MEDIA: A short break from my break ...

I did say in my last post that I was taking a short break from writing and blogging. But now I think I'll take a short break from my break. Not much happens here in central Queensland (apart from work and the odd thunderstorm).

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African migrants seem to be getting the raw end of the police racism stick in Victoria. The Oz reports of the results of a study by a Community Legal Centre in Melbourne about complaints of racism by African migrants against Victorian police, many of which resulted in cover charges.

The same CLC has reported on police attacks on other new Australian communities such as Afghans.

Police behaviour reported to the legal centre includes assaults requiring hospitalization of victims, punitive beatings of handcuffed or otherwise restrained people, unlawful imprisonment, acts of torture and brutality within police stations, excessive use of force, unlawful searches, threats of sexual violence, unjustified use of capsicum spray, strip searches conducted after such threats are made, searches in unjustified and humiliating circumstances, racist and sexist comments, thefts of money and mobile phones, loss of vehicles, harassment, degrading and humiliating conduct and ill-treatment against racial and religious minorities. In some of the reports, children as young as 10 have been assaulted and mothers sprayed with capsicum spray.

This is disturbing stuff. Citizens should be treated as individuals in a liberall democracy, not lumped together and mistreated based on personal characteristics beyond their control. Allegations of police racism and brutality also undermine the rule of law which forms a bedrock of any civilised society.

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Miriam Cosic has written a terrific piece about the Athiest Convention recently held in Melbourne, the same city where the multi-million dollar Parliament of World Religions was recently held. Atheists of varying degrees of evangelical fervour were present, among them the Ayatollah of unbelievers Richard Dawkins. Here's a great few lines:

"I don't think we should go out of our way to insult Islam because it doesn't do any good to get your head cut off," he continued. "But we should always say that I may refrain from publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, but it's because I fear you. Don't for one moment think it's because I respect you."

Taslima Nasreen, Bangladesh's answer to Salman Rushdie, was also present along with 3 security guards (who were probably Muslim!). Among other things, she said:

"All religion, but particularly Islam, is for the interests and comfort of men," she said, "Why would women believe in any religion?"

She should pose that question to my mother. And be prepared for extra chilli in the biryani.

Nasreen also expressed these sentiments:

India, the country that likes to think of itself as the largest democracy in the world, she pointed out, placed the religious rights of its Muslim minority above her freedom of expression.

Perhaps a more nuanced approach to Nasreen's experiences in India can be found here. The fact that she jumped into bed with the Hindu far-Right that persecutes not just Muslims but also Catholics doesn't do wonders for her liberal credentials.

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Greg Sheridan, recipient of the Jerusalem Prize from a pro-Israel lobby group, thinks the Rudd government criticised Israel too much over the fake passports affair. He also thinks that building homes on other people's land isn't such a bad idea. No doubt he'll be donating both his passport and his backyard to the cause.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Why fight racism when you can incite racism to sell newspapers?

Writing in The Age on May 22 2009, Nazeem Hussain asks some very simple questions about attacks on South Asian (largely Indian) overseas students:

I am another brown person. I can say unequivocally, on behalf of every other non-white person in the country, that hearing about racially motivated crimes frightens us.

To an aggressor bent on beating up a "fob" (fresh off the boat) or a "curry", it does not matter that I was born here, and that my parents came here long before the attacker was born. To the aggressor, I simply match the description of their target.

What concerns me is that each time an attack against an Indian is reported, Victoria Police has quite determinedly ensured the issue of racism is not closely linked to the crime.

Inspector Scott Mahoney said that "sometimes, it's just a combination of timing and chance". Is that supposed to mean that the attackers don't see colour when they incessantly find targets of Indian appearance? These "chance" encounters that he describes are occurring with alarming regularity.

With respect, the inspector's analysis is flawed. Victoria Police has itself claimed that people of Indian background are "over-represented as victims". When both the victims and the aggressors claim that these attacks are racially motivated, what purpose does it serve to avoid a discussion about racism?

The police are charged with upholding the law and fighting crime, whatever its causes. There is little benefit in denying the existence of racist attitudes in our communities ...

So far, we have seen police directing their attention to victims and potential victims, telling them they should not speak loudly in their native language or travel on public transport with their MP3 players on display. Police also set up a hotline for Indian victims after the attack on Sharma. I fail to see how these measures tackle the cause of the attacks.

Now the police plan to go to India to educate Australia-bound students on how to minimise the risk of being attacked.

I thought the police said these attacks were opportunistic? Why, then, are they going specifically to India to advise Indians on safety? Or is this simply a business trip to ensure Indian international students continue to bring education revenue into the state by allaying their fears?

