Myth-busting Islamophobic lies and hoaxes

Our esteemed colleagues at the OHPI ( Online Hate Prevention Institute) have exposed yet another attempt by the usual sorry band of haters to circulate a scurrilous piece of propaganda.

In this instance the lies were reposted by someone in the Philippines but we have seen them extensively circulated on Australian hate sites.

Snopes.com, the hoax-breaking US site details the sad history. You will note that every Prime Minister from John Howard onward has been falsely attributed with this hoax.

A later version falsely attributes yet another version of the rant to former PM Julia Gillard.

Note that all the hybrid hoaxes contain additional US material from the US far ratbag right

Hoax-slayer is an Australian site which also uncovers such scams. Here is its exposé on the same fake e mail

Other hoaxes loved by the haters

Muslim “child bride” hoax

The bogots have a particular love for this one. They keep posting it everywhere even though it has been comprehensively debunked.

One wonders at the mentality of those haters who get off on imagined child abuse.

Then there’s the fake allowances supposedly paid to refugees and asylum seekers.

Those and the others can be found on our blog pages as the ignorant hate-filled bigots just keep on keeping on…

The Hoopla: US & THEM PROJECT

By Randa Abdel-Fattah
July 3, 2013

Anglo-Australians are a bunch of drunken bogans. They wear wife-beater Bonds singlets, drive around in utes with bumper stickers such as ‘Real Aussies drive utes’ or ‘F off, we’re full’.

When they’re not marinating their barbecue meat in VB, they’re at the pokies or bumming around at the beach, or posing for a photo in front of a Holden while draped in an Aussie flag, posting status updates about Aussie pride.

Pretty offensive, isn’t it? This kind of crude caricature is intuitively repulsive.

Imagine what it would be like if every news story about Anglo Australians contained an accompanying image of a drunkard in a ute. Actually, no, I think I can do better than that. An image of a cast member from The Shire.

Imagine if every racist, sexist, rat bag named and shamed on the online site, the anti-bogan press, was the visual representation and dominant marker of Anglo Australian identity.

Now imagine you are a Muslim and belong to any one of the countless ethnic backgrounds that characterise the Australian Muslim community. Or imagine you are an Arab. The most persistent images of Islam and Muslims that we are bombarded with in our popular culture and media are the Shire equivalents in Muslim communities.

If you don’t believe me, just switch to Today Tonight, which regularly churns out the ‘angry bearded Muslim man’ story.

All the research demonstrates that since the 1990s and certainly post-September 11, Muslims and Arabs are our ‘folk devils’. The vitriol and Islamophobic diatribe Ed Husic (Australia’s first federal parliamentarian of Muslim background) was subjected to yesterday for choosing to swear an oath on the Koran was not surprising.

Being Australian and Muslim is considered an oxymoron.

Muslims are accused of failing to ‘fit in’ (code for abandoning one’s Muslim identity) or, as part of larger moral panics and discourses surrounding Islam, are viewed as a clandestine group attempting to subvert the nation from within.

When you type a text in your smart phone, the predictor text function automatically inserts a word that overrides what you intended to write. I believe that even the most well-meaning ‘I’m-not-racist-but types’ have failed to develop an immunity to the predictor text function.

Because we are living in a time when any and all discussions about Muslims and Arabs start from several default positions, namely, that a) Islam is intrinsically incompatible with Western values; b) Muslims and terrorism are inextricably linked and c) Islam oppresses women.

And so in the public imagination you try to say ‘Muslim’ but what you automatically get is ‘terrorist’, ‘extremist’, ‘radical’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘Islamist’. You say Muslim woman and you get a woman in a black burqa. You say Muslim man and you get an angry, hairy bearded guy frothing at the mouth.

But wait! We should reassure ourselves, we are told ad nauseam, because the Italians, Greeks and Asians had their turn. Is that supposed to make us feel better about our experience of prejudice? We just need to wait until we can hand the baton onto another group and breathe a sigh of relief that the focus is off us.

The only thing that Australia’s ‘cycle’ of victims tells us is that Australia is fundamentally a racist country.

One of the most insidious aspects of the racism we see in Australia is how deeply entrenched it is in the language we use in our public space and discourse, and how such language threatens the capacity for Muslims as a diverse and nuanced group to be treated as legitimate citizens.

By language I mean words and representations and the values and meanings we ascribe to particular communities. I mean the way we visualise Muslim otherness.

