DIVERSITY: What if our collective racism turned again to Asians?

It turns out 49% of Australians want to stop Muslims from immigrating. But what if they were convinced China's military were a much bigger threat than Islamic State (which it probably is)?

Prejudices. Unless we’re lying, we all have at least one of them. I have a prejudice against music that doesn’t involve at least one hand-played musical instrument. Apologies to Iggy Azalea fans.

The latest Essential Report turned up an interesting mixed bag of voter prejudices. There was prejudice against Pauline Hanson (45% of those polled agreed with the statement that “Pauline Hanson’s views do not reflect Australian values and she should not be given so much media coverage”. Meanwhile 22% of the 49% who said they opposed Muslim immigration did so on the basis that Muslims “do not share our values”. Which I guess means Muslims are more consistent with Australian values than Pauline Hanson.

Still, it requires some nuance and an ability to perform basic statistical analysis to extract the above-mentioned conclusions. The kind of nuance that journalists appear to lack. But in electoral politics and emotive culture wars, nuance and rationality are best kept out of the scene and relegated to wherever it is those Muslims came from.

Funnily enough, the figures were worse (or better, depending on your perspective) for Coalition voters. How much does this make sense historically? Have Liberal voters always ignored the individual in favour of group identities?

The first episode of John Howard’s ABC documentary on his political hero Bob Menzies includes a section on the formation of a new political party for the “forgotten Australians”, the middle class, those who wished to be “lifters, not leaners”, whose core political beliefs included the free market and free individuals. This party’s ideology attracted enough votes in post-war Australia to deliver Menzies a landslide.

Now some 60% of the party’s voters have adopted a new freedom — the freedom to live in a country free of migrants who identify with a disparate group that make up some 25% of humanity. The party’s voters want freedom to imagine that each and every one of this huge rump of humanity are likely terrorists and are unable to integrate into Australia. No doubt the non-integrating terrorist wannabes to be stopped at the border would include people like Houssam Abiad, a former Liberal deputy lord mayor for the City of Adelaide. Three out of five Liberal voters were opposed to immigration by anyone who identifies as Muslim. Or is deemed Muslim.

The national figure was just under one half. Some 34% of Greens voters would oppose the migration of someone like NSW MP Mehreen Faruqi, notwithstanding her PhD in environmental engineering and her passionate support for marriage equality.

Apparently

[t]he most common reasons for wanting a ban were fears over terrorism. 

Little wonder some 40% of ALP voters wouldn’t want any further Muslims from Egypt migrating here, Egyptians like the parents of counterterrorism expert and ALP federal member for Cowan Professor Anne Aly.

Apart from the usual suspects (Greens, a few Labor MP’s and an extra suspect in John Alexander), most pollies have been totally silent on not just the poll but also Hanson’s speech and the underlying prejudices and ignorance it evidences. The silence from the Coalition and from allegedly conservative commentators is even louder. The message this sends to both the perpetrators and victims of the bigotry is that Australia’s political establishment wishes to play a “wait and see” game.
More sober voices can throw facts — that 2% is hardly a swamp, that Hindu communities are growing at a faster rate, that most home-grown terror suspects aren’t migrants but were born here — but since when have facts mattered in such mass debates?

The best we can hope for is that bigger prejudices and problems come along. That other concerns — the economy, health, industrial relations, etc — take over from prejudice against Muslims or Africans or Asians. But how’s this for a scary scenario? The security risks in the future posed by Islamic State and other rogue actors could quickly and easily be dwarfed by the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China flexing its economic and military muscle. Australia could get dragged into conflict in the South China Sea. Our newspapers and media could be swamped with images of Asian-looking people threatening our security, with other Asian-looking people seeking refuge.

How will the average Aussie bigot be able to tell the difference between different kinds of people who look like Chinese leaders giving threatening speeches on TV? Nuance and prejudice tend to go in opposite directions. The likes of George Christensen, Cory Bernardi, Reclaim Australia, Pauline Hanson, etc, may find the notion that a migrant who speaks Mandarin and has a name like Tsai Ing-Wen or Lee Hsien Loong is a security threat.

And why stop at language? That pro-democracy bookseller from Hong Kong Lam Wing-Kee sure has a suspicious name. As does that Suu Kyi woman, who wears funny clothes and lives in Burma.

Why do they celebrate Chinese New Year? What’s wrong with our New Year? What are these moon cakes they eat? How can we tell the difference between a Chinese-looking person from Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Burma or Fiji?

Am I insulting the intelligence of the average Australian bigot? I wish I were. So do the thousands of Sikhs who must put up with the nonsense they cop due to non-Sikhs assuming the Sikh turban is the same as Osama bin Laden’s and the Sikh temple is a mosque.