If it is racist hate-crimes we are looking at, just call them racist hate-crimes. Who or what is committing them is irrelevant.

But Andrew Bolt, provocateur-in-chief for the Herald Sun, isn't interested about the race of victims. Why is that, Andrew? Are they of the wrong colour? Instead, Andrew wants to accuse the whistle-blower of being involved in a cover-up.

But, since he’s writing in The Age, he does not dare be frank himself and name (directly) one of the ethnic groups most implicated in these attacks ...

Jeez, Andrew, does it really matter what ethnic background they are when the gangs perpetrating the incidents are themselves of no single ethnicity? What is the point of pointing out each ethnicity of each perpetrator? What will it prove? That non-whites have the ability to be racist also? That perpetrators of every race and colour can be inspired by the same violent and racist sentiments that you allow onto your blog? And that companies like Dell (whose banner advertisement appeared on Bolt's blog when I accessed it) sponsor?

The two most senior Muslim coppers in the UK are being had up, separately, on charges of serious fraud. Their defence is that the police ‘system’ is ‘institutionlly racist’. This is what happens when cultures (not races!) who do not share Western values in the rule of law and blind justice (and much more besides) infiltrate rather than assimilate. It is too late for Britain (and Holland and France and Canada) but not too late for Australia.
Why is it that Hindus don’t run around the planet beheading people, stoning women to death, letting off bombs and flying planes into buildings?
Gardez Bien (Reply)
Fri 22 May 09 (08:08am)

Probably because Hindus are too busy getting bashed up in Melbourne.

Had Andrew Bolt and his cyber-buddies read the balance of Hussain's article, they would have understood his point. There's no point Victorian police heading off to India to warn people there of the dangers lurking on our trains. Maybe what they should do is deal with the problem here. And acknowledge that these attacks are almost certainly racially motivated, regardless of who is perpetrating them.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Extraordinary asylum stories ...

The Daily Telegraph may see fit to publish racist comments about persons of Somali heritage. However, its fellow News Limited paper The Australian has published a more nuanced feature piece on Melbournites of Somali heritage in its Weekend Magazine.

A large number of Somalis migrated to Australia as refugees. Many have witnessed horrific violence in their home country, which has been locked in a vicious civil war since 1991. I cannot even begin to imagine what impact these experiences must have on Somali migrants today. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this is to cite passages from the March 23 story, authored by Drew Warne-Smith and titled New home, new hope:

Jama came to Australia in 1996, aged 12, with his mother, four brothers and three sisters. Like so many Somalis, his family had fled the capital, Mogadishu, after the civil war erupted in 1991. He remembers sitting on the crowded roof of a truck as it drove south towards Kenya, dead bodies littering the side of the road.

They were five years in a refugee camp in Kenya, awaiting asylum; a camp where rape and theft were commonplace and school comprised 50 kids in a room with one adult. His father was killed by Kenyan soldiers near the Somali border in 1993. He doesn’t know how or why.

Landing in Australia, a place his friends at the camp had teased him was “the last place on Earth”, Jama felt disarmed. Literally. No one was holding a gun. And no one looked scared, either. People seemed free to do anything and say anything, not that he could understand them.

Less than a year later, after studying English for six months at a language centre, he was sent to high school in Brunswick, placed in Year 7 according to his age. He could barely understand the teacher, let alone learn or contribute. Embarrassed, resentful, he began wagging days.

Soon he was hanging out with other African kids doing the same. Ignoring his mother’s pleas, he dropped out altogether in Year 9, then returned to school but never got as far as Year 11. He didn’t attend the mosque either, nor say his prayers. And he began drinking alcohol, a taboo in Islamic culture.

Then came the nightclubs and the fights. Stealing. Run-ins with police. A 5cm scar over his right eyebrow tells of being glassed in a brawl at a club in Ringwood. But Jama wasn’t scared of anyone, not here in Australia. Not after what he’d seen in Africa. He had no father, no discipline, no moral compass, and not much hope either. He had cut loose from his own culture and he had little hope of embracing a new one. Within Melbourne’s Somali community, Ahmed Jama became known as one of the Lost Ones ...

Some may say that Jama is an exception. After all, don't these boys all have fathers who can teach them good manners? The answer can be found in this frightening statistic.

About a quarter of all Somalis in Victoria – about 4000 – live in a family without a father, according to research by the Somali Australian Council of Victoria.

“The fathers are dead, or fighting, or they left Australia to return to Somalia, or they work overseas. And there is a tendency for teenagers in those families to become lost,” Ibrahim says.

But that's just one story. What about all the other Somali families? Meet Abdulle Hussein, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Somali Army.

