More thoughts on the riots in Sydney
Lebanese Muslims have targeted Lebanese Christian churches in Australia:On Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell asked gangs of Middle Eastern descent not to target Christmas celebrations, after families were abused and gunshots fired into cars at a primary school's carols night in western Sydney on Monday.
Cardinal Pell said the attack in the multicultural suburb of Auburn, where Lebanese Muslims are believed to have turned on Lebanese Christians, was 'apparently motivated by religious intolerance'.
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Arab Christians have suggested the attacks on churches may have been meant as a violent attempt to 'shame' the city's Lebanese Christian community into supporting Lebanese Muslims in the race-hate war, which began as a battle against young white males over use of suburban beaches. The reason why this is worthy of mention is because this is the plight of many Christians in the Holy Land. In Nazareth for example, the Israelis will mistreat the Palestinians because they are Palestinian, while amongst the Palestinians the Palestinian Muslims will attack the Palestinian Christians because they are not Muslim.
In Australia, the dynamic seems to be no different. Stateside, I hear that kind of talk all the time, Arabs and Muslims seemingly an interchangable term, and most always associated with some form of reference to being a terrorist, a fanatic, or some paraphrasing of Team America's "dirka, dirka, Muhummad jihad" nonsense.
Now with the last name of Kenney, I certainly don't get anything direct unless I see it going on. I can remember shortly after 9/11, my brother working in a Borders was called a dunecoon, sand nigger, and "one of them" for telling a group of people (not kids, grown men) to quit harassing a Muslim family. He proudly announced that he was Lebanese, and he got blasted for it. You hear it in bars, coffeehouses, from Democrats and Republicans, sensible conservatives and open-minded liberals.
Does this mean I'm against the war on terror or any of that? Heck no. But it does mean that I am much more sensitive to the violence shown towards Arabs than most, and it has certainly opened my eyes to the idea of racism. It was always the counter-argument "you don't know what racism is like, you're not (fill in your ethnicity here)" that always trumped debate on what society owed to oppressed groups, because it was entirely ancedotal. Post 9/11, I can truly say that I have an understanding of what that meant.
Society generalizes because it is an easy, efficient way to categorize and deal with perceived problems. We've done it to Native Americans, the Irish, Catholics, Slavs, African-Americans, the underclass through eugenics programs, Jews, Latinos, and now Arabs. Is it part of human nature to act in this way? I'm beginning to think so. But perhaps this is why, at least in the American experience, education has always been the first and best tool to fight prejudice?
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D.J. McGuire 
1 Comments:
I happened to be working at a Dominoes in Lorton (southern Fairfax County) at the time as a driver. The Lorton area was (and still is) ethnically and politically diverse, but we were all worried about a fellow driver of ours, an Afghan named Saleem.
Of course, Saleem was an expert on the Taliban (he had family still over there), so, oddly enough, the cooks and drivers at the Gunston Plaza Dominoes accidentally became some of the most knowledgeable folks about the raging civil war in Afghanistan. Still, we asked him at least once a day if he was encountering any problems. He always insisted he had none.
Granted, no one paid much attention to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban groups (but, oddly enough, the local PUBLIC elementary school did, to the point that my then-eleven-year-old son knew the NA was "our team"), but with the exception of one woman (another public school teacher) I neither heard nor saw one scintilla of racial or religious hatred.
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