Muslims
Portrayed
By Ghali Hassan
17 July, 2004
Countercurrents.org
"The
damage caused by the Crusades was the poisoning of the Western
mind against the Muslim world through a deliberate misrepresentation
of the teachings and ideals of Islam". Mohammed Asad, The Road
to Mecca.
Given
the relatively low frequency of reporting on Muslims and Islam in
general in the media, it is not surprising that the Western media displays
a
distorted image of Islam and Muslims. Television programs and the print
mainstream media have perpetuated the stereotypes of Islam and Muslims
for years. Media images of Islam are omnipresent and are part of Western
culture of racism and imperial design. Islam has always been seen in
the West as violent, barbaric, anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-rational,
etc. The aim is to turn Muslims into an enemy people, to be regarded
collectively with contempt and scorn.
Since the attacks
on America (9/11), media speculation has pointed the
finger at Muslims. A Muslim is portrayed as "terrorist", a
"refugee" or
"militant", but seldom a real human being. The term "Islamist"
is used as a
catchall term and many Muslims have been arbitrarily detained, simply
because they are Muslims. It is the Islamist who provided social and
health
services the government neglected to provide. It is they who wanted
democratic elections and honest government. Similarly, many of Islam's
concepts have gone through process of reduction. For example, the concept
of Jihad, the spiritual, intellectual and social components have been
stripped away, and have been reduced to war by any means including 'terrorism'.
Other connotations of Jihad, including personal struggle, intellectual
endeavour and social construction have evaporated.
For Muslims, nothing
could be further from the truth, Islam is peaceful
religion, and peace is an essential precondition for 'submission' to
the
'will of God'. Muslims like any other people, they believe in freedom,
justice humanity and democratic principles. They really want to control
their own affairs. They don't want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed,
etc. A critique of Islam, like a critique of any religion or ideology
that has doctrines preventing people from exercising their moral sense,
solidarity, and reason, is welcome.
After 9/11, racism
against Muslims and Islam became a form of "free speech" in
the West. Muslims and Islam were subjected to widespread abuse and bashing.
Publishing houses competing to make money from this commercialised business
of producing books made up of rubbish and fabricated images of Islam
and Muslims. Countless obscure university scholars and intellectuals
suddenly appeared on TV screens and treated as "experts" on
Islam by the mainstream media. They project the manufactured and distorted
images of Islam. This corporate picture of Islam is a depressing and
misleading one.
In Australia, Muslims
have been subjected to unprovoked racist attacks. Muslim women wearing
traditional clothes were spat upon, physically assaulted and had their
scarves ripped from their heads. Mosques were firebombed and Islamic
schools and other community facilities vandalised or deluged with hate
mail. Following the Bali bombing, the Liberal government of John Howard
saw an opportunity to inflame the situation by targeting innocent Muslims
as "terrorist suspects". Without any substantiated evidence,
homes of Muslim students in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth were raided
by Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence
Organization, seizing properties and interrogating terrified Indonesian
families. Muslims are the only people who remain whom one can indulge
in bashing with impunity.
A study on racist attitudes conducted by the University of New South
Wales in 2003 found one in eight Australians interviewed admitted they
were prejudiced, particularly towards Muslim Australians. The study,
conducted by a team led by geography lecturer Kevin Dunn, also found
some Australians were living in denial of such prejudice though 80 per
cent of those surveyed recognized racism was a problem.
Dr. Dunn writes
that Australia has a "hard core of racists" and that some
of
the country's worst racism is found especially in more "working
class"
suburbs of Sydney and Brisbane. However, this is not the case. Racism
in
Australia is institutionalised and systemic. It is not only just confined
to
working class Australians. It is like blaming the abuse and torture
of Iraqi
POWs by US occupying forces on "a few bad apples". Furthermore,
while there remains "persistent intolerance" to Aboriginal
and Jewish Australians,
anti-Muslim sentiment is "very strong", the study observed.
Racism in Australia
is not new phenomena, and it is not prompted by the 9/11 or the Bali
bombing, as suggested. Racism is a diet feed continuously to the public
by conservative political parties and mainstream media. Evidence of
surveys carried out in Australia in the late 1980s found Muslims are
the most discriminated and victimized Australians.
The Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission (HR&EOC), the Australian Government
agency, reports evidence about a rise in violence against Muslims and
Arabs. A key finding of the report was that 90 per cent of female respondents
reported experiencing racism abuse or violence. However, the Race Discrimination
Act - which covers Jews and Sikhs - does not recognize Muslims as an
"ethnic group" and protection of Muslims under Australian
federal law is limited. "While the government has created a climate
where many non-Muslim Australians live with a perception of fear of
Muslims, it is Muslim and Arabic Australians who are living in a state
of real fear, based on their frequent, sometimes daily, experience of
physical and verbal abuse and discrimination" write Sarah Stephen
in Green Left Weekly, the only honest newspaper in Australia.
