Pseudo-conservative monoculturalists lose the plot over Sydney beach riots

Having spent 10 years in the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, I believe I can speak with some authority about conservative philosophy. Here are a few pointers ...

Conservatives believe in the maintenance of certain established symbols and values. Conservatives believe in evolutionary and not revolutionary change. Finally, conservatives prefer a working status quo to untested radical reform.

But in recent times, some conservatives have decided to abandon all these core philosophical premises in order to claim that certain sectors of the Australian community need to be marginalised in order to preserve “our culture”.

Often, this has involved marginalising a broad range of ethnic and linguistic communities whose sole common offending feature is their association with the religion of Islam.

Of course, anyone familiar with Islam's religious values and ethics must wonder how such conservatives could find objection with followers of an essentially conservative religious tradition. However, for some conservatives, the facts should not be allowed to get in the way of a good wedge.

Just over 18 months ago, the Bankstown Young Liberals (of which I was a member for some 8 years and executive member for 6 years) held a re-formation meeting at the Croatian Club in Punchbowl. Numerous reports suggest that former conservative Party colleagues of mine used anti-Muslim rhetoric to recruit members.

It seems that wedge politics has become the order of the day in conservative circles. This trend can be found not just in the recruitment practices of allegedly conservative political activists.

The analysis of recent events made by some allegedly conservative commentators and politicians is grounded in the assumption that those with an association with Islam can play no meaningful role in mainstream Australia. The rhetoric bears striking similarity to the allegedly conservative rhetoric used in Europe during the 1920’s and ‘30’s, when persons of Jewish background were blamed for a host of social and economic ills and when being Jewish meant being constantly subject to suspicion.

Of course, one cannot deny that some persons of Muslim background have committed acts of terror abroad and may even pose a threat to Australia. Further, a number of violent sexual crimes have been committed by persons of Muslim background, sometimes with racial overtones.

However, to use these incidents to then claim that migrants of a particular faith cannot integrate and do not make a neat cultural fit in Australia could hardly be described as inherently conservative. And when the claim is made about a faith group comprising of people from over 60 different countries from every part of the world, it can only be inspired by ignorance at best and hatred at worst.

Sadly, such sentiments have found their way into the pages of some respected and widely read newspapers. The Australian newspaper has published three pieces by former National Party Senator John Stone which have suggested that the cultures of Muslim migrants simply do not integrate.

In one piece, Stone even called for the formation of a Queen Isabella Society, in honour of the medieval Spanish Monarch who forcibly converted Jews and Muslims to Catholicism before embarking on a program of terror and mass expulsions we know of as the Inquisition.

And what is Stone’s allegedly conservative solution? Overturn decades of consensus on a non-discriminatory immigration program by ending the migration of all Muslims. For this conservative, even the most radical and revolutionary changes in policy are permissible if it involves furthering one’s pet prejudices.

Now, controversial historian Keith Windshuttle also entered the fray. In a piece published in The Australian on December 16, Winshuttle labelled the Cronulla incidents as “multicultural riots”. His analysis of the Cronulla riots attempted to paint a mixed picture of Lebanese migrants, with the dividing line being religion.

He claimed that Lebanese Christians were more Australian and Muslims because the Christians had produced a NSW Governor and a Wallabies captain. He then asks: “How Australian can you get?” before virtually denying Australianness to the Muslim proportion of Lebanese Australians.

One wonders which Australia Windshuttle is living in. Had he followed ARL football, he may have heard of Hazem al-Masri. Had he read the October edition of the Australian Financial Review Magazine, he would have seen Ahmed Fahour’s name amongst 4 others considered as the most powerful figures in financial services.

Mr Windshuttle described the drunken rioting as merely “mass retaliation” to the “Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers”. He then went into an explanation about the causes for one former headmaster from Punchbowl Boys High School bringing what appeared to be a Workers Compensation Claim for stress against the NSW Department of Education.

Mr Windshuttle conveniently fails to mention other “ghetto” schools such as Granville Boys High School, a school with almost equal if not greater proportion of Lebanese Muslim students. This school has produced at least 2 partners of major Sydney commercial law firms and 1 partner of a major insolvency firm, not to mention other people prominent in business and professions.

Somehow Mr Windshuttle is able to extract from this mass of confused information some kind of coherent theory on why our multicultural status quo is to blame for the Cronulla riots. Despite trying to push as many facts as possible into his diatribe, Mr Windshuttle neglects one important point – exactly how does one define multiculturalism? And perhaps more importantly, exactly what is Australian culture?

To presume that Muslim cultures are a monolith and always different from the cultures practised by other Australians involves generating a mythology whose creation requires a rush of blood to the head. Some writers appear to have generated this blood flow by plonking their heads into the sands of Cronulla beach.

Cultural factors were involved in the recent rioting. But to blame the multiplicity of a still-developing and maturing Aussie culture for the lawlessness of young people from a range of backgrounds centralises the trivial and trivialises the central. Those who play the cultural blame-game have missed the point. And in the case of Messrs Stone and Windshuttle, they appear to have lost the plot.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and was Liberal Candidate for the seat of Reid in the 2001 Federal Election. iyusuf@sydneylawyers.com.au

© Irfan Yusuf 2005