What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation: Why Did the
World Trade Towers Fall?
A scientific explanation
at last, from a physicist and mechanical engineer. P. Sainath recalls
Gandhi's 9/11, one hundred years ago; Chris Sands reports from Afghanistan on the rise
of the Taliban.What you just missed, but can still get, in our
last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this
online edition.
Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
"I Certainly Don't Want People of
that Type in Australia"
Australian
Government Steps Up Attacks on Muslims
By RICK KUHN
Australian Prime Minister John Howard
has used the Pope's association of Islam with violence as another
opportunity to target Muslims, criticising them for overreacting.
This fits into a pattern. Since July 2005, his conservative Coalition
Government has been explicitly generating hostility to Muslims
in Australia.
Shortly after the attacks in
the United States on 11 September 2001, however, the Prime Minister
said 'I think the most special of all measures is for me to use
the authority of my office to remind all Australians that our
quarrel is not with people of Arab descent, our quarrel is not
with people of the Islamic faith.' And his Government stuck to
this stance for almost four years.
What has changed?
It is not that the Howard Government
has recently begun to use racism to build support. Appeals to
racism have long been part of John Howard's political arsenal.
As leader of the opposition in August 1988, he raised concerns
about the level of Asian immigration to Australia. This did not
go down well in his own party. Howard lost the Liberal leadership
within a year, only regaining it in 1995.
But claiming that Aboriginal
landrights were a threat and that the Aboriginal and Torres Straight
Islander Commission was corrupt proved much more successful during
and after the 1996 election campaign. The Coalition won, thanks
to this racist tactic, widespread disillusionment with the Labor
government's neo-liberal economic policies and the appeal of
the conservative's contrasting claim that they would make Australian's
'comfortable and relaxed'.
Howard soon expressed understanding
for the concerns raised by the right-wing populist Pauline Hanson,
as her support for her grew between 1996 and 1998. She railed
against immigration and allegedly preferential treatment given
to Aborigines and Asians in Australia.
The Tampa and 'children
overboard' affairs, together with the attacks in New York and
Washington on September 11 were key episodes in the Coalition's
2001 election campaign. The government did not allow refugees,
picked up from a small, sinking boat by the Norwegian freighter
Tampa, to land on Australian territory. Instead they were
sent to an Australian-funded concentration camp on the independent
Pacific island of Nauru. Later Howard and his ministers falsely
claimed that refugees on another boat threatened to throw their
children into the sea if a nearby Australian naval vessel didn't
pick them up. In fact they were signalling for help because their
boat was sinking.
Kevin Dunn's research has demonstrated
that racism in Australia is particularly directed against Muslims,
who make up about 1.5 per cent of the population, roughly 300,000
people. A large proportion of the refugees arriving in Australia
by sea were Muslims. So the government's encouragement of public
paranoia about them could invoke anti-Islamic racism without
being explicit.
'I certainly don't want people
of that type in Australia' John Howard said during the 'children
overboard' affair, leaving Australians to draw their own conclusions
about the 'type' he was referring to. It was left to other commentators
to connect the dots, for those slow on the uptake.
Despite an economic slow-down,
the Government won the election and wedged the Labor Party.
The Government knows that questions
of race, especially when tied to supposed physical threats to
Australians, is good ground for it, especially compared with
industrial relations, privatisations and cuts in social welfare.
The concrete message of Australian
participation in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the
preparations for them was that the Muslim inhabitants of Afghanistan
and Iraq did not have the right to themselves settle accounts
with their oppressive rulers; these incompetent (Muslim) people
needed the strongest state in the world and its allies, with
an agenda primarily driven by issues of strategic power and oil
rather than terrorism, to impose new rulers on them.
From 2004, the Howard Government's
ability to mobilise support on a racist basis, one of its strongest
policy assets, declined dramatically.
