Is Australia a Racist Country?

By Najad Abdul-Aziz

This piece is partially inspired by a comment from a reader arguing the concept of Arab victimhood: “At what point does one tire of the narcissism of Arab victimhood, and will we ever reach this point in any of our lifetimes?”

In light of the race riots gripping Sydney, this statement is hurled at migrant communities all to often. However, it is one worthy of debate considering the idea of “blame games” hurting the progress of Muslim and Arab minorities in the West is a flawed argument, deprived of historical context.

The bastion that is professional journalism in Australia (i.e. Murdoch owned outlets for neo-con propaganda), portrayed the brawls between white Australians and “men of Middle-Eastern appearance” in a campaign where Anglo-Australia was trying to take back their neighbourhoods from the “terror of multiculturalist ideology”, according to the Patriotic Youth League, a far-right organization akin to Neo-Nazism, blamed for the violence.

In the tired cliché of good vs. evil, a thank you goes out to radio “shock-jock” Alan Jones, for further inciting racist rhetoric, and eventually, a mob of drunken youths out to bash anyone who filled their stereotype of just what an Arab should look like. Incidentally, an Italian man was also attacked. Whoops.

“We don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney,” Jones responded to a concerned caller. Mr Jones represents an exclusive club of provocative radio commentators known to cater for redneck Australia.

At a press conference, Prime Minister John Howard dismissed accusations of Australia being a racist country.

“I think it’s a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I’m simply not going to do so,” he said. The UN however, has officially used it. In 2001, Australia was given the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

This stems from a history of colonialist brutality, still rearing its ugly head. While many may contest the validity of the White Australia Policy as a concept no longer applicable to the “multicultural successes of modern Australia”, the riots on Sydney beaches, displayed the roots of racism, alive and well in the minds of Australian youth, driven by a narrative of fear and hatred of anything foreign, implanted by a government put into power based on an illusionary threat posed by “ethnics” to the “Aussie way of life”.

The dubious notion of a threatened way of life primarily got John Howard re-elected, a premise ridiculously flawed, considering Australia is collectively termed as the 51st state of the United States. While the influence of capitalist consumerism and virtually identical foreign policies is implied, Australia also has a dark racial history.

It is however conveniently swept under the rug, as Howard aggressively campaigns against the teaching of the rapacious past, deriding it as the “black armband view of history”. Furthermore, the Prime Minister holds the unique position of being the only leader of a white settler nation to refuse to apologise for the decimation of the original inhabitants.

As youths pounced on anyone who looked Arab, it was a picture of 1960’s Australia, where Aboriginals were hunted down, many killed, termed as “nigger hunts”. History repeats itself, as the Other is now disturbing the peace, constructed from a systematic hate campaign from a complicit media.

Scapegoat or victim? The former can be used to describe the state of asylum seekers, in which issues surrounding immigration to Australia are inextricably linked with a growing barrage of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Ameer Sultan, a detainee at Villawood detention centre would probably agree:

“We are not paying for what we have done. We are paying for what we are. I think we came to a very racist country.”

A valid statement, considering the “illegal alien” that is the refugee is treated like his indigenous counterpart. Lecturer of History at Melbourne University, Tony Birch, in his essay “The Last Refuge of the UnAustralian”, discusses how, after the foundational period of colonisation, “the establishment of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines in 1860, marked a period when the dispossessed Aboriginal was reconfigured as a landless and homeless refugee”.

A mirror image to the plight of the asylum seeker, and also the Arab and Muslim migrant, reflected through the slogan of “We grew here, you flew here”, written on the chests of the rioting crowds, with the Australian flag draped over them.

The conflation of the Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern asylum seeker and the fundamentalist terrorist was reinforced in 2001 by the events leading up to the Tampa stand-off, where Iraqi asylum seekers were accused by Howard of throwing their children into the sea to “emotionally blackmail decent Australians”. This was followed only a couple of weeks later by the terror attacks in the US. In a climate of an approaching general election, the great repulse of the Tampa served first as a surrogate war for the government and later, fortuitously, was available to be mobilised into the charged emotional rhetoric of the real war in Afghanistan.