Countless studies have been carried out that demonstrate both the overt and subtle dimensions of racism that exist in this country.

Underpinning it are moral panics about so-called boat people, ‘Islamic’ extremism, creeping shariah, the burqa debate, a clash of civilisations, angry men as ticking time bombs.

I am just as interested in subtle racism as I am in the overt. While subtle racism is systemic and pervasive, it is easily disguised and denied and represents a symbolic violence, challenging people’s status as legitimate social participants. Its banality renders it less embarrassing to the dominant cultural elite and so it doesn’t really provoke much fuss.

Yet while I am utterly appalled by our government and community stance on asylum seekers, for example, and see that debate as a clear example of how effectively some politicians and media commentators can exploit the politics of fear and racism, I am also concerned by the white-washing of our popular cultural content on TV as another example.

Trivial? Perhaps, but nonetheless an example of the dangers of systemic and subtle racism. Our popular culture and media can disenfranchise and delegitimise human beings who are literally liquid papered white in our cultural, artistic and political production.

The ‘ethnics’ and Aboriginals are relegated to SBS while commercial TV is still predominantly white. Neighbours practically imploded when an Indian family arrived on Ramsay Street.

Our hospital and medical shows are also largely white even though anybody who’s been to the ER department of any Aussie hospital knows it’s the Aussies of Indian and Asian descent who run the show.

I see this as a cultural white elite desperate to retain the delusion of a monocultural society against the reality of our clearly diverse population. As for our indigenous population, they are by and large invisible.

After all, as anthropologist Ghassan Hage argues, Australia constituted itself physically through a racist act. It exists as a territory because of an act of appropriation of a land and the decimation of a people who were defined racially.

The ‘us and them’ project continues, perpetually against indigenous Australians, and cyclically against various kinds of ‘brown or third-world looking people.’

Australia’s culture of racism can only be challenged when we acknowledge and address the systemic, shameful racism that persists against our indigenous population, and cure the racism that deprives agency and dignity to the indigenous people of this country.

This is fundamentally about honestly rejecting our colonial mindset, understanding and owning up to dominant group Anglo privilege and reinventing ourselves as a nation.

*Randa Abdel-Fattah is an author and current PhD candidate, exploring Islamophobia and racism in Australia. You can follow her on Twitter: @RandaAFattah.

Source

Islamophobia overshadows bipartisan multiculturalism inquiry

By: admin

March 26 2013 22:52

A small but vocal group of bigots can congratulate themselves for successfully hijacking a much-needed national discussion on multicultural service provision, writes Dr Chloe Patton.

By Dr Chloe Patton

THE Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s report on its two-year inquiry into multiculturalism released last week is the most significant statement on multiculturalism in Australia since the Government’s 2011 “People of Australia” statement.

The Australian reported that the inquiry has been overwhelmed by concern about Muslim integration, leading its bipartisan Committee to declare that it “does not support legal pluralism”. Of the 512 submissions the inquiry received, 212 directly raised questions about Islam.

What The Australian omitted to mention, however, was that none of these submissions directly addressed the inquiry’s terms of reference, and were therefore about as relevant to the task at hand as 212 musings on last night’s episode of Master Chef. The joint Standing Committee on Migration called for submissions from the public to help it report on issues surrounding migrant settlement, the effects of globalisation on social inclusion, and the contribution of migration to the nation’s productive capacity.

More than forty per cent of what it received, instead, demanded that Australia abandon its policy of multiculturalism because Muslims are said to be:

• taking over;
• not assimilating;
• having too many wives;
• having too many children;
• marrying off their daughters too young;
• killing their wives;
• forming ghettos;
• ruining Christmas;
• establishing Islamic schools;
• refusing to work;
• building too many mosques;
• taking offence too easily;
• demanding Shariah courts;
• plotting to kill non-Muslims;
• bringing their families over;
• wanting to live in the seventh century;
• hating democracy;
• not speaking English;
• watching too much Arabic news on satellite TV;
• wearing burqas;
• eating halal food;
• mutilating genitals;
• wrecking Europe;
• hampering access to suburban public swimming pools;

and so on.

These submissions paint such a detailed and disturbing picture of the Islamophobic attitudes held by some Australians that it is worthwhile considering whether they are representative of broader public opinion.

The answer? Not exactly.

