<nettime> Jason Wilson: Australians are asking how did we get here? (re: Christchurch) (The Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/17/australians-are-asking-how-did-we-get-here-well-islamophobia-is-practically-enshrined-as-public-policy

Australians are asking how did we get here? Well, Islamophobia is 
practically enshrined as public policy
Any 28-year-old Australian has grown up in a time racism was quickly 
ratcheting up in the country’s public culture
Jason Wilson, The Guardian, Sun 17 Mar 2019



Australia has indulged in a ‘decades-long drumbeat of xenophobia and 
Muslim-hate, which has issued from some of the most powerful 
institutions in the country’.

The worst terror attack in New Zealand’s modern history took place on 
Friday, and the alleged perpetrator is an Australian.
Appropriately, this calamity has started a process of deep reflection in 
the man’s home country. Everywhere, decent Australians are asking, how 
did we get here? Do we own him?
There has been extensive, international discussion about the role of the 
online subculture of the far right in these events – the codes, memes 
and signals of internet-mediated white supremacy.
There’s been less reflection on the fact that any 28-year-old in 
Australia has grown up in a period when racism, xenophobia and a 
hostility to Muslims in particular, were quickly ratcheting up in the 
country’s public culture.
In the period of the country’s enthusiastic participation in the War on 
Terror, Islam and Muslims have frequently been treated as public 
enemies, and hate speech against them has inexorably been normalised.
Australian racism did not of course begin in 2001. The country was 
settled by means of a genocidal frontier war, and commenced its 
independent existence with the exclusion of non-white migrants. White 
nationalism was practically Australia’s founding doctrine.
But a succession of events in the first year of the millennium led to 
Islamophobia being practically enshrined as public policy.
First, the so-called Tampa Affair saw a conservative government refuse 
to admit refugees who had been rescued at sea. It was a naked bid to win 
an election by whipping up xenophobia and border panic. It worked.
In the years since, despite its obvious brutality, and despite repeated 
condemnations from international bodies, the mandatory offshore 
detention of boat-borne refugees in third countries has become 
bipartisan policy. (The centre-left Labor party sacrificed principle in 
order to neutralise an issue that they thought was costing them 
elections.)
The majority of the refugees thus imprisoned have been Muslim. It has 
often been suggested by politicians that detaining them is a matter of 
safety – some of them might be terrorists.
Second, the 9/11 attacks drew Australia into the War on Terror in 
support of its closest ally, and geopolitical sponsor, the United 
States.
Australian troops spent long periods in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting 
and killing Muslims in their own countries. The consequences of this 
endless war have included the targeting of Australians in Jihadi terror 
attacks and plots, both at home and abroad.
The wars began with a deluge of propaganda. Later, the terror threat was 
leveraged to massively enhance surveillance by Australia’s national 
security state. Muslim Australians have frequently been defined by arms 
of their own government as a source of danger.
Two years after the war in Iraq commenced, the campaign of Islamophobia 
culminated in the country’s most serious modern race riots, on Cronulla 
Beach in December 2005, when young white men spent a summer afternoon 
beating and throwing bottles at whichever brown people they could find.
Cronulla was a milestone in the development of a more forthright, ugly 
public nationalism in Australia. Now young men wear flags as capes on 
Australia Day, a date which is seen as a calculated insult by many 
Indigenous people. Anzac Day, which commemorates a failed invasion of 
Turkey, was once a far more ambivalent occasion. In recent years it has 
moved closer to becoming an open celebration of militarism and 
imperialism.
Every step of the way, this process has not been hindered by outlets 
owned by News Corp, which dominates Australia’s media market in a way 
which citizens of other Anglophone democracies can find difficult to 
comprehend.
News Corp has the biggest-selling newspapers in the majority of 
metropolitan media markets, monopolies in many regional markets, the 
only general-readership national daily, and the only cable news channel. 
Its influence on the national news agenda remains decisive. And too 
often it has used this influence to demonise Muslims.
On Anzac Day 2017, a prominent young Australian Muslim woman, Yassmin 
Abdel-Magied, posted on her personal Facebook page, “LEST.WE.FORGET. 
(Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…)”, which appeared to draw an 
equivalence between the suffering of Muslims around the world today, and 
that of Australia’s diggers during the first world war.
News Corp outlets – especially the Australian – howled about her 
supposed disrespect for months. Opportunistic conservative politicians 
lined up to condemn her. Towards the end of the year, she decamped for 
London, and in a television appearance compared Australia to an “abusive 
boyfriend”.
On the other hand, News Corp has been far more solicitous to touring 
grifters from the “alt-right” movement. They gave softball interviews 
and free publicity to Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern and Stefan 
Molyneux ahead of their national tours. They also gave Gavin McInnes the 
soft touch, but his plans were aborted when he was denied a visa on 
character grounds.
More significantly still, News Corp has itself recently run campaigns 
based on white nationalist talking points.
A year ago, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran reports on the alleged plight 
of white farmers in South Africa, in a way that echoed far-right myths 
about “white genocide”. This worked well enough to elicit a short-lived 
policy proposal from the immigration minister to give white farmers 
“special attention”.
News Corp also had a big hand in promoting the idea over the last few 
years that “African gangs” were holding the city of Melbourne to ransom. 
This campaign was also in lockstep with the rhetoric of local neo-Nazis 
such as Blair Cottrell.
And last August, News Corp’s most influential rightwing pundit, Andrew 
Bolt, wrote a column which explicitly raised the prospect of demographic 
replacement – a recurring obsession of the white nationalists.
Bolt depicted a possible future in which a “tidal wave of immigrants 
sweeps away our national identity”. For Bolt – who has previously been 
found to have breached Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act – the 
country was under demographic attack.
This normalisation of white nationalist concepts is also visible in 
politics. Senator Fraser Anning has had a hit of global social media 
fame this week after he appeared to blame the victims of the 
Christchurch massacre, and again when a young protester cracked an egg 
on Anning’s bald pate.
Anning is hardly alone – white nationalist anxieties have continually 
surfaced at the heart of Australia’s political process. In 2016 the 
Australian Senate held an inquiry into halal food, in which senators 
asked questions which appeared to owe a debt to rightwing conspiracy 
theories about certification funding terrorism.
Anning himself was elected as a result of the revival of Australian 
anti-immigrant populist party, One Nation, whose recent elected members 
have included an alleged sovereign citizen. Last year the Australian 
Senate almost passed a motion that “It’s OK to be white”, which would 
have seen a 4chan meme approved by the national parliament.
Just last week, publicity-hungry former Labor leader Mark Latham, now 
running for state office with One Nation, suggested that self-identified 
Indigenous people be DNA tested before they receive welfare.
And at least until Friday, it looked like a desperate conservative 
national government might run a race-based election, reaching once more 
for the same playbook the party has used for decades. (In 2011, the 
current prime minister Scott Morrison reportedly recommended an 
anti-Muslim election strategy to his Liberal party colleagues). Former 
race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane said the government 
was “campaigning on fear, seeking to incite hysteria about asylum 
seekers and border security”.
Australia now has a public collection of open white nationalists – from 
antisemitic podcasters to would-be infiltrators of mainstream 
conservative parties.
They need to be understood in their proper context: the decades-long 
drumbeat of xenophobia and Muslim-hate, which has issued from some of 
the most powerful institutions in the country.
This is the environment in which Muslims, refugees and immigrants have 
come to be understood as enemies of Australia. It may be an environment 
that has nurtured white supremacist terror.

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