A community says no to racist burqa bans
All around the Western world, far-right groups (some with neo-Nazi orgins and links), are gaining political ground through an orchestrated campaign against Muslim communities. By spreading fear and hatred against recent immigrant communities from Muslim countries these groups have tapped into well-resourced post-9/11 war propaganda campaigns initiated by rulers of the world’s richest and most powerful states.
One of the favourite tactics of these anti-Muslim hate campaigners is to push laws banning the burqa, the fully-veiled dress style used by a tiny minority of Muslim women. In Australia, the ultra-conservative Reverend Fred Nile, leader of the Christian Democratic Party and a member of the NSW Legislative Council, and Liberal Senator Cori Bernardi from South Australia, have unsuccessfully tried to move private members bills to ban the burqa.
The burqa ban issue became a local controversy in the Sydney’s cosmopolitan inner-west suburbs when Sergio Redegalli, a glass sculptor and gallery owner, painted a stark “Say no to burqas” mural on the wall of his studio in Newtown.
Two local residents, Amanda Perkins (a union organiser) and Pip Hinman (prominent anti-war campaigner, community activist and Socialist Alliance election candidate in several local, state and federal elections) organised a public meeting in the Erskineville Town Hall on November 24 to bring the debate into the open.
Presentations by Sally McManus, Australian Services Union state secretary; Aisha Chaabou, a student activist from the University of Western Sydney, Father Dave Smith, Holy Trinity Church and Pip Hinman kicked off the debate. Several members of the audience spoke for and against banning the burqa. Redegalli, the painter of the anti-burqa mural, also spoke.
Redegalli is slippery about his motives. He claims he just wanted to “start a discussion” but his anti-Muslim prejudice is clear. He told the meeting he’d love to have a discussion with Muslim women about the issue — prompting a Muslim woman at the meeting to remark that having such a mural on his wall was not exactly “inviting”!
Redegalli’s playing with some nasty far-right forces. On the far-right www.australianidentity.net site, Redegalli was first applauded (some forum members said they rushed to have their photo taken in front of it) and identified as a great opening. Some suggested buying Xmas presents from his gallery to show support. But when Redegalli amended the mural to replace the clear image of a woman in a burqa with an outline, one member of the forum wrote: “Well, this was predictable. The gutless dago has removed it…”
Two commercial television stations, Channel 7 and Channel 9, filmed the entire meeting but in their news items broadcast the following night focussed solely on the small pro-burqa ban minority. Many readers will not find that too surprising perhaps but they may find it a little shocking that these two TV stations were actually promoting and projecting to a mass audience an orchestrated media stunt by the far-right Australian Protectionist Party. The APP split off from another far-right party called Australia First (a group headed by the notorious open Nazi supporter Jim Saleam) in 2007, and hopes to advance in electoral politics on a model borrowed from the British National Party. In March this year, Nick Chance a visiting speaker from BNP coached APP members on how they could advance by using anti-Islamic propaganda and by shedding connections with anti-Semites and overt neo-Nazi types. Alas for the APP, its members and supporters find it hard to hide their racism as a perusal of its Facebook site quickly reveals (see some excerpts below).
Members of the APP, and another far-right group called the “Southern Cross Soldiers”, came to the Erskineville meeting with prepared scripts and a male APP member, Robert Hunt, dressed in a black burqa. With the TV cameras focused on him, Hunt strode to the front to address the meeting and then theatrically whipped off his mask and said: “No one has raised the issue of security yet. I’m a male!” For extra emphasis, Hunt added, that he could have gone into the female toilets! Later, boasting on his Facebook page, Hunt wrote: “Yes it was me! … and the sound of the vaginas closing in the front… I had never heard so many squeeks as to what I did when I said I could have gone into the female dunnies.”
Another wild-eyed APP member, Jack Zedee, said he was a former soldier who lives in Lakemba and that he was sick of being abused and spat at by burqa-clad Muslim women in the street and fearful of “Sharia law” being imposed in Australia
Another speaker who seemed costumed and primed with a crude script was a woman who a gave her name as “Skye Patch” and claimed to be a “concerned resident”. She declared herself to be from “Generation X” and argued for her right “as a proud Australian woman” to wear a sleeveless dress, makeup and high heels, use Botox and be free from “political correctness”. She was very Pauline Hansonesque in her language and played to the TV cameras.
It was a weird argument. There is no move to “impose Sharia law” in Australia and there is no move to ban any dress apart from the burqa, but allowing Muslim women wear a burqa is the “thin edge of the wedge” and next thing we know we’ll all be under Sharia law. It’s the sort of wild leap of no-logic that you would think the white supremacist far-right (born again as anti-Muslim hate campaigners today) would struggle to get a mountain goat to chance. But perhaps not if they get a little help from powerful rich friends with TV stations.
BY PETER BOYLE
