After Cronulla - solidarity against racism - but not "with Islam"

Submitted by AWL on 18 December, 2005 - 12:38

About 150 people turned up in King George Square, Brisbane, on 18 December to protest against the racist riots in the Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla, New South Wales, on 11 December, when 5000 white people, mostly young, took to the streets waving Australian flags and attacking anyone of Middle-Eastern appearance.

The size of the anti-racist rally - the last Sunday before Christmas, and in baking heat - was encouraging, as was the fact that it was mostly young people. In Sydney, according to a report phoned through to the rally, up to 5000 protested (the police estimated 1000).

All the socialist groups were there in Brisbane - DSP, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Action Group, Solidarity, Workers' Liberty - except the ISO.

Two things bothered me. Although most of the speakers were socialists, they mostly appealed to "the Australian community" to reject racism, rather than to working-class solidarity. (The speech from Mark Gillespie of Solidarity was an exception).

Socialist Alternative had a placard denouncing "Howard's anti-Muslim Australia" - not "racist Australia", but "anti-Muslim Australia" - and Meredith Rose, presiding at the rally, announced that our second speaker, after a welcome to Aboriginal land by Sam Watson, would offer "a Muslim prayer". Actually, the speaker only gave us "salaam alaikum" and then a few words of support "as an Australian Muslim"; but many other speakers emphasised support for "the Muslim community". Two or three felt that anti-racism obliged them to insist that there was nothing sexist about Islam.

When I spoke, I pointed out that the racists had targeted people because they looked "Middle-Eastern" - not much different from many of the asylum-seekers sent to detention centres or to Nauru by John Howard - regardless of whether they were Muslim, atheist, or Christian. We owe no solidarity to Islam or any other religion. We owe solidarity to the human beings attacked by racists, regardless of their religious belief or disbelif.
If I had had more time, I might have added that:

  • According to all reports, the racists' primary target was Lebanese-Australians. To identify Lebanese-Australians with "the Muslim community" is inaccurate in at least two ways. A survey done for SBS among Lebanese-Australians found only 55% Muslim, 29% Christian (16%, presumably, no religion). And it found "only a slight, non-significant difference in the level of personal dissatisfaction [experiences of racism, etc.] between Christian and Muslim Lebanese". In Brisbane, I would guess the majority of Muslims must be from Bosnia and Kosova.
  • Even where religion actually is the marker which identifies a community which is the victim of oppression and prejudice, socialists and democrats can defend that community without defending the religion. And we must do so, if we are to remain true to our humanist principles and build a solid movement against oppression, rather than a series of special pleas for religious groups supposed to deserve friendship because of the alleged merits of their religions. Support for the oppressed Catholic community of Northern Ireland could not be helped by socialists pretending that Catholicism is not so bad after all on abortion rights, children's rights, or divorce.
  • Why do groups like Socialist Alternative, Socialist Action Group, and Solidarity, which have all split away from the main body of the international political tendency led by the SWP in Britain on organisational grounds, never reconsider the actual politics of that tendency? Why do they so uncritically reproduce such follies as the SWP's "Islamic turn"?

Martin Thomas

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