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Politicisation of Asylum Seeker funerals reeks of xenophobia

Coalition comments are not a case of poor timing – they lack all humanity.

Published in The Age, 16 February 2011
http://bit.ly/epZ2iX

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MY WIFE is buried not far from the three victims of the Christmas Island tragedy in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery. During my regular visit this week, I was saddened by the bleaker plight of my fellow mourners, but ashamed by the opportunistic politicisation of this tragedy.

The fact that my wife was buried in Sydney was a decisive factor that led my family to stay put rather than move back to Melbourne, where we spent most of our life. It was essential that we could regularly visit the site which is now sacred to our family.

If the victims of the shipwreck tragedy of December 15 were buried on Christmas Island, the grave sites would remain abandoned and inaccessible to the relatives. Joe Hockey respectfully declared that “to be there for the ceremony to say goodbye” was totally understandable. It should go without saying, unless what you are saying is that the victims should be blamed for their tragedy. Indeed, this was what his colleague, opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison, implied when he questioned the cost to the taxpayer of these funerals. Morrison has fanned the flames with his concession that “the timing of my comments was insensitive”.

Does this mean that a debate about funeral costs for shipwrecked asylum seekers should be adjourned, and this will be the extent of our interest in this global humanitarian epidemic?

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was quick to contextualise the division within his party and regurgitate his boat-stopping, vote-buying mantra – “the most humane thing you can do is put in place [border protection] policies that stop the boats”.

Apart from this being a narrow and xenophobic perspective, the concepts do not flow.

Rather than being fixated on border protection and channelling taxpayers’ money at the symptoms, it makes more sense to understand the inhumane conditions from which these asylum seekers are fleeing.

For example, Australia was a proud partner in the US-led coalition that forced regime change in Iraq in 2003. This strategy unleashed a civil war that has rendered the country so unsafe that thousands of citizens have fled. How could we be complicit with the bombardment of Iraq, then blame the victims when they land on our shores seeking refuge?
Australia is also a proud partner of many of the undemocratic countries in the Middle East that have driven this desperation for a new homeland. Our political leaders are happy to shake hands and raise glasses for the cameras with Israeli, Saudi Arabian and Egyptian leaders. But when families flee from the oppression of these same regimes, we halt them with the same hands and call it ”border protection”.

How extreme do conditions need to be for families to endure border after border, detention after detention, queue after queue, then risk what is left by paying smugglers who dispatch them onto the wild seas?

We hear rumours that boat people are future terrorists, queue jumpers or risk takers and must never set foot on our soil.

Many of us were even sucked in by the ”children overboard” rumour in 2002. Yet most refugees I have met are the exact opposite; they love law and order and have kissed Australian soil. Where are the statistics to verify how many asylum seekers were ultimately deemed to be telling the truth all along and granted refugee status?

Like us, these people also hear rumours about a safe passage to Australia’s friendly shores, where they will live happily ever after. Like us, they too get sucked in. They find that the boat is overcrowded, with no life jackets, and the ocean voyage is treacherous. Many perish at sea with no funerals, no faces and no names. After all, they had no citizenship, no home, no passport, and no record of their departure. If they survive to reach Australian waters and are intercepted, they are then at the mercy of interpreters and officials who need to make a prima facie assessment before the detention and deprivation ensues.

Tony Abbott’s proposed tougher border protection looks superficially at the symptoms of a far more serious humanitarian crisis – a crisis that Australia cannot pretend to have clean hands over, as we have been complicit and supportive in sustaining the very regimes that have become intolerable for these people. Only when we face the international sources of these asylum seekers, rather than the symptoms, will we seriously find a solution to ”stopping the boats”.

If the Catholic Abbott asks what Jesus would do, he would find a familiar story about a family fleeing persecution. Herod ordered a mass murder and the parents feared for the life of their baby. They were prepared to cross as many borders as necessary to save his life.

The problem with the politics is not the timing. It is the tapping into the simplistic victim-blaming that absolves us from any responsibility for the plight of fellow humans. Cemeteries remind us of our common humanity that temporary politicians prefer us to forget.

Joseph Wakim is founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former Victorian multicultural affairs commissioner.

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What if the Oslo terrorist was Ahmed Brevik?

What if the Oslo terrorist was Ahmad Breivik?