Fundamentalist Christians were significantly over-represented among the voices heard. The inquiry’s final report notes that around eighty per cent of the submissions declared that Australia is a Christian country and should not accommodate other value systems. Many of the anonymous individual submission authors identified themselves as Christian. A number of unfounded claims cited in the report’s chapter on Islam – for instance, that 15 per cent of Australian Muslims hold fundamentalist views – were attributed to a Christian organisation called the Salt Shakers, whose website indicates they strongly support the political views of Geert Wilders. Two Christian anti-abortion lobby groups, the Family Council of Victoria and the Endeavour Forum, are also cited in the report.

A further two extreme-right racist groups round out the views of organisations included among the Islamophobic submissions. The Australia Defence League is a small local chapter of the neo-Nazi street groups more common in Europe, while the Q Society of Australia received national notoriety recently for bringing Wilders to these shores.

While much of the rhetoric espoused before the inquiry can be dismissed as the ramblings of fringe-dwelling tinfoil-hat wearers, it is worth recognising that a significant number of Australians have problems accepting Islam as a legitimate part of the Australian social landscape. As the inquiry’s report notes, in 2012 the Scanlan Foundation found that one in four Australians hold negative feelings about Islam. Fifty-six per cent of respondents to a 2011 Essential Research poll said they were concerned about the number of Muslims living in Australia, with roughly half saying they felt ‘very concerned’. A quarter of the overall sample polled said that Muslims should be excluded from Australia’s migrant intake.

Dog whistle politics from both major parties appears to be stoking xenophobic fears in the community. Image: Left Flank

Interestingly, 65 per cent of respondents to the latter poll believed that the proportion of the Australian population that identifies as Muslim is higher than it is. When informed of the correct figure (1.7 per cent), a significant number of respondents reassessed their views. In light of this apparent mutability of Islamophobic views, the Committee’s painstaking efforts to debunk the misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in its report are commendable.

The report’s statement about legal pluralism was only part of one of the recommendations made in its chapter on Islam. The Committee also recommends that the Australian Government continue to support programs promoting intercultural and interfaith understanding in Australian universities, institutions and the community sector. It recommends the institution of regular interfaith and intercultural dialogues involving the broader community leadership to better target settlement services and foster wider inter-community understanding.

I would suggest that in addition to investing in feel-good interfaith activities, the Government gets as tough on Islamophobic extremism as it is on Islamic extremism. Perhaps it’s high time the narrative of concern over extremism in this country is re-worked — let’s replace the young Muslim with the average Australian as the stereotypical vulnerable object of extremist ideology.

Source

(Tall) Tales of Hoffman

Otto Hoffman was an obscure American B picture film actor who died from lung cancer at the age of 65.

His namesake is an obscure apparently Australian Islamophobic B grade bore who unfortunately is very much alive.

Note his lovingly assembled collection of fellow phobes such as the Muslim hater “Robert Spencer”, “Spencer”‘s paymaster David Horowitz, batshit crazy US blogging bimbo Pam Geller and dodgy far right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

Normally Otto confines his inanities to a ragtag collection of anti-Muslim sites where he is welcome and comfortable with his own sort.

For instance if you are keen to follow Otto on Yahoo! here he is

And just take a look here! Not content with being a Muslim-hater and Christian Talibani, our Otto is also a birther (*snigger) and is happy to admit it

For those who fortunately have not yet encountered the birther myth, it’s the one that casts doubt on the veracity US President Barack Obama’s birth certificate which states clearly he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and was therefore constitutionally eligible to be a candidate for the Presidency.

What the birther myth actually was about was racism – the horror amongst white exceptionalists that an African-American should dare run for the Presidency and actually win office.

Now watch Otto try and tell us he is not racist even as he approvingly quotes another racist poster on this topic despite his fellow poster “Peter” on the Andrew Bolt blog trying to put him right.

Guess what Otto, everybody’s birth certificate is now computer generated in this country and in the US, including ours.

And not content with infesting the print media blogs, Otto then heads over to Sydney radio station 2UE to let its audience know how much he hates and fears Muslims.

Now since Muslim hating site Australian Islamist Monitor collapsed into irrelevancy Otto has been lonely and craving an audience so much he has been lately infesting this blog with his unwanted musings, despite it being largely a gathering place for the people Otto hates most – left wingers, socially conscious Christians and Muslims.

Otto has some education and a certain amount of literacy which distinguishes him from the usual mouth-breathing illiterate xenophobes. However we are not easily fooled and Otto’s arguments have all the authenticity of  the cacophony described in Corinthians 13:1.

