Identity owes itself to the Media: When does News become Politics?

Recent political demonstrations from spilling over into social life, from the Cronulla riots to protests over the Innocence of Muslims film last year, polarized Arab-Australians in a binary mentality of “us” versus “them”. Arguably, the media capitalized on these (among other) events to further a political prerogative, namely to seek to villanise the Muslim world as inextricably linked to the terrorist events of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

News coverage of Muslims in Australia equates Islam with the Lebanese national identity and Arabic ethnicity (Hopkins, 2008: 41).  This demarcates the boundaries of Muslim identity according to artificial criterion based on a sectarian understanding of Islam. That is to say, it excludes non-Arab Muslims from the popular discursive conceptualization of Muslim identity and links the faith with the socio-politics of the Middle-East.

Consequently, discourse in Australia tends to make Arab identity synonymous with a single identity category of ‘Muslim’, when in fact 11% of Australian Muslims are born in Lebanon and 9% in Turkey (ABS, 2007). In so doing, Islam is linked to the political agenda of the Middle East, and interpreted according to Australia’s relationship to those politics.

The rise of political Islam is not passively accepted as community norm, even in Muslim majority countries. Media discourse needs to be problematized to recognise the fundamentalist politics of few do not, by any stretch, represent the sacred beliefs of the majority.

 Islamic protestors face-off with police in Sydney.

Source: WikiCommons

Islamophobia in the media is fuelled by the notion that Islam is counterintuitive with the goals of democracy. Followers arguably invert the principle of multiculturalism, according greater weight to submission to sacred laws than to national laws (Hage, 2006). Consequently, there stems the crude deduction that Muslims are ‘un-Australian’. This consciously overlooks the clear intuition that, as with any religion, followers may not always believe the same things or to the same extent (Hopkins, 2008: 44). Cultural Muslims, for instance, can adhere to religious tradition and maintain obedience to the laws of a secular state.

Who is really un-Australian?

Source: WikiCommons

Identity is contextual. Any blanket interpretation that does not recognise the unfixed, contingent, malleable nature of culture will inevitably exclude and narrow what it means to claim an identity.

References

Australian Bureau Statistics (2007). Year Book 2007. Retrieved May 5, 2013, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/7056F90A147D09D3CA25723600006532?opendocument

Hage, G. 2006. “The doubts down under”. Catalyst: Journal of the British Commission for Racial Equality: pp. 1 – 7.

Hopkins, Liza. 2008. “Muslim Turks and anti-Muslim discourse”. Australian Journal of Communication 35.1: pp. 41 – 55.