An ignorant Australian?

Its advertisements pose the question: “Are you an informed Australian?” But if you believe what has been written in The Australian on February 20, 2006 about Muslim migrants, you will probably end up a bigoted, or at best ignorant, Australian.

The Australian newspaper has painted a picture of a Muslim culture hostile to mainstream Australia, with extreme attitudes toward women, powered by a sense of “jihad” and unable to adapt to the Australian mainstream.

In the past, The Australian has published numerous opinion pieces supporting or suggesting such a view. The authors have pointed to the alleged inability of Muslim migrants to adapt to Australian conditions. Alternatively, they have used Muslims as a scapegoat in an attempt to impose their own cultural monolith on Australia’s multicultural status quo.

When parliamentarians have made (and then withdrawn) infantile allegations against Muslim migrants (such as the recent embarrassment with Danna Vale’s contribution to the RU486 debate), The Australian has supported them, "gracing" its op-ed pages with an article by Muslim-hater Mark Steyn.

Last Monday The Australian published excerpts from an interview with the Prime Minister. They were originally meant to be published on or about March 11, 2006 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Howard Government, but for some reason the paper brought this date forward.

Mr Howard has made some recent remarks on what he views as unfortunate traits limited to a small minority from within Muslim communities. Some of Mr Howard’s remarks are correct, while others are perhaps reflective of popularly-held misconceptions.

I don't intend to focus on what Mr Howard said, but rather on the editorial baggage which The Australian has tried to attach to Mr Howard’s comments.

Mr Howard’s words were about a minority, but The Australian generalises these traits into characteristics of what it describes as “Muslim culture”.

In an article entitled “Howard hits out at ‘jihad’ Muslims”, George Megalogenis has the PM “strongly criticis[ing] aspects of Muslim culture, warning they pose an unprecedented challenge for Australia's immigration program”.

The paper went on to report that “[t]he Prime Minister also expressed concern about Muslim attitudes to women”.

So we have “Muslim culture” and “Muslim attitudes”. The suggestion is that there exists an homogenous Muslim culture, that it is a migrant culture, and that it has implications for Australia’s immigration program.

And what evidence has been presented of an homogenous Muslim culture? Who knows? Perhaps more importantly, who cares?

The Australian’s editorial of February 20, 2006 provides some background behind the interview with the PM, which was held “to discuss multiculturalism, immigration and the integration into our society of new arrivals”. In this context, Mr Howard “was asked if he was confident that Muslims would integrate as thoroughly as the wave of Asian immigrants of the 1980s and 90s had done”.

The very fact such a question could be asked shows the exceptional ignorance of the editorial’s author. It suggests that Muslim migration is a recent phenomenon, and Muslim migrants all have the same culture. Muslims are painted as a recently-arrived monolithic migrant group.

The reality is that Muslims have been migrating to Australia for over a century. Apart from the descendants of Afghan and northwest Indian cameleers and hawkers, there were a large number of post-war Muslim migrants from Albania and the former Yugoslavia.

Hardly four decades after the Gallipoli campaign, Australia relaxed its White Australia Policy to enable migration of Turks from Cyprus and Anatolia. Today, Turkish Australians are some of the best settled migrants in the country. Turks manage more mosques than any other ethnic Muslim group.

If they seriously believe that Muslims make up a monolithic cultural group of migrants arriving after the wave of Indo-Chinese migrants of the 1980’s, one wonders which Australia the editors of The Australian have been living in all these years.

The editors claim “[i]n recent years we have had no one, other than some Muslims, bringing such missionary zeal to the establishment of their own religion and society within our own”.

Exactly what the problem is with establishing one’s culture and institutions isn’t explained. Islam, like Christianity, is a missionary faith. Displaying missionary zeal is not in itself illegal. Neither is establishing mosques or schools. Indeed, the Howard Government has been committed to the public funding of independent schools.

Muslim missionary work has been performed in Australia since the arrival of the first Muslim settlers in the 19th century. The vast majority of Muslim missionary work has been peaceful, usually in the form of speeches by imams and visiting scholars.

The Australian editorial laments “… the attitude of some of our latest arrivals who see the relaxed and tolerant lifestyle of their neighbours as some sort of affront to their passionately held beliefs”.

The most recently arrived waves of Muslim migrants (apart from skilled tradespeople, professionals or business migrants) have been asylum seekers from Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa. Apart from one Bosnian charged following the recent anti-terror raids, there is no evidence of such attitudes being held by any of these categories of asylum seekers. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Afghans or Bosnians or Somalis or other similar groups live and work in ghettoes or enclaves.

The Australian continues:

Since the end of World War II, Australia has prided itself on the ability of everyone to fit in. The waves of Greek and Italian migrants have been absorbed in two generations. They are now no easier to pinpoint than the Scots or Irish immigrants of a century before.

Exactly the same can be said for Albanian and Bosnian Muslim migrants from the post-war era. It can also be said for many Turkish migrants, whose dress and appearance makes them indistinguishable from other European Australians. One wonders whether The Australian’s editors have ever visited Smithfield or Penshurst in Sydney and attempted to identify a Bosnian Muslim who isn’t sporting a prayer cap.

The Australian goes on to state “Asian immigrants of the last part of the 20th century are now doing likewise. None of these peoples harboured any hope or desire to imprint their culture over that which existed here.”

So how does one define the “imprint” of a culture? Have Vietnamese or Chinese migrants suddenly started eating only meat pies? Is Sydney’s China Town being dismantled? Did we see the last of the Chinese New Years celebrations in late January?

The Australian editorial shows how completely divorced it is from reality in the following lengthy paragraph:

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some of our newest Muslim immigrants. They have arrived with attitude. They have a mindset that disapproves of our relaxed and socially unstructured lifestyle. Their young men, raised in the strictures of Muslim households, do not understand, and have no wish to accept, the freedoms young Australian women take for granted. It was this clash of cultures that fuelled the Cronulla riots and which is at the heart of Mr Howard's warning.

Again, none of the most recent Muslim arrivals had any involvement in the Cronulla riots. The riots were said to be in retaliation for the assault on surf life savers by certain people of “Middle Eastern” appearance. I am yet to meet someone from Bosnia or the Horn of Africa of Middle Eastern appearance. Further, there is no suggestion of involvement by Afghans.

Rather, if there are young Middle Eastern men showing bad attitudes to women and the law, they are from second and third generations of more settled migrant groups - Lebanese and Pakistanis. The boys convicted of gang-rapes were not Afghan or Somali or Bosnian. They were boys from Lebanese and Pakistani families.

In adding editorial baggage to the PM’s recent pronouncements, the editorial writers of The Australian are seeking to paint a coherent picture of a monolithic culture of recently arrived Muslim migrants. But examined against the reality of wave after wave of Muslim migration, the picture painted looks little more than incoherent pieces of paint hurled onto the canvas.