Then Defence Minister Peter Reith’s remark that refugees arriving in boats could well include “sleepers for terrorism” is the most obvious example of the ways in which asylum seekers became stand-ins for terrorists. And till this day, Muslim migrant communities, some living here for generations are labelled in a similar fashion.

The continuing revelations about the Howard government’s role in promoting lurid and increasingly gruesome rumours about asylum seekers only reinforce the conclusion that a deliberate campaign was waged to associate asylum seekers with fanaticism, terror and inhumanity, a mindset in parallel to the average Australian who feels threatened by “outsiders” intent on destroying the “Aussie way of life”.

The facade that is Australia’s immigration policy is constructed by a country’s consolidating vision of “national morality”, or building a consensus of “national values” – a mantra still holding John Howard in power.

This is ultimately linked to the development of moral panics around particular groups and the projection of an aura of criminality and danger upon certain minoritised populations, in this case the Arab and Muslim.

Themes of crime and contamination of migrants and asylum seekers as potential corrupters of morality, carriers of disease and “sleepers” for terror against whom fortress like barriers must be erected resonate deeply with the historical anxieties of the White Australia Policy. Consequently, the perception of criminality among Lebanese Australians resulted in their serving of longer and tougher sentences than any other group (excluding indigenous Australians) for most crime categories.

To view the issues faced by minorities as a problem they should fix themselves, absolves responsibility and by imputation, argues civil unrest is a result of migrant mentality, peculiar only to non-White cultures. It is a morally bankrupt and self-serving argument.

Is it truly narcissistic to openly acknowledge the wrongdoings of this government? One can never tire in the search for justice. In neo-conservative Australia however, Prime Minister Howard continues to plant the seeds of prejudice by depriving the mainstream of the opportunity to reach out to those of various backgrounds.

Instead, under the guise of national unity, this absence of knowledge results in a public perception of Muslims and Arabs that draws heavily from orientalist stereotypes reinforced by racialised anxieties brewing for many years.

In November 2003, retired NSW police detective Tim Priest claimed, “Middle-Eastern crime groups and the violence they perpetuate is directed mainly against young Australian men and women – because they are Australian.”

He called for a tough approach to curbing the unrest, likening the recent upheavals to the riots witnessed in France, echoing the words of French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, promising to ride the streets of “scum”.

The difference is while France recognises the failure of integration, Australia has not. What is proposed however is a police state allowing authorities to racially profile suspected “thugs”. Dalal Ouba, a Muslim woman active in Sydney’s Stop the War Coalition spoke to police involved in the riot operation, and they categorically stated Lebanese Australians were more likely to be targeted and arrested than Anglo-Saxon Australians for hate crimes.

The head of the Police Federation of Australia, Mark Burgess says racial profiling will no doubt be used and that he wanted the police force to be immune from prosecution. “We’re obviously not targeting 60-year old women and 70-year old men here,” he told ABC Online.

Racial profiling is not isolated to the police, as politicians; in an effort to score electoral points constantly engage in racist rhetoric. Frequent reports by officials such as former NSW Premier Bob Carr that “ethnic gangs and thugs of Middle-Eastern appearance terrorise suburban Sydney”, by the subsequent representations of Islam as a violent and misogynist religion inherently oppressive of women, representations inflamed by sensationalised accounts of racially motivated rapes of Anglo-Australian women by gangs of Middle-Eastern men, by studies linking high levels of unemployment with suburbs identified with Arab and Middle-Eastern migrants, by claims that these populations are intractable to assimilation into the Judeo-Christian value system and work ethic. It goes on and on.

These homegrown representations collude with and are ultimately swelled by international reports of Islamic terror and fundamentalism.

A fortress of despair and injustice surrounds Arabs and Muslim Australians alike. As Australia turns into a democratic police state, a somewhat militarised approach is imposed on the Other, positioning them as a dangerous, illegal and even a criminally deranged enemy.