Islamophobia envoy avoids hard questions
The Malik report on Islamophobia is a wasted opportunity to seriously consider what has happened to our multiculturalism as we grappled with changes in the Australian Muslim community.
As to quite what Islamophobia is and what it is not, the report is unclear; but the report assures us that it is widespread and on the rise. Whether that is correct is hard to say: a collection of anecdotes, elicited and presented in such a way as to confirm the hypothesis, seems a weak basis for so sweeping a conclusion, as does selective citation of the academic literature.
There is, however, no doubt that there have been some utterly reprehensible incidents in which, for example, young women were harassed, if not assaulted, for wearing a hijab. And there is equally no doubt that those young women have every right to dress as they please, just as Jews should not fear wearing a skullcap or Christians prominently displaying a cross.
The report is also correct in saying a distinction needs to be drawn and maintained between Islam as a complex, historically shaped system of beliefs and Islamism as an often murderous political theology. However, to recognise that they are distinct does not mean they are unrelated.
It may well be that the persecution of heretics, the attacks on Jews and the excesses of the Inquisition that marked the High Middle Ages were distortions of the Catholic faith; but no one could plausibly deny that they reflected trends in Catholicism that found expression in the Fourth Lateran Council.
In exactly the same way, radical Islamism may be a distorted interpretation of Islam, but to ignore its organic link to the trends that have dramatically reshaped Islam and the Islamic world since the mid-19th century is to dismiss decades of serious scholarship.
Shutting one’s eyes to the realities of contemporary Islam is perhaps comforting to the Malik report’s intended audience; but it is never possible to advance the cause of a liberal and tolerant society by believing that which is false to be true. And it is even less possible to understand contemporary Islam and public attitudes to Muslims without taking those realities into account.
It is, after all, hardly unrelated to public perceptions of Islam that, since 2000, 85 per cent of the fatalities from terrorism in the Western democracies have been due to attacks by terrorists acting in the name of Islam.
And the stark facts about the Muslim world are also hardly irrelevant to understanding contemporary Islam. Seven of the 10 countries that have the most severe restrictions on religious freedom are Islamic; and the level and intensity of religious persecution is not merely higher in those countries but has increased over time. Muslim-majority countries also have a uniquely high level of violence against sects they regard as heretical, such as Ahmadis and Bahais; an especially heavy reliance on barbaric forms of punishment; and the greatest legal and social discrimination against women.
As for freedom of expression, the vast bulk of the world’s prosecutions for blasphemy occur in Muslim-majority countries, which also have far-reaching censorship laws: it is surely telling that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is banned or prohibited from public sale in every Muslim-majority country while Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are banned in none.
Last but not least, interstate and intrastate conflicts involving Muslim countries have caused, in just the past 20 years, more than two million civilian casualties, highlighting Samuel Huntington’s famous statement that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards”.
These are, in short, countries and regimes that are overwhelmingly violence-prone, intolerant and authoritarian; and in a number of important cases, such as Turkey, Algeria and Tunisia, they have become ever more so.
Were those traits confined to the Islamic countries themselves they might matter less. But as the globalisation of information channels and of organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Tablighi homogenises Islam internationally, the harshly sectarian, staunchly anti-Western attitudes that were once specific to parts of the Arab world have become increasingly widespread, including in Australia.
It is therefore unsurprising that highly reputable surveys in Western Europe not only find that Muslims are at least four times more likely to be anti-Semitic than the population as a whole; they also find that they account for a very high share of violence against Jews. And to make things worse, younger Muslims seem especially likely to harbour extreme views, with a recent French study finding that, compared with young people generally, they are more than twice as likely to oppose banning radical Islamist organisations and, compared with young practising Catholics, three times more likely to think religious law – on issues such as the rights of women – must prevail over French law.
It is surely not Islamophobic to find those facts profoundly disturbing, as they cannot but compromise the respectful toleration and social integration on which democratic societies rest. Nor is it easy to see how the tensions they create in societies such as ours can be addressed while pretending, as the Malik report does, that they don’t exist.
On the contrary, the best official reports on the issues the Malik report was intended to cover, such as that (which the Malik report doesn’t cite) by French Socialist MP Malek Boutih, tackle them head-on.
But rather than discussing the problems frankly, the Malik report devotes itself to attacking Israel and the government’s policy with respect to the Middle East. Quite how that relates to its terms of reference is a mystery; and if Malik himself has any expertise in that area it is certainly not on display.
That the report then complains about the “potential discriminatory effect” of counter-terrorism laws without ever considering whether that might be due to the far higher likelihood of Muslims being involved in terrorism than of say, Baptists, does nothing to restore its credibility.
But whatever one makes of those aspects of the report, its grand finale – that is, its recommendations – is little more than a vast job creation scheme, notably for “experts” in flushing out Islamophobes, whatever that may mean. Thus, on an admittedly rough count, made all the rougher by the recommendations’ lack of detail, fully 47 of its 54 recommendations fall into that category.
As for its final recommendation, which is on parliamentary proceedings, it is truly ludicrous. It not only demands that all parliamentarians and their advisers be subjected to mandatory training and retraining each year on Islamophobia, presumably by experts the special envoy’s office will recruit and certify. It also recommends, in yet another round of job creation, that an “independent oversight” body be created to hear complaints about “parliamentarians who engage in hate speech or behaviour” – with the miscreants being disciplined by “formal reprimands” and “temporary suspension from the party room or various party-granted roles”.
Yes, overt absurdities are better than covert ones: they are more readily caught. And yes, ours has become a nation of professional grievance collectors, relishing all the instances of microaggressions they can discover or invent, with this report being a perfect expression of that zeitkrankheit, or disease of the times.
But in the end the Malik report is a wasted opportunity. A wasted opportunity to seriously consider what has happened to our much vaunted multiculturalism over the past two decades as we grappled with the changes occurring in the Australian Muslim community. A wasted opportunity to seriously consider how things then went so disastrously wrong immediately after October 7, 2023.
And most of all, a wasted opportunity to open an honest and respectful discussion about difficult, still searing, issues that eat at our hearts, for both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
More Coverage
According to the report by Aftab Malik, Australia’s special envoy to combat Islamophobia, that was released last week, Islamophobia “is a pervasive, and at times terrifying, reality” in Australian society.