He and Shukri had three children under four years old when they fled the Baidoa region, northwest of Mogadishu, in 1991. For three days and three nights they walked without stopping, until they reached Ethiopia about 140km away. Soon after, their youngest son died from illness in the suffocating heat. They buried him and kept walking. Six months and 4000km later they wandered into a refugee camp in Kenya, where they waited two years until being accepted into Australia.

Hussein glances at his 15-year-old son Said, sitting quietly in the corner. “They have no idea what it took to come here,” he says, without any trace of sadness or bitterness. Such hardship is unremarkable among those who came here.

Another family, I’m told, lost two sons escaping Somalia. A militia group kidnapped the eldest – being old enough to carry a gun – and they never saw him again. A crocodile killed the second as they crossed a river by night. The father still draws pictures of his boys to stop the memory of what they looked like from slipping away.

Really, who can imagine such grief, let along endure it? These experiences beggar belief. Fleeing a civil war only to be eaten by a crocodile. A stolen son, probably fighting for those who tried to kill his parents, most likely dead himself. Relatives already killed by bullets and knives. Burying a baby on a roadside.

I will also learn of Hussein Mumin, a Somali turned street kid, who saw his father and brother murdered, having already lost his mum. Rejected by a devout community unable to cope with how far he had strayed, he would be killed too – stabbed to death in a domestic argument. And as Barbara Chapman, his social worker and friend, tells me – when these refugees arrive, there are no government services to screen or treat them for their trauma. Yet we act surprised when they drop out of school, or pull a knife, or clash with police, or retreat to their own culture. The surprise, she says, is that they function at all.

Who can imagine, let alone endure, such grief? And we can hear so many other stories from those desperately risking their lives to reach our safer shores. Should we resent them for their efforts? Should we demonise them?

EVENT: Stop what you're doing, siddown, shut up and read this ...

If you are in Melbourne, you must go to the Melbourne Fringe Festival and watch the new comedy show Who Is Abdul Smith? Because if you don't go, you ... um ... er ... well you simply won't know the answer to the question!

Here is what the bludgers promoting this show have to say ...

IMAGINE THE UNITED NATIONS CROSSED WITH AUSTRALIAN IDOL AND DEAL OR NO DEAL.

10 comedians battle it out to prove who is the most "multi-culti" on Australia's favourite TV show: Who is Abdul Smith?

It's an action-packed 90 minutes of stand-up, storytelling, spontaneity and song, featuring Melbourne's most diverse comedy talent:

- Mohammed El-leissy was part of Fringe 2007's Fear of a Brown Planet, nominated for Best Newcomer.

- Sema Kuyruk is Australia's first hijab-wearing stand-up comic, on a one-woman mission to bring hijab back!

- Trent McCarthy had a sell-out season with his 2008 Comedy Festival show Turning Sudanese, described by The Age as "a delightful experience, both broadening and funny".

- Ajak Kwai, a former Sudanese refugee, is a singer and storyteller who promises not to eat you!

- Simon Pampena, the Angry Mathematician, has just toured Australia with his Maths Olympics comedy show as part of National Science Week.

- Farah Faiq is a feisty Iraqi-born gal with a passion for fashion and a razorsharp wit.

- Scott Fraser is a frustrated stand-up with a rod in his leg and a chip on his shoulder.

- Simon Tengende recently premiered his play Discrit Zimbabwe, using humour to explore the troubled history of his homeland.

- Alev Girgin has never been so single in her life, looking for Mr Right among so many Mr Wrongs.

- Cameron Farshid McDonald is a half-Iranian, half-Scottish Aussie who doesn't know which part of him dislikes the English more.

- plus a different special guest each night!

Who will win? Who will lose? And who is Abdul Smith?

Momo El-leissy tells me that this show will so damned good, I should be travelling to Melbourne just to see it. He'd better be right or I'll demand a refund.



Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

EVENT: Maz hits Mexico …

Attention All Melbournians!! You seriously cannot afford to miss Maz Jobrani. This dude is one of the funniest Americans to perform this side of the equator. Not bad for an Iranian!

You can read more about Maz here. His Sydney show on Saturday night 2 February 2008 was an absolute hoot. Yes, there was a large Iranian/Persian element in the audience, but they certainly were not the majority. Maz attracted people from across the ethnic and religious spectrum with his simple message of culturally “mixing it up”. If only John and Janette Howard could have been there. They might have actually learned something!

So stop what you’re doing, siddown, shuddup, grab your laptop and purchase a ticket online for tonight, Sunday 3 February 2008 before they all sell out. It’s his only performance in Melbourne and the last gig of his current Australian tour. Don’t miss out!!

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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