The challenge of our times is to answer the call of our common humanity

Today I had an article published in The Advertiser about what I feel the incidents in Christchurch might be telling us. Of course, the most immediate and the most important thing is the grief engulfing those who have been affected by a singular act of violence. Following that, the lessons we absorb as a society are also important. I for one am not OK with people blaming one or two “bad eggs” like Fraser Anning or Pauline Hanson. What we have to contend with as a society is far more pervasive and far reaching, and less convenient, than that.

Please read on…

Durkhanai Ayubi: Christchurch massacre shows we … – The Advertiserhttps://www.adelaidenow.com.au/…/durkhanai…/a5fcc3322ff910cb93fa1386cb57b046

The most important revelation I feel we can collectively absorb from the horrors which unfolded in Christchurch last Friday is that this is not just a ‘Muslim’ issue.

As a first-generation Muslim migrant to Australia, the sorrow I feel for the victims, their families and their communities does not derive from a simple cultural or religious alignment.

But it derives from a sense of grief steeped in the revelation of just how far we have slipped as a nation into the dark abyss of “othering” – marginalising others by seeing them as somehow different from ourselves.

While bodies were still slumped across mosque floors, Senator Fraser Anning saw fit to charge Muslim migrants, and the New Zealand dead, as guilty of the killer’s murderous spree.

Our crime? Being here. Many from across the political spectrum rushed to condemn Senator Anning’s comments. The line in the sand, it seems, had been found.

But many of those who finally tripped across this line are the same people who have long contributed to the creation of the dark cloud of xenophobia hanging heavy over our nation. The cloud finally burst, and rained bullets.

Fear of minority groups has long been enshrined in Australia’s public policy and cultural outlook. The current fit of Islamophobia we are in the grips of as a nation has its origins in the Tampa and ‘children overboard’ affairs of 2001. The Howard Government left asylum seekers drifting  at sea while falsely accusing them of throwing children into the ocean in a desperate bid to gain entry to Australia. Combined with the fateful events of 9/11 that year, and the climate of fear capitalised upon, Howard won what was supposedly the “unwinnable” election.

Australian politicians had seized upon the opportunistic value of othering.

Since then, our asylum-seeker policy of offshore detention, sanctioned by both major parties, has taken on progressively harsher iterations. By the time Tony Abbott was prime minister, he and his ministry employed a rhetoric of war, making asylum seekers synonymous with national security and terrorism.

All the while, our nation trailed behind the US and other Western powers into every war in the Middle East, legitimising the notion of a clash of civilisations, and creating generations of children whose psyches know nothing of peace, but only destruction.

Meanwhile, at home, every time Pauline Hanson and her ilk stood in the lofty halls of Parliament and reduced them to rubble with the introduction of motions like “it’s OK to be white”, and various other openly anti-Muslim statements, we were creating our own monsters.

At the same time as this collective normalisation of Islamophobia, our politicians made sure that Indigenous Australians were cut off from self-determination, with the rejection of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, while also keeping “African gangs” in the media long enough to ensure they and their communities felt sufficiently crushed.

So when the horror like that seen in Christchurch unfolds, and our politicians rise to say we mustn’t be divided because it is “what the terrorists want”, I have more immediate concerns. I am more concerned with the division our own leaders have created, or done little to stop, which now engulfs us all. And I say Australians have had enough.

After the deep lacerations of Christchurch, we would do well to honour the victims and their families, by at least building our resistance against the barrage of “othering” which has now long been a part of our national psyche and begin to expect more of our leaders.

We can reach deep down into the well-spring of life that flows indiscriminately through us all, regardless of culture or creed, and realise that as an increasingly connected global community facing the same insecurities and uncertainties the world over, the challenge of our times is to answer to the call of our common humanity.

The times of thriving on the fear of the other must come to an end. Not just for the sake of “minority” groups, but because our future as a nation depends on it.

 

 

My thoughts on what’s driving Australia’s depraved asylum seeker policy

This is an article of mine recently published by The Adelaide Review.

Nationalism, history and petty politics: The toxic brew behind our national illness

The acts of state-sanctioned harm carried out against detainees held in offshore detention centres ring like warning bells prophesising self-imposed decline as a nation, unless a different path is taken.

As dystopian and terrifying to digest as the treatment of the detainees on Manus Island has been, I fear it is not a one-off act of indecency, but that it is merely the symptom — the visible wounds — of an illness which runs far deeper than our national narrative concedes.

We cannot afford complacency or to accept the unfolding travesties as forgone conclusions. We must at least understand the full extent of what is being defined through the actions of our political class against detainees — we are deciding not just their future, but that of our nation.