First published in Crikey on 22 September 2016.

MEDIA: WikiLeaks hysteria ...

This post will be a running tally of updates on WikiLeaks developments. I can't guarantee it will be updated regularly. If only I had the resources of Fairfax or News Limited!

UPDATE 1: Jeffrey T Kuhner, a writer for the Washington Times, a far-Right newspaper published by a Korean preacher, has called for WikiLeaks dude Julian Assange to be assassinated. He writes:

... we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.

Yep, send him off to be tortured at Guantanamo. Clearly he is worse than the worst of the worst.

(Thanks to NB)

UPDATE 2: A bunch of (largely left-of-centre) academics, lawyers, journos and entertainers have signed an open letter to Julia Gillard regarding Julian Assange. Read it here.

UPDATE 3: Here's a discussion on the unusual offence Assange has been charged with under Swedish law. They call it "sex by surprise".

UPDATE 4: Here's another op-ed, this time from a newspaper that at times tries to emulate the other Washington newspaper owned by a Korean preacher I mentioned earlier. The headline reflects just how much George W Bush's imbecilic logic still pervades certain sectors of the American Right. Read this and try not to laugh:

Assange has threatened America with the cyber equivalent of thermonuclear war.

UPDATE 5: I am accustomed to hacking into Alexander Downer's record as foreign minister. Hence I always imagined he would be more stupidly pro-American than the ALP when it came to China. But The Age reports that Downer and Howard showed far more good sense on this issue.

... 2004 remarks by the then Howard government foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, that a conflict between America and China over Taiwan would not necessarily trigger Australia's obligations under the ANZUS treaty with the US. The ANZUS treaty, which came into force in 1952, commits Australia and the US to respond if the armed forces of the other party in the Pacific come under attack.

Mr Downer's comments - which he insisted were taken out of context - caused concern in Washington and prompted the then US ambassador Tom Schieffer to declare that America expected Australia's support in the event of conflict over Taiwan.

The then prime minister John Howard refused to comment publicly on what Australia would do if hostility broke out between the US and China, saying it was a hypothetical situation.

But what of Kim Beazley?

AUSTRALIA'S ambassador to the US and former opposition leader, Kim Beazley, assured American officials that Australia would always side with the US in the event of a war with China, a confidential diplomatic cable reveals.

Mr Beazley's remarks, made in a 2006 meeting with the then US ambassador Robert McCallum just months before Kevin Rudd replaced him as Labor leader, are significant because no Australian federal political leader has publicly disclosed what position they believe the nation should take if the US and China came to blows over Taiwan - an event that would present Australia's greatest foreign policy dilemma.

The cable, classified as confidential and not to be disclosed outside the US government, gave the following summary of Mr Beazley's comments: "In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen."

If the contents of this cable are correct, they show a troubling degree of political and foreign policy naivety. It also shows that our political establishment places the interests of a foreign power above those of our own nation.

UPDATE 6: While millions in his country were suffering after a massive cyclone and storm surge, the head of Burma's military junta wanted to spend $1 billion buying English football team Manchester United. We know about this because of WikiLeaks.

UPDATE 7: A report from AlJazeera English on WikiLeaks on Latin American leaders.



UPDATE 8: Julian Assange cites Rupert Murdoch in Rupert's own Australian flagship newspaper.

UPDATE 9: A Labor Right powerbroker revealed as one of numerous US Embassy contacts within the Labor Party.

UPDATE 10: Hopefully my credit card won't be affected by this revenge hacking.

UPDATE 11: Hilarious video.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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VIDEO: Rabiye Kadeer's call to settle remaining Uighur Guantanamo detainees ...

Exiled World Uighur Congress leader Rabiye Kadeer told the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday:

All of the Uighurs in Albania, Bermuda and Palau are living very normal and productive lives -- so we'd be happy if Australia took the four.

Below is a documentary from AlJazeera English showing the experiences of four Uighurs living in Albania.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf






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VIDEO: Uighurs from Guantanamo settled in Albania ...

Here is the text accompanying this DW European Journal video:

Two years ago, four Uighurs were released from the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay. They belonged to a Muslim minority group in China who had traveled to Pakistan via Afghanistan because they alleged they had suffered human rights abuses in their home country. In 2000, Pakistani police arrested the men and transferred them to US custody and spent years in detention. They found asylum in Albania but life in the foreign country is everything but easy and hopes of reuniting with their families have completely faded.

OPINION: Appreciating Australia's indigenous heritage ...

