From Christchurch to Gaza: The Politics of Islamophobia

Image credit to Carlos Latuff @LatuffCartoons

Fifteenth of March, marks the anniversary of the day an Australian terrorist gunned down 53 Muslims at prayer in the Christchurch mosque shootings, livestreaming the massacre on social media for the world to watch.

Two years before the attack, I began working on my PhD looking into Muslim community organisations understanding of and response to Islamophobia. You can read my findings in my recently published book: the Politics of Anti-Islamophobia in Australia: The Case of Muslim Community Organisations.

The majority of my interviewees – who were representatives from religious and civic community Muslim entities- understood Islamophobia as the misrecognition of Australian Muslims citizenship due to “Islamic terrorism” abroad, leading to governing practices by the Australian socio-political context (government, media and the public). Islamophobia was seen as a disruption to a multicultural policy that ideally grants Muslims equality and protection.

Very few saw Islamophobia as embedded in the Australian system itself and connected to a broader Western hegemonic empire that seeks to undermine Muslim countries by casting them as barbaric or terrorist in order to justify military expansion into their regions. Those who did argued that Islamophobia in Australia is not unique; it is the residue of that global tactic.

After the genocide in Gaza, I am hoping that more and more Australian Muslims are realising that Islamophobia is not simply the misrecognition of Muslims’ citizenship or a disruption to multiculturalism but is a political tool to produce and sustain anti-Muslim sentiment to enable a hegemonic imperial project. The war on Iran is the latest episode of this project. I hope Australian Muslims stop falling into the same traps thinking Australia’s multiculturalism policy automatically gives them equality and will protect them from Islamophobia.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Two Victims of Hate, two different responses.

The Australian government’s response to the Bondi Beach attack compared to its response to the Christchurch massacre tells you everything you need to know about whose lives the Australian government (labour and liberal) values and why.

After Christchurch massacre, the government didn’t rush through special legislation to combat Islamophobia, the ideology that radicalised the terrorist who carried out the massacre, like it did for antisemitism. It didn’t set up a Royal Commission like it did for antisemitism. It didn’t ban or label far-right groups as terrorists like it did for antisemitism. It didn’t crack down on academics’ funding who criticize Islam and Muslims, and it certainly didn’t invite a “Muslim head of state” to Australia to “check on” the Muslim “diaspora” after the Christchurch Mosque shooting.

But after the Bondi Beach attack, the Australian government did all the above and rolled out the red carpet for the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who was cited at the International Court of Justice for speeches inciting genocide in Gaza; to visit Australia to “check on” the Jewish “diaspora”. During protests against his visit, Australian Muslims saw something they’d never witnessed before: police attacking Muslims while they were praying.

The stark contrast in how two minorities were dealt with is jarring. And the double standard continues to unfold.

Islamophobia incidents in Australia skyrocketed after the War on Gaza and raised even further after the Bondi Beach attack. Within twenty-four hours of the Bondi attack, the Islamic Council of Victoria ICV reported a surge in abusive and threatening calls and messages, forcing it to disable public comments across its platforms. Similarly, the Islamophobia register documented a sharp increase in incidents, with its social media channels flooded with accusations of antisemitism and overtly abusive rhetoric.

Aided by NSW police official statement framing the Bondi attack as an attack to “advance a religious cause”, the Australian far-right groups, media and politicians went on a spree reviving the old troop of the ‘Islamic threat’ narrative, echoing the same discourses that gave us the Christchurch shooter, with no repercussions from the government.

Only four days before the Christchurch anniversary, a man crashed into an iftar gathering at a mosque in Ballarat, punching and attacking Muslims while screaming “I will kill you all” and “Death to Muslims”. He was not arrested; instead was asked to move on by the Victorian Police.

The government has shown no real nor tangible interest in protecting Muslims in Australia in the same way it has rushed through legislative changes to protect Australian Zionist Jews, despite the Australian Human Rights Commission renewed call for urgent action to address rising Islamophobia in Australia. Instead it most recently rejected a motion to comate raising Islamophobia in what can only be seen as cherry-picking which lives are more valuable than others.

 

The reason is: The politics of empire.

No state claims global custodianship over Muslims. Israel claims Jews worldwide irrespective of what anti-Zionist Jews feel and how they identify. Australia’s foreign policy, which remains tightly aligned with the United States and Israel and consistently influenced by pro-Israel lobbyists, shapes how antisemitism and Islamophobia are treated differently in public policy.

This is why Israel’s impunity confers Jewish life a racial ‘political value’ beyond their religion in Australia and the West in ways that Muslims life does not possess.

No multicultural policy will ever even this ratio.

More importantly, Islamophobia exists within the folds of this social and political reality where Zionists’ must appear to be under constant threat from the Muslim “other” so that Zionism’s colonial projects in Muslim countries can continue to be justified and supported. Israel and its Zionist allies are well-known core tenets in the Islamophobia industry, from the moment of inception of the “Islamic Terrorism” narrative in Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute conferences of 1979 and 1984. Throughout the past 25+ years, this narrative shaped the US and its Western allies’ anti-terrorism legislations. Besides, Israel has been known to fund anti-Islam groups and most recently it has forged new alliances with European and US far-right groups under the banner of defending “Judeo-Christian civilisation” in their fight against “political Islam”. Israel has return to weaponize Islamophobia, reviving fear of “radical Islam” and “jihadism”, as propaganda strategy to uplift it’s deteriorating image in the West.

The Islamophobic association of Muslims anti-colonial movements with terrorism is undermined as criticism of Israel, a threat to the West and rebranded as antisemitism. Support for Palestine is tarnished as support for “Hamas”, “Islamic terrorism”, and “Jihadism”.

Today new-antisemitism has become Islamophobia’s newest apparatus in the West.

This is why Islamophobia in the West is not and should not be understood in isolation from how and why it was manufactured in the Middle East: to justify the geopolitical expansion of the United States and Israel by painting anti-colonial Muslim movements as terrorists and diminishing the value of Muslim lives. 

Islamophobia reframes Muslims’ political grievances across the Middle East as a security threat. In doing so, it allows genocide and war to appear more justifiable; receiving not accountability but continued colonial support.

Muslim lives in the West, are less safe, less valuable precisely through this geopolitical ordering. And Islamophobia has made this geo-political ordering possible and plausible.