Key to understanding the extent of the implications of the unfolding depravity is the the link between our political class, their loosening grip on authority, and their inability to resonate with the public. Australia’s faith in government is at its lowest since its overall collapse under Kevin Rudd in 2010, according to findings of the recently released Scanlon Foundation’s 2017 Mapping Social Cohesion Report. The same report found Islamophobia sitting at 41 per cent, the highest recorded in the report’s 10-year history.

In such times, one might expect that the role of leadership is to steer society through difficult times, and provide a bulwark against social fractures. Instead, our politicians, devoid of authority, have opted for a desperate agenda of seizing upon this resounding Islamophobia. In an attempt to create resonance with the public, the issue of asylum seekers has been linked to national security and become highly racialised.

During his time as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott introduced a rhetoric of war around asylum seekers, spoke repeatedly of ‘sovereignty’ and advocated accepting only Christian refugees from Syria. One Nation has emerged and openly admonishes immigration and the presence of Islam in the country, and our conservative Government, instead of condemning, lurches its own policies further to the right.

Australia is, of course, not alone in its increasingly ruthless politics against minorities, but is mirroring a trend occurring throughout the west. In recent years, we have also witnessed the rise of white nationalism throughout Europe and the United States. Its mission is to address a rising sense of grievance stemming from the fall of the west as the dominant global power.

This is what Tony Abbott often referred to as a loss of western “self-confidence”. This loss of confidence is perhaps directly proportional to a steady dismantling of the privileges many in the west have grown accustomed to. Gone are the days of secure employment, rising wages in line with the cost of living and unstrained infrastructure. We have arrived at the days of power shifting into the developing world, with Asia and Africa on the rise.

Simplistically, it is the catch-cry of white nationalists around the world to blame culturally incompatible foreigners for their sense of decline. It is a grievance which is becoming increasingly overt, and, as described in a recent essay for The Guardian by author Pankaj Mishra, “the white nationalists have junked the old rhetoric of liberal internationalism … instead of claiming to make the world safe for democracy, they nakedly assert the cultural unity of the white race against an existential threat posed by swarthy foreigners, whether these are citizens, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers or terrorists”.

This conveniently shifts the focus from where it should be: on western powers themselves. Numerous unsustainable ideologies have been designed to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of an elite few, while public institutions and social protections have been left to erode. Likewise, the repeated military failures throughout the Middle East, the dismissal of climate change, and the lack of vision for the challenges arising as the world arrives at the dawn of artificial intelligence, are problems contributed to significantly by western political powers, and not boatloads of migrants drifting helplessly at sea.

Just as an insecure vision of the future plays a role in our present, so too does our unreckoned past. I do not believe that the current tendency towards xenophobic ideologies can be separated from a long history of imperialism in the west.

For centuries, the spread of European imperialism relied on faith in the idea that its colonial subjects were racially inferior. This is captured succinctly by Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden where he lamentingly speaks of the duty of the racially superior west towards its “new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child”. Racism was not an accident, but a deliberate element of the imperialist vision. Racism is, as expressed by Richard Cooke in his recent essay Once Upon a Time in the West, “beneficial to the racist … colonialism is the supreme example of this. The racist can even come to believe that their racism is beneficial to the victim, a kind of custodianship or paternalism”.

Australia, of course, is no exception to such paternal custodianship, which enabled the justification of the abuse of our First People in the name of imperialist territorial expansion. This has remained largely unreckoned with in our national consciousness, and thus allowed for ongoing cycles of abuse to unfold. Its rationale runs deeply through the rejection by Prime Minister Turnbull of the Uluru Statement in October 2017, and the denial of human liberties through our asylum seeker policy. To some, the image of Kipling’s “sullens” can be invoked to this day.

We must remember the extent to which this depraved focus on racialisation and fear acts as a distraction. At its heart, it is not an argument about the cultural compatibility of the detainees in offshore centres. It is, in fact, about the desperation and opportunism of the men and women in Parliament House.

We should prove our political parties right on at least one thing — that they are out of touch with their constituency. We can begin by showing we understand that any attempt to recreate a class of helpless subjects onto which old imperial fantasies and blame for social failures can be projected, portrays not authority but chronic weakness. This is the underlying illness that we must work to heal. Our future relevance and ability to flourish as a nation depends on it.

Durkhanai Ayubi is co-owner of Kutchi Deli Parwana, an Advisory Board Member for the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and a fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity.

Letter for you to send to your MP re Refugee Crisis

Like many Australians, and probably like many around the world, I have been watching a dystopian horror unfold on Manus Island.

If our refugee policy is a tree, its seed was a deep act of injustice and entitlement, the roots it grew a knotted mass of fear and manipulation.

It is no wonder this tree of ours has borne such strange and rotten fruits.

