Islamophobia In Australia

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Muslims everywhere began to be wrongfully persecuted and attacked. They have also since been denied equality in the workplace as “Americans with Muslim names have a harder time finding a job” and “American Muslims have experienced increased job discrimination since 2001” (Epstein 53). Without the ability to find a job, not only are Muslims effected in their daily lives, they are also unable to find a source of income, hindering them from supporting their families. Muslim religion can also cause further disturbances because there are several “law-abiding Muslims who are unfairly targeted and punished simply because they are Muslim” (qtd. in Epstein 52). This exemplifies the idea

It answers, as far as it can, questions as “Is Islam against the West?” and “Who defines moderate Islam post 9/11?”. In one of the case studies presented in the book, the author discusses the impact of 9/11 has had on British Muslim Identity, giving an overview of the presence of British Muslims, then looks at 9/11 and the impact it has had on the British Muslim community.

I am an Australian Muslim. The recent actions of the group known as Islamic State have put my faith in the spotlight as a threat to my nation and fellow Australians with whom I share the privilege of living in this great nation. It is here that I practice my faith freely.” This is someone that values and respects the land he lives on and is truly in disbelief in the attempts of ISIS to turn his faith against the country he lives in. Previously mentioned, Waleed Aly is becoming a reference point and communicator for Muslims in Australia. He has recently advocated his views about ISIS on news program The Project where he brings truth to the strategy of ISIS. He believes that ISIS want to diminish the social cohesion between Muslims and Australians so that Muslims become the enemy and threat for Australians so they have no where to turn. ISIS creates the stereotype for ordinary Muslims to be seen as though they stand for terrorism to the Australian public but really don’t at all. Aly says “They want to start World War III, a global warm between Muslims and everyone else, thats what they want to create. They want societies like Australia to turn on each other.” What Australians fail to see nor except is that when they show feelings of hostility and anger against ISIS and Muslims in general, it is feeding the Islamic State even more because they are

There is a populace of 18 million in Australia with Indigenous Australians making up roughly one percent of the Australian population. Due to this, the closest that a non-Indigenous Australians will come to have contact with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is through representation in the Australian media. Most media stories are viewed as one sided or racist with even the Prime Minster Tony Abbott making comments that it is a ‘lifestyle choice’ for the Indigenous peoples to live the way that they do in small communities consisting of up to 8 people. These statements that he had made is seen as racist, leaving him open to criticism by members if his own party, friends and his opponents. The 2 articles

This is a 39% increase in the Australian Muslim growth rate since 2001, alarmingly, surpassing Australia’s current total population projections, however, although Islam is the fastest growing religion internationally, it is not domestically and Muslims are still an under represented minority in Australia. The above mentioned figures are an example as to how statistics can be manipulated into the wrong context to fit a media publications own construction of Muslim discourse. The contemporary (post 2000) links between Muslims and terrorism made by the media were the unprecedented widespread attacks in the United States that occurred on 11 September 2001. These events set the scene for the Australian medias role in implicitly and explicitly identifying Muslims as the other, equating Muslims [and Islam] with the threat of terrorism (Anne Ally,2007). An example of the equating of Islam with terrorism is Sharia Law. The media often associates this holy law of Islam documenting the expectations of Allah, and the positive principles followed by billions of Muslims of different backgrounds and cultures globally through scenes of brutality and oppression of the people in the conflicted middle eastern region linking it to the corrupted Jihadist fighters

One of the most widely discussed issues in the U.S. Muslim community is the negative image of Islam in the American media, an issue that was cause for concern even before 9/11. While appeals to the media for accuracy and fairness continue, newspaper headlines regularly print the words “Islam” and “Muslim” next to words like “fanatic,” “fundamentalist,” “militant,” “terrorist” and “violence.” Uses of the term “jihad” in television programs

Within a society that is places a great deal of importance on the pursuit for truth, there must be discourse on the controversial Maclean’s articles regarding the prominence of Islam in the West – rather than leaving it as a one-sided argument. It is very easy for those opposing Islam, or for argument sake, anything that contrasts the Western majority’s views or background, to disguise their hate speech under the guise of free speech, and one can see that is the case for Mark Steyn’s arguments. Not only is Mr. Steyn using selective quotations and certain ‘facts’ as a means of defending his position on the suggested Islamic takeover of the West, but he is also contributing to rhetoric that can be taken by readers that already have a biased and negative outlook on Islam as a vehicle to further their distaste in the religious practice. Painting a religion of over a billion followers with the same brush is not only extremely detrimental to society, but to only showcase Mark Steyn’s opinions as well as the many articles that posit an unfavourable view of Islam which were highlighted in Maclean’s is harmful for a society such as Canada and in no way contributes to achieving truth. In order to grow and develop as a democratic society, the values of the majority should not overpower those of the minority and the government should have intervened on the basis that the rhetoric could be interpreted in a manner that can lead to the hate of a group by those who already hold a negative

