IT took Hossein Adibi, the sociologist and “Islamic philosopher”, to finally convince me enough was enough.
Yes, enough with the racial scapegoating. Enough with bashing the same old ethnic group.
Adibi, a Queensland University of Technology researcher, has released a study on why our Muslims are twice more likely to be jobless.
Said AAP: “Dr Adibi found that Muslims were disadvantaged due to four main factors: racism, discrimination, media bias and the lack of Muslim representation in decision-making bodies.”
But how convenient: each one of those reasons involve Muslims being picked on or ignored by non-Muslims.
Apparently Muslim unemployment has little to do with poor English, poor skills, poor assimilation, poor education of women or a rejection of our society.
On ABC television’s Q&A last week, I was treated to yet another lecture of this kind by fellow panelist Susan Carland, born a Baptist but now a celebrity Muslim.
She, too, claimed Muslims were just being “demonised” as Italian and Greek immigrants had been before. “It’s just the Muslims’ turn now,” Carland declared. No difference.
Really? I come from a migrant family from Europe and my father taught English to Greeks and Italians. I do remember some scorn of “New Australians”, but not that suspicion and even fear that some now clearly feel for a minority of Muslims.
And if Australians have simply grown more racist, how come our Buddhists, far more numerous than Muslims and just as exotic, aren’t feeling it, too?
Might this difference be better explained by the fact that the Greek Orthodox archbishop never preached jihad, and Italian Catholics didn’t get jailed for plotting to blow up heathens?
Yet even that doesn’t explain just why making white Australians scapegoats for Muslim woes no longer cuts it.
As I told Carland, she herself once confessed to a strong rejectionist streak among Muslim Australians that might help to explain both Muslim disadvantage and non-Muslim fear.
At a Muslim conference two years ago, this Monash University sociologist complained that Muslims bombarded converts like her with demands to give up not only Western culture, Western clothes and “unIslamic” jobs, but non-Muslim family and friends as well.
Converts were often made to feel inferior by those born Muslim: “Female converts report being shouted (at), criticised and, worse, simply ignored by both other women and men the first time they nervously enter a mosque.”
Tanver Ahmed, a psychiatry registrar, writer and Advertising Standards Board member, has told of growing up in such a culture after moving here as a child from Bangladesh.
“What we now call extremism was virtually the norm in the community I grew up in. It was completely normal to view Jews as evil and responsible for the ills of the world.
“It was normal to see the liberal society around us as morally corrupt, its stains to be avoided at all costs.”
Ahmed blames not non-Muslims for rejecting Muslims, but the other way around. May this be one reason why some Muslims have trouble fitting in, getting accepted, finding work?
If so, then how poisonous is it for some to push the myth of a racist Australia, doing down poor Muslims?
What petrol are they pouring on the smouldering paranoia of some young Muslims - a sometimes violent sense of victimhood - that is a true source of the fear that Carland so condemns?
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