How opposing racial stereotypes combine to create anti-Arab racism

But, unlike many migrants, the Arab Muslim migrant is a subversive will. He or she is interested not only in opening a restaurant and offering exotic food. He or she (especially, she, the veiled one) embodies the will of the other, the one who can subvert the European national/patriarchal order by speaking and acting in the name of another, Arab Muslim, supranational patriarchal order. They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere: explicit bin Ladens and closet bin Ladens; conscious bin Ladens and unconscious bin Ladens; bin Ladens on the beach and bin Ladens in the suburbs. Within this register, the Arab, like the Jew of the Nazis, is intolerable as such. Even a single Arab is a threat.

Contain the Arab, or exterminate the Arab? A "tolerable" presence in the suburbs, or caged in a concentration camp? Exterminate their political will or remove them physically, in their totality, will and body? The politics of the Western postcolonial state is constantly and dangerously oscillating between these two tendencies today.

When I first arrived in Australia in 1976, I was an anti-Muslim racist. Born and raised in a staunchly Christian Lebanese environment, leaving Lebanon in the midst of a civil war I understood as "backward Muslims hordes out to destroy civilised Europeanised Christians", I embodied and felt most of the racist categorisations I am critically reflecting upon today.

But as I began my studies at Macquarie University, I increasingly interacted with many anti-racist students and teachers who were forcing me to question my beliefs. My early interaction with them was reasonably hostile. But in the end, they were offering a version of human relations that was very far from, and I say without hesitation ethically and practically far superior to, my "Christians versus Muslims" world outlook. As I thought things through, which is what a university allows you to do - despite what some simplistic anti-university journalists want people to believe today - it did not take long before I was won over.

I like to think that, through these anti-racist students, the Australian society of the 1970s made me a better person. They represented what was best about that society. And so, today, as I see Australia moving towards the very "Christian versus Muslim outlook"' that it has so successfully rid me of, I experience puzzlement, pain and a sense of dread. On one hand, I can see in the new "Christian versus Muslim" zealots a part of me, and as such, I understand how good people can come to think in such ugly ways. I have no desire to diabolise racists just as I don't diabolise my early self. But on the other, I cannot but feel that such people are taking a well-trodden path, one that has proved a disaster for all those who have taken it.

In the name of being part of an advanced civilisation, they are taking Australia backward, in the direction of the ignorant, arrogant and prejudiced Lebanese Christian culture of the 1970s I thankfully left behind. And so, even if part of me thinks that it is useless to preach, I have to tell such people: You never go forward by thinking of yourself as protecting Western Christian civilisation against Muslim hordes. You only go backward. This has been proved historically again and again. Please believe me.