Recording: Coming of Age in the War on Terror

VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today.  Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that ‑ well, I'm meeting on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, it's the land where this university is built, and I want to pay respect and extend that respect to Indigenous Elders past, present and emerging, particularly for their custodianship of knowledge for this land on which this university is built.

 

My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Director of Social Justice and Inclusion here at the University of Technology, Sydney, and it's my pleasure to introduce and to be joined today and to introduce the brilliant and distinguished Randa Abdel‑Fattah, who I'll be introducing properly in a moment.  But that's the book that we're going to be talking about today, so have a good look at it.  I absolutely loved it.  It's fantastic.

 

Before I introduce Randa, I've just got a couple of housekeeping that I want to talk to you about.  The first is that the event is being live captioned.  So to view the captions, you click on the link that is in the chat and you can find it at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  The captions will then open in a separate window. 

 

Now, there will be an opportunity to ask questions during the event.  So if you do have a question, you'll see there's also a Q&A box.  You can click on that box, type in your question, and you can also upvote other people's questions.  To be honest, I tend to ask the questions that have the most votes.  I sort of take a pretty democratic approach to it.  So you type in your question there and you can also vote for the questions that you would particularly like Randa to respond to.

 

So this month Randa released her newest book, titled Coming of Age in the War on Terror.  It's the first book of its kind to deep dive into the lives of the generation born after the 9/11 attacks.  Now, for a lot of us here online today, we probably remember the moment in time ‑ where we were and what we were doing.  It's a marker in our history, delineating global politics and events into a before and after.  But for the generation of young people that Randa interviews in this book, there is no pre or post, they have lived their entire lives in a world at war with the war on terror post 9/11.

 

So that means growing up in a context of widespread Islamophobia, of surveillance, of suspicion and fear and it's also a time in which we've seen the far right gain traction, public discourse in a number of the well‑established democracies, such as England, there's Brexit, Trump in the US and a deepening polarisation of politics is becoming more and more the norm.

 

In the opening of your book, Randa, you note that the majority of students that you work with, the high school‑aged students, don't consider themselves political and Randa notes that this aligns with the research that shows that young people tend to consider political to mean parliament or political parties or electoral processes, rather than everyday issues.  But what this book makes really clear ‑ and probably the thing that spoke to me the most about it ‑ is that young people are deeply invested in the political.  They may not think they're political, but they really are and they've got deep thoughts about the political.  Yet they're almost completely missing from the public dialogue.

 

Well, this book rectifies this.  It places young people at the heart of a treatise on racism and Islamophobia post 9/11 and it particularly looks at the distinctive nature of Australian racism.  I really enjoyed this book and I'm therefore delighted to be properly welcoming Randa to this webinar.

 

Randa Abdel‑Fattah is a multi‑award winning author and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University.  Her books include Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia.  She also serves on the editorial boards of Journal of the Comtemporary Study of Islam and Continuum:  Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. 

 

Randa is also a lawyer and a prominent Palestinian and anti‑racism advocate.  She's the multi‑award winning author of 11 novels ‑ I don't know how you do all of this, it's pretty amazing ‑ 11 novels published in over 20 countries.  She is co‑editor of the anthology Arab, Australian, Other and is currently adapting her best‑selling novel Does My Head Look Big In This? into a feature film. 

 

Her latest book, "Coming of Age in the War on Terror, has just been released and also, if you decide you're interested, we're going to post a link in the chat and you can click on it and you can purchase the book.  So it's like a book launch except it's a virtual book launch, so you can go and click on the link.  So welcome, Randa?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Thanks so much for having me.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  No worries.  We're going to have opportunity for Q&A, but I'm going to ask you some questions first.  Your book begins by boldly declaring that Australian racism is profoundly linked to the unfinished business of Indigenous sovereignty and I thought it was a really beautiful way to start the book and I just thought you might be able to expand on this concept for our audience and how this concept of Indigenous sovereignty impacts on the issues that you explore in your book.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes, so of course I was quoting Aileen Moreton‑Robinson, distinguished professor, when I was talking about that quote and the reason that I was setting up the scene there is that I start by looking at the massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand by Australian Brenton Tarrant in March 2019 and what fascinated me and frustrated me about debates at the time was how suddenly the conversation was that this man was abhorrent, he was an anomaly, he was fringed and he was not one of us.  This is not us, that was the rhetoric, and of course Indigenous people were coming out, like Chelsea Bond, saying race is foundational to this country and this nation and it is very much part of the intrinsic structure of this nation's base, so to say that racism is something that is somehow on the fringes is to go against the very history of this nation.

 

So what I wanted to do there was trace how a person who was 28 years old could commit such a terrorist crime and to link it to the war on terror.  Aileen Moreton‑Robinson has an incredible article about sovereignty and about the war on terror in her book and she talks about how the anxiety over dispossession, the anxiety over having stolen from you what you stole from others is what characterises this white patriarchal anxiety that fuels race in this country. 

