Australian Freedom: A Fallacy
- From: "Zimbawi"<zimbawi@xxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:53:43 +0800
Australian Freedom: A Fallacy
Australian Freedom: Muslim women being harassed
By: A'aesha Bayatly
Most Australians today believe our country to be one upholding values of
democracy and freedom. Few Australians understand however, that there are
individuals today living in our society who have to have to look over their
shoulder when they leave the house and who live the life of someone observed
by the government. "Be careful. Don't be seen in certain places. Don't talk.
Don't be seen talking. Don't think, or at least don't tell anyone what you
think. Don't look too religious when you appear in public and careful of the
phone. when you hear the clicks. shhhh."
George Orwell's 1984 revisited or perhaps it sounds more like dialogue
excerpted from a 1980s 'living behind the iron curtain' movie? Really, I
wish I could say I was exaggerating or even joking. I never guessed I would
ever have to live like this, not in Australia, but I do now, and I fear I
will not be the last Australian to lose my freedom.
Freedom lovers beware.
As an Australian woman I converted to Islam 3 years ago and 6 months later,
I met and married the now love of my life, my husband, Zaki, from Iraq. " I
have never bombed an embassy nor hijacked a plane, but regardless, I live my
life imprisoned in my home because it is no longer safe for me to venture
out"
As a schoolgirl in the early 1980s I grew up as a proud Australian singing
'I Love My Sunburnt Country' and 'God Save the Queen', as all children do in
this country. And as a teenager I loved to listen to stories of Australians
fighting gallantly against German and Japanese militarism during war-time.
Three of my grandparents served in the Australian armed forces during WW2.
Even though until their deaths none of them ever recovered from their
experiences, they all stood proud saying they had 'done their bit' towards
maintaining the freedom of this country, supposedly a freedom we all still
enjoy until today.
When I came to Islam however, I quickly began to see a different side to
Australia and its' people- one that I never knew existed.
In the past 3 years, I've come close to being bashed several times, have had
bricks thrown through my lounge room window, have had people try to run us
off the road in our car, had my home spray-painted with anti- Islamic
obscenities, have been refused service in shops, have been attacked by an
individual attempting to forcefully yank my covering robes from my body in
the city, not to mention being subjected to verbal insult by who one would
otherwise have thought were law-abiding, civilized, educated, middle-class
citizens. And how could I forget the catch-cry, 'F*** off back to your own
country!' As an 8th generation Australian, I wonder where else I'd go home.
With such attitudes becoming more and more prevalent I wish now I had
somewhere else to live and Australians need to realize that almost every
foreigner here without exception would go home to a familiar culture and
family and friends if only they could.
How many times have I heard someone remark, "Spot the Aussie"? But who says
Australia belongs only to white Anglo-Saxons? The White Australia Policy was
fully revoked in 1966 and our land has been built by and benefited only from
migrants since its very first immigrants, the Aborigines. Only man
establishes political boundaries on this earth and stops God's creatures
from moving about freely on His earth. If only His perfect Law prevailed.
Despite the Prime Minister's recent assurances that his newly launched
terrorism awareness media campaign 'would not cause Muslims to be made
scapegoats', one only has to take into consideration the fact that the said
national security hotline attracted 500 calls in its first day to understand
just how damaging to date our government's failure to contain anti foreign
(especially anti Arab) and anti Islamic sentiment in the Australian media
has been, and many would say it has been a deliberate tactic. Prime Minister,
John Howard's notable silence was deafening over the recent outburst of NSW
MP Fred Nile's call to ban Muslim women from wearing traditional cloaks in
public. Doesn't it seem ironic that Howard's token comments at strategic
moments discouraging racial/religious intolerance in Australian society are
a mere drop in the ocean compared with the amount of negative talk and
propaganda he has tolerated throughout the mainstream media over the last 18
months? One only has to tune in to talk-back radio programs around the
country to be shocked on hearing the anti -Muslim and Anti-Islamic slander
that is tolerated on air, but how many Muslims have I spoken to who have
been refused their say when they call-in to present a different side to
domestic and foreign policy issues.
On examination of recent history, one only has to look back as far as George
W. Bush's on-going propaganda war launched in the year or so leading up to
the American invasion of Afghanistan on October 13, 2001, to understand the
far-reaching effects (and to some, benefits) of negative propaganda and
slander in one's media. After all Bush's
long-planned military assault on Afghanistan aimed at facilitating the
construction of the U.S.-profiting gas pipeline passing through Afghanistan
and other poor South-East Asian countries would never have been tolerated by
the rest of the world had he not done such an efficient job at demonising
people who had no money to feed their citizens let alone counter a sustained
world-wide media attack in which CNN and it's colleagues were the first
missile launchers to be utilized in President Bush's War of Terror. After
all, even Bush knows that no one will cry for a 'criminal' when he is seen
to get his 'just deserts'.
