Abstract
This paper examines the global provenance of Australian Islamophobia in the light of the Christchurch massacre perpetrated by a white-supremacist Australian. Anti-Muslim racism in Australia came with British imperialism in the nineteenth century. Contemporary Islamophobia in Australia operates as part of a successor empire, the United States-led ‘Empire of Capital’. Anti-Muslim stories, rumours, campaigns and prejudices are launched from Australia into global circulation. For example, the spate of group sexual assaults in Sydney over 2000–2001 were internationally reported as ‘ethnic gang rapes’. The handful of Australian recruits to, and supporters of, IS, is recounted in the dominant narrative as part of a story propagated in both the United Kingdom and Australia about Islamist terrorism, along with policy responses ostensibly aimed at countering violent extremism and targeting Muslims for surveillance and intervening to effect approved forms of ‘integration’.
Highlights
In the contemporary international upsurge of right-wing nationalist, nativist and anti-Muslim populism as the ‘war on terror’ meets the Global Financial Crisis (Vieten and Poynting 2016), a renewal of the concept of Islamophobia has been called for
On 15 March 2019, the world had received the harrowing news of that day’s ‘Christchurch massacre’, in which an Australian white supremacist cold-bloodedly and systematically slaughtered 50 worshippers. (The 51st casualty died some five weeks later, after unsuccessful surgery.) It is essential, for perspective, to keep firmly in mind the long and atrocious history of self-appointed white Australian guardians of the ethnic purity of what they claim as ‘our land’, using overwhelming firepower to mass murder unarmed people in a campaign of what would later be widely understood as genocide
This article will demonstrate that the ‘exterminism’ (Hage 2004) inherent in Islamophobia, and most visible at its ‘extremes’, arose in its Australian manifestation from the white-supremacist settler colonialism of the British Empire
Summary
In the contemporary international upsurge of right-wing nationalist, nativist and anti-Muslim populism as the ‘war on terror’ meets the Global Financial Crisis (Vieten and Poynting 2016), a renewal of the concept of Islamophobia has been called for. The point is that the journalistic telling of the story in Australia, with its morals about violent Muslim misogyny of young immigrant men, was inflected by (distorted and falsified) accounts from the other side of the world, while the Australian crimes were reported in Europe as an object lesson for threatened ethnic majorities.
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