 

So what I was arguing was that somebody like Brenton Tarrant has grown up in the war on terror, where we have seen in the name of the war on terror Muslims being killed globally and that has emboldened domestic terrorists to then see Muslim life as game in a domestic context.  We cannot ignore the fact that what has been enabled and allowed on the global scale in the name of the war on terror has inspired and emboldened white supremacist terrorists on the domestic front and this is what is missing from the conversation which the apologetics of this being a fringe crime was covering up.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  And it's interesting because that theme of sort of tracing the history of Australian racism ‑ you also in that opening chapter talk about the vagaries of racism, how racism actually moves from one form of racism to another, ignoring logic or contradiction.  So the example you give obviously is Pauline Hanson, who basically railed against Aboriginals and Asians in 1996 and then just basically used exactly the same language to substitute Muslims into exactly the same dialogue sort of a decade later.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  She went from Asians to Dancing with the Stars to Muslims ‑ opportunistic.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  The projection.  So are we in the same pattern with 9/11 or is there something intrinsically different about this time from other periods of history?  Is this going to wash over us and move on to another group of people or is there something intrinsically different?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  No, see, when I started my activism as an anti‑racism activist (inaudible) that's what really fired me up, but after 9/11 I fell into the trap of fighting racism and Islamophobia post 9/11 and all that was happening in the Muslim community on the logic that this was our terms.  So what we had to do was explain ourselves, counter the negative stereotypes and misconceptions, provide the correct definition of Jihad, explain why we aren't a problem. 

 

When I came to my PhD to look at Islamophobia and race from the point of view of perpetrators, I realised very quickly that understanding Islamophobia only from a position that we are a problem people was the wrong way to go about it.  I had to understand what race means in this country and then the racism that is expressed against all other minority groups, which takes on its own nuance, but then it can be understood. 

 

That's why I always start back to what is the foundational injustice of this country.  Of course all of my knowledge has come from understanding race and racism from the point of view of Indigenous people.  That's why that article ‑ that book by Aileen Moreton‑Robinson really helped me understand the Muslim problem in Australia by tracing it back to the roots of anxiety over dispossession and of having stolen from you what you've stolen from other people.  The fact this is happening on stolen land was the elephant in the room.

 

So I think that it's very tempting for us to think that 9/11 was this watershed moment, but first of all that also erases the experiences, for example, of black Muslims, who have always been visible.  9/11 rendered the Muslim population visible and an attention and a problem people at large, but that also ignores the fact that there was a greater issue of race at play in this country for Muslims as a minority population.

 

I think that is really important to make those connections when we talk about race and so we understand that 9/11 was in some ways a watershed moment, it launched the global war on terror, but it was an extension of empire, an extension of western imperialism.  I think that's constantly missing in our conversations about the war on terror and it also accounts for why we fail to understand in terms of policies and political discourse and media debates the conversations we have about radicalisation, the conversations which we have about terrorism become focused on the individual rather than state terrorism or global terrorism in the name of national security.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  In your book you talk a lot about the policies that governments implement around the anti radicalisation of young people and the different programs that they seek to roll out into schools.  Can you just elaborate a bit on that, about why they're so problematic and not particularly effective?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yeah.  Well, the thing about a lot of the policy frameworks is there's such a lack of transparency about which schools they're applying to, what kind of training is going on.  We do know that with some of the programs, and in particular some of the policy frameworks, that they are implemented in certain schools based on Muslim populations and the numbers of Muslims in those schools, but there's a lack of transparency about that and that's why in the book I try to forensically analyse these policy documents, but also acknowledge that we actually don't know how they're being implemented in schools, who are the subjects of these policies and that's a real problem in and of itself.

 

In terms of the millions that's been poured into grants programs working with young people since the problem of "home‑grown terrorism" emerged and sort of the way that Muslims ‑ I mean, these grants programs, most of the students I spoke to had no clue that these grants programs or policies existed.  It was not something that was under their radar at all. 

 

But the point for me is that they are material practices in the war on terror.  There is a cumulative impact and sort of there is an effect and impact that these grants and programs have in terms of reinforcing the perception of the Muslim young person as at risk, as a problem community, as a group of Australians who are future risks of attack, so they need to be civilised into adhering to Australian values, they need to be schooled in Judeo‑Christian values, whatever that means.  

 

There's a long pattern of this.  A lot of us have forgotten this has happened, where it was very explicit particularly in the Howard years.  If you look at even the press releases around a lot of the grants programs, they were programs that introduced sports into schools, into community groups, working with media, you know, music, media training.  But the way that they were represented officially was always that they were targeting at‑risk youth.

