In Australia, war on ISIL fuels debate on radicalism

As the war on ISIL leads to virulent anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, the threat to social cohesion is obvious in the rants of populist press and politicians – but there are also more subtle causes, writes foreign correspondent Antoun Issa.

Police search a property in Sydney after the terror-linked murder of Curtis Cheng, a police worker in the city. William West/AFP Photo

MELBOURNE // The process of radicalisation was steady but effective on Farhad Jabar.

Jabar, 15, was born in Iran of Iraqi-Kurdish heritage. He was said to be a lonely teenager from a troubled family.

He would regularly skip school to pray at Parramatta mosque in Sydney’s west – the same mosque at which he would become associated with supporters of ISIL.

Gradually they turned him to their extremist views and con-vinced the teenager to carry out a terrorist attack that would cost him his life.

It was on Friday, October 2, that police said Jabar obtained an old handgun from Raban Alou, 18, who was already at the time a terror suspect.

He also received instructions to walk to the local police station less than a kilometre away and kill a worker there.

The victim was Curtis Cheng, 58, a police accountant and father of two adult children.

Mr Cheng had just finished his shift and was walking out the door when Jabar appeared, gun in hand, and shot him in the back of the head.

Jabar continued to taunt police officers with his handgun, waving it above his head, before they shot him dead.

The execution was described as a terrorist act by Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and authorities arrested four young men in connection to it.

The war on ISIL has led to a dramatic breakdown in community relations in Australia, sparking a fierce national debate over radicalism and the ability of Muslims – who make up 2 per cent of the population – to integrate into the country’s society.

Dozens of mosques have been vandalised across the states and anti-Islam protests under the banner of “Reclaim Australia” have been regularly held in major cities. The attack has added fuel to an already tense climate in Australia.

“There’s definitely a more palpable hatred directed towards the Muslim community,” said Asma Fahmi, a community worker in Sydney.

The rhetoric is also coming from high ends of the government. Former prime minister Tony Abbott made a series of controversial remarks about Islam during his tenure, while his attorney general George Brandis went even further last year when he argued that “people do have a right to be bigots”.

Popular right-wing columnists have also fanned the flames, such as News Corp’s Andrew Bolt who, in one of his regular tirades about Islam, wrote “Islam is at the heart of the Islamic State”.

Such remarks are antagonising the public against Muslims, said Ms Fahmi.

“If you have politicians in high office saying it’s OK to be a bigot, then how are people who already have racist tendencies going to take that?” she asked.

Amid such heightened racism there have also been many cases of Australian Muslims being physically assaulted. Ms Fahmi was among the victims. “I’ve been a victim of assault twice. One time I was walking to work and a man attacked me from behind and called me a ‘terrorist’. One time I went to a theatre with my mother and sister and a group kept calling us ‘****ing Pakis’ and then started throwing things at us and tried to smash our car,” she said.

The root causes of the problems facing Australian Muslims go much deeper than the populist discourse perpetuated by politicians and the media, Ms Fahmi said.

Socio-economic factors and discrimination were two key causes of angst for many Muslim men, she discovered in her research within the community.

“What we found was that a lot of the Muslim men that we spoke to had felt some kind of discrimination at some point in their lives, that there was a lack of opportunities for them,” she said.

That correlates with findings in a 2010 government-funded report on inequality, discrimination and social cohesion among Australian-born Lebanese and Turkish youth.

All Muslim men that took part in the University of Sydney study said they perceived discrimination in comparison to Anglo Australians of similar qualifications in seeking employment.

The study from 2010, released before the Arab Spring, also found that second-generation Lebanese and Turkish Muslims “strongly identified as Australian”. They perceived Australia as a multicultural haven that enabled them to practise their religion freely.

They have also tightened their overly liberal brand of teaching.

“Laila Ali” was born in New South Wales to migrant parents from the Middle East, and said it used to be common there for men and women to pray together.

Ms Ali and her family were heavily involved in their local mosque, where men and women would mingle.

“Gradually the mosque got more money, and they separated the women and moved them upstairs,” she said.

It is now standard practice for new Australian mosques to segregate men and women, as they are in mosques around the world.

Contrary to the widespread belief that Australian Muslims are failing to integrate, the study found “little evidence that this cross-section of young people was experiencing significant levels of alienation or marginalisation”.

These positive perceptions can easily be reversed when the mainstream community no longer represents the ideals of multiculturalism and reverts to xenophobia, which is how many Australian Muslims view the current social climate.

The report’s findings appear to have been ignored by policymakers.

“Such threats to social cohesion may be more likely to come from Anglo-Celts and others whose images of young people from various Middle East or Muslim backgrounds is largely derived from the more sensational media accounts that still exist,” the study said.

Ms Fahmi said a more nuanced conversation was needed to address the root causes of radicalism, which come from within the Muslim community as well as the broader populist discourse led by politicians and the media.

Maintaining extreme positions risks exacerbating an already delicate problem.

If there is a line that anti-Islam protesters and ISIL supporters agree on, it’s that Muslims are not Australian and that they belong in the Middle East.