Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
The notion of preventing Islamic influence has strong echoes of the simple Cold War ‘domino theory’. This powerful metaphor and enemy image, popular in the 1950s and 1960s and used to justify US military intervention in Southeast Asia, was later widely criticised for its undeveloped and unstructured generalisations about political systems that are quite different.
Daniel Baldino is head of the Politics/International Relations program in the School of Arts and Sciences at Notre Dame University, Fremantle.
Manipulating narrowly conceived notions of national values simply triggers a storm of prejudice, while undercutting efforts to improve conceptions of the nation’s Muslim community.
Howard’s legal positivist stance limits individual rights to the confines of a particular legal system. In the ‘war against terrorism’, there is no safeguard against executive excesses or the seizure by the state of absolute power, no basis to defend the dignity of human persons.