 

Now, there are so many huge implications of racialising an entire community as at risk as inherently on this conveyor belt to being radicalised, but also to think that there were parents who sent their children to these programs not realising that they had been officially labelled as at risk is again there is an effect long term, at least in the collective imagination that young Muslim youth, particularly young Muslim boys, are potentially vulnerable to radicalisation.  And again, even the word radicalisation is fraught and meaningless.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, that's right.  In fact, one of the things that hit when I was reading all of that was about when you actually talked to the young people, actually talked to the young boys, young girls, none of them put up on their list of concerns their impending radicalisation.  They all had just the normal teenage concerns of any young person and this is a part ‑ this is basically what your book goes to great lengths to tell, put their words and their voices into this issue.  So can you talk a little bit about the project you did with students using the Childish Gambino song This is America because I thought that was very powerful.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes, definitely.  I also wanted to raise, for example, one of the students ‑ going back to that point I made ‑ his main issue for me when I asked him about the war on terror, he said to me, "I'm not afraid of terrorism, I'm afraid of being accused of being a terrorist."  That hit me so hard. 

 

Another student had absolutely no idea about any of these policies, the war on terror, in terms of he didn't pay attention, his life was soccer, he just loved soccer.  But he said to me when he goes and plays soccer in the local park, he wants to play with anyone who will play with him and sometimes he tries to put on a good act so that people don't assume because he says "I look Muslim".  He had the beard and he said, "I have to try to look a certain way so they don't think I'm like those people on TV."  That for me was profoundly sad, he'd internalised the idea he'd be suspected or perceived in a racialised way and that in itself was affecting the way he was behaving.  For me these are the things that I'm looking at, you know, those quiet moments where young people have internalised these expectations and stereotypes.

 

So I was sitting in the car on my way just at a school, I had arrived early, and Childish Gambino's song This is America had just dropped and I was listening to it in the car absolutely mesmerised, I loved it, was watching it on repeat and then I felt there was a lot to work with in this.  So I experimented with the class that I was going to speak to and I got them to watch it and then on the board I asked them to workshop with me what if we were to create our own song lyrics, not This is America, This is Australia. 

 

I got them to start thinking about what does Australia mean to you, how is it represented, what are the common myths, what would you like to see improved?  Mind you, this is a class most had said, "I'm not political", "Politics, I hate it", "Oh, politics is voting."  That was the extent.  Then they produced these remarkable poems and the sarcasm and the wit and they are just scathing and so incisive. 

 

The time I was conducting these workshops was around the time of the plastic bans in Coles and Woolies and it was also the time that Scott Morrison had taken over as Prime Minister, so there was a lot happening and that was also very important to me to see because I'd run this workshop over a long period of time now since then at different schools and it is really interesting to see how what's happening filters down into these poems.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, and I'm going to read one of them because it is true, everything Randa is saying is true.  All the kids went, "We're not political" and every poem is like a searing indictment of Australia and this is one of them by a young boy called Nick:  "This is Australia.  We're not really nice to Aboriginals.  The Queen is our God.  We really enjoy alcohol, unjustifiably patriotic.  Tony Abbott ate a raw onion."  They're all as sort of hard hitting, but you're right, cheeky and witty as well.

 

I think on your previous point it also shows I suppose the depth of understanding.  People always assume young people don't understand what's going on.  Even when you talk about the internalising of those messages, they do understand what's going on and that's ‑‑

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  That's something that was very important.  That was something that was very important, as somebody who has been an activist for so many years now and I started in high school, you know, 1992.  I came of age at the time of the first Gulf War.  It directly impacted me at the school, attending Islamic school, vandalism on the walls, constant graffiti, "Go back home, wogs."  This was my teenage years.  That was my principle of activism. 

 

I also realised change is slow and young people also need to have confidence that small, informal acts of protest, small gestures they make online, for example, refusing ‑ I had one student who said, "I'm not political", but proceeded to tell me he refuses to read the Daily Telegraph.  I thought that active refusal is a conscious political act.  It is withdrawing your attention, withdrawing your business from ‑ your consumerism from a media empire and that in itself should be lauded and celebrated so when people understand that the way you curate your social media, when they have confidence in those small informal acts of protest and realise it doesn't have to be spectacular, they can understand these are the sorts of things that quietly mobilise a mass force to reckon with and it takes time to do that.  All of us would love for it to be quicker, but we have to do what we can with the resources and the talents that we have. 

 

So that's what I was trying to do with young people to get them to realise these small acts they're participating in are just as important politically as casting your vote when you turn 18.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm.  So throughout the book you talk about how governments on both sides of the political divide introduced and backed policies that were designed to identify and prevent extremism in Australia and of course this led, as we all know, to increased surveillance and policing of people's lives down to the colour of their tights, which is one of the examples you use.  Could you give us all some insight into how this played out in the community and at everyday level and the sorts of impacts the young people you talked to felt?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  One year in particular that stood up as particularly difficult for the Muslim community was 2015.  So it was after the horrific murder of the police accountant Curtis Cheng in Parramatta and a raft of new policies that were introduced by the New South Wales Government then, particularly directing it at schools, and also ramping up the rhetoric about home‑grown terrorists and radicalisation among younger populations, so the way that this collectively projected the idea of an entire young Muslim community suddenly even more at risk and needing to ‑ being cautioned to look out for warning signs as though there was a checklist that you could just tick off and as though race had nothing to do with it.

