Students confront racism

BY SARAH STEPHEN

SYDNEY — “Student protest hijacked by hatred”, Sydney’s tabloid rag the Daily Telegraph declared, the day after the March 26 10,000-strong student anti-war protest. The newspaper argued that the rally was “ambushed” by a “mob of violent troublemakers” who led a “vicious rampage through the streets of Sydney”. The word “mob”, of course, was used to describe Muslims and Arab-Australians.

The article quoted assistant police commissioner Dick Adams saying it was clear a large proportion of protesters — he repeatedly used the term “Middle-Eastern males” — had come to the rally “for the express purpose of fighting the police”.

The following day, the Australian ran a story arguing, falsely, that it was in fact the organisers who had manipulated Muslim students: “Playing the race card: protest organisers enlisted Muslim students”, it was headlined. A letter to the paper the following day [from Roy Stall in Mt Claremont WA], commented on the choice of words in the article’s headline: “That’s interesting ... I always thought Islam was a religion, not a race.”

It was evident at the March 26 protest, and the subsequent April 2 student anti-war protest, that the racism of the NSW police and media has not endeared them to many young people. “Fuck the police” was a popular chant at some points during the April 2 rally, as young people expressed their anger and frustration at being penned in to Town Hall Square by close to 1000 police.

I asked Rihab Charida, a Palestinian activist involved in Sawiyan — Coalition for Palestine, what she thinks this anger reflects. She replied: “Anger towards police is not just something that happened at a rally, it’s built up over time. People have to remember that in the areas where most Arabs live, police harass young people all the time. Groups get humiliated and harassed all the time where I live, in Bankstown, for no apparent reason.”

Scott Poynting, a sociologist from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, told GLW: “[The police] have been repeating the allegation that the worst troublemakers are Middle-Eastern males, yet arguing that it’s not an ethnic descriptor but a geographic descriptor. If it was a geographic descriptor, then all the young people being chased by cops on April 2 [following the Books Not Bombs rally] were residents of Sydney!”

NSW is the only state that officially uses “ethnic descriptors”, a form of racial profiling, in police work. Describing this practice as “reckless and damaging”, Poynting said, “The targeting of young people on the basis of physical appearance for political attention is discriminatory and racist”.

Poynting, who was at the April 2 protest, said he saw “no violence, no bad behaviour, no confrontations with the cops. The police presence was intimidating, overwhelming, and deliberately so. They were deployed in such a way as to be able to trap people in, as they did on March 26 in Philip Street [outside John Howard’s office], something which was potentially dangerous and provocative.”

In Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime, Poynting and co-authors Jock Collins, Paul Tabar and Greg Noble, write that the terms “Asian appearance” and “Middle-Eastern appearance”, “not only lack geographic specificity, they imply that people from these places all look enough alike to allow another person to immediately identify a stranger’s background”.

Charida described the use of the term “Middle-Eastern appearance” as racist. “So many times I’ll read an article where its use is so irrelevant ... for example, a Middle-Eastern boy who didn’t pay his fines and lost his licence will be a full-page article in the Daily Telegraph. How is that relevant? The more they use it, the more they reinforce the negative stereotype of Arabs. If you say something enough, it does have an impact on people’s views.”

Kuranda Seyit, a Muslim writer who was filming the April 2 protest, did an impromptu survey of a group of young migrant men, discovering that only a few identified as Muslim, and while some were from a Middle-Eastern background, not all were. Yet they were equally involved in chanting Arabic and religious slogans, burning US flags, condemning the police and the media — no doubt unified by their experiences of racism and their common opposition to the war.

The Bankstown area, in Sydney’s south-west, is home to one of the highest proportions of Arabic Australians — in 1996, one in five of all residents spoke Arabic.

Sarah Halebi is 13 years’ old, lives in Padstow and goes to Bankstown Girls’ school. Her family is Muslim, and Sarah wears a veil. Sarah believes there is racism in Australia. She told GLW how her neighbours turned against her family after September 11. “Our neighbours used to be friendly to us. We used to always talk to them, be friendly, but after September 11 and the Iraq war they stopped talking and waving to us, even though we had nothing to do with it ... When you walk in the street, people give you dirty looks and make you feel like you’re not wanted.”

With the support of their mother Hannah, Sarah and her younger sister participated in the Books Not Bombs student anti-war rallies. Hannah told GLW of her disgust at the war in Iraq, where the invasion forces kill Iraqi people “like they are spraying flies with Mortein”.

Sarah was outraged by the treatment of some of her friends by the police at the BNB protests. “In last couple of protests, there were seven girls who had their scarves ripped off, which is what aggravated the Arab boys”, she said. “My friend got her scarf ripped off by the police. She was arrested and they kept her in the station for seven hours, for doing nothing.”

More than 60% of the students at Bankstown Girls’ are from Muslim or Arabic backgrounds. “As young people we’re one community”, Halebi explained. “Most students agree there shouldn’t be a war. We go to school and do stuff together. It doesn’t matter what culture or background you’re from.”

Charida explained that in Sydney’s west, there had been a rise in racism since the late 1990s, after the hysteria about gang rapes being carried out by young Lebanese men. It has gotten worse since. “People didn’t all of a sudden become racist when the war started. It’s almost as if, in the last few years, the racism that was there below the surface, a hatred of Muslims and Arabs, has been given a green light.”

“I was sitting on the train a few days ago, reading. There were four or five Arab boys standing next to the door, talking and laughing loudly, as boys do. Nobody else on the train seemed bothered by it — they weren’t disturbing anybody. Two police officers got on the train and started yelling at them, using a humiliating tone. They were asked to show their tickets, chastised and told to 'Sit down and keep your mouths shut’. It was completely uncalled for.

“I remember a recent incident in a Bankstown carpark where an Arabic woman was trying to find a parking spot during the day. It was busy, chaotic. An Anglo male was in a car behind her, and he was getting impatient. He beeped and swore at her, then said: 'Go back to your fucking country’. A few people yelled back and told him to go back to England first.”

According to Charida, the media is partly to blame. “The media tries to portray Arabs as aggressive, belligerent, barbaric; to make violence and aggression synonymous with Arab.” She pointed out that Palestinians are often portrayed as aggressive and violent, in order “to justify Israel’s attacks as self defence, which is untrue.”

“If one Arab does something wrong, for example the guys involved in the gang rapes, the whole of the Arabic community gets vilified. But if one Australian does something wrong, the same thing doesn’t happen. Take the example of Martin Bryant [responsible for the Port Arthur massacre]. Everyone could understand that there was something wrong with him.”

It’s become more common for governments and the media to use “Muslim” as an ethnic descriptor rather than a religious identifier, to the point where all Arabs are — incorrectly — seen as Muslims and vice versa.

“The classic case of that is Palestine”, Charida said. “It’s portrayed as a religious conflict, but it’s about colonialism and occupation, it’s a struggle for a homeland. The fact that many Palestinians are Muslim is not important. [The media] do it for a reason — they are trying to portray Israel as a victim of Muslim fundamentalist aggression, and link it to terrorism. Putting religion at core of it [exploits] people’s fears of Muslim fundamentalism.”

From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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