When I was growing up, some of my Indo-Pakistani aunties expressed some extraordinary views. One was particularly scathing of Indo-Pakistani doctors who married gori (Hindi/Urdu for "white-skinned" ) women. "These gori women are all cheap. They just take our men's money and then leave them for some handsome white fellow!"

It wasn't just the auntie's implication that men of Indo-Pakistani origin could not be good-looking that offended me. It was also the idea that women with white skin were necessarily selfish, money-hungry and incapable of maintaining stable relationships with wealthy tanned medical practitioners. This particular auntie often boasted of being highly educated herself. Apparently she had completed a Masters degree in Indian literature from some university whose name I could never pronounce and won't even try spelling.

However, having a quality tertiary education doesn't inoculate one from making absurd generalisations about entire groups of people. Back in May 2006, I found myself seething with anger and disgust having read an article in a certain newspaper which contained this startling claim: "Traditional Aboriginal society was always harsh on women".

Indeed, I was so disgusted to read this that I put fingers to keyboard and sent the following e-mail to the opinion editor:

It reflects poorly on your newspaper that it could [publish a] piece... Claiming that Aboriginal cultures are characterised by abuse toward women and children is a gross insult to our nation's cultural heritage. Would you publish an article if the writer to make such claims about Jewish cultures? Or about Catholic or English-speaking cultures?

The editor's response spoke volumes.

I think it reflects poorly on you that you can't even think outside your narrow ideological box. What is wrong with competing ideas, esp[ecially] , given that the 30-year orthodoxy of self determination has disadvantaged so many indigenous Australians in the outback.

Whether indigenous Australians should be stopped from living anywhere in what is essentially their country is a debate I'd rather avoid. My concern is this strange obsession some allegedly conservative people have with proving that their culture is somehow superior to everyone else's. And even more strangely, that they somehow have the right to issue black cheque fatwas about the cultures and histories of entire races.

The Australian recently published some important observations of Major-General Dave Chalmers , who has just completed an 18 month stint running the Northern Territory Intervention. Chalmers is convinced indigenous Australians can only secure a better future by preserving their culture. And this can only be done if we as a broader Australian community learn to respect indigenous cultures.

Over time, we as a society have undervalued indigenous culture and in many places it's been lost... And where it's been lost, people have lost their compass, they've lost their framework of life. It's not being replaced by a mainstream Australian framework, and people are in limbo. We need to be paying a lot more attention to traditional healers and traditional lawmakers, the role they played, and play, in people's lives.

Genuine conservatives show genuine respect and reverence to our 40,000 year indigenous cultural status quo at least as much as they will to our 220-odd year European status quo. That involves recognising the sophistication of indigenous communities. In her 2007 book The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian Story Peta Stephenson tells just some of the stories of trade and cultural interaction (and indeed intermarriage) between indigenous tribes and Makassar trepang fishermen from Sulawesi (going back at least a century before Captain Phillip landed in Botany Bay) and Chinese indentured labourers.

Stephenson shows that these interactions were suppressed by colonial and Australian authorities, with members of culturally mixed families torn apart. Her nook should convince even the most hardened monoculturalist the Indigenous Australia wasn't some isolated monolithic horde of noble savages waiting for the Poms to civilise them. Before and after Europeans settled and plundered, non-European peoples interacted with indigenous peoples on more equal terms, respecting their laws and customs.

We've all heard of Cathy Freeman's indigenous heritage. But how many of us are aware that Freeman is also part-Chinese? Her great-great grandfather moved from China in the late 19th century to work on sugarcane farms in northern Queensland. Stephenson writes that Freeman actively supported Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics, and Chinese-language newspapers openly celebrate her Chinese heritage even if mainstream newspapers ignore it.

And who could forget the 1988 bicentennial celebrations, including the re-enactment of the Endeavour landing in Sydney? Our Territorian cousins up north had their own celebration, with the landing of the Hati Marege (meaning "Heart of Arnhem Land" in Indonesian) on the Arnhem Land coast. Stephenson provides evidence of Makassar fisherman from Sulawesi making annual voyages to fish for trepang (sea cucumbers) and to trade with the local Yolngu people since as early as the 17th century. This mutually beneficial trading relationship was banned by the South Australian government in 1906-07, ensuring the local Aboriginal people became isolated and insular. Mixed Makassan and indigenous families were torn apart, some only reunited recently after 80 years.

Indigenous Australians entered into complex and sophisticated trade relations with numerous non-European peoples both before and after colonisation and dispossession. They didn't need Europeans to teach them how to interact with outsiders. It's about time we learned more about these aspects of indigenous history so that we can enjoy the same healthy respect and admiration for the first Australians as Major-General Chalmers.

First published on the ABC Unleashed website on Wednesday 03 December 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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