Page 3263 - Week 10 - Thursday, 25 August 2005
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What it means in Australia is that anyone of a particular religion is branded as part of this broad-brush approach to the world.
While this operates in the global sphere, it also percolates down to our communities. In Australia and, I am quite sure, in many other Western countries, it is the Islamic communities that are currently experiencing the impact of this clash of civilisation’s rhetoric. With every passing decade, a different cultural group perhaps faces the same fate in Australia. People of my mother’s generation, for instance, remained racist to the end about Japanese people—my mother did—because of experiences of the war. What happens is an experience is extrapolated across a whole nation. We are reasonable people. We know that that does not work.
The Australian Greens believe that genuine security does not rest on military strength but on cooperation, just, economic and social development, environmental sustainability and respect for human rights and that pre-emptive invasion is very rarely justified. I am not game enough to say “never” because there is always that exception that I do not know about yet, but that may occur. It saddens me greatly that human rights, which was the great global conversation of the 1990s, has, I think, fallen down in a heap. My great fear is that the so-called war on terrorism has become the great justification for the erosion of human rights.
Terrorism, of course, is a real thing. It has been with us for a long time. I am not sure that there are more acts of terrorism now; there is more focus on acts of terrorism. Again, it suits a certain political agenda to focus on that. Mind you, I am not saying it does not exist or there is not a concern; do not misread me. As far as I am concerned, terrorism is premeditated acts of violence directed at non-combatant targets, with the aim of intimidating others to agree to a particular political, social, cultural or religious demand. Such acts, whether they are carried out by isolated militants, political organisations or governments themselves, are terrorism. The Australian government has followed the example of the United States and others in using fears of terrorism to force through attacks on basic, hard-won civil liberties and in justifying military action such as the invasion of Iraq.
What concerns me as much as the fact that our civil liberties are being eroded in the name of national security is that the community is not concerned enough about it. I am quite sure that most people do not even know what is being done in the name of national security and that it might turn back and bite them one day. The Greens recognise the need for action to address the legitimate economic and social grievances which exist in many parts of the world and which provide fertile breeding grounds for terrorist ideologies. I believe that ignorance is the bed for terrorism. I believe that, where people are denied certain information and are being fed overwhelmingly other kinds of information, we have the ability for ideologies that are harmful to society in general to thrive.
We should oppose attempts by governments and other authorities to use the threat of terrorist acts as justification for undermining civil liberties and promoting other antidemocratic agendas. But similarly, that means that our aid programs should involve making sure, for instance, that in many countries girls go to school. We know that we still have a problem with girls having less access to schools than boys, simply because it benefits families more economically to educate boys because of the prevailing gender
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