C L O S E R

C L O S E R – Race, Religion, Culture & ethnicity

Posted on December 12th, 2005 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

The (continuing) riots in Australia sparkle a debate about the relation between these riots and Race, religion and culture & ethnicity.

According to PM Howard Australians are not racists.

Mob violence is always sickening and always to be unconditionally condemned,” he said. “Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians, irrespective of their own background and irrespective of their politics.”

But he said the riots were primarily a “law and order issue”.

“I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people. I do not believe Australians are racist.”

But the Premier, Morris Iemma, condemned the weekend riots as “un-Australian”. “What it showed on the weekend was the ugly face of racism in this country,” he said.

“There is no way this disgraceful behaviour will be tolerated anywhere, not in Cronulla, not in Maroubra , not anywhere.”

The Minister for Police, Carl Scully, said there appeared to have been an element of white supremacists inciting the weekend violence, and that their attitudes had no place in mainstream Australian society.

According to others such as Aussie News & Views it is religion (ic Islam):

“The chief weapon in the quiver of all Islamist expansionist movements, is the absolute necessity to keep victims largely unaware of the actual theology plotting their demise. To complete this deception, a large body of ‘moderates’ continue to spew such ridiculous claims as “Islam means Peace” thereby keeping non-Muslims from actually reading the Qur’an, the Sira, the Hadith, or actually looking into the past 1400 years of history. Islamists also deny or dismiss the concept of ‘abrogation’, which is the universal intra-Islamic method of replacing slightly more tolerable aspects of the religion in favor of more violent demands for Muslims to slay and subdue infidels”

Interesting to see that that also means the attacks are not framed as attacks but as ‘protests‘ Also the role of the mosque is interesting there, with a call for prayer (in the whole article no mention is made of prayer though, only of rumours; a nice example of framing the conflict. Also the ‘protests’ (yes i can play with words as well) of the Muslims are framed as attacks

Nadia Jamal blames ‘culture’ instead of religion but also pays attention to the process of framing:

The search is on for answers. For their part, Muslims need to ask themselves why so many young Muslim men, not Muslim women, have problems; why some men of Australian Lebanese Muslim background seem to be so aggressive and violent.

This might have something to do with the double standards that have taken hold in some Muslim households. There are different rules for boys and girls, especially when it comes to discipline. Anyone who denies this is kidding themselves. The boys are allowed to get away with things their sisters would not. This has everything to do with culture and patriarchal attitude, and nothing to do with religion.

The lack of ambition among some of these men seems to be growing. One teacher who taught in a high school in Sydney’s south-west whose pupils were mostly Arabic-speaking could not understand why some boys wanted to do work experience at McDonald’s, rather than setting their sights higher. There is nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s, but if you can’t see more for yourself at 15, then when can you? And it’s even sadder for the families who came to Australia to give their children a better life.

There are no simple answers to these problems – yet the answers should be so simple. Violence is violence and racism is racism.

Sydney’s young Arab men have had much to deal with. Little has been done to address the emotional and psychological impact Sydney’s gang rapes and recent terrorist bombings around the globe have had on the great majority of decent, innocent Muslim men. Many are treated with suspicion by the broader community because of the way they look and some have been unjustly labelled “rapists” and “terrorists”.

Then there are the inconsistent positions taken by the media and politicians on ethnic descriptions. Middle Eastern can mean anyone from an Aborigine to an Italian. Arab or Middle Eastern always seems to mean Lebanese and Lebanese automatically means Muslim, but most Muslims don’t speak Arabic and more Lebanese are Christian than Muslim.

When a Sydney man was found guilty last week of murdering his girlfriend and stuffing her body into a cricket bag, no one described him as being anything but a Sydney man who had murdered his girlfriend and stuffed her body into a cricket bag. The same is true for the man charged with the attempted murder of teenager Lauren Huxley.

None of this is an excuse for criminal behaviour. But why is it that when men of Middle Eastern background get together, they are described as “gangs”, and when men of Anglo-Celtic background gather they are “groups of people” or “mobs”?

When things go wrong, every Muslim is left to pick up the pieces. So the next time you ask a Muslim to explain another Muslim’s actions, remember that they are not politicians or religious scholars. And they are tired of being told that they need to stand up every time some idiot who claims to share their religion commits a crime. They should not be expected to apologise for the actions of every Muslim who does something wrong in the world. This does not mean that they are being silent to those wrongs but, like everybody else, they want to get on with their lives and leave the politics to the politicians and the religion to the scholars.

Some people warn things will worsen before they get better. I just want things to get better – and they will, with goodwill on all sides.

Andrew West disagrees and insists on focusing on (certain forms of) Islam and has some interesting points to think about:

Australia does not have a race relations problem. We have a clash of cultures and that’s a big difference — and maybe the problem is certain forms of Islam.

Of course, the marauding boneheads who rampaged through Cronulla on Sunday don’t make this distinction. If they did, perhaps they would realise that when they screech “Lebs out” they are also referring to the majority of Lebanese Australians who are Maronite Christians, in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

The problem is not the blood that runs through people’s veins. Any form of discrimination based on race or ethnicity — based on the colour of one’s skin or hair or eyes — is inherently immoral, illogical and evil.

But culture and religion are behavioural. They involve values.

People can be born into a particular culture or religion but sooner or later they reach an age of reason where they can embrace or reject their precepts. And if people freely embrace a culture that is antithetical to the prevailing social mores — in our case, I would hope, liberal, enlightenment values — then we are entitled to judge, object, censure and even discriminate.

Which brings us to this extremely prickly issue of radical Islam.

My colleague on this paper, Nadia Jamal, has mounted a strong and sophisticated argument that the issue is not religion but culture, specifically the patriarchal culture that prevails in many traditional Muslim households. This is a good point but I think it diplomatically sidesteps the fact that some strains of Islam — most obviously the strict, puritanical and downright fanatical Wahhabism — do, indeed, sanction attitudes and behaviour that are not simply patriarchal but repressive. I’m sorry, but to this extent, this particular brand of Islam is most definitely the problem.

When groups of young Muslim men stalk the beaches of Sydney making sexually threatening comments against women in bathing costumes, as they indisputably do; and when they believe they act with the license of a sheik who claims that such women are responsible for their own sexual violation, then I do blame, in part, their religion.

Some multicultural theorists will squawk and say that I prefer only a soft multiculturalism (if they insist on calling it that) that does not offend western liberal values. They would be spot on. My acceptance ends when the assault on the liberality of society itself begins.

None of this erases the points I made yesterday, condemning the lynch-mob mentality of the Cronulla crowds, boozed up, in their thousands, chasing down lone Lebanese teenagers.

But I do accept the need for a debate about cultural, rather than ethnic, compatibility — because the two are not the same.

Enough to think about for the people down under.

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