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Since the first churches offered sanctuary to the refugees facing deportation to Nauru, a steady stream of voices have joined the call for compassion. As a political language, compassion is itself a reclamation of power. Extending safety, resources, or even a mere welcome to people in need proves that we have something to give. Strength is embodied by a capacity to aid and assist, rather than in cruelty. Empathy, care and compassion appeal to us on a level of emotion that runs deeper than mere rhetoric.
A perception of Muslims as 'savage' and antithetical to peace accounts for incidents where overtly racist people can rejoice easily at the loss of human life, to little negative reaction. When a person is deemed unworthy or bereft of humanity, their death becomes gruesomely welcome. While Islamophobia itself does not define racism, Muslim people exemplify ideas of a cardinal threat against the Anglocentric West, which laterally affects how brown non-Muslim minority groups are treated.
A series of protests against a mosque in Bendigo and the launch of an Islamophobic party in Perth may be cause for concern, but only if political leaders fail to invalidate fringe views. Under Tony Abbott, the conflation of Islam and extremism became mainstream. Corrections regarding racial vilification and incitement are most properly determined in the court, so it is not Muslims or lefties who are oppressing these views but the laws that operate in the secular democracy they purport to defend.
Invoking Joseph Conrad's story about seagoing doppelgangers, 'The Secret Sharer', Edward Said identified Islamophobia as anti-Semitism's respectable twin. Indeed Israeli PM Netanyahu's description of the Mufti urging Hitler onto greater evil contains an echo of the old anti-Semitic canard of Jews as shadowy manipulators. This trope is central to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, was a key element in Goebbels' propaganda campaigns, and is now central to contemporary Islamophobia.
'How we address radicalisation as a psychologist is to help people to examine their way of thinking. Every form of radicalisation and fundamentalism is to do with rigidity in the way people think. Our job is to help people to see that rigidity in anything doesn't work.' Clinical psychologist Shehzi Yusaf has a particular interest in the role of religion and spirituality in mental health. She is based in Parramatta, the site of the recent murder of NSW police employee Curtis Cheng by 15-year-old Farhad Jabar.
There is a particular anatomy to the process of othering. In any context, the formula consists of propaganda, hatred, division, suppression and control. I'm from Perth. Some people would dispute this due to my brown skin and non-Anglo name. But I was born here, and have lived here for my entire life. Still, people like me are too often considered Australian only by law, and not by sociocultural connotation.
The readiness with which some westerners take the most violent and extreme groups as legitimate expressions of Islam betrays the racism that underpins perceptions of Muslims. Whether I like it or not, my religious background and my name tie me to these 'jihadists.' I feel the permanent weight of expectation to publicly apologise for their actions.
Team Australia postulates that the world is a competitive environment of nations that win or lose. You have to choose your primary loyalty or affiliation: 'He who is not with us is against us'. The more one unpacks the term Team Australia, the nastier it gets.
There is no denying that our nation was forged by men and women who settled here from the UK. There is also no denying that men and women from other parts of the world came after them, and that there were countless generations here before them. Until monarchists can reconcile themselves with these facts then the image they hold of Australia is incomplete.
In the past, Christian Democratic Party leader Fred Nile saw conservative Muslims as allies. Now he, like the Australian Christian Lobby, prefers to play sectarian wedge politics. Most homophobic Muslims would rather stay silent on gay marriage than support sectarian bigots.
It's not that Catholicism has nothing to answer for, but the problem is that caricatures quickly become facts. Many Catholics have learned to 'cop it sweet', but there comes a point where you have to say something. The papal visit to the UK might just be it.