Australia: Look Different and Risk being Assaulted
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By Ghali Hassan, Axis of Logic
Axis of Logic exclusive
Monday, Mar 29, 2010
The
ongoing, racially-motivated attacks on international students and people from
non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, and concerted efforts by the Australian Government
and the media to downplay racism, prove that Australians are unable and
unwilling to live as a civilised society without racism. In white Anglo-Saxon
Australia, it remains as deeply-entrenched as ever.
On February
6, 2010, atan international
students' safety forum organised by the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women's
Coalition in Melbourne, the Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mr Simon Overland said: ”Don't display your iPods, don't display your
valuable watch, and don’t display your valuable jewellery. Try to look as poor
as you can or risk being assaulted.” (The Age, February
7, 2010). Mr Overland was referring to a
spate of racially-motivated attacks against Indians in Melbourne. In reality,
Mr Overland was saying: ‘If you look different (i.e., not white Anglo-Saxon),
you risk being assaulted and it is your fault.’ Mr Overland was denying the
existence of deeply-entrenched racism in Australia and blaming the victims of
racially-motivated crimes.
The
Australian government and media are refusing to acknowledge racially-motivated
violence and continue to play down its horrendous effects on people from
non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. The Government is concerned that racially-motivated violence on
international students will damage Australia’s manufactured image and undermine
Australia’s multimillion-dollar “education industry”, which is destroying
Australia’s education system (For more, see my: “Australia’s Predatory Education”).
To be
clear about Australia’s chronic racism, Indian students are not the only
victims of racially-motivated violence in Australia. Violence against Indian
students is reflected in racially-motivated crimes against anyone who looks
different, whether Indigenous Australians, Muslim Australians, or people from
ethnic minorities, including refugees. However, the majority of
racially-motivated crimes are covered-up and excluded because they are
considered politically unpalatable. Racially-motivated crimes against Indian
students took centre stage, because of wide coverage by the vocal Indian media
and the Indian community in Australia.
The primary victims of
racially-motivated violence and discrimination in Australia are Australians of
non-English speaking backgrounds, Muslims Australians, Indigenous Australians
and refugees, including Africans.
On September
26, 2007, Liep Gony, a 19-year old Sudanese-Australian was murdered in
Melbourne in an unprovoked and cowardly attack by two white Australians who
were motivated by hatred of “blacks”. Kevin Andrews, the bigoted former
Immigration minister in the Howard’s government, linked the murder of a young
man who spent half of his life in Australia, to lack of “integration” on the
part of the Sudanese refugees in Australia who continue to suffer
discrimination.
In
February 2010, an Australian student from non-English speaking background at a
regional university in Southern Queensland was seriously assaulted by a white
Anglo-Australian landlord. After the police arrived on the scene, the police
immediately took sides to protect the white landlord. The student was removed
from the property which he was renting and made homeless by the police despite
the fact that the landlord was holding the student’s bond and rent money. The
student was taken to the hospital and spent the night there. The landlord remains
free and continues his illegal business preying on unprotected people.
When
the student called the Residential Tenancy Authority, he was informed that the
police acted unlawfully and that he should insist on laying charges against the
landlord and demand compensation for damage. “Queensland is like the rest of
Australia, extremely racist and extremely violent state”, wrote the student in
an email. There is no doubt, if the crime had been committed by a non-Anglo
Australian, the offender would have been arrested and charged.
The
perception that the police were doing everything they could to stop assaults on
non-Anglo-Saxon Australians and foreign students doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Police inaction and Policing are part of the problem of racism in Australia.
On
February 14, 2007, Ahmed Dini, an 18-year old youth of Somali origin was
assaulted by a police officer at Flemington police station in Melbourne. The
assault was so violent, the young man required dental surgery. Recently, an
out-of-court settlement awarded the Somali man more than $70,000 in
compensation for his ordeal. In another civil case, eight police officers based at Moonee Ponds police station are facing
assault and false imprisonment charges after it was alleged that a 19-year-old African youth was assaulted by police and lost part
of his sight in one eye. (The Age,
March 17, 2010).