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2825888.html#

Published on The Drum, ABC Online

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5 August 2011

If the Oslo terrorist suspect Anders was Ahmad, the blame game would have revealed a double standard.

Right-wing ideologues and hate peddlers both in Europe and Australia have hastily ducked for cover and denounced Anders Breivik as a deranged psychopath. They have tip-toed away from the crime scene, insisting that there is no blood on their hands.

By contrast, Muslim leaders step up to the podium, denounce acts of violence and assume a position of responsibility when any misguided Muslim commits a crime in the name of Islam. Rather than shy away, they face the press gallery, even if the criminal is a psychopath. They are cornered to be accountable, with a microphone and camera pointing to their head, as if there is something intrinsically evil about their creed.

If Anders was Ahmad, he would have been promptly linked with some Islamic organisation. The terrorist tag would have begged a series of questions about the sources of the evil.

Counter-terrorism intelligence would have investigated the ‘supply chain of hate’ that stems from subjective interpretations of the Koran, to the toxic sermons of firebrand Imams, to underground hate groups against western infidels, to illegal suppliers of weapons, to bomb-making internet sites, to those cowards who glorify the mass murder of innocents, and promise the martyrs some reward in a perverted paradise.

But Anders Breivik’s terrorist act was re-diagnosed once it was confirmed that a white European was responsible. Our-post mortem zoomed in on his internal psychosis rather than zoomed out to his external supply chain, hence allowing the hate peddlers to keep peddling away.
London mayor Boris Johnson declared that “It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him.”

Similarly, British journalist Simon Jenkins claimed that “The Norwegian tragedy … is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics.”

Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung dismissed any link between the terrorism and the rise of right-wing populism is “akin to modern superstition”.

His defence lawyer Geir Lippestad is also feeding the pathology diagnosis with his client’s recent plea that any psychiatric assessment must be done by a Japanese expert because they understand “the concept of honour”. When did we last hear of any Muslim terror suspect having any psychiatric assessment?

In any crime, the diagnosis determines the deployed.
Oslo TerroristIf Breivik’s crime was misdiagnosed as pathology, then psychologists are deployed to understand his victimhood, vulnerability, anger and violence.

But if his crime was correctly diagnosed as terrorism, then intelligence experts would have been deployed to crack the supply chain of hate, all the way back to the hate mongers of the ideology.

The experts would have interrogated the sources who supplied Breivik with this ideological ‘fertiliser’, the sources who sowed the seeds to germinate the ‘terror cells’ for his Muslim-free utopia, and make them all accountable. The experts would expose his school (madrassa) of thought and identify his peers (shabbab), and make them all accountable under relevant hate crime legislation, exactly like Muslim leaders.
Disowning is an unacceptable cop-out, and the same standard must be applied to the responsible right-wing elders.

Did the hate peddlers ever stop and think that maybe one person, one day may take their rhetoric, policies, propaganda, scaremongering and Islamophobia to the next level and literally fulfil their Muslim-free fantasy with the ultimate solution?

Despite all the speculation that Anders Breivik acted alone, his 1,518 page manifesto, 2083 – A European Declaration Of Independence, is testament that he thrived in the ‘good company’ of many mentors and vehement voices. He loved people who hated Muslims. In a bizarre twist of alliances, he subscribes to both neo-Nazi and Zionist ideologies. As the Arab adage states, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and neo-Nazis are increasingly demonising Arabs as the new Semitic target, viewing “Israel as an outpost of Western civilisation in the mortal struggle with barbaric Islam”.

His mentors in his manifesto did not advocate killing Muslims, but killing the multicultural policy that sustains “deconstructing Norwegian culture and mass importing Muslims”. Hence, he did not attack the dirty water, but the tap itself, blocking the pipeline and supply chain of another generation of these policymakers.
After years of wolf whistling, did the hate peddlers never suspect that one day someone may howl back heroically with a ‘martyrdom operation’ with a soldier’s salute to their ideology?

Attempts to amplify his pathology and downplay the ideology also attempt to straightjacket any public discourse about the dangers of mainstreaming extreme right-wing views. His views echo some of the xenophobic platforms of political parties such as Norway Progress Party, Danish People’s Party, Swiss People’s Party, Swedish Democratic Party, Dutch Party of Freedom and True Finns.