 

In terms of how this was impacted on by young Muslims, you know, the people that I spoke to, there was one boy who said to me about there was an incident at his school, it was in the media, and so him and his friends had to change the route that they took to get to school because they would be mobbed by the media, by the cameras. 

 

It played out differently for girls who wore hijab.  Parents felt worried about their girls catching public transport.  They'd make changes to their work schedule and drop the girls at school.  It squeezes space as well and mobility for young Hijaby Muslim girls because suddenly they are, as we know through empirical evidence ‑ the first people on the frontline when it comes to hate crimes are Muslim women wearing hijab.  And I spoke to girls who wear hijab, students who had actually been attacked.

 

So immediately there's a community who feel under siege, who start changing their behaviour, their patterns.  For me it was just shocking that this has to happen to 13‑, 14‑, 15‑year‑old kids.

 

Another impact is ‑ I know we're going to speak about this later, but the way that this also has a chilling effect on young people in classrooms who suddenly feel all eyes are on them to explain to the ambassadors for an entire community ‑ to explain the actions of an individual as though they somehow bear a culpability for those actions and they're 15, 16.  That's not the world that they live in.  Suddenly they have to get on top of politics and geopolitical nuances.  For me that's trying to understand the pressure on them in that sense.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  There was a wonderful interview you made with that young woman who was saying she started to study up and learn everything about the entire history because she felt such a sense of responsibility.  You thought what a wonderful young woman, but also, you're right, why is she bearing this entire responsibility on her shoulders?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  She could not make sense of it at that age.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So getting back to that ‑ I think this ‑ because the next question I was going to ask you is about the chapter you write about the class of geography and where people feel safe.  I think that relates quite nicely to what you just said about how when you're not feeling safe, there was one story you told of a girl whose family moved from I think the Hills District or something to South Western Sydney because they actually wanted to be in a place where they felt safe and they felt she could be herself and probably not have to feel she had the whole world on her shoulders and explain to everyone in her class and be the sole representative of Islam. 

 

So talk a little bit about what you discussed in that chapter about the overlay of class and geography and also what this means, because basically it's everyone retreating into their own spaces.  It's also Anglo Saxons retreating into their single‑sex private schools as well.  Talk a bit about that.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes, and Christina Ho, academic at UTS, looks at that in her research on selective schools and the way that race plays out in schools.  So what I found ‑ and it's always lovely to be a researcher and to go into your research and be surprised by something or go in arrogantly expecting something and then it being totally turned around. 

 

What I found very quickly was I could not assume this master category of Muslim that every Muslim young person would be thinking the same thing and feeling the same thing.  Instinctively I knew that, but I still felt they'd all have this sense of be furious about the politics of the war on terror and equally be experiencing the impacts of it. 

 

But what I found quite quickly was that class and gender of course had a massive impact on how the war on terror was experienced.  So I found, for example, that a Muslim student in a private school in the Hills District of Sydney had more in common in terms of their experience of the war on terror with their non‑Muslim peers at that school than they did with a Muslim student in south‑west Sydney.  So this was very, very quickly ‑ those lines were very quickly drawn, that the war on terror was clearly being waged differently according to sort of these landscapes and racial landscapes and geographies, which makes sense given the paranoia and moral panics around Western Sydney and what's been happening for a long time in those schools and I do talk about that.

 

So that definitely had an impact.  People who were growing up in, say, schools in Bankstown or Greenacre or Punchbowl understood what it meant to feel the burden of being securitised, to have police as a regular guest speaker at your school, to be constantly seen as people who need to be moved away from this potential path of radicalisation, whereas the people I spoke to in suburbs, in the eastern suburbs and northern just had no clue about any of this.  Some of them didn't even recognise some of the key moments, the shooting of Curtis Cheng.  It was just a headline they might have paid attention to because they hadn't experienced the counter‑terrorism raids, hadn't experienced the community grants projects that were directly targeted at them.  So that certainly was surprising for me, yes.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, and you're right, it seems obvious, but it ‑ yes, you're right.  I agree. 

 

The other thing I really wanted to dig into is your critique of the Australian curriculum and that was particularly damning and I am going to quote some stats and things here to set up the next question.  So in your book you talk about how of the 102 prescribed texts for the New South Wales HSC curriculum, only 2 are authored by Muslims and the list of top 15 books includes no texts by Australian women, no texts by migrant Australians, no texts by Indigenous writers, let alone Muslim writers.  So the sort of homogeneity is pretty stark. 

 

But the analogy or metaphor that I thought was brilliant that you used was you talked about your son doing a puzzle creating the frame first and then filling in the detailed pieces afterwards and you say the frame is the whiteness, the frame is the whiteness of the curriculum, and it doesn't matter how many diverse or inclusion pieces or bits you throw into the middle, the frame, the master frame, remains white and because of this, you write quite movingly about how a lot of the young people you spoke to stressed about how much they relied on teachers to set the conditions of school as a safe space and how much they wanted teachers to creatively deviate from the constraints of the curriculum and open up new and critical routes of learning and discovery. 

