theguardian: by Randa Abdel Fattah —

To offer security to all its citizens, Australia needs a new counter-terrorism paradigm – one that does not use ‘terrorist’ as an everyday metonym for Muslim

 (L-R) Maha Abdo of the Muslim Women’s Association, Father Rod Bower of Gosford Anglican Church and His Eminence, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, Mufti of Australia, arrive for a media press conference in Bankstown, Sydney, Friday 9 October 2015. 

Australia’s tough national security posturing in the past 14 years has cultivated a discourse and climate of fear and overreaction.

If our fears were based on objective reality, then domestic violence would evoke the toughest of legal, political, economic and media responses. We would understand that the greatest threat to our national security is the fact that the most dangerous place in Australia is at home.

Yet the “war on terror” has little concern for risk assessments and statistics. Politicians, media, academics, and opportunistic Islamopobes have created a false sense of national insecurity over the “could-be” Muslim terrorist with insidious results. The rhetoric of the “war on terror” has turned “terrorist” into an everyday metonym for Muslim. Thus, the proposition that “anyone could be a terrorist” translates into “any Muslim could be a terrorist”.

Consider that in June 2014, Rodney Clavell, a rightwing Christian, took hostage women in a massage parlour in Adelaide’s CBD in a 13-hour siege. According to his brother, Clavell “came unstuck when he discovered that corruption existed within the correctional services system”. Despite using force with an aim to intimidate or coerce, and ideologically driven, Clavell was a “violent fugitive”, not a “terrorist”.

The 2014 case of convicted firebomber Daniel Fing demonstrates how far authorities and politicians will go to deny any connection with terrorism when the perpetrator is not Muslim. The case had the hallmarks that usually lead to allegations of terrorism: a stockpile of explosive materials, drawn maps of targets in Sydney and Newcastle, and investigations by police as to whether Fing was“plotting a mass attack on Sydney and his home town”.

Yet Fing was not charged with any terrorism-related offences. In fact, NSW police “strongly reassured” the public that the plot had “absolutely no links to terrorism”. During a radio interview, then prime minister Tony Abbott casually mused in relation to the bomb plot: “There are all sorts of people who do all sorts of weird and, at times, pretty dangerous things. But I haven’t been advised of any potential terrorist threat in respect of this particular issue.”

The stigmatisation of Muslims as “could-be terrorists” in an ongoing, feverish national insecurity crisis also translates into the blatant and culpable disregard by law enforcement, politicians and media of explicit statements of incitement to violence against Muslims (including calls to bomb, shoot, kill, bulldoze specific people and sites), openly made on social media.

The double standards are so flagrant as to produce a situation where a Muslim student was this week arrested for comments he allegedly made on Channel 7’s Facebook page, while calls to violence in the comments made on that same pageabout the arrest were ignored.

The political narrative of the omnipresent “could-be terrorist” has produced a toxic social order of racialised hyper-surveillance, hate and marginalisation of Australian Muslims. Religious rituals performed by devout Muslims – praying five times a day or reading the Qur’an – are pinned with suspicion and racist aversions because they are framed as risk indicators.

Pervasive, loose and mobile racial summaries attach to, and arrange, Muslim bodies (“brown”, “bearded”, “veiled”), things (a Qur’an, a flag, a thobe), spaces (a suburb, mosque or school) and words (“Allahu Akbar”) as “terror”, as “radicalisation”. It is in this environment that we are asked to citizen-police students, colleagues, neighbours and friends.

social justice implications of this destructive social order, the way in which the “war on terror” continues to be executed at the discursive, policy and legal levels is fundamentally counter-productive. Inequality, racism, injustice and marginalisation are a warm petri dish in which grow part of the seeds for violent extremism.

We have an entire generation who were born into the “war on terror” and whose identity is forming in an explicit climate of being encountered, framed and suspected as the internal enemy. To obscure this fact calls into question the political will to really address this issue.

A 2015 federal review of Australia’s counter-terrorism machinery declares that we are “not winning” the counter-terrorism war “on any front” and that we are facing an increasing “home grown” “lone actor” threat. Why, then, do we not consider the possibility that we need a new counter-terrorism paradigm?

First, we should treat violent extremism not as a national security issue, but as a crime, addressing its political, sociological, economic and mental health complexities the way we do all other crimes.

Second, we should stop expecting a mythical, homogenous “Muslim community” to act as witnesses and commentators to an issue that requires the intervention of qualified experts only.

Third, it is the work of our justice system to draw conclusions, not politicians or law enforcement. Exercising restraint in their statements (the way they do in cases involving non-Muslims), upholds democratic principles.

Fourth, we should stop the hysterical and sensationalised narration of radicalisation which embeds the Muslim as “could-be terrorist”/“treacherous other” into our collective psyche.

And last, if equality before the law is to have any shred of credibility, we should stop ignoring the blatant and increasingly violent extremism expressed against Muslims by individuals and organised hate groups.

These are only the first steps. But it seems to me they are urgent ones if we are truly committed to delivering a nation that offers “security” to all its citizens. 

Origional Post here:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/09/the-stigmatisation-of-muslims-as-could-be-terrorists-has-produced-a-toxic-social-order