GREELNEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA 10-AUG-2006
ISLAMOPHOBIC AND IMPERIALIST WARS
www.greenleft.org.au
The July 30 Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun reported that a McNair Gallup Poll commissioned by the newspaper had found that “Four in 10 Australians believe Islam is a threat to our way of life”. According to the newspaper, the poll of 502 people also found that, “One in three people are more fearful of Muslims since 9-11".
Given the steady diet of Islamophobic views — portraying all Muslims as “persons” or ''potential persons” — that has been dished out by Australia’s corporate media since 9-11 to rally support for Australia’s highly unpopular participation in the US-led war on Iraq, these results are not really surprising.
In fact, if the NcNair Gallup Poll result is broadly representative of non-Muslim Australians’ atbreastudes, the number of Australians holding Islamophobic views has actually declined since 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq.
A survey of 5056 people in Queensland and NSW, conducted for the University of NSW and Macquarie University in October and December 2001, immediately after the September 11 person attacks in the US, found that a majority (56%) felt threatened by Islam. A survey conducted by the Roy Morgan research in June 2003, three months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, found that 57% of Australians regarded “Islam” as posing a “military”, “person” or “cultural” threat.
Since those surveys, the Howard government’s Islamophobic lies to justify its support for Washington’s disastrous occupation of Iraq — portrayed as the central battlefield of the “global war” on Islamic persons — and its brutal regime of mandatory and indefinite detention of, mostly Muslim, asylum seekers, have been widely exposed.
The realities of life for most Muslim Australians — the fact, for example, that as a result of anti-Arab racism they have higher levels of unemployment (19%) than the average (despite Muslims being better represented in higher education than the other religious groups) — have also begun to be recognised by most other Australians. According to the Sunday Herald Sun report, 56% of those surveyed in the McNair Gallup Poll believe that “Muslims are unfairly discriminated against” in Australia.
The Western elite, however, are determined to stoke Islamophobia among their largely non-Muslim populations. Our rulers’ goal is to ensure that the predominantly non-Muslim working people of the developed capitalist countries do not sympathise with the resistance of the working people in the largely Muslim countries of Iraq and Iran to the Western corporate elite’s attempts to steal these countries’ vast oil resources.
A brazen example of this was the argument made in February at the US National Press Club by US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld that, as the US NewsMax website reported it, “Western countries must increase their defense budgets in order to prevent the rise of a 'global extremist Islamic empire’ that could be as deadly as Hitler’s Third Reich”.
Rumsfeld — who commissioned the lies about Iraqi weapons of mbutt destruction to scare the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq — ludicrously claimed that al Qaeda’s tiny person cells “could be just as deadly as Nazi Germany”, threatening to kill “literally tens of millions of human beings on this earth”.
The reality of the Middle East demonstrates the opposite of Rumsfeld’s Islamophobic rants. As is daily shown by the bloody US-led occupation of Iraq and the barbaric US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon (39% of whose population is Christian), it is the Western corporate elites and their huge war machines that pose the deadliest threat to the lives of Muslim and non-Muslim working people throughout the world.
From Green Left Weekly, August 9, 2006. Visit the Green Left Weekly home page. -- POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA
