The mount of a hideous fresh irrational fear is intimidating multiculturalism.
One
of the most significant ways the
world has distorted since the dreadful
felony of September 11 has been the increase of an unsightly strain of
Islamophobia all through the Western humanity. Beginning this
new ideological virus Australia has, regrettably, established far from immune.
On
the far right of the political range something sociologists have come
to call "new racism" seems to be taking hold. Previous
racism debated
that the obstinate differences stuck between human groups were
entrenched in biology and blood. This shape of racism was discredited
by Hitler and the Holocaust. A new racism took its place. It argued
that differences between human collectivities were based on the
eventual inappropriateness not of blood and biology but of civilization
and belief.
Following 9/11, in Australia,
this kind of new racism emerged with startling fleetness. Let one
important example suffice. Past Treasury Secretary John Stone had long
been an adversary of Asian immigration. Subsequent 9/11 the center of
his worry shifted to Muslims as an alternative. According to Stone, Australia
was, from the cultural point of view, a "Judeo-Christian" country.
Because of its hypothetical inaptness with such a culture, Stone argued
now that all future Muslim immigration must end.
Stone
was attentive, of course, that on account of his proposition he would
be accused of racism. Such accusations were, he claimed, both
mischievous and wrong. In advocating a ethnically biased immigration
policy Stone pointed out he had no noticed in the color of a probable
migrant''s skin. The only matter that troubled him was "culture" and not
"race".
In
focus of the scholastic description of new racism, John Stone and his
followers unsuspectingly supplied an almost perfect textbook casing.
The
second stand of Islamophobia, boosted by the actions of September 11,
took place on more conventional Christian ground. The best instance
here was seen in the writings of Andrew Bolt, resident right-wing
columnist at the Melbourne Herald Sun.
In
the beginning Bolt responded to September 11 in a decent way. Was it
not, he argued, a "tragedy" that the crimes of fundamentalist Islamic
terrorists had rendered "the many serene Muslims among us the worthless
target of misgiving and abhorrence". Would it not, he argued, be "a
discredit if the
terrorist carnage in the United States made us lash out" at Australia''s
Muslim community? As it shortly ejected, no one was more in need of
such a caution than Andrew Bolt himself. Within days he had begun to
speculate mysteriously about why Australia''s
Islamic privileged had not issued a fatwa against Osama bin Laden.
Though he had no fight with Islam, he said, but only with "the
terrorists who tainted its teachings", was it not the case that the
Koran was all "too easily interpreted to justify terrorism"?
Inside
three months of September 11, Bolt was experiencing "severe qualms
about the function of Islam in a worldly, multi-ethnic country akin to Australia".
Within six months he was totally annoyed by the estimation that Islam,
in fact understood, was a religion of tranquility and human rights. By
mid-2002, Andrew Bolt had occupied himself in the defense of an
anti-Islamic campaign waged by a fundamentalist Christian sect called
Catch the Fire. The gloves were now entirely off.
"Let''s
match up to," Bolt wrote on June 3, 2002, "those two nearly all holy of
men - those founders of great religions. Unlike Mohammed, Christ did
not slaughter unbelievers, perform women who sang impolite songs about
him, cut off the limbs of apostates, sleep with a woman whose family he
had just killed, have sex with a nine-year-old, urge the murder of
Jews, authorize the thrashing of wives . . . and assure ecstasy above
all to those who made war on infidels." I do not know whether it was a
matter of concern for Bolt or his editor that he was writing, thus, of
the man who stood at the centre of the faith of 300,000 or so of their
fellow Australians.
In actual fact, Andrew Bolt was not the lone journalist in Australia
who had begun to play with fire. A third strand of Islamophobia
appearing in the press after September 11 was ingrained in something
even profound than religious soil - ethnic difference and sexual panic.
Behind
September 11, The Australian''s columnist Janet Albrechtsen began to
take significant curiosity in the appalling
rape cases in Sydney
perpetrated by gangs of Lebanese Australian Muslim males. With
reference to these cases, Albrechtsen appears to have conducted a
search for data with the articulate intention of discovering as many
instances as possible where Muslim males have been involved in rape. On
the basis of this anecdotal evidence she began to write in a manner
that recommended that rapes by Muslims of young women had reached
outbreak size in the Western parts.
In
conjuring this moral panic - as Media Watch exposed last Monday -
Albrechtsen, on more than one juncture, indistinct the confirmation on
which she relied. Where, for illustration, a French sociologist had
written of rape as a beginning ritual of young men, Albrechtsen
claimed, quite incorrectly, that he had been writing purposely about
Muslim males. Or again, to divulge the insensitivity of the local
Muslim leadership on the question of the Sydney
rapes, Albrechtsen claimed in a recent column that a leader of the
Lebanese population had absolved the young men of moral liability for
their crimes. As it turned out, in the article from which she quoted,
the question of the rapes had not even been talked about.
Nobody
acquiring even a transitory contact with the history of race
relationships could be ignorant of the volatile potentiality of the
question of inter-ethnic rape. Accordingly, no contemporary subject in Australia
demands from a journalist superior wisdom, adulthood and tact. Janet
Albrechtsen''s writing has been literally slapdash, socially
irresponsible and morally inconsiderate straight away.
The materialization of Islamophobia in Australia
in current times is not, in the end, tricky to make clear. The view was
equipped with the rightward drift in Australian political culture
during the period of Hansonism. For three years, anti-Islamic feelings
grew as a consequence of the denigration and confinement of the mainly
Muslim asylum seekers from the Middle East. Those we mistreated we came to despise. With the coincidence of the Tampa "crisis" and the September 11 terrorist attacks, a hazardous detonation of anti-Islamic sentiment took position.
Via : www.lovemusichateracism.com
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