a war footing. It is working hard to win public support for Australian military involvement in a US-led "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq under the pretext of combatting "terrorism", but the majority of Australians remain opposed.
In the wake of the Bali bombings, the government has sought to weaken that opposition by fostering fears of an "enemy within". Hence, the ASIO raids on Indonesian-Australians and Indonesian citizens living in Australia.
The corporate media's constant linking of the term "terrorist" with Muslims and Arabs reinforces the racist assumption that the threat of terrorist actions only comes from non-whites. The Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVey, wasn't referred to as a terrorist.
For more than a decade, the majority of Australians have been conditioned to fear Arabs and Muslims as the "new enemy". The two groups of people are seen as synonymous by many Australians, despite the fact that many Arabic people are not Muslims, and most Muslims live in Asia, not the Middle East.
"Racism works by stereotyping people", Alex Kouttab, secretary of the Melbourne-based Australian Arabic Council, told Green Left Weekly. "Stereotyping homogenises a community", so despite the fact that the government and the media have repeatedly pinpointed Islamic fundamentalists as the enemy, "Islam is seen as synonymous with Arabs and Arabic culture".
"The Arab and Islamic communities, which have been in Australia for well over a century, are being positioned outside the national identity", Kouttab added.
"Arab and Islamic communities are demonised in the media; they become the thing which Howard uses to define Australia as a nation. Arabic culture is presented as an alien malaise, ruining the Australian way of life."
The raids of Indonesian Muslims' homes were not the first instance of racial and religious profiling by the police and government. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, there were a series of raids on the homes of Muslim Australians which closely match the more recent raids. While 30 or so homes were raided, no charges were ever laid.
The wave of racist abuse and discrimination which has followed the recent raids is also not the first of its kind. Arab Australians have been under siege for a long time, Randa Kattan from Sydney's Australian Arabic Communities Council told GLW.
This abuse began with the mainstream media's treatment of the gang rapes of young women in western Sydney, and the racialisation of the perpetrators. "Then there was September 11, and the Tampa crisis, then the Middle East conflict [between Israel and Palestine], then talk of war on Iraq. The community hasn't had a rest!" Kattan exclaimed. "The media has been drumming up fear in people's minds, constantly portraying us as villains."
Kattan told GLW that attacks on Arab Australians ranged from widespread verbal abuse to the refusal of services to women wearing the hijab. She gave a recent example of a pregnant Muslim woman who was told when she went to hospital for a check-up that there were no female doctors available to examine her. "She was forced to see a male doctor. People are making a mockery of Muslim people's religion - this never used to happen. There used to be a basic sense of respect!"
"Sadly, it is women and children who tend to bear the brunt of racist attacks", said Kouttab. "In Melbourne, many women wearing the hijab have been yelled at and spat at. Tram drivers have refused to let them on trams; some women have had their heads bashed against poles at tram stops.
"Many Arab and Muslim teachers have also felt under attack. Unfortunately, no principal is willing to admit that racism is a problem in their school, so the education department is not addressing it."
From Paula Abood's experience as a community worker in Sydney, the education system is a war-zone for young migrants from Muslim or Arabic backgrounds.
"Two months ago, I spoke to a group of young Lebanese Australian students in western Sydney", she told GLW. "Their views reinforced what we already know. They have to prove every day that they are not rapists, that they're not terrorists."
Talking to a wide range of ethnic women's groups in recent months, Abood found that "there was a common fear of public space. Having to deal with the looks, the stares, being told they don't belong. One woman said: 'I don't feel Australian in Australia, only when I go overseas'."
"During the 1991 Gulf War, I was working with migrant and refugee women", Abood continued. "People were losing their jobs because they were Arab, Muslim or Palestinian. People were being underemployed because their bosses thought they could get away with it. Every day in the newspapers, Arabs were being demonised; so Arabic Australians felt more fearful about speaking out in defence of their democratic rights."