Otto specialises in collecting fatwas the way other men collect stamps. No matter if the fatwa comes from a semi-literate desert Imam or from a descendant of the Prophet, Otto collects them assiduously and gives them all equal weight. Similarly with hadiths (Qur’anic commentaries), where he carefully cherry-picks those which best suit his self-image as a Hollywood movie crusader heading off to save “Western civilisation” from “teh_Mooslems.

How Hollywood and Otto see Crusaders

And how the late Professor Norman Cohn on US Public Radio sees the Crusades.

Otto argues the way Christian Taliban exceptionalists always argue

A: There is a God who looks just like mine does.
B: Prove it.
A: No.
B: Why not?
A: I don’t have to

Otto thinks his version of God should take precedence over everyone else’s

A: My God is the correct one
B: Prove it.
A: No.
B: Why not?
A: I don’t have to

Otto thinks he has the right to promote his god exclusively among vulnerable children

A: Only my God should be taught in schools
B: Why?
A: Because I said so
B: Why does your God have to be taught
A: Because he stops terrorism
B: How?
A: Because I say so.

Spiritual grooming going on here?

Otto argues in the same way most illogical defenders of religion would argue.

A: There’s a God.
B: Prove it.
A: No.
B: Why not?
A: I don’t have to.
B: Why not?
A: Prove there is NO God then.

To quote our admin:

By the way Otto has been provided with excerpts from the Qur’an and fatwas which state the Muslims can be friends with non-Muslims, visit churches, adopt new traditions in non-Muslim countries, give eulogies at non-Muslim funerals at non-Muslim places of worship, attend weddings and give wedding gifts to non-Muslims. He has been provided with Qur’an excerpts, hadiths and fatwas that state that Muslims may fight back but are unable to strike the first blow, and can make alliances with non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are not prevented from building places of worship in Muslim countries and Muslims are allowed to migrate to non-Muslim countries.

In fact Otto’s god looks very much like the one he admires in the mirror each morning – as is always the case with these obsessive exceptionalists

Otto is a staunch supporter of the Burqa Centipede. So if you have a strong stomach and are up to it you can read Otto’s rants at these links

More on Niqab Folkes and friends – ‎”it’s a front (sic) to a civilised country like Australia”

Six Bogans Wear Burqas to, um… Prove A Point

No Svengali with this Trilby

Are you sitting comfortably?

At the beginning of last century there was a fashion for lurid Gothic novels usually featuring an innocent young girl ensnared by the hypnotic powers of a charismatic and diabolical mentor. The practice of hypnotism was in its infancy and the ability to apparently control minds was regarded with awe.

The most famous of these was George du Maurier’s Svengali. It was filmed several times, the most famous version being in 1931.

Early Trilby

Let us introduce Trilby Steinberger who seems to have managed to incorporate delusions and diabolical behaviour into her repertoire without the need for any assistance from a charismatic mesmerist. Unless of course you think it is Luke Jenkins.

There’s Trilby at the local watering hole with friends. We have edited the friends out of the shot.

Now how do we know about this Trilby? Seems her Facebook friends are quite happy to let us know about her.

We’ll let Trilby’s odd self-description pass for now. If she wants to characterise herself as a murderous purple Dalek then she can do so.

And Trilby’s good friend Daniel typically follows his heads-up with a gratuitous swipe at Indigenous people.

On yet another occasion a friend’s enthusiasm overcomes his(?) discretion. Trilby must be some woman.

And here’s another enthusiastic fan named Kevin Huggins. Great to see that such a consummate artist has such caring friends.

Here’s Trilby having an intimate tête-à-tête with Facebook bore and well-known Sydney businessman Allan Ellison “Jarrod Devan”.

So now Trilby admits she is the artist formerly known to us as Batty Burqa. In fact so enchanted is she by this fake profile she is chatting to she forgets to delete the conversation – oh well.

We figure that “Paul” refers to Paul Toohey, lately outed by one of his own as a part of  “John Harris”. The arse end of the Centipede no doubt.

But wait…what is going on here? Has Arse End disappointed Trills in some way? Has the whole Centipede slithered away?

And the implication that she knows Sergio? – well Sergio loves meeting people for coffee and actually invited one of us, though we at TAB have better things to do – like watching Inglourious Basterds once again to remember how to really deal with Fascists.