I can’t help but shake a feeling that is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to make it known that it is time for those in power to stop nurturing the growth of this tree, so that it may crumble and wither away with the shifting winds of history.

                                         Photo from SMH 

To this end, to help in some small way, I have written a pro forma letter that you can send to the Federal MP who represents your electorate. I think we should collectively apply pressure to the Government and the Opposition – to send a message that an approach which justifies depravity and which allows for brutality and abuse of our fellow beings, is not something that many Australians stand for.

I know there are many of us who are horrified by the treatment of detainees and by the principles which underpin our policy of indefinite offshore detention. It is up to us to collectivise our voices and place on the record that we oppose the unfolding horrors.

So, if you cannot bear the idea of the misery taking place, then feel free to use the letter linked to below, noting that it’s a good idea to personalise letters, so feel free to modify the text to reflect your own words, and/or add in a paragraph about who you are:

If your MP is currently in Government, download this letter to send to them.

If your MP is currently in Opposition, download this letter to send to them.

It’s a good idea to send a letter to the MP who represents your electorate, because they have added incentive to take heed of what your concerns are – your vote! If you’re not sure who represents your electorate, you can find out by entering your postcode into the search box here on the Parliament of Australia website. The website also includes contact details for MPs and tips for how to best address them in your letter.  But similarly, you could send a modified version of the letter directly to the MPs with the portfolio responsible for our refugee policy, so to the Minister for Immigration (The Hon Peter Dutton MP) and/or Shadow Minister for Immigration (Hon Shayne Neumann MP).

So our first step is to put an axe to the tree of misery which has been planted for us. And then, after that, we must begin to sow the seeds that will reap a different type of harvest – one that is good, just and full of life for all.

The world is changing, but we need to overcome fear to succeed

This is a piece I wrote on what I think is the biggest challenge of our time – staying open, kind and forward thinking at a time when we might be feeling fearful and unprepared for the massive changes on our doorstep. It was published by The Adelaide Review, 27 Feb 2017.

http://adelaidereview.com.au/opinion/general-opinion/ship-past-sailed-durkhanai-ayubi/

The ship of the past has sailed

We must choose to stay open and not build walls in a world that is rapidly changing, writes Durkhanai Ayubi, and we should reject any attempts to regress to times gone by.

These days, trying to imagine the future and my place in it has become an increasingly unnerving task. Never before have I felt less able to predict the certainty with which I can stride forward in the world. As an Afghan-born migrant to this country, I am not even certain that my passport, with its ‘Place of birth: Kabul’, won’t one day read as an indictment against me. But none of this deters me. It only makes me feel more determined to try to understand our world today and the forces driving our collective psyche.

Right now, I would say that the defining feature of our experience in the developed world is an ever increasing pace of change. Author and prominent New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summarises this change neatly, as being driven by the simultaneous and rapid acceleration of three interdependent forces: Mother Nature – seen in climate change, loss of biodiversity and population explosions; Moore’s law – which is Intel cofounder’s prediction in the ’60s that the power of microchips will steadily double every two years or so, as will, more broadly, the power of technology; and finally, the market – more globalised than ever and binding the world increasingly tightly together.

So with three major things we rely on as a population for our sense of stability – the environment, technology and the markets – in an ever increasing state of vulnerability and unpredictability, I cannot help but wonder what effect this is having on our sense of self and on our approach to one another. I think it is entirely possible that this discomforting state of flux is subconsciously stoking a broad sense of insecurity and fear, driving the rise of the populist politics we are seeing domestically and globally. It is perhaps a pertinent and unique duty of our times to recognise the levels of change we are facing, to ensure we are not hapless victims to a sense of uncertainty.

We are living in remarkable times which history may well record as the dawn of the next human revolution. Our history as a species so far has been defined by four major eras, each one taking place in a radically shorter time span than the one preceding it – the Hunter-gatherer Age lasting several million years, the Agricultural Age lasting a couple of thousand years, the Industrial Age lasting about two hundred years, and the Information Age of the previous two decades. The era we are transitioning into is perhaps the most monumental of all, in terms of how radically it will impact our lives.

It has been labeled the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – an era where traditionally human roles are increasingly being eclipsed by machines and artificial intelligence. It has also been coined as the ‘Augmented Age’, explained by author and futurist Maurice Conti as an era in which humans and machines work with one another to create optimum results. This is an era where ‘natural’ humans will be augmented by computational systems which help us think, and robotics which help us make, all while we are connected to a world far beyond our human senses through a digital nervous system.

So with these unprecedented levels of change engulfing us, how we choose to react is critical. Will it motivate us to band together and create a world where we use our machine-aided intelligence to drive down inequity? Or will we allow the uncertainty to take us down a path of collective fear, leading to even greater inequity?

