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Good comment on Australian government's policy of preferencing
"persecuted minorities" from Syria in the new refugee intake.
If you turn your back on Syria’s Muslims, forget about ‘Team Australia'
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/if-you-turn-your-back-on-syrias-muslims-forget-about-team-australia-20150908-gjhr06.html?stb=fb
September 9, 2015
Maher Mughrabi
I know that many people will already have moved on to some other social
media sensation, but I would ask you to cast your mind back a couple of
days to the boy on the beach.
How terrible, you thought, when you saw Aylan Kurdi's lifeless little
body, or maybe just his shoes as he "rested" in the arms of a Turkish
policeman.
Now look again. Because the little boy on the beach - like the vast
majority of those fleeing Syria and Iraq's wars - was a Muslim.
You and I have no idea what kind of Muslim he would have turned out to
be.
Maybe he would have prayed five times a day and kept his political views
to himself. Maybe he would have said "in the name of Allah, the
compassionate and the merciful" before tucking into a bacon sandwich and
never darkened the door of a mosque. Or maybe he would have beaten his
wife or gone into organised crime or blamed the West for his and his
people's misfortune and blown up a bus.
Illustration: Cathy Wilcox
It doesn't matter. What matters, it seems, is that we can now decide
that Muslims are trouble and that if we walk into a burning house, we'll
save the others first. What do we know about the others? We know they're
not Muslims.
In mid-August, when little Slovakia said it would take some refugees -
200 in all - but that they had to be Christians because Slovakia
"doesn't have mosques", we all knew what was going on: the rise of the
far-right in Europe's post-Communist east, part of a wider wave of
anti-immigrant feeling across the continent.
The last time I checked, Australia had a few mosques. Indeed, there is
one of them at the end of the street where I live. And that means there
are Muslims here. Indeed, some of them would be generous enough to say
that I am one of them. I have always said that I am not a Muslim, but
that Islam is a part of me.
The question is now whether this country can truly say - for all the
mosque visits by pollies, for all the iftar dinners at Ramadan, for all
the talk of "Team Australia" - that Islam is a part of it. After
watching the Reclaim rallies recently, after hearing some of what passes
for commentary and debate, the question seems almost foolish, naive. Of
course "we" don't want them! Muslims are just trouble. Let them go
somewhere where they can get their sharia and their halal and their
fatwas and their burqas and all the rest and leave us alone.
Perhaps this country has decided that Muslims are too big a cultural
problem. In the same way that in 1938, when Thomas Walter White, the
minister for customs in the Lyons government, attended the conference at
the French resort town of Evian on the plight of Jewish refugees, he
told those gathered there that Australians would rather not import a
"racial problem".
I am not the only Arab of Muslim parentage who regards what has happened
to the Christian populations of the Arab world in recent decades as a
shame and a disgrace and a crime, one that shows little sign of ending.
It is true that Arab Christians are confronted with an existential
threat. But it is also true that the bulk of those being butchered by
the Assad regime and by the so-called Islamic State are Muslim Arabs and
Muslim Kurds.
Australian Muslims were alive to the plight of these people long before
the death of little Aylan. On YouTube and on Arabic-language satellite
channels they saw far worse horrors involving men, women and children.
And they became convinced that what was happening in Syria was a
genocide.
But when they turned over to mainstream Australian TV and to political
debate in this country they saw no urgency in the discussion. The Prime
Minister was happy to label Bashar al-Assad "the worst of the worst" and
to accuse him of "serial atrocities", but as for doing something . . .
well, it was all too hard.
Now we are told that Canberra is considering bombing the areas held by
Islamic State - areas where the population is largely Muslim - and
rescuing Christians and Yazidis and Druze - but not Muslims. If this is
so, then there is no point in talking about relations with the
Australian Muslim community.
Perhaps that will win the Coalition some votes in some important seats.
I don't know. But I do know that the Arab communities of this country
are already bitterly divided by this conflict and the government's
response to it. If Muslims here feel that the blood of their brothers
and sisters in Syria does not cry out as loudly as that of other
communities, I worry about the long-term consequences.
And I wonder what the hue and cry about a little boy on a beach was
really all about.
Maher Mughrabi is Fairfax Media's foreign editor.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/if-you-turn-your-back-on-syrias-muslims-forget-about-team-australia-20150908-gjhr06.html?stb=fb#ixzz3lLLu5vUp
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