'Four Corners' blames non-Muslims for extremism

It's always quite amusing when someone mounts an argument that those who break the law do so because of others who don't accept them. An excellent recent example of this was Ryan Al-Natour wanting to blame the rest of society, particularly "morally corrupt conservatives" for the Macquarie Field riots. With such arguments, both collective and self-responsibility of wrongdoers are successfully taken out of the equation.

We have a similar story constructed on the ABC's Four Corners program a few nights ago, where Sally Neighbour essentially tried to say it's the fault of non-Muslims that Muslims are being radicalised.

At the start of the show, Neighbour makes her prejudices clear. Referring to anti-Muslim sentiment, she says:

Since September 11, the Bali bombings and the war on terror, views like this have become commonplace.

The implicit assertion is that terrorist attacks overseas are wholly or mostly responsible for hostility to Muslims. Unlike my blog, she appears not to have contemplated the role of the following behaviours, committed by some Australian Muslims, at all:

• the committing of racially motivated pack rapes on “Aussie sluts”;
• the vilification of non-Muslim Australian women to “cover up” and “dress modestly”;
• gang violence committed on non-Muslims;
• Muslim clerics preaching that non-Muslim women are to blame when they are raped; and
• other Australian clerics promoting anti-Semitism and supporting terrorism

Such a possibility also appears to have completely escaped the minds of the Muslims that Sally Neighbour interviews. Like Neighbour and the left, they are also determined to stamp out their own individual and collective responsibilities by blaming the rest of society for the behaviours of members of their communities:

FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: People are asking the question, "Why is there anti-social behaviour? Why is it on such a great level?" I mean when you have a group of young people, a group, any group, take any group, put them under the microscope and put them under so much pressure and under so much scrutiny, eventually they’re going to rebel. And you are creating a generation that has deep-rooted hatred and anger and frustration towards the very place that they’re supposed to call home, and this is quite dangerous.

SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Walid Sabourne): Walid, why do you think that whole Cronulla thing happened? What do you think it was all about?

WALID SABOURNE: I think my personal opinion, like tension, that the Muslim community and Arabs and Middle Easterners, you know, attacked so much by the media that we wanted an outlet and that was a good excuse, just to attack; the white attack us, men attack us, we’ll go and attack their people and attack their belongings. That’s only my opinion.

JOE ELALI: We don’t want this fight but some people are pushing us, some people are like, are pushing it to the limit where we’re going to start a war in this country …

Nope. No responsibility for the criminal and anti-social behaviours I have described above, and no consideration of the possibility of this having something to do with the hostility towards them. No pledges to change the way young members of their community think about Australian women, or to persuade them to not commit criminal acts. Rather, indulgence in self-pity, on the basis that Australian Muslims can only become violent delinquents or Islamic extremists:

MOHAMED TAHA (at forum): The way I see it as a young Australian, a Lebanese Muslim, this is how the media portrays it to us: If you’re growing up and you commit crimes, if you do bad, if you vandalise, if you steal, if you do all the bad stuff, what does the media call you? A Lebanese thug, yeah? And alright, the opposite of that - if you do good, if you grow your beard, if you wear the Islamic original dress and if you do everything good, they call you an extremist. So where is the line drawn between good and bad?

And, in fact, a justification for Islamic terrorism is offered. You see, when a terrorist act is committed that kills hundred of people, it's all our fault because of Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel:

WALID SABOURNE: Every day hundreds of people, Muslims dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet one person dies you know in America or in England by a terrorist, you know, we’re terrorists. But when America hits the Middle East, you know, that’s freedom, human rights and democracy and when Muslims you know bomb America it’s terrorism.

It’s hypocrisy, double standards. We aren’t the ones going around with armies and raping you women and you know bombing you to pieces. We’re not the ones doing it. You are the ones doing it to us; we’re there getting slaughtered, we’re there defending ourselves we, we are the freedom fighters.

Yes, there really is a moral equivalence between the targeting of civilians to establish a totalitarian Islamic regime and the overthrowing of a regime in order to install democracy. You see, the freedom of religious thugs is equal to the freedom of everyone else. The left's moral relativism applied to real-life.

Gandhi Sindyan was the only person to bring a sober perspective to the program:

GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES: Yeah look honestly I think there is, yes. There is, you know because it’s so easy to be a victim. It’s so easy to sit back and say, you know, "I give up, everybody’s picking on me," you know. But I use that to empower myself. But once again this is how I operate but I can’t say that other young people in my community will have that same mentality.

As Tim Blair points out on his blog, Neighbour's crusade against non-Muslims is easily undermined by the facts:

BOMBERS EXCUSED
The ABC’s Sally Neighbour on Britain’s July 7 bombers:
”They flourished in poor, under-employed, ghetto-ised communities, already alienated from British society and further marginalised by the belligerent politics and policing of the war on terror.”
Nonsense. The bombers were not marginalised http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4678837.stm nor particularly poor. Two had university degrees. One left behind £121,000 http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/009705.php . Neighbour is rewriting history. (Via Ganesh S.)

Has Neighbour any objective evidence for her claims? She speaks with Waleed Aly from the “Global Terrorism Research Centre”, but he is simply an Islamic spokesperson and community leader, who opposes the banning of books which promote terrorism. So Neighbour has done the equivalent of asking a trade union leader for an opinion on industrial relations: you are never going to get an objective, disinterested answer. Rather, Aly, like Neighbour, is keen to shift responsibility for anti-social behaviour by Muslims onto non-Muslims.

As Noel Pearson wrote, terrorism involves a poisonous and nihilistic ideology which relies on an “Islamist narrative”. While Muslims should certainly not be victimised for the acts of a few terrorists, it is equally important to engage in the field of ideas and win the intellectual debate against the Islamists. The truth is that Muslims are not generally being persecuted, and when they are, it’s usually by fellow Muslims. In fact, most Muslims in Australia have been admitted as citizens on humanitarian grounds, because they were refugees. Most of the time, they were being persecuted and were at risk from other Muslims. When the Islamist narrative is compared to the facts, it simply does not measure up. This is our biggest intellectual weapon in the fight against extremism.

Yet the left want to surrender this important weapon by legitimising these absurd feelings of victimhood. The problem with this approach is that it would empower Muslims to feel more aggrieved, thus justifying more bad behaviours.

Sometimes it’s forgotten that there is a real difference between resentment which is justified, and that which is not. To repeat, the Islamist narrative does not stack up. If Muslims are encouraged to feel like they are victims, some will be making other demands on us too, such as the implementation of sharia law (one study in the UK by Daniel Pipes found that 50 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law implemented in the UK). We would end up with a situation similar to before World War II, where the English and the French were so keen to appease Nazi Germany they allowed it to empower itself to the point where a second World War was unavoidable. Rather than avoid conflict, this type of “solution” is destined to produce it.

Instead, national dialogue should concentrate on the individual and collective responsibility of Muslims. To deny or ignore the anti-social behaviours which have caused hostility towards Muslims will not help anyone in the longer term, including Muslims. Instead, the legitimate concerns that non-Muslims have should become the focus. Not in the sense where blame is distributed from one group to another, but in the sense that we admit that there are problems within the Muslim community and we constructively discuss how to best confront those problems.

Instead of feeling sorry for themselves as a result of the suspicion cast upon them, Muslims must instead be honest and focus on the reasons why those suspicions exist and resolve to work towards helping themselves.