Back to have your say

Flash of violence amid the tension

Martin Chullov

THEY attacked in a pack, just like the rapists their community despises. It was 15 minutes after lunchtime prayers on Friday, the holiest day of the Muslim week.
The SBS crew had just finished an interview with Lebanese Muslim Association spokesman Keysar Trad in his office across the road from the Lakemba mosque in Sydney's southwest.
It was an in-depth chat exploring reaction to the record 55-year sentence on Thursday of an unnamed community member for leading a gang of rapists in three savage attacks.
Mr Trad left the interview satisfied that the views of Lebanese Australians he represents would get a fair and balanced hearing on the evening news.
He asked two men, who also had been at prayers, to accompany the crew -journalist Adrian Flood, cameraman Mick O'Brien and sound engineer Andrew Smailes - to their cars. All they needed was one last shot of a civic centre being built next door.
The group of up to 10 men had waited in ambush. They hit O'Brien first. His instinct was to protect his camera, which he held to his chest, leaving his head exposed to a volley of fists that knocked him to the ground.
Despite a group of Lebanese men trying to stand between the attackers and their victims, Smailes was also decked with a flurry of punches. And Flood was chased down the street by a horde who caught him and bashed him too.
When it was done, they ran -up to five men bolted towards Punchbowl Road, where they got into cars and fled.
O'Brien was left with a broken nose and a severe gash to his ear, and was being treated last night for, possible concussion. Flood was left with severe facial bruising. All three were left in shock after the attack.
Mr Trad said nobody among the 30 or so people on the street at the time recognised the attackers. Last night, police expressed doubt about ever being able to lay charges.
The attack was the flashpoint of a morning of tension in the nation's Islamic heartland.
Before his client was sentenced on Thursday, barrister Terry Healey described the southwestern Sydney community, Muslim and non-Muslim, as a tinderbox. It was a claim that helped convince judge Michael Firmane not to release the rapist's identity.
Until the attack, the mood outside the Lakemba Mosque had ranged from measured anger to acceptance of the crime, but shock at the very severe sentence.
"We need to introduce into this matter a bit more serious consideration, so that justice gets done," worshipper Dawood Hyder said outside the mosque.
Elsewhere, community leaders said the mood was more one of relief than anger.
"In my experience, these incidents have caused the local communities to look at themselves," said state MP for Bankstown Tony Stewart.
"The recognition coming out of this is that communities have a significant role to play ... the Muslim community more than wants the law applied in its maximum."

 

Plus

 

Rape: the debate we have to have

From The Age (Melbourne), 24 July 2002

Some Muslim leaders need to realise multiculturalism is a two‑way street, writes Pamela Bone.

 

The New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdrey, QC, said on ABC TVs The 7:30 Report last week that race had to be considered as a factor in the recent gang rapes of your ‑7 women in Sydney's western suburbs. Later in the program he said he believed male gang culture was the cause of the crime.

Politicians, media commentators and thousands of callers to Sydney talkback radio programs have referred to the rapes as "racially" motivated. The word race is often .used when what is meant is culture or religion.

What the NSW Supreme Court has been told is that seven teenage girls, all of whom were non‑Mushm Anglo‑Australians, were subject to hours of frightening and demeaning sexual attacks by a group of young men, all of whom were Muslim Lebanese‑Australians. The court also heard that during the assaults the young men identified themselves as Muslim or Leban­ese, and made it clear the girls were being targeted because they were "Aussie pigs" or .sluts". According to media reports, the mother of one of the accused men made a spitting noise at one of the victims in the court.

Racially motivated rape, the intention of which is to defile the women of the enemy, is as old as warfare, but it is devastating to think this could be happening in Australia today.

Nicholas Cowdrey is right in blaming gang culture for these crimes, and you could add to that low socio‑economic status, unemployment, frustration and alienation.

 

Yet the fact remains that

someone has taught each of

these young rapists that white,

non‑Muslim women are to be

despised.,

 

The Lebanese‑Christian who owns the fruit shop I go to does not think Australian women are sluts. The few Muslim‑Australians I know well enough to think of as friends do not, I am fairly sure, believe this either. But as one who is subjected to self‑righteous lectures from Muslim women ‑educated, well‑off Muslim women ‑ whenever I write about the human rights abuses of women in the name of Islam, it is possible for me to conclude that if they do not believe we are immoral, they do think we are less virtuous than they are.

It is you (non‑Muslim women) who are oppressed because you are slaves to fashion and because you expose your bodies, while we, in our modest dresses and with our heads covered, are protected from "men's glances", they write.

The decadence and materialism of Western society is frequently pointed out, as is the prevalence of sexual violence here compared with Muslim countries. (I can imagine there would not be many reports of rape in countries where four male witnesses are needed to prove the rape happened, and where if rape cannot be proved the complainant is punished for adultery.)

But a letter in The Sunday Age last week makes me wonder just how deep the divide is between secular Australian culture and some Muslims' beliefs.

Dr Amirudin Ahamed, writing about the alleged incompatibility between feminism and the family, states that Islam assigns a single leader to the family ‑ "usually the husband", who needs to "ensure discipline by following a hierarchy of steps" outlined in a verse of the Koran.

The verse to which he refers says in part: "As for those (women) from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat thern.'

The principle contained in this vem is odious enough . If Ahamed is talking about its practice, he should know that under Austral­ian law, beating women is a crime. And while some socially conservative Christians might half agree with him about women's more submissive role, under Australian law women and men are equal ‑ whether he likes it or not.

The vast majority of Muslims ‑ including Lebanese Muslims ‑ who are decent and law‑abiding should not be smeared by the behaviour of the Sydney gang rapists. But those parents and community leaders who have taught their children that the dominant society is contaminating, that because young women might drink alcohol or dress in tight­fitting clothes they are undeserving of respect, have much to answer for.

It is attitudes like these that build up resen­tments and prejudice in the wider society. And it is this built‑up prejudice and resent­ment that allows the Federal Government to get away with the repressive and inhumane asylum‑seeker policies that shame us all.

Since 11 September, Muslim women have been abused and had their headscarves torn off in the street. This, like rape, is based on the idea that it is acceptable to project what­ever hatred you might be feeling on to the bodies of women.

Prejudice against Muslims is now apparent­ly so bad that in a survey taken in Sydney and released last week, more than 50 per cent of respondents said they would be concerned if a close relative married a Muslim. And judg­ing by the common practice of Lebanese­born Muslim men going back to Lebanon to get a bride, bigotry is not confined to Anglo­Australians.

Do we need to talk about this? The media have been accused of breeding hatred by identifying the ethnicity and religion of the rapists. But the rapists themselves identified these as the motivating factor. In such a serious circumstance the media would not be fulfilling their purpose if they covered up this fact for fear of offending some communities.

A country that locks up children is not the kind of Australia I recognise. A country in which fear of the "other" is as prevalent as now is not the Australia I recognise either.

I want to live in a tolerant, multicultural society. But for it to work, multiculturalism requires the goodwill not only of the domin­ant culture but of all cultures. Tolerance of difference is a two‑way street.