Trapping Australian Arabs in a cartoon

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.