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Trapping Australian Arabs in a cartoon

By Abe Ata - posted Wednesday, 16 August 2006


Australian, and other Western ignorance about the Arab world - its peoples, religion, culture and literature - has mutated into many stereotypical forms: jokes, cartoons, TV commercials, serials, songs and films.

Cartoons are particularly a unique species. They require different criteria of assessment and approach. Unlike editors and news analysts, cartoonists may not feel obliged to present all sides of the story. Rather they make a blunt assault on the characteristics of their subjects, and pride themselves on being selective in their presentation.

Clearly cartoons are created to entertain. They present information and transmit unambiguous messages. They have also played a significant role in defining racial stereotypes.

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The long-term effects of racist cartoons are enormous. My intuition compels me to believe that the damage caused to Australia’s Arab image – both Christian and Muslim - is beyond repair.

Other minorities such as Aborigines, Asians, Greeks and Italians have been the cartoonists’ delight since World War 1 but it has been with a difference.

The pitch of imagery targeting Muslims finds no match. The extent of the psychological wounds inflicted may warrant a nationally funded survey. Admittedly, the so-called Arab (Christian and Muslim) community leaders have not always been good at presenting their case.

Since the Six-Day War Australian cartoonists have adopted a different standard of assessment from those of ordinary journalists. To them an “objective” political caricature is considered to be a contradiction in terms. For a Muslim caricature to help sell more editions, the political or social comment must be graphic, blunt and succinct. It should also be a distortion of selected behaviour or morals.

Cartoonists in the Australian and Western press tend to pride themselves on their independence, and so they consider protests from their victims as attacks upon their own integrity. They have recognised that their success depends on their ability to reflect the prejudices and preferences of their readership. But they also seem to reflect those of their employers.

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When the recent racial vilification laws were introduced most Australian cartoonists defended trapping Muslims in cartoons as satire. A cartoonist of a regional paper rejected that he was a propagandist promoting a particular editorial posture. However, he recognised that Muslim caricatures were often more effective in influencing community attitudes than news and current affairs programs.

A 20th century Punch-like caricature of a bog Irishman or long-nosed Jew, or Norman Lindsay’s grotesque Huns or "Chinamen" now seem repugnant. Not so for Australia’s Christian and Muslim Arabs. Clearly the cartoons are now infrequent but are highly pitched when they surface.

Early in the 1990s a sign, placed in the foyer of a Melbourne theatre where Barry Humphries’ An Evening’s Intercourse was being staged, offered an unequivocal directive: “Arabs, use the dunnies please.”

Humphries, despite undergoing a wholesome education, lapsed on this occasion. He triumphantly offered a full range of tired clichés concerning power-mad dictators and Middle Eastern squalor in his film Les Patterson Saves The World. The human side and grievances of ordinary citizens deprived of basic human rights remained untouched. Other ethnic groups (notably, of course, Jews) have protested admirably and steadfastly against such vilifications, aided by changes in community attitudes.

Why is such stereotyping still considered acceptable when it is applied to Arabs and Muslims?

Part of the answer may lie in the inability of Australia’s small Arab Christian and Muslim population to counter such propaganda. Occasional complaints made to the Australian Press Council or the Human Rights Commission seem to be brushed off.

As a group Arabs are an economically-deprived group within Australia. Arriving relatively recently, many of them (34 per cent) are without a job - the highest among 144 ethnic groups. Arab and Muslim communities apparently have a limited understanding of the workings of Australian media and politics. And, it seems, they are still novices in the art of public relations.

One day I called a Muslim editor of a leading paper in Sydney suggesting ways to repair the damage inflicted by cartoonists. His immediate response was “Why should we? We know the truth ...”

The lecherous Arab has long been a pervasive stock figure in Western popular culture. This preoccupation with sexuality reflects images of the harem, the polygamist, the white slaver and the like. Even the old standby, the “Gypo” selling dirty postcards, still seems to be potent enough to titillate cartoonists. Trading on these images, a leading book publisher in Melbourne now sells postcards projecting a Muslim obsession with sex for 45 cents.

Another potent cartoon shows a Muslim-Arab oil sheik holding the West to ransom. The image is rooted in the mistrust of those who held oil sheikhs responsible for threatening others’ lifestyles by controlling oil flow. (This scenario, of course, ignores the fact that only 10 per cent of the world’s Arab population lives in the major oil producing states.)

Pre World War II German and French cartoonists caused similar damage to Jewish bankers and by implication the rest of their community.

The myth propagated by the Western media is that all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arabs is equally damaging. Hence Indonesians and Malaysians are not generally portrayed in cartoons wearing the appurtenances of Islam. This despite the reality that they are among those oil producers who held the West to “ransom”, and at times were a vague “threat” against Australia.

The well being of the 25 million Christian Arab minority (namely, Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi and Jordanian-Syrian) worldwide is conveniently ignored. Presumably because all their organised Christian activity is non-political and non-violent, the community hardly ever hits western headlines. An independent journalist commented that Islamists were equated with terrorists whose stories sell more copy than people who congregate for Bible study.

There is some evidence that a direct hostility to Islam is part of the ideology of the secular Australia. This has a little bearing on the prejudices that have survived from European history. They reveal a destiny to which ordinary Muslims are chained - one that fixes them, and students at school, to a series of set reactions.

Several books in Australian school libraries were found to show that the ordinary Muslim does not escape the “fanatical” image of Ayatolla Khomeini. One of these is The Book of the Year (Allen & Unwin, 1981). The book depicts dozens of cartoons. They show various caricatures depicting greedy exploiters, terrorists and arrogant nationalists - all subject to the irrationalities of religious belief. The book has never been banned from school libraries.

If the media can start to report the pain felt by ordinary Christian and Muslim Middle Easterners at these stereotypes there is hope that these types of cartoons will eventually disappear.

Conscious or unconscious racism should not be a component of our politics, nor should it be disguised as freedom of speech.

And while any cartoonist, Australian or others, must perforce deal in stereotypes, there are some which are outdated, insensitive and threaten community harmony.

It is reasonable to suggest an end to satirists’ pens drawing these outdated and unacceptable images, and to withdraw offending books from Australian schools.

Trapping the cartoonist's prejudices is always a better option.

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The following individuals are to be acknowledged with great and sincere appreciation for providing permission to incorporate their cartoons in this article: Patrick Cook, Ron Tandberg, Peter Nicholson and Larry Mendonca.



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About the Author

Abe W Ata was a temporary delegate to the UN in 1970 and has lived and worked in the Middle East, America and Australia. Dr Ata is a Senior Fellow Institute for the Advancement of Research, and lectures in Psychology at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne). Dr Ata is a 9th generation Christian Palestinian academic born in Bethlehem.

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