Even before 9/11, the effects of stereotyping against Muslims has been present. For example in a Harvard University article about Muslim Americans struggling with stereotypes it states,”in the immediate wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, early news accounts included reports of people of “Middle Eastern heritage” fleeing the scene; many journalists, “experts,” and even former Representative Dave McCurdy linked the bombing to “fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups.” In media such as newspapers they have printed in a way that could be misleading to the reader, “newspaper headlines regularly print the words “Islam” and “Muslim” next to words like “fanatic,”

A decade-long national study conducted by the University of Western Sydney found that nearly half of Australians describe themselves as having anti-Muslim attitudes (Veiszadeh 2015). Islamophobia and alike attitudes can have deeply hurtful effects and create considerable fear within religious communities. It also may serve to erect barriers between different religious communities in Australia.

September 11th holds many hard and upset feelings around the world today. The harsh actions of Muslim extremists unfortunately completely changed the way Muslims are treated, especially in the United States. These events, exacerbated islamophobia. Unfortunately, “the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, connect Muslims and Islam to terrorism within the geographical borders of the United States.” (Byng) Although it has been over a decade since the attack, many still feel racist and discriminatory attitudes towards Muslims. Muslims are the targeted minority in the United States, “the 9/11 terrorist attacks shifted the social and political context for Muslims in the United States. Terrorism within the geographical borders of the United States carried out by Muslims places an identity at the center of national and global politics.” (Byng) The blame of the horrible terrorist attacks, rather than be placed on terrorists or religious extremist, has been placed on Islam in America. After September 11th, hate crimes towards Muslims skyrocketed, “the most dramatic change noted by the report was a more than 1,600 percent increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims -- a jump from 28 hate incidents in 2000 to 481 last year.”

How the has media poisoned peoples’ brains to think like this. Media has created this mental construct, in which all Muslims are the “bad guys”. Media plays a big role in a lot of different situations. Media mostly portrays African American as “thugs, and drug dealers”, media portrays Latinos as all being “illegal”. Media plays an essential role in the development of the young children, who’s brains are still developing. It really affects their world view.

Some people say don’t trust the media it’s a bunch of malarkey blown into proportion. I agree with that somewhat, and do understand that the media sometimes is malarkey but there is some truth in the media. In general the media is more negative than positive. Coming from a Muslim family life was good as a child with our community, our neighborhood and had no hatred toward the Muslim people. Then after a fate full day of 9-11-2001, tragic, and heartbreaking day many life changed. The media began to make the Muslim people a scapegoat. The media began to generalize and categorize the Muslim people with a terrorist organizations. The media in general has many other negative impacts on society but the generalization that was blowing up to proportion

To illustrate, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) organizes suicide bomb attacks in many countries and they claim that they justify this attacks with Islam and different interpreting of Quran. These attacks pose a threat for the innocent people all around the world and cause a massive fear from Muslims among non-Muslim people. What’s more, due to ISIS’s belief that it represents the Islam, people generalize all Muslims as terrorists. In this point, in his article ‘Islamophobia plays right into the hands of Isis’ Jones (2015) express that it is certainly enough to say that the vast majority of Muslims do not except their interpretation of Islam and he emphasizes that there is a highly big distance between Muslim world population and the ISIS. Besides, as it is known ISIS also attacks several Muslim countries and causes to death many Muslims. In spite of this fact, it might be suggested that one of the most important reason for the Islamophobia in the world is existence of terrorist groups and their brutal

Syed Soharwardy asserts that “Media always tried to portray Islam as a religion of terror and all the Muslims as terrorists. The way the talk-show programs and news are produced and presented, it seems that the media has already decided the guilty verdict, regardless what would be the outcome of an investigation” (Soharwardy). So too do members of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee recognize the media’s predisposition toward bias, as is pointed out in this statement, found on their website: “Key industries of American mass culture, Holllywood and television, for decades have been bastions of anti-Arab stereotyping, and have consistently resisted positive or realistic representations of Arabs and Arab Americans. (Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee).”

The connection between Islam and terrorism was not intensified until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center that pushed the Islamic faith into the national and international spotlight (Smith, 2013). As Smith (2013) articulated, “Many Americans who had never given Islam a second thought before 9/11 now had to figure out how to make sense of these events and relate to the faith tradition that ostensibly inspired them” (p. 1). One way in which people made sense of these events was through the media channels that influenced their overall opinions by shaping a framework of censored ideas (Yusof, Hassan, Hassan & Osman, 2013). In a survey conducted by Pew Forum (2012), 32% of people reported that their opinions of Muslims were greatly influenced by the media’s portrayal of Islam that depicted violent pictorials and fundamentalist Muslims. Such constant negative depiction is likely to lead to the inevitable—prejudice and hate crime. For instance, in 2002 alone there were approximately 481 hate crimes that were carried out against Muslims (Smith, 2013). Ever since the 9/11 attacks Muslim people have been the target of “suspicion, harassment and discrimination” (Talal, n.d., p. 9).