 

So I thought I really wanted to talk a bit about this because it's such a critical part I suppose of the work that we also do at a university, how do you make sure that the truly diverse or true knowledges are being taught to our young people?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yeah, I mean, what I'm effectively talking about is revolution when it comes to our education system, and of course I'm not the first to say it.  My work is deriving and building on what Indigenous scholars have been saying for a long time and still saying that ‑ and also referring to the work that's done in the UK and the US, this idea of the white master script as Ladson‑Billings talks about. 

 

So it's this idea that everything is referred to this white ways of knowing and histories and if you do get included, it is done in a tokenistic way or it's an add‑on.  It's never respected in and of its own right as a knowledge system in and of its own right.  It's always in reference to the core central white paradigm of knowledge.

 

It's not just about the lack of ‑ for me it's staggering those statistics because when we have curriculum, for example, the Australian curriculum, which explicitly talks about the need for young people to be Asia literate, and then you have the majority of Muslims in the world living in Asia and then you have a curriculum that has these lofty goals, but it's not translated into what young people are actually reading and being exposed to. 

 

In, fact it's even more insidious than that.  There are texts that, for example, in the K to 10 curriculum of prescribed texts, English texts, and there are three about Afghanistan, with Afghanistany characters, but written by white writers and then they're mapped on explicitly to this goal of intercultural understanding of Asia.  It's not even it's something that is an afterthought, it's actively using white voices to speak for people of colour.  So there's a lot ‑ so much work that needs to be done. 

 

But going back to the young people and how they experience this, there's a lot of different ways.  So like you said, it leaves to chance a teacher who is actually going to have the time and the resources, because let's face it, we're talking about people, human beings here, who are juggling a lot on their plate as teachers, probably the most overworked profession who actively then have to go and write a new curriculum. 

 

I'll give you an example when my daughter was learning about the dark ages in year 8 and I was speaking to her teacher, who I know very well, and she said, "Do you want to come in and do a lecture about the dark ages" but from the point of view of the rest of the world, which was actually lightest time the golden age.  I came and spoke to this class.  It took me a long time to write that material, but what was so frustrating for me and sad at the same time was that I was giving this class this lecture to a class of year 8 students at an Islamic school, Pakistani background, Lebanese, Egyptian, Palestinian, as many ethnicities as you can get in one class who had no idea about their own histories and heritage, who had no idea about the depth of history that has been denied to them. 

 

So this curriculum not only distorts what white students are learning; it deprives people of colour, young students of colour, of their own histories, something they can take pride in and give them a sense of identity as well.  So I think there's so much to work with. 

 

Another impact of this is that young people, particularly when you talk to Muslims about the curriculum that they're exposed to when it comes to talking about the Middle East or 9/11, they feel this responsibility to compensate for these gaping holes in the curriculum, to fill and plug these gaps.  There's a lot of responsibility on the young person.

 

For me what's even more poignant about this, it assumes students are already comfortable with the idea of being a young Muslim.  Many of the ones I spoke to said, "I feel that I have to come to terms with my Muslimness because of what's happening around me.  I still don't know what it means to me."  "I'm not a religious person", for example, one person told me, "but I feel I have to be the Muslim spokesperson in the classroom or talk about these issues that I really have no idea about."  One girl said, "I like fantasy novels, I hate reading about history and that."  But after she did a class on 9/11, she felt this responsibility to go and learn about it. 

 

So that's not their job to teach their teachers and other students.  That's the job of an education system that's actually responding to what's happening now in real time in a New South Wales context to a significant portion of the population.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  And it's the thing, they keep saying we want people capable of critical thought and creativity.  Well, you need all of the actual history of the world to be laid out in its complexity and nuance for you to be able to do that.

 

I'm going to move on to audience questions in a minute because we have a number over here and they're all building up, but I know I spoke to you yesterday about this, but there's this amazing research out of Harvard where they talk about how is it that you basically build anti‑racism in young people, how do you actually get this working properly, and they see two significant ways to do that.  They talk about diversity of cohort, where they say it's actually really important that you get to know people from all different backgrounds, right, something that increasingly we don't do in Australia, as everyone retreats into more segregated schooling, as we talked about before with Christina Ho's work, but talk about diversity of cohort, but they say it isn't enough.  If you just have diversity of cohort and nothing else, that still doesn't lead to anti‑racist attitudes.  You also have to have explicit instruction and teaching about structural and systemic disadvantage and the history that created that and it's those two things that produce the effect.  Either alone won't necessarily do it. 

 

I just think a lot of what you're talking about speaks directly to that point and it's also a role that we can play at universities making sure that we have those diverse cohorts, but that we're telling people the truth about how the world works and what's happened in the past and what's happening now.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Absolutely.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That was a bit more of a rant from me, wasn't it?

