10/8/06:ISLAMOPHOBIC RACIST RATS RUMBLING AROUND(GLW/FWD)
- From: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 11 Aug 2006 02:04:48 +1100
GREELNEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA 10-AUG-2006
ISLAMOPHOBIC AND IMPERIALIST WARS
www.greenleft.org.au
The July 30 Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun reported that a McNair Gallup
Poll commissioned by the newspaper had found that â??Four in 10
Australians believe Islam is a threat to our way of lifeâ??. According
to the newspaper, the poll of 502 people also found that, â??One in
three people are more fearful of Muslims since 9/11".
Given the steady diet of Islamophobic views â?? portraying all Muslims
as â??terroristsâ?? or ''potential terroristsâ?? â?? that has been dished out
by Australiaâ??s corporate media since 9/11 to rally support for
Australiaâ??s highly unpopular participation in the US-led war on Iraq,
these results are not really surprising.
In fact, if the NcNair Gallup Poll result is broadly representative of
non-Muslim Australiansâ?? attitudes, the number of Australians holding
Islamophobic views has actually declined since 9/11 and the invasion
of Iraq.
A survey of 5056 people in Queensland and NSW, conducted for the
University of NSW and Macquarie University in October and December
2001, immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US,
found that a majority (56%) felt threatened by Islam. A survey
conducted by the Roy Morgan research in June 2003, three months after
the US-led invasion of Iraq, found that 57% of Australians regarded
â??Islamâ?? as posing a â??militaryâ??, â??terroristâ?? or â??culturalâ?? threat.
Since those surveys, the Howard governmentâ??s Islamophobic lies to
justify its support for Washingtonâ??s disastrous occupation of Iraq â??
portrayed as the central battlefield of the â??global warâ?? on Islamic
terrorists â?? and its brutal regime of mandatory and indefinite
detention of, mostly Muslim, asylum seekers, have been widely exposed.
The realities of life for most Muslim Australians â?? the fact, for
example, that as a result of anti-Arab racism they have higher levels
of unemployment (19%) than the average (despite Muslims being better
represented in higher education than the other religious groups) â??
have also begun to be recognised by most other Australians. According
to the Sunday Herald Sun report, 56% of those surveyed in the McNair
Gallup Poll believe that â??Muslims are unfairly discriminated againstâ??
in Australia.
The Western elite, however, are determined to stoke Islamophobia among
their largely non-Muslim populations. Our rulersâ?? goal is to ensure
that the predominantly non-Muslim working people of the developed
capitalist countries do not sympathise with the resistance of the
working people in the largely Muslim countries of Iraq and Iran to the
Western corporate eliteâ??s attempts to steal these countriesâ?? vast oil
resources.
A brazen example of this was the argument made in February at the US
National Press Club by US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld that, as the
US NewsMax website reported it, â??Western countries must increase their
defense budgets in order to prevent the rise of a 'global extremist
Islamic empireâ?? that could be as deadly as Hitlerâ??s Third Reichâ??.
Rumsfeld â?? who commissioned the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction to scare the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq â??
ludicrously claimed that al Qaedaâ??s tiny terrorist cells â??could be
just as deadly as Nazi Germanyâ??, threatening to kill â??literally tens
of millions of human beings on this earthâ??.
The reality of the Middle East demonstrates the opposite of Rumsfeldâ??s
Islamophobic rants. As is daily shown by the bloody US-led occupation
of Iraq and the barbaric US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon (39% of
whose population is Christian), it is the Western corporate elites and
their huge war machines that pose the deadliest threat to the lives of
Muslim and non-Muslim working people throughout the world.
From Green Left Weekly, August 9, 2006.Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.
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emails: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx druneoo@xxxxxxxxxxx
POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA
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