Just imagine this: Greens senator Faruqi and her academic guest Abdel-Fattah praise Australia

Academic Randa Abdel-Fattah with Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi last week. Picture: Instagram

The Mocker surreptitiously attended an International Women’s Day event hosted by Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney last week, featuring keynote speaker and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah. (The following is satire and opinion based on the political positions adopted by the two ‘speakers’.)

Faruqi: Welcome, everyone. Here we are, looking out at the most beautiful harbour in the world. As a migrant who did not always live in beautiful and secure surroundings, I feel so grateful and privileged to be here.

Abdel-Fattah: And as the daughter of migrants who came here seeking a safe place for their family to prosper and thrive, I echo your sentiments. Australia has been so good to us.

Faruqi: Indeed. Thanks to the generosity and sacrifices of Australians before us, I have realised ambitions and a lifestyle that my native Pakistan would not have afforded me. Thank goodness I live in a Westminster democracy.

Abdel-Fattah: I know, right? Imagine spending your entire life under the rule of fundamentalists and barbaric enablers who hold that women are mere chattels. I feel sick at the thought of raising my children in such a society.

Faruqi: Me too. I have nothing but disdain for the immigrants who want to import these practices. And that also goes for the ones who have profited from living in Australia but disparage the country at every opportunity.

Abdel-Fattah: It does my head in! These anti-Western ideologues are so obsessed they make the most ridiculous claims to perpetuate their disinformation. On that note did you hear what that Afghan-born senator recently claimed at the so-called Benevolent Iranian Women Association event?

Faruqi: Oh yes, Fatima Payman! She insisted Iran was an “incredible” place for women and said that criticisms of the regime’s treatment of women amounted to “propaganda”.

Abdel-Fattah: Unbelievable. Her family flees from the Taliban, her father comes to Australia as an asylum-seeker, he sponsors her migration here, she becomes a senator – and not only does she do the dirty on the ALP and WA voters, but she also becomes a mouthpiece for a criminally misogynist regime.

Faruqi: Next thing you know she will claim Pakistan is a feminist utopia. It currently ranks at 145 out of 146 countries on the Global Gender Gap Report 2024, above only Sudan.

Abdel-Fattah: Again, I am so lucky to be born here. My mother hails from Egypt, which rated 135 in the same report. And a 2013 survey by the UN revealed 99.3 per cent of Egyptian women had suffered sexual harassment. But you would think from the carry-on of certain Middle Eastern-Australian women here that this is the world’s most dangerous country for them.

Senator Mehreen Faruqi last November. Picture: NewsWire / Monique Harmer

Faruqi: (Laughs) And what about their favourite term of disparagement, ‘White Australia’? I am a brown Muslim woman who is also an Australian senator. I ask them: what do you think are the chances of a Christian woman, let alone a white one, holding similar office in an Islamic country?

Abdel-Fattah: Exactly! Self-awareness isn’t exactly a strong trait in the activist Muslim sisterhood, is it?

Faruqi: Sadly, no. Always shooting their mouths off but oblivious to their hypocrisy. Imagine, for example, me – having amassed a lucrative investment portfolio of multiple properties – sanctimoniously banging on about Australians “living on stolen land”?

Abdel-Fattah: Yes, you never see these self-righteous blowhards handing over their numerous title deeds to mob, do you?

Faruqi: No. And you would have to be a real misery guts to not only demand the abolition of Harmony Day on the basis it “whitewashes this historic and ongoing racism in Australia” but also insist people stop using words such as inclusivity, harmony and social cohesion.

Abdel-Fattah: Yes, nothing upsets these types more than the thought of a multiracial society of loyal Australians. They want to perpetuate and entrench grievance because it is the only drum they can beat. Pathetic, really.

Randa Abdel-Fattah at a women’s day event in Sydney last week. Picture: Facebook

Faruqi: You must see a lot of them in academia.

Abdel-Fattah: All the time. My employer is Macquarie University, and one of the academic fellows there claims the organisation is “named after a genocidal coloniser”. She has vowed she will make sure whatever she does there will be “an act of resistance against that blood-soaked tribute’’.

Faruqi: Do her acts of resistance include liberating herself from the public payroll?

Abdel-Fattah: No, because that would mean having to get a real job. She has a fierce hatred of Israel. And she has labelled her fellow academics as “protectors and sustainers of white supremacy’’.

Faruqi: How so?

Abdel-Fattah: She is in a huff because they will not dance to her tune. Consequently, she refuses to cite their academic work, no matter how authoritative, if they are, in her words, “silent over Gaza”.

Faruqi: Dear oh dear. Is this the one who is also a children’s book author?

Abdel-Fattah: That’s her.

Faruqi: Figures.

Abdel-Fattah: Do you want to hear something funny? Guess what she included in her university profile under the category of ‘Research interests’?

Faruqi: What?

Abdel-Fattah: The ‘Sociology of everyday life’.

Faruqi: That’s priceless!

Abdel-Fattah: And get this – she has received around $1.28 million in taxpayer-funded research grants. Yet this year she bragged that she had refused an Australian Research Council requirement to hold a conference as a condition of her $870,000 taxpayer grant, saying “I look for ways to bend rules and refuse and subvert them”.

Faruqi: And she calls herself a fellow? Surely no-one would defend her on the basis it is a conspiracy against an Arab woman by the white male establishment. On second thoughts a race-baiting politician would have no hestitation about doing just that.

Abdel-Fattah: But isn’t it funny, Mehreen, that Muslim activists can dish it out –

Faruqi: Dish it out with spite, abuse, and contempt.

Abdel-Fattah: All that and then some. But if a non-Muslim calls out their BS –

Faruqi: I know what you are going to say.

Abdel-Fattah: As sure as night follows day.

Faruqi: It must be a case of –

Abdel-Fattah: They immediately start screeching –

(In unison): ISLAMOPHOBIA!