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  No, it's fine.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So what I'm now going to do is turn over to the audience because they're all chomping at the bit to ask you some questions.  In my typical way I'll start at the top with the person with the most votes gets the question.  Nilmini Fernando:  "Randa, could you talk to us more about the uses/differences of the temple Islamophobia versus anti Muslim racism?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH: Yeah, it's one of those things where there's debate about what sort of word encapsulates the experience more.  I think there's no right way to term it.  What frustrates me about the usage of Islamophobia in terms of the response to it is that people will often say oh, Islamophobia, you know, you can't be racist towards Muslims or Islamophobia presumes it's about fear, phobia. 

 

I came across that a lot with the PhD when I was speaking to people who were openly anti Muslim, but said to me, "I'm not Islamophobic because I'm not scared of Muslims" or those who said, "I am scared of Muslims, so it's the job of Muslims to make me not scared."  For me that depoliticises what race is about.  It becomes an individual issue, an individual problem.  If I can just placate your fear, then Islamophobia will go away. 

 

For me, anti Muslim racism is probably more apt description.  Islamophobia just has the advantage or one of the reasons why it's more advantageous is because it has actually become part of the vernacular now.  It took a long fight to get there.  For me, whatever term you use, it's very important that we understand that this is about race, it is not something that is an individual issue. 

 

I really could not care less if a person individually hates me as a Muslim.  What I'm interested in is the structural issues here of race and the systemic issues of race and that means looking at the bigger picture, at the histories and the interconnections again with where all these conversations are taking place on stolen land, and that is not something you can ignore when you talk about race as it is experienced by minorities in this country.  It is absolutely fundamental to understanding why there is always in Australia a problem people. 

 

So that's what I concluded at the end of my PhD, that the question is not why am I a problem for you, Australia, but Australia, why do you always have a problem with a certain group, so what is it about you that is constantly requiring a people to fear, to scapegoat, to mine or advertise and marginalise, that means going back into your psyche and history and your crimes and reckoning with that.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  The next question is from Arij Elmi:  "Dear Randa, could you share about your decision to interview both Muslim and non‑Muslim youth?  How did non‑Muslim youth take up the question of growing up during the war on terror?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes, so when I first conceived of this project, I really felt it would be important for me not just to understand what it feels like to be Muslim in this climate growing up, but to compare it, that generational impact.  Obviously the main focus was the war on terror, on Muslim youth, because the war on terror has been constructed around Muslim youth as a problem group.  But also I very quickly realised there are more than just wars on terror in this climate.  There's wars on gender, there's wars on climate change, there's wars on science.  So all of these wars are impacting on young people and I really wanted to understand well, if you are growing up as a non‑Muslim student in this time, how has that impacted on you and there were overlaps and there were differences that were very quickly apparent.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm, mmm.  Amelia Johns asks:  "Counter‑terrorism policy makers in Australia are starting to address the threat of far‑right and white supremacist political extremism after the Christchurch terrorist act ‑ largely owing to anti‑racist activism from yourself and other community members ‑ but is this just a cynical PR exercise that attempts to balance out a racist policy?  Does this policy shift have the substance needed to address the problem?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  I don't think so.  I don't think it has the substance at all.  I do think that this has happened, like you said, because there was no choice, that the voices and the fact that this terrorist attack in New Zealand was carried out by an Australian, the evidence that we have of white supremacist groups mobilising and getting stronger means that it can no longer be ignored. 

 

But we have been saying for a very long time now that all the money and attention that's been poured into Muslim communities, the security gaze that has been focused on the Muslim communities, has emboldened white supremacists.  It's not just that they were ignored, but it's an active emboldening when you ignore somebody and you know it's happening.  You are giving them the green light, you are implicitly acknowledging and endorsing and validating what they're doing.

 

I think that until Australia actually addresses the issue of race rather than just throwing money ‑ and I can't see ‑ I cannot see the same level of attention or money being thrown at white students and white young people the way that the Muslim community has been racialised and stigmatised and targeted.  I don't see that happening at all, for the government to go into a school with a majority white population and say, "Okay, we're going to round up all you white students because you're at risk of becoming white supremacists."  These are the things happening with Muslim students.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I think in the book you use the example of the Cronulla race riots and you said there wasn't this whole giant exercise after the Cronulla race riots to, as you say, go into schools and actually get to the heart of what it is that fundamentally is driving their racism and stuff.  It is a really pertinent point to make.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes.  Or demand condemnations from so‑called leaders, whoever they are ‑‑

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Or demand all white people to say I'm not part of the Cronulla riots.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Hashtag I'm sorry, or something.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Jenny Care asks:  "What role does government/policy have in elevating or dampening terrorism and racism?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  An absolutely fundamental role.  That's what I tried to do with the book was ‑ I started by thinking I could do this based on just the interviews and a bit of media analysis, but realised I had to dig deep and trace from the very beginning on the war of terror all the policy documents, what language was embedded in our collective imagination and then see how that then becomes part of the vernacular jargon. 