A new report by the Springvale Monash
Legal Service (SMLS) revealed that police in Melbourne were assaulting and
racially abusing young Africans, particularly [1]. Although the report covered only three
regions in Melbourne (Braybrook, Flemington and Greater Dandenong), it
is a good representative sample of Australia as a whole. In addition, the Australian
Broadcasting Corp (ABC) revealed recently that a large number of Victoria
Police, including senior officers, are involved in serious racial discrimination
after a racist email was circulated state widely on the police email system.While not all police are racist and there are many honest and
professional police, the
vast majority of police in Australia are white Anglo-Saxon and like the rest of
Anglo-Saxon Australia, racism is deeply entrenched in the police force.
A study by the Institute for
Community, Ethnicity and Policy Alternatives (ICEPA) of Victoria University in
Melbourne found that; “More than half (57%) of international students (not just
Indian students) surveyed said they found Australia less safe than they have
expected.” A majority (more than three-quarters) of international students
reported “threats to their safety”, ranging from verbal abuse to violence that
they believed was motivated by “a racial, religious or cultural element”, and
even felt that “police at time displayed ethnic and racial bias” towards them,
according to the ICEPA study.
Despite
the disproportionately low rate of “ethnic” crimes, police across Australia are
known to target certain groups. Australians
from non-Anglo-Saxon background were more than three times likely to experience
discrimination in policing than those white Australians born in Australia.
According
to data gathered by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission – a government
funded department – Indigenous Australians are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned and 26
times more likely to be held in police custody than Anglo-Saxon Australians.
Indigenous children are 18.6 times more likely to be held in detention.
In Western Australia – the nation’s redneck state –
the rate is 32.4 times higher than for Indigenous children. In Queensland – the
nation’s most corrupt state – more than half
(55.7%) of young Australians in detention were Indigenous. In 2007, 432 of Australia's
742 juvenile prisoners were Indigenous.
Twenty years after the Royal Commission in Aboriginal
Death in Custody, Indigenous Australians continue disproportionately to risk
arrest, detention, assault and death in custody. In Queensland alone, there
have been four deaths in custody in just over a month this year, one on
February 20 and three in March 2010.
Discrimination
against Muslims Australians (1.8 of Australia’s population) is on the rise. Muslim women have
been an obvious target of racially-motivated attacks by racist Anglo
Australians because their traditional dress makes them visible. On November 5,
2005, “[a Muslim woman] was punched, kicked, spat on and abused, told to ‘go
home to her own country and left with an injury to her right eye’. Her sister,
she said, had a knife thrust towards’ her face.” The family was picnicking at a
Williamstown’s park near Melbourne. (The
Age, November 13, 2005). ”I think families are staying home and avoiding
going out, particularly women who wear the hijab, because we have seen
that they are particularly targeted”, said Australian Arabic Council deputy
chairman, Mr Taimor Hazou.
In February 2009, a Muslim student at
the University of Western Sydney – the cesspool of Australian universities –
was racially abused and assaulted by one of the University’s unskilled general
staff. Despite overwhelming evidence of racially-motivated attack and the fact
that the staff has admitted using racist language and violence, the University
concocted and used baseless allegations to justify the student’s exclusion from
the University just a few months before he was scheduled to complete his
graduate study. The
student was accused of calling another staff a “racist”, a form of bullying
employed by Anglo-Australians not only to intimidate their victims of racism,
but also to legitimise and normalise racism. While the student was denied the right to view the
“evidence” against him, the accused staff continues to enjoy the University’s
protection and support. Anglo Australians do not like to be called racist, but they love to preach “tolerance”
with bigotry. When the student made a complaint to the NSW Ombudsman against
the unfair and racist conduct of the University, the Ombudsman declined to investigate the case, because it would
be against the Ombudsman’s role to act in public interest.The case
highlights a policy that forms part of Australia’s systemic racism in higher
education and employment.
For a decade, John Howard’s right-wing Liberal (Party) government reinvented
and nurtured widespread racism and bigotry against Muslims. The September 11 events in America – which had
nothing to do with Muslim nations – were a convenient tool used by the Howard’s government to
enact anti-Muslim repressive and draconian “Anti-Terrorism” laws.
The current right-wing
Labor Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has adopted the same laws and discriminatory
policy of its predecessor. On February 23, 2010, the Rudd Government unveiled its “Counter-Terrorism
White Paper”, specifically targeted Muslims in Australia and people from a list
of Muslim nations. Mr Rudd alleges that Australia is “under permanent terror
threat” and “faces an increased terrorist threat from people born or raised in
Australia”. Mr Rudd also announced tougher visa checks of people
from ten nations. The Rudd government is refusing to name these nations, and no
one knows if Israel, the
world’s leading terrorist sate, is on the list.