Australian conservative
politicians follow the footprints of their counterparts in the US, the
Islamaphobic Christian Right. In November 2002, Reverend Fred Nile,
leader of the rightwing Christian Democratic Party, and a well known
for his bigoted views, issued an inflammatory call for the New
South Wales state government to ban Muslim women from wearing traditional
Muslim clothes, in public. His remarks directly contributed to the climate
of racial hostility, cultivated by sections of the media, which has
already led to a series of racist assaults on Muslim women and attacks
on mosques. However, Prime Minister John Howard supports these racist
views. The PM said, it would be better, if Muslim women were "less
conspicuous" at this time, and that Mr. Nile "speaks for many
people". These are the same racist tactics used by the rightwing
US Christian evangelist, Pat Robertson, the Baptist Jerry Falwell and
the Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who are preying on the abuse of Muslims
and Islam to advance their messianic fascist ideology.
In Australia, Muslim
refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war torn countries
are completely removed from humanity. They are detained in remote centres
and stripped of their human rights and dignity. They are portrayed as
"illegal" immigrants and "potential terrorists".
The fact that, thousands of
illegal immigrants are white Anglo-Saxon living and working illegally
in
Sydney and Melbourne, shows how tolerant Australia is? Illegal immigrant
it seems, if you're not white.
Muslim refugees
are detained, women and children included, in remote prisons called
"Detention Centres". The largest of these centres is South
Australia's Baxter Detention Centre or "Australia's Abu Ghraib",
as recent
German tourists call it. Baxter Detention Centre "is a chilling
sight,
surrounded by barbed wire and towering electric fences humming with
9000 volts. No life can be seen from the outside: all buildings face
inwards, and there is only the long, lonely road that winds out from
Port Augusta at the remote apex of South Australia's Spencer Gulf, past
mangrove swamps and into the vast plain that vanishes into the distant
Flinders Range". If it is
sobering from the outside, it is so much more when the gates slide shut
behind the asylum-seekers sent there under Australia's policy of mandatory
detention" reported the New Zealand Herald on 22 May 2004. 'It
is like a
prison here', one inmate told the Herald. 'There is a fear in us when
we see
the cameras everywhere and the doors are all electronically opened.
They
only gave us a room with a toilet inside, like an ensuite ... It is
only a
land with grass and all around us there are rooms that other people
live in.
We can see only the sky and the grass'. Most of these refugees are Muslims
from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq dreaming to see the Australian "freedom".
A new report by
the HR&EOC titled A Last Resort? found Australia's
immigration detention policy breached the international Convention on
the
Rights of the Child by seriously failing to protect the mental health
of
children, provide adequate health care and education and protect
unaccompanied children and those with disabilities. Members of the HR&EOC
visited all the immigration detention centres in Australia and took
evidence from a large number of detainees and organizations. The report
noted that between July 1999 and July 2003, 2184 children passed through
Australia's mainland detention centres. At its height in June 2000,
the Australian detention system had 164 babies in detention. The report
also noted that violence and despair, self-mutilation and suicide, and
the infliction of severe, long-term psychological damage are common
in these centres.
No all lost, many
decent and courageous Australians have rejected this
racist and inhumane policy. Rural and urban organizations, and individuals
are working very hard to defend the right of refugees and expose the
lies
and deception perpetuated by the government. "The thing that keeps
people going in the refugee movement is the personal contact with asylum
seekers - meeting people behind the razor wire, hearing their stories,
seeing their despair. We are involved in a struggle that is both political
and
humanitarian. The politics makes us angry; the people make us care",
writes Anne Coombs of Rural Australians for Refugees, an informal group
of concerned citizens.
Thousand of Muslims
(Iraqis and Afghanis) have been killed as a result of US wars on Iraq
and Afghanistan, adding to the thousands of innocent Muslims killed
or imprisoned since the "end" of these wars. The so-called
"democracy" and "freedom" have been denied to the
people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan. The "war on terror"
is a distraction, and it is
nothing but an extension of globalisation fuelled by anti-Muslims racism
to
wage war and control vital resources located in the Muslim world.
With the destruction
and occupation of Iraq by US forces, we are witnessing more dramatic
misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims. Muslims who opposed to this
imperial ideology are portrayed, as "terrorists", and Islam
will continue to be reduced according to this Western ideology.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted
on:
[email protected]