Racist attacks have been on the rise over the last 12 months. In the two weeks following the Bali bombings, Muslims in Sydney reported 40 racist attacks. These included:
A 54-year-old Muslim woman wearing a burqa was pushed to the ground and sworn at by her attacker.
A woman with a young baby was parking her car when a man pulled into the spot beside her, then accelerated and took her door off its hinges, calling her an Arab Muslim and a terrorist.
A woman walking in Ashfield with her five-year-old daughter was spat at and abused about the Bali bombing.
In a case of religious discrimination in the workplace, 19-year-old Kamal El Masri took his employer to the Industrial Relations Commission over threats to sack him because he prays during working hours. El Masri had worked in the job for two years, but it was only after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that his employer made it difficult for him to take breaks to pray. El Masri's case was eventually resolved and his right to pray reinstated.
"People are considering whether they should change their names", Kouttab noted. "A lawyer I know who was recently job-hunting was told by prospective employers that he should drop some of the Arab references in his CV."
These individual incidents can only be understood if they're viewed in a broader context in which the mainstream media is whipping up generalised racist hysteria, and where that's being reinforced by the actions of the government and the police.
In an example of this interplay, female students at Noor Al Houda Islamic College had a booking cancelled by the Auburn Swim Centre in August, after a racist campaign by talk-back radio shock-jock Alan Jones. The school had booked, and paid for, exclusive use of one of the centre's three pools for 10 one-hour blocks, wanting to limit access to women only while female students were dressed only in swimming costumes.
According to the August 21 Auburn Review, "irate callers had threatened to march on the pool because they believe specific religious groups should not have exclusive access to the facility". The manager of the pool told the Auburn Review: "Only one pool out of three [would have been] open [at that time] anyway. It was just the same as a school booking the pool for a swimming carnival. Because it was a Muslim school, we had to stop the program."
The October 12, 2001, Daily Telegraph, Sydney's largest circulation daily, carried a front-page headline "Terror Australis Bin Laden groups in our suburbs", claiming that "as many as 100 members of four international terrorist groups linked to Osama bin Laden have been identified living in Sydney".
Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Ackerman wrote on September 18, 2001: "A beard, a scarf, a headdress or the length of a sleeve or dress are all important to some of these people and the supporters of multiculturalism tell other Australians that they are the ones who must exhibit tolerance when they are spat upon or cursed for wearing ordinary clothing in keeping with the dominant culture."
The actions of police often inflame racist tension. Following the Bali bombings, police routinely dismissed treating attacks on Muslims as hate crimes, including a serious attack on Muslim cleric Ahmed Shabbir on October 15. His house, which is in the grounds of an Islamic school in Sydney, was damaged in an attack, its windows smashed.
In a cruel example of racial profiling, 18-year-old Zak Mallah, an Australian citizen, was denied a renewal of his passport to visit Lebanon to get married. After applying for a renewal of his passport, Mallah was called by ASIO and asked to come to a vacant office in Bankstown, in south-western Sydney, for two hours of questioning.
Mallah then received a letter, authorised by foreign minister Alexander Downer, telling him: "The minister for foreign affairs has formed the opinion that you are likely to engage in conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country". ASIO suspected that Mallah wanted to travel to the Middle East to engage in terrorist acts. An orphan born in Australia, Mallah has since lost his job stacking supermarket shelves, and is suffering from depression.
The Arabic Australian Communities Council in Sydney has set up a racism register. "We want to know about everything that is happening, to report what is going on in the community, so that we can respond to things, take action", Kattan told GLW. "It's important to know the level of attacks and try to make sense of them."
The council is encouraging people to phone or email instances of racist discrimination and harassment, whether witnessed in person or seen or heard through the media. For media incidents, include the name, time and date of the program. For other incidents, include the time, date and place. Email: <info@arabcouncil.org.au> or phone (02) 9709 4333.
From Green Left Weekly, November 13, 2002.
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