To
date, not a single Australian has been killed by “terrorists” in Australia. It
is the Australian army that is participating (as a mercenary force to enforce U.S.-Zionist
ideology) in the slaughter of innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. In poor
Afghanistan, the massacres of school children and women have become a daily
ritual. In Iraq, an estimated 1.5 million innocent Iraqis (mostly women and
children) have been slaughtered since 2003 – the third phase of a long
holocaust that began in 1991 – in one of the most premeditated mass murders of
civilians in modern history with the full support of the Australian government.
Furthermore, during the Israeli attacks on the population
of Gaza (under Israeli military siege since 2006) in December 2008-January 2009,
when more than 1,420 defenceless Palestinians (mostly women and children) were
massacred in cold blood, Australia was one of a handful of Western governments
that supported Israel’s terror and war crimes, and continues to do so unconditionally.
Australia’s “Anti-Terrorism” laws are aimed at
manipulating the public, fomenting fear and stoking up resentment against
Muslims. Indeed, Muslim men in Australia were rounded-up, imprisoned, put on
show trials and convicted of “terrorism”. Recently, some Muslim men were found
guilty on preposterous charges – with no victims and no known targets. The aim
is to intimidate and bully the entire Muslims community, and to send a message
that Muslims are dangerous and that Muslim Australians do “not belong” to this
country.
To make the situation worse for
Muslims, the Australian media – a collection of anti-Muslim Zionist and
proto-fascist outlets competing with each other to promote Israel-U.S. ideology
– play an important role in the construction of racialised communities as
“ethnic” and in inciting hatred and promoting Islamophobia among Anglo-Saxon
Australians. Muslim Australians are demonised and presented as a ‘threat to the
Australian values’. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi propagandists would have been
pleased to have such racist propaganda organs on their side, iånflaming xenophobia
and promoting fascist ideology.
On the
surface, Australia is a friendly and “multicultural” (best defined as
anti-cultural) country until you scratch the surface. Most, if not all,
Anglo-Saxon Australians see themselves as being uniquely pure and superior to
all ‘other’ people by virtue of their Anglo-Saxon origin, very backward
thinking. Racially-motivated violence and
discrimination formed the foundation of Anglo-Australia and
were forged into the Australian national character, and remain so today alive
and thriving throughout
Australian culture.
Australia’s
manufactured image of a “fair-go for all” is an illusion designed to project
Australia as an equal society and cover-up deeply-entrenched racism. Just take
a look at who is doing what. Privileged employments are reserved for the white
Anglo-Saxon majority, with few places for those exotic faces that are chosen to
tick the so-called “equal opportunity” box. White Anglo-Saxon middle-class and
rich males “shape legislation, administration and judicial texts in their own
image and to their own advantage”, wrote Margaret Thornton, a legal scholar and
professor of law at the Australian National University (ANU). One of the many places to watch white Anglo-Saxon
Australians indulging in keeping their privilege and defending their white
ideology is the
exclusively white clubs of the Australian federal and state parliaments, they
are white only territories.
A survey on racial and ethnic
discrimination in Australia by the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University released in June 2009 found clear
evidence of racism in employment. The study revealed that Australians with
“foreign” sounding names had greater difficulty of finding employment than
those Australians with Anglo-Saxon names. According to the study, people with aMiddle Eastern
background (i.e., Muslims) had to send 127 per cent more applications for awaiter’s
position than their Anglo-Saxon contenders [2]. As
a nation, Australia has no ‘Bill of Rights’, but it has ‘anti-discrimination’
legislation to legitimise racial discrimination.
A
civilised Australia rests on the pillars of non-discriminatory equality and
justice for all of its citizens, regardless of skin colour, race, religion,
wealth and political affiliation. The best solution is for Australia to adopt non-discriminatory
policies and makes people’s safety and wellbeing its top priority.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in
Australia.
Notes:
[1]
Smith B. & Reside, S. (2010, March). ‘Boys, You Wanna
Give Me Some Action?’Intervention into
Policing of Racialised Communities in Melbourne. Melbourne: Legal Services
Board of Victoria. (PDF).
[2] Booth, A., Leigh, A., & Varganova, E.
(2009, June). Does Racial and Ethnic
Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment,
(Working paper). Canberra: Australian National University, Research School of
Economics. (PDF).
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