 

For example, going back to policy documents which use the word Sunni radical or transnational extremist terrorists, you can't make this stuff up and it's there social cohesion, Australian values, these are implanted into a collective psyche and then they become just words that are part of the jargon that are just dropped in media interviews, in public debates and they become part of the jargon.  That for me is the issue, that government policy and rhetoric then creates a new way of seeing meaning, social sort of images and language around a certain community so they must be held to account for that.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  And I think, again, you talk about how government ministers just throw away the line something like extremist Sunnis and in your book you go people talk about these differences, these are centuries of theological debate and it's just suddenly thrown away in one line by a government minister this is totally what it's all about.  It's so awful and patronising and ignorant.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Oh, absolutely.  I traced these interviews that kept coming up on Lateline and just this distinction between Sunni and Salafi.  Does any of you saying this have a clue what these words and histories and communities mean?  They've just become these sound bites.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, the rest of the world interprets it that way.  Tessa Colclough:  "As young people, how do we educate" ‑ you must be young, Tessa, thank you for joining us today ‑ "How do we educate or share this knowledge with the older generations who don't believe racism exists in Australia, yet who may have an unconscious bias (stereotyping) towards different cultures?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  I'm saying this as a Muslim myself.  I've got ‑ we all have people in our families, in our own immediate networks, who you'll never convert to your cause, never see the world you do, who drop racist jokes, who are not conscious of their own prejudices, and so sometimes you have to just think about the fact that you are going to work with the people that you can impact on.  For me that's really important that you expend your energy where it's actually going to be most useful.  Some people don't deserve your emotional intellectual labour and sometimes it is actually harder to speak to people who are close to you and who are loved ones, like in one of my novels after my PhD looking at how do you challenge the racism of your parents as a young person?  It's very difficult. 

 

What you need to do ‑ I can say this as an activist ‑ you need to create spaces of solidarity, people who share the same values as you, the same vision and politics, and build your coalition around that.  It doesn't mean you have to agree on everything, but you draw your strength from that and then you can at least work as a collective and work in the spaces where you can make an impact.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, yes.  I'm going to ‑ there's a question from Janet Gibson about the name of Aileen Moreton‑Robinson's book.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  The White Possessive.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Excellent.  There you go.  Janet, you've got the name of the book now.  I might ask Christina Ho's question now ‑ it's going up on the screen:  "How much difference did culturally diverse teachers make for students in your study?  How can we get more diversity within the teaching profession?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  It made an enormous difference.  I have several stories ‑ I didn't use all of them in the book ‑ where students, for example ‑ one student who had her personal interest project, she wanted to do it on feminism, thought about doing it about Julia Gillard ‑ that was the time she was doing it.  It wasn't until it was a Lebanese Christian teacher who pulled her aside as she was about to go on maternity leave and said, "Don't do that topic, you have so much to say about Muslim women", helped her shape another project idea, gave her the confidence to pursue it and she ended up winning an award at the school. 

 

This student said to me that she directly attributes the confidence that she had to step outside her comfort zone and work with something that she was passionate about to that teacher.  It makes an enormous difference in the way that content is also delivered. 

 

So another student told me about a class in studies of religion where they were talking about 9/11 and the teacher was almost a literal reading of the book about what the meaning of Jihad is.  She said she was speaking to a class of mainly Muslim Lebanese students in the school she was in.  She had no idea about the impact of those words on the students, no understanding to try to nuance ‑ provide nuance and her political context to these words.  She said on the other hand there was another teacher who was a person of colour and who was able to step beyond the limits of the curriculum and contextualise it for them.  So it does make an enormous difference.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm.  There's a few others.  I'll ask this next one from Nour Lzmeter:  "Do you think that Muslims can live authentically as Muslims in a capitalist western society?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  No, and I'm saying that as a Muslim who's devout and struggles with it every day.  I don't think that I'm living ‑ that my values are ‑ that I'm properly reflecting the values of living in a society where it's so difficult not to be sucked into and seduced by consumerism, by materialism.  So I think it's very difficult. 

 

But it is what it is and it just means we need to struggle against that.  That struggle is not to benefit me as a Muslim, but for me the vision is bigger than that.  The vision is that it's damaging for everyone, you know, the neo liberal capitalist society that we live in damages everyone, and COVID has proven that in the way it has ravished the poor, casualised workers.  So I think that there's something as a Muslim and as somebody who deeply cares about a different kind of political set‑up to where we're living, for me that's an issue we need to constantly be fighting against.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm.  Atem Atem asks, "What is the role of ethnicity in this?  Is ethnicity and racism just the same thing?" 

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  It's a difficult question.  I think that there's a lot of scholarship about this kind of terminology and how you ‑ what language adequately captures the experience of racism.  Is it because of ethnicity, you know, or culture, what is ethnicity, what is culture, what is racism? 

 

I think that for me one of the things I can say in this short space of time is that it is really important to also pay attention to intra racial complexities within communities.  So, for example, when I spoke to young people, Lebanese Muslims had a very different experience of the war on terror to, say, somebody who was from an Indonesian Muslim background.  Perceptions of each other changed.  Pakistani Muslims, and their class played a role in that, in affluent suburbs looked down on Lebanese Muslims from Western Sydney and vice versa for different reasons. 

