An ignorant Australian?

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.