If we fail to render these same leaders accountable for the ultimate ugly manifestation of their utterances, we do so at our own peril. The double standards between Anders and Ahmad create a chasm wide enough for the hate peddlers to escape with impunity.

Joseph Wakim is a freelance writer and former Multicultural Affairs Commissioner for Victoria.

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An unholy union to deport refugees

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Before our pragmatic politicians are wedded to the offshore solution, they may need to check who is hiding under that bed.

The new vows may amount to a civil marriage of convenience with enormous ‘discretionary options’ for the legal guardians, but they breach previous vows regarding rights of children and rights of refugees.

When the celebrant asks if anyone objects, 54 per cent of the congregation will say ‘I do’, according to a recent Nielsen poll. Such is the disconnect between Australian voters who prefer a humanitarian onshore solution, and the federal leaders seeking a political offshore solution.

Australiawas the first place on the planet to give birth to an offshore solution in 2001, buoyed by the war on terror and the Islamophobia.

Only two other countries conceived similar solutions. The first was aborted and the second was abandoned.

In 2003, Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, floated ‘A new vision for refugees’, whereby asylum seekers would be interned then deported to ‘transit processing centres’ in non-EU counties such as Albania, Ukraine and Russia. Modeled afterAustralia’s offshore ‘solution’, these ‘refugee reservations’ would be as ‘close to home’ as possible.

The accommodation was to be minimalist – ‘the cheaper the better’ – to serve as a deterrent for potential refugees. With barbed wire fencing, these ‘zones of sanctuary’ were more like concentration camps. They made a mockery of article 3 of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention which banned signatory states from sending refugees to countries where political instability reigned. Like the High Court of Australia, the EU torpedoed the Blair vision, and left behind a skeleton.

In 2009, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi initiated a push-back agreement with Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi, whereby African refugees caught at sea are sent toLibya, the typical point of departure. While the refugee numbers did not drop, only a 10th of the annual 14,000 reached Italian shores while the rest experienced push-back toLibya. Human Rights Watch condemned the policy andLibya’s dangerous detention camps – “What they are trying to do is outsource this responsibility to countries likeLibyawho are not party to international refugee and human-rights conventions.” This familiar verdict, and the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, left behind another skeleton.

InAustralia, Liberals are chest-beating about fathering this brainchild but ashamed to acknowledge the real mother. Shadow immigration spokesman Scott Morrison trumpets that the ‘Coalition has always supported offshore processing. We have a patent on it.’

But the birth certificate of the offshore solution is a bombshell. Walkley-winning journalist Ghassan Nakhoul accidentally witnessed the birth of the offshore solution, and commemorates its 10th birthday with a revealing book Overboard to be launched today. He was the first Australian journalist to interview a people smuggler who ironically and inadvertently conceived the offshore solution.

The birth certificate declares that Phillip Ruddock, then the attorney-general, twice affirmed that “the strongest message that has ever been given was the message to turn around boats. In an interview on SBS radio in July 2001 [with Ghassan Nakhoul], one of the most notorious – and now prosecuted – people smugglers, Keis Asfoor, had this to say: IfAustraliacloses the door and … a ship is turned back, I will stop this thing.”

Five weeks later, the Howard government took his advice and turned back theTampa, as ‘accomplices in the conspiracy of alienating rejected humans’.

Today, both major parties are keen to ensure that any children borne out of this solution are towed away ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Their human faces and pleas must be hidden from home ‘theatres’, so the Gillard Government can save face over the High Court embarrassment.

Given the Prime Minister’s latest vow to ‘smash what is truly evil – people smuggling’, surely she should distance herself from this contaminated conception. Surely, the two skeletons under the bed should be a deterrent.

InAustralia, there is only 1.1 refugee for every 1,000 people, which is 0.1 per cent of our population, and boat arrivals are much less. Yet they trigger a disproportionate amount of agitation, because it goes to the heart of what our Prime Minister calls ‘our national spirit’.

The solution will continue to bounce between the chambers of Parliament and the chambers of the High Court for so long as it is seen through a political prism – the number of dollars it costs, the number of votes in Parliament, the number of boats arriving, the number of detainees. It is not about numbers at all. It is about our fellow humans and our moral responsibility to be compassionate which cannot be measured numerically.

We need to smash the political prism that reduces refugees to mere numbers