BE CAUTIOUS - FRESH RACISM

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