Xenophobia is not the answer

I wonder if ‘as a mother’ Sonia Kruger has heard of Tara Costigan and Marcus Rappel. Costigan was murdered by her ex-partner a day after she took out a domestic violence order. I wonder if ‘as a mother’ Sonia Kruger has considered that honour killings in countries like Pakistan might not actually be greatly dissimilar in substance to all the other intimate partner and family killings in Australia and other Western nations. After all, in these cases a man decides to kill a woman because he feels that she has slighted him. The nature and structure of the violence might not be the same between the different societies, but the core notion of male entitlement and consequent violence remains essentially the same.

More importantly, ‘as a mother’ has Sonia Kruger ever thought that Marcus Rappel or the other men like him, might be representative of all Anglo-Australian males? Such a thought would obviously be ridiculous. We know this because there are literally millions of everyday examples of decent Anglo-Australian men that demonstrate that it is ridiculous. 

Why then would any intelligent person go on live television and advocate banning all Muslims from entering Australia?

Nobody is denying that there is a problem with radical Islam. Nobody is unconcerned by ISIS. Every decent person is immensely saddened by what happened in Nice.

Yet, it beggars belief that anybody would ascribe the actions of radical terrorists to every Muslim. Leaving aside the fact that there are major cultural differences between Muslim societies, it is simply not tenable to think that each member of the Muslim faith is a threat. The actions of a few do not define 1.6 billion people.

I doubt that Sonia Kruger is blessed with a great deal of natural intelligence.

If she was then perhaps she might have remembered that the first victim in Nice was an elderly Muslim woman.

I wonder how her family would feel about Sonia’s ‘reaction’.

In the aftermath of Sonia’s statement, a gallant Waleed Aly spoke out against the ‘cycle of outrage’. Aly’s point was that we should try to understand where Sonia was coming from and to forgive her.

For her part Sonia’s explanation was that the image of a dead child ‘shocked her to the core’.

Apparently, that is why she came out with a statement that would not have been out of place in Germany in the 1930’s. Worse still, quite a number of Australians supported her.

Let’s not worry about the fact that previous images of deceased brown children have not sparked a similar emotional reaction in public from her.

As an aside, I have a number of German friends, many of whom I met during my graduate studies overseas. Many of them had grandfathers who fought in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe or even the Waffen SS during the war. On occasion they have wondered whether there was anything unique about German society that made Hitler and Nazism possible.

Comments like Kruger’s, the support it drew, the rise of Trump and now the odious re-emergence of Hanson, suggests otherwise.

The type of far right politics that we are now seeing seems inevitable when previously egalitarian societies become very unequal.

The people who support Pauline Hanson are disenfranchised. They feel like they have lost out as the current era of globalisation has taken off and they are correct. It is nobody’s fault, not even their own for having failed to adapt as the society and the economy changed. Their expectations might be disappointed, but a host of imagined enemies, be they Muslims, migrants, asylum seekers or the so-called ‘elite’, are not actually to blame for their predicament. The harsh truth is that they are no more entitled to a privileged first world lifestyle than anybody else.

It does make me wonder, if they increasingly don’t like this country and the direction that it is headed in, then why don’t they just move and try their luck elsewhere? If Hanson and her supporters had their way, Australia would be an isolated and poorer country. They would, through their own naivety and resentment, cut us off from international trade and the prosperity that comes from being a free and open society. That is self-destructive. The path to a better life can only come through tolerance and a rational conversation about sharing opportunities and the benefits of economic growth. Choosing to live here should involve cooperation and respect. You don’t get a free pass on that just because your grandparents were born here.

A society is not free if a Muslim woman cannot walk down the street without being afraid that she will be harassed due to her religion.

These small acts of terror and intimidation, perpetrated by the far right and their unwashed supporters, should not be tolerated.

Waleed Aly is wrong. We do not have to forgive Sonia Kruger. Whether she is a ‘nice’ person or not is neither here nor there. Her comments did a lot of harm. As Matthew Johns pointed out that Sonia’s comments were, “saying to a young Sydney boy whose parents came here from Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, it’s saying, 'you might be born here mate, but you’re not one of us'.”

Pointing out the unfairness of Sonia’s comments doesn’t impinge on her free speech. She still has a spot on national television, if not the intellect to warrant it.

Increasing levels of inequality may be driving the xenophobia. We do need to have an open dialogue about inequality, but we do not need to tolerate or accept brainless xenophobia.