The Australian parliament is debating legislation to amend the criminal code and ban the Lebanese-based Hezbollah (Party of God) as a terrorist organisation. This means that any Australian resident raising funds or supporting the organisation in any way faces prosecution.
Attorney-General Darryl Williams cited the unsubstantiated and spurious allegation that Hezbollah poses a direct and immediate threat to Australia, simply because it has "the capacity to carry out a terrorist attack anywhere in the world".
Hezbollah, which has 12 members in the Lebanese parliament, is a Shiite-based Islamist organisation which has been a major provider of social services to thousands of poor Lebanese Shiites. Formed in 1982, it waged an armed resistance against Israel's illegal post-1978 occupation of southern Lebanon, finally forcing an Israeli withdrawal in 2000.
US State Department official David Satterfield — the former US ambassador to Lebanon — stated in 1998 that Hezbollah constituted a legitimate freedom fighting force. This is also the position of the Lebanese government.
However, in April 2001 the US State Department included Hezbollah on its list of international terrorist organisations, blaming it for the 1983 suicide truck-bomb attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in which 241 marines died. Hezbollah does not deny responsibility for this attack, but points out that the US military intervention, undertaken during Israel's siege of Palestinian guerilla fighters in West Beirut, had 'lost its semblance of neutrality".
Washington also accuses Hezbollah of carrying out two attacks on Israeli embassies in Latin America in the mid 1990s, which the group denies any responsibility for.
The banning of Hezbollah will no doubt fuel the further stigmatisation and racist scapegoating of Australia's Lebanese Muslim community.
The War on Terror has fuelled the stigmatisation of sections of the population based on religion, nationality and race. After 9/11, suspicion of, and attacks against, Muslims and Arabs rose sharply in Australia, the US, Britain and other countries.
After the Bali bombing, highly publicised raids on Indonesian Australians fuelled greater hostility and suspicion. No charges have been laid as a result of those raids, but people are more likely to associate Indonesians with Islamic fanaticism, even though such groups have a tiny base of support in Indonesia.
Recent raids on Iranian households have also fed the perception that refugees pose a threat within Australia, and seem designed to limit sympathy for a group facing deportation.
Solidarity and sympathy with Third World struggles against First World military interventions has been a marked feature of popular consciousness in the decades since the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and '60s and the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the US war machine.
The climate of racism, fear and distrust which the War on Terror has produced is not an unintended consequence — it's a deliberate byproduct of the First World ruling elites' drive for to maintain their domination over the Third World. It helps the imperial ruling elites to erode popular solidarity with Third World resistance movements. That's why they stoke it at every turn.
From Green Left Weekly, June 11, 2003.
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