Islamophobia in Australia: From Far-Right Deplorables to Respectable Liberals

Abstract

In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending ‘Australian values’ against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devil by whose otherness the boundaries of acceptability of the national culture may be marked out and policed. The Muslim Other is positioned not only as culturally incommensurate, but dangerously so: dishonest, criminally inclined, violent, misogynist, homophobic, backward, uncivilized. On the far right, extremist nationalist organizations incite racist hatred under cover of this rhetoric, often cloaked as reasonable common sense. This paper undertakes an ideology analysis of political and media discussion, and examines the forms of social control that they advance and sustain.

Xenophobia towards asylum seekers: A survey of social theories

“…xenophobia. While the form that these strategies take is always conditioned by local political, cultural and economic factors (Poynting and Briskman 2018), this model argues that it is also essential to grasp the explanatory importance of global economic forces for understanding…”

“…In documenting the shift from biological to cultural characterisations of Otherness, scholars have often used the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ to describe the way that asylum seekers have been homogenised as uniformly Muslim, and to show how racial fears and hostilities have thus been projected onto the Islamic faith (Dunn et al, 2007: 574; Jackson, 2018; Klocker, 2004: 10–11; Maddox, 2004: 2; Ogan et al, 2013; Poynting and Briskman, 2018; Poynting et al, 2004; Randell-Moon, 2006). Negative portrayals of Islam are prominent in Christian majority nations, as are broader claims of links between the Islamic faith and terrorism (Dunn et al, 2007; Jackson, 2018; Nagel, 2016).…”

Australian Media and Islamophobia: Representations of Asylum Seeker Children

“…Shee (2016), and also Bambrick (2016), proposed some level of compassion towards asylum seeker children around 2015 and 2016-indicating a vague, potentially short-lived, paradigm shift in written text. However, both historical and contemporary analysis shows that racist underpinnings have continued to prevail in media reporting of Australia's immigration policies and of the Muslim asylum seekers effected by them (Poynting and Briskman 2018;McLaren and Patil 2016;Kabir 2006Kabir , 2007Hoang and Hamid 2017;Nolan et al 2016;Woodlock 2016;Itaoui 2016). Further, critics argue that demonizing media representations of Muslims, terror and asylum seekers has normalized Islamophobia and rooted it right in the middle of the Australian psyche (Briskman 2015; Poynting and Briskman 2018; Abdel-Fattah 2019).…”

“…Increases in asylum seekers, including asylum seeker children arriving by boat, was characteristically couched with terms that conflated 'boat people', 'queue jumpers', and 'criminals.' Researchers associated this language as contributing to moral panics in the Australian imagination towards 'people from Middle Eastern backgrounds'; to put it differently, the media representations in news articles predominantly mimicked the discursive structures that underpin Islamophobic discourses of fear and deviancy (Briskman 2015;Martin 2015;Hage 1998Hage , 2014Poynting 2002;Poynting and Briskman 2018). These discourses permeated Australian society then, and still do.…”

Race/Ethnicity, Crime and Social Control: An Introduction

“…Poynting and Briskman (both at Western Sydney University, Australia), in their article 'Islamophobia in Australia: From far-right deplorables to respectable liberals' (Poynting and Briskman 2018), critically examine the growing normalisation of Islamophobia in Australia. The authors argue that the vilification of Muslims in Australia has reached a level of such intensity, differing to that experienced by other immigrants, such as the Chinese, Greeks, Italians and Vietnamese.…”