The prolonged campaign by activist
groups against the harsh treatment of refugees and their imprisonment
was turning public opinion around, to the extent that even Liberal
parliamentarians started raising public criticisms. Then the
scandals of the detention, as an illegal immigrant, of Australian
permanent resident Kornelia Rau and the deportation of Australian
citizen Vivienne Solon to the Philippines erupted.
The inquiries into these events
thoroughly discredited Australia's immigration detention policy
and administration. The Government initiated reforms and released
a large proportion of the imprisoned refugees.
It was now much harder to generate
fear of refugees. In August this year, a revolt by some Coalition
members of parliament even forced the Government to drop legislation
designed to shove all asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat
into camps on Pacific islands.
But the turning point was a
year earlier, in 2005. John Howard used the London bombings to
recast his manipulation of racism. He attacked Australian Muslims
explicitly for the first time, claiming that some mainstream
Islamic leaders in Australia were not 'as strong in denouncing
these acts as they should have been'.
His summit with Australian
Muslim leaders, on 23 August 2005, was designed to demonstrate
that the Government regarded Muslims as a problem and security
threat.
Treasurer Peter Costello chimed
in with talk about expelling radical Muslim clerics. Brendan
Nelson, then Minister for Education, said that special steps
were being taken to teach Muslim children about 'Australian values',
especially about Simpson and his donkey. People who 'don't want
to live by Australian values' could 'clear off'.
The new method of generating
racial fears was soon deployed to good political effect. Just
before ACTU mass rallies against new industrial relations legislation,
on 15 November, the Government staged raids on Muslims allegedly
plotting terrorist acts and scheduled debates on anti-terrorist
legislation.
Government policy helped to
create the political climate that led to the mob violence against
Muslims and Arabs in the Sydney beach-side suburb of Cronulla,
on 11 December. Just as John Howard denies that his own policies
have anything to do with racism, in commenting on the Cronulla
riot he denied that there is 'underlying racism in this country'.
In February this year, evidence
presented to the inquiry into the bribes paid by AWB, the monopoly
marketer of Australian wheat, to secure sales to Saddam Hussein's
Iraq became very embarrassing for the Coalition. The Prime Minister
and Treasurer again criticised Muslims.
But John Howard shifted his
campaign against Australian Muslims into high gear a few weeks
ago, to distract attention from issues that are heavy going for
the Government: a jump in petrol prices, higher interest rates,
the privatisation of the state-owned telecommunications giant
Telstra and the health insurer Medibank and slower growth.
Howard raised concerns about
the 'integration' of Muslim migrants and their acceptance of
Australian values. As usual, the nature of these values was left
vague. He focuses on the tolerance, attitudes to women or democratic
beliefs of 'a small group of Muslim migrants' is an appeal to
prejudice. Much higher numbers of Australian-born, Anglo-Celtic
Christians have bigoted attitudes towards and even physically
assault people they regard as different; harass or rape women
or, more genteelly, oppose women's right to control their own
fertility; and support the authoritarian right.
On the anniversary of the September
11 attacks, he again raised concerns about Muslim integration.
It seems to be the special
task of former director and election campaign manager of Howard's
Liberal Party, parliamentary secretary Andrew Robb, to maintain
the anti-Muslim momentum. He has tied fear of Muslims into a
discussion of tightening Australia's citizenship laws.
He recently said 'Muslim communities
in Australia have been stigmatised unfairly.' So Muslims must
take the lead and assume 'primary responsibility' for their own
integration. In other words, if Muslims are suffering it's their
problem and not a responsibility of government to stop encouraging
attacks on them.
Explicit targeting of Muslims
in Australia indicates that the government is worried about its
prospects and the declining effectiveness of its racist appeal.
Particularly if the economy falters, in the run up to the next
federal election, John Howard will stoke up anti-Muslim racism
as an issue that is good for it. But, during August, there were
demonstrations, of up to 50,000 people in Sydney, against Israel's
invasion of Lebanon and the Howard government's support for it.
These rebuilt the self-confidence of Australian Muslims and Arabs.
They and their allies are now better placed to combat Howard's
latest racist tactics.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.