It is the worst nightmare and best of wet dreams for Australian racists – jailed Aboriginal men converting to radical jihadist Islam.
Australia’s indigenous peoples have for years been the lowest of the low in the eyes of the colonial settler state and those who benefit from the dispossession of Aborigines. About 226 years in fact.
If there has been one constant theme running through the ruling class Australian nation narrative it has been racism against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, a racism born as justification for the genocide unleashed on indigenous Australians to win their land.
Of late, the war on terror has deliberately made Muslims the latest target of ruling class fear mongering. The enemy is not capitalism but those terrorist Muslims.
Now it looks as if a new scare campaigning uniting these deep fears is emerging. Aboriginal men in jails across Australia are supposedly converting to Islam. The Fairfax Daily (aka The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times) is running a disgraceful piece suggesting that there is an epidemic of conversions going on in prisons. And not just nice conversions, but Aboriginal men converting to the most radical, jihadist versions of Islam.
Imagine that. Black ex-crim terrorists in Australia. It both shocks the racists to the core and proves their fears are completely justified. Completely justified.
Of course there is just one little problem for this new scare campaign. There is no evidence for it, as the article itself admits.
Even if there was, so what? The most oppressed people in Australian society are entitled to look for something that offers them hope in the here and now. Certainly not much in capitalist society offers hope, with indigenous Australians dying over ten years earlier than the rest of the population, poverty rates ten times higher in aboriginal communities than other communities, and Aboriginal prison rates 13 times higher than their presence in society.
A Malcolm X among Aboriginal people leading the fight against oppression would be a great step forward.
The fact that there is no strong left-wing and socialist current in society, let alone a strong movement of black and white demanding a treaty which recognises sovereignty, means that the options for hope for many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are pretty narrow.
Now one solution would be to stop jailing indigenous Australians, but since the justice system is designed to oppress the oppressed and to marginalise the marginalised, that isn’t going to happen.
Another more radical solution would be to negotiate a treaty recognising prior ownership and paying the rent. That is a direct challenge to the rule of capital and the only way for it to come about is a working class revolution. One of the first acts of a workers’ government would be negotiating just such a treaty.
But that is in the future. In the here and now we must all, black and white, continue to fight for a treaty recognising sovereignty and paying the rent. We must continue to fight for religious tolerance, against the war on terror and for palestine.
Given that the Fairfax media is the so-called progressive media in Australia, the fact that they are pandering to racists and stoking their fears with jailed Muslim Aboriginal men scare stories shows both just how far Fairfax has degenerated and just how deep into the racist shit the Australian ruling class has burrowed.
And all the time the genocide in Gaza and austerity in Australia remains unremarked.
The colonial settler state killing Palestinians is the same sort of settler state in Australia unleashing its power against indigenous Australians.
If Fairfax is running this sort of racist scare campaign, News Limited won’t be far behind and even more crude.
The threat of reaction and its actuality is getting worse.
It is time for us to take the fight up to the rich and powerful in society and join with Muslims and black Australians against the systemic racism and fear-mongering of the establishment.
That is why it was great to see an Abi=original elder give a rousing defence of of Palestine at a rally recently in Canberra and finish with the cry: La lutta continua.