Well that anti-Muslim page is one of her hate pages despite her constant denials that she is racist or bigoted. Such as this one.

No doubt Trilby is keen to be seen by people as being normal. A normal bogot that is. And note the comment by oxygen thief Andy Watts.

Of course Trills manages to contradict herself elsewhere, but we are all getting used to that.

Don’t know which “moron” Trills is referring to since she seems to be surrounded by quite a collection of them.

Though it is rather disturbing to realise that she sees green maggots overrunning her pages. With fake profiles of themselves too.

Sorry to disappoint you Trills but maggots are white – so perhaps you need to clean up your 38 members? Get rid of the white maggots?

Now Trilby and friends get down to some serious stalking.

Now we have never figured out why racists like “Julia Munnrow” would be interested in the personal details of anti-racists.

Are they going to report them to the law for being anti-racists?  Nooo

Are these people going to be publicly embarrassed by being named as anti-racists? Nooo

Are these people going to be shunned by the community for being anti-racists? No, far from it.

Will “Julia Munnrow” and her kind stalk and harass them? Most likely. In fact they have done so already.

Replete with the skills obtained in her TAFE Photoshopping Photography course, Trills is happy to prominently display her very own personal gallery. In this presentation of Trilby’s artistry we have edited out photos stolen from the profiles of people who have offended the bogot community by actually disagreeing with them.

Here’s Trills and her mates workshopping the collection

Art conoisseur Jude Billman Milly Knight “Mardi Templar” gives Trills the benefit of her expertise gleaned from hanging around hate sites and making inane comments.

However Trills and her cronies are not exactly burdened with the weight of high ethical standards – the same old pics have been splashed enthusiastically around every conceivable hate group. This is just a sample.

And while resting from her efforts to promote racism and bigotry she also manages to have a swipe at people who don’t like Tony Abbott – thus showing that criticism of politicians is not allowed in her strange little world despite the constant clamour of the bogots for “freedom of speech”.

And we do not think for a moment that Tony Abbott would welcome her as a supporter. Especially when she is accompanied by armchair Brownshirt Andrew Watts.

Meanwhile, back at Stalk Central, Aaron Cross of the Ryde area is getting very excited about the Antibogans being mentioned on the neo-Nazi site known to us here as Witless Towers.

At that stage Trills, as always showing her peerless artistic taste, had assumed the profile picture of the late shoe-throwing activist Peter (surname redacted) who has recently and tragically died of cancer.

Aaron had decided to call the person he assumed was the “chief Antibogan” and by his own admission had continued to make nuisance calls to the person’s phone. Trills certainly keeps delightful company.

And Trill’s reaction? Apart from calling the victim a “fag”?

And speaking of ethics take a look at this

Posting people’s photos? What was that again about “double standards”? So it is OK in Trill’s dystopia to do one thing then to condemn others for allegedly doing the same?

There’s that obsessive sense of entitlement all these racist bigots have rearing its ugly head again.

One project obsessing this little band of bigots artists is the continual spamming of a video of someone they do not like. We are not sure what this is meant to achieve. There is no point in undertaking dumb childish revenge fantasies art works unless someone is interested in seeing them. I mean, does anyone want to watch endless repeats of TV shows which were not all that good the first time around?

And now for the crowning artistic achievement. Covered in pirated photographs triumphantly displayed by Trills, Centipede and other members of their artists’ collective, with obvious and lovingly executed works from the great artist itself comes this exquisite piece.

Note Trilby’s enthusiastic embrace of this scurrilous and defamatory group.

And here is the most bizarre aspect of the lot.

As an additional titillation for her 38 white maggots, and obviously seeking to recruit more fans, Trills managed to create by her own admission a defamatory dating profile of the targeted male anti-racist as revenge for a defamatory dating profile created by a female acquaintance of hers in 2008 who is completely unrelated to any of the events outlined here.

Confused? Yes, we are too. A search of the DSM IV failed to find a particular psychiatric disorder which applied here.

But in case Trills is having second thoughts this has been reported to the police, to our entourage of public interest lawyers who work for us pro bono and the website owner has been informed of his obligations under the US Communications Decency Act (1996).

Elsewhere

The Human Centipede- “John Harris” Exposed

Village of the Damned

Extortion is an ugly word

Of all the stupid things

Should we name and shame online racists?

ASIO, Fascists and anti-Fascism