 

So I think that ethnicity is an axis of identity that factors into the way that you experience the world, just as gender and sexuality are, and it certainly does make a difference in terms of how you are treated and perceived, but again, you have to look at the context.  We're talking about Sydney here, where being Lebanese has a very particular history and meaning to, say, being Lebanese in the UK.  So we have to understand those complexities and the interaction between ethnicity, religion and race.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So I'm going to ask ‑ there are other questions, I'll try to get to them, but I'm going to ask a quick question of my own.  Something you said prompted it.

You talk a lot about freedom of speech as well in your book and one of the things you write about, which actually made me think about myself for a second because you talked about getting refugees to tell their story and often it's the narrative of their story, but there's no anger in their story. 

 

So at UTS we have a humanitarian scholarship and routinely have students telling amazing beautiful stories ‑ not beautiful, horrific stories, but it ends well because they end up coming to university.  But they often don't express anger.  It's more of a narrative retelling in a way that sort of makes us at the university feel all very good about ourselves because they've had this terrible time getting here, but now they're here and all will be well.  And in your book you talk about how freedom of speech doesn't really apply when those voices are angry or actually try to tell the true tale of the structural disadvantage that they encountered, or so forth, and you use a Q&A episode to talk about when that Q&A episode that actually got taken off air because the Indigenous woman on that episode was particularly angry and pointed about the impact of Australian racism. 

 

I just thought it was so true and it made me reflect on my own way that we even at the university consume these stories.  Can you talk a bit about freedom of speech and how it's not so free for some.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Yes, the girl that I spoke to, she was incredible, an Iraqi refugee, and she talks about how we're only ever asked to speak when we're ‑ there's this paragon of gratitude, it's always about how we're grateful to be in Australia.  It's almost ‑ it becomes this ‑ they just want to consume our tragedy and then the wonderful ending.  But whenever she tried to push against that and actually politicise her talks, talk about, "Well, why am I a refugee, what has Australia done as a participant in the war on terror to destroy my country and push me out of my country?"  ‑ instead of talking about the pull factor, let's talk about the push factor, you know ‑ "then my voice becomes suddenly a problem." 

 

I do trace or provide constant examples.  Particularly I think that it's important to say that first and foremost the people who experience the silencing and the gas‑lighting and the censoring are Indigenous people and then Indigenous women.  I have a few examples there where as soon as they go off script, as soon as they justifiably express their anger, they are suddenly attacked.  And Chelsea Bond has this amazing article about anger and how the discourse of hope ‑ we need to get rid of that and talk about anger because it's anger that fuels and drives change. 

 

I think as a Muslim who was part of post 9/11 activism, it was always the rhetoric of hope.  We were too scared to be seen as angry because the trope of the angry Muslim inevitably was linked with radicalised terrorist.  Now I see actually, no, it is anger that drives change and it's justifiable anger.  It's a miracle that we are able, given what our countries have gone through and are still going through ‑ it is a miracle that we are so peaceful, that we have bottled up so much anger, because there are times when it does threaten to spill over given what we have to witness is happening to our friends and our family right now in real time in our home countries.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm, mmm.  So we've got 3 minutes left.  I'm just going to ‑ let's see.  I will ask Najmeh Hassanli's question:  "Do you see the possibility for further issues rising when we keep referring to 'Australians' when referring to the majority/mainstream population?  Do you think it excludes the (ethnic) minority groups from being seen as part of the "Australian" population?  Do you think it creates an us and them mentality among majority/minority groups which widens the differences rather than bring everyone close together?  So I guess my question is how careful/conscious should we be with the terms we use when talking about sensitive issues?"

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  I never like answering these questions without first saying that the issue of power is always at play here, so rather than ask minorities, you know, can you use more careful language so that you don't create an "us" and "them", I would rather ask those in power who have the power to make a difference to watch their language, to critique and police their language.

 

It was very interesting for me to speak to young Muslims who would say Aussie as a reference to a white person but never about themselves because it's something that I grew up doing myself, and probably still do when I'm talking casually to friends and family, but that's not because I chose to do that, it's because I've been socialised to think and to see Aussie as represented as an Anglo Saxon white person.  So that's not my problem to fix.  It's on white Australia to be inclusive rather than me to avoid being exclusive.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Well, that brings us pretty much to the end of our session.  I want to thank everyone for joining us here today.  That was a really wonderful conversation, Randa.  Thank you so much for giving up your time.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Thanks so much.  It's a pleasure, thank you.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I'll do one more plug of the book, which is a really great read, everyone, like really passionately written, but I just loved the stories told in their own voices of the young people that Randa interviewed.  And you can buy a copy.  All you have to do is click on the link in the chat and you can get a copy as well.  So thank you, everybody, for coming today.  I hope you enjoyed that.  I definitely did.  And thank you again to Randa for all that you do and for this wonderful new book.

 

RANDA ABDEL‑FATTAH:  Thank you so much for having me.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  See you, everybody.