The truth of the matter is, of course, as every Western government including
Australia's has discovered, that if Muslims are kept busy just surviving
media-generated public intolerance in their lands of residence, they will
remain too preoccupied to publicly speak the truth on topical issues in an
organized fashion and to actively unite
internationally to defend their Brothers in Belief, in poorer Muslim
countries who are continually subjected to the intimidation and harassment
of money-hungry, well-armed, exploitive western countries who arrogantly
stand to inflict their own self-benefiting brands of democracy on peoples
and nations who would prefer to be self-governed
according to their own cultural and religious beliefs. Even America's puppet,
the crippled but potentially useful United Nations legislates that every
country in the world has this right.
In their anti-terrorism public education campaign, the government's
catch-cry asserting that 'the way of life that we value so highly must go on,
' presumably excludes the life of strangled freedom and uncertainty that I
and many Muslims live in this country today and surely, nor does it take
into account such events as the fire-bombing of my local mosque shortly
after the Bali bombings. Had the mosque been a church, synagogue or even a
shopping centre, the media would have been fueling the fire of public
paranoia further, telling us that terrorism had come to down-town Perth, but
because Australians had the excuse of being grief effected after the Bali
bombing episode, this violent and criminal attack made on the local Hepburn
Heights Mosque went relatively unnoticed by most of Australia due to the
lesser media attention it warranted
The first newspaper advertisements in the Australian Government's "Be alert
but not alarmed" advertising campaign earlier this week pointed out that
"Australians are friendly, decent, democratic people, and we're going to
stay that way." But judging by recent trade trends with the Middle East, the
reputation Australia has enjoyed to date as a 'friendly' nation, with a
healthy distance from USA, Britain and Asia, has been irreversibly eroded in
the last twelve months by the complete lack of neutrality Howard has
displayed by pathetically clinging to his 'US military might security
blanket'. When our government aligns Australia with the US and its history
of foreign interference, especially in the Arab and Muslim countries, we
implicate ourselves into an enemy camp and Mr. Howard must realize that we
cannot have it both ways - friendly people with unfriendly foreign policies
in the Middle East.
I am not a terrorist, but I am a Believer in Islam. I am not an oppressed
and shrouded Muslim woman, but a treasured and devoted wife and the
expectant mother of 2 young children, who proudly chooses to dress with
modesty as worship to Allah. I have never bombed an embassy nor hijacked a
plane, but regardless, I live my life imprisoned in my home because it is no
longer safe for me to venture out without the accompaniment of my husband.
In an effort to de-complicate the lives of other Perth Muslims, my husband
and I have also felt it necessary to break contact with our Community as my
husband and I are under the constant and meticulous observation of the
Department of State Security after being falsely reported as being in
communication with Al-Qaeda. The Department now receives our emails before
we do and during interrogation, a family member was questioned as to how
clever my husband is with computers to be able to detect outsiders entering
into our computer to access documents. As a woman educated in the West, I
have been encouraged to always use my mind, exploring all sides of topical
issues, and then on making an educated choice, as an act of responsibility
and conscience, to speak the truth even if that truth is contrary to popular
media opinion. The result of such however, is that I cannot even chat with
my husband privately and freely on the telephone, even just to say, "I love
you, How are you?", because all my telephone calls are now being recorded
until such time as enough evidence is found to have my husband and I proven
terrorists.
Mr. Howard if you are reading my words this morning, as you suck the egg
yolk off your bacon rind before heading off to the office, I would like to
ask you why my freedom as an Australian to walk in the street un-harassed,
to think, to speak, to associate, to dress as I choose, to believe and to
educate according to my choice, disappeared when I became a Muslim? And Mr.
Howard, as you self-righteously ride your hobby horse into Iraq behind Big
Brother Bush on his war horse to bomb my in-laws whom you nor I will
probably ever be privileged enough to meet-Is cheap oil for you, Tony and
George really worth it? Please consider if your policies, justifying
censored media, political harassment of innocents, lost privacy, prejudicial
government law-making, public education programs in which people are
encouraged to watch, suspect and inform on each other and of course your
unforgettable but concealed act of having would-be Australians in leaky
fishing boats fired on by your navy, are now all that different from the
evil Saddam's.
url:http://www.myreader.co.uk/gp/1212-1.aspx
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