My fear is that we are creeping towards the latter. The presidency of Trump in the United States and the rise of ultra nationalist parties throughout Europe, and the race-to-the-bottom politics of both our major parties as well as the increasing power of One Nation and the birth of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservative Party domestically, are perhaps all symptoms of allowing our uncertainty about the future give way to fear. I believe that an undeniable part of what makes these parties or individuals so attractive to millions around the world today is their promise to return to the past.

Whether it’s their pledge to shut down immigration by erecting walls or building offshore fortresses, their promise to resurrect jobs by building coal power plants, their denial of the man-made effect of global warming and their dismissal of the science, or their bid to return to a world where markets are localised – all are lies designed to stoke a nostalgia of times gone by to win our votes, rather than to face the complex challenges of a rapidly changing world.

They have made us believe that foreigners – other people of different colour and different creed – are the biggest threat to our jobs and our peace, when in fact it is the accelerated pace of change which is making most existing systems and processes redundant. They have made us turn on one another loudly – ‘left’ against ‘right’, Christian against Muslim, men against women, wealthy against poor – out of fear that, in the absence of this din, we might hear the faint whisperings of what we truly have to fear. Our real enemy today is believing we can ignore the change knocking loudly at our door. Our real enemy today is leadership which can muster only inaction and regression.

The truth is the ship of the past has sailed, and we should collectively reject any attempt to hold onto it, lest we create a future that rapidly sinks. The truth is, we need to move forward with grace and stare boldly into the crevice of uncertainty. This begins at an individual level, by understanding the remarkable chapter in the human story which is about to unfold. We need to ponder on what it means to be human in times such as ours, and what traits we need to draw on to meet the challenges which lie ahead. On a collective level, we can raise our expectations of leadership.

At the very least, our times require leadership which is courageous and intelligent enough to join the dots between the intersecting forces at play in our world, and which can tell us all – yes, there are major changes that lie ahead. And yes, there is a natural anxiety that comes with this change. But we can choose to stay open, not to build walls. We can choose to draw on the most elevated parts of the human spirit and we can muster all our ingenuity to harness change and steer ourselves away from a path of darkness.

We have fought for far too much, and we have won far too much, to stand by and watch as our Place of Birth determines the shot we have at life.

Durkhanai Ayubi is a co-owner of Parwana Afghan Kitchen and is an Advisory Board Member for the Melbourne Social Equity Institute

Amnesty International: activism after dark speech

Tonight I had the opportunity to speak at an Amnesty International event, where I was asked to speak about the refugee crisis. It was a rewarding thing to be sharing with others, especially given the comments earlier in the day by Sonia Kruger about her idea to keep all Muslims out of the country, so that she can ‘feel safe on Australia Day’. It really brings home to me, how much our society has been crippled by the dethroning of intelligence as King of cohesion. We all need to make more time to really understand context, history, the interconnectedness of all of the problems in our world today and the fact that none of us are truly separate from any of the tragedies unfolding before us. It’s not easy, or quick to do this, and nor should it be, but its the only way forward if we are to stand a chance at unity.

Below is a copy of my speech.

 

 

Hi everyone and its so good to be here at an event dedicated to opening up conversation and to challenging ourselves to think beyond an accepted narrative.

 

I want to talk to you about why the refugee situation today globally is not something we can necessarily consider in isolation – and how it might be connected to a long string of preceding transgressions of people’s dignity and right to a safe and full life.

 

In much of our conversation surrounding the refugee crisis – regardless of whether it is pro-refugee rights or anti – we begin the conversation right at the end. At the point where our discussion is purely about what we do with displaced people washing up on shores around the world. At this point, the conversation is largely politicised and devoid of context or responsibility. For example, when boatloads of people enter Australian waters, our conversation is immediately tilted towards the legality or illegality of their arrival, which of our horrendous offshore processing centres they will be banished to, or about the necessity/or inhumanity, depending on your convictions, of how long it will take to process them.

 

The conversation ultimately becomes entangled in a tug of war between those who feel that refugees are a threat to our community and those with a view that we welcome all refugees and integrate them into society. It boils down to a philosophy of what is painted by the media and politically as a choice between head versus heart. And of course, when it comes to matters of national security (as the conversation about refugees has successfully been warped into by right wing forces), head will always win. This is the exact policy approach we are seeing carried out in Australia.

 

But I think we are all getting off too lightly by picking up the conversation on the refugee crisis at this end point of the chain. By doing this, we allow our politicians and leaders to avoid being answerable to bigger and tougher questions, and we also pick up the fight to preserve people’s humanity at a point where it has already been violated several times over.

 

To understand this more, we could begin to ask a different question. Instead of fixating on the what and how (what we do with refugees and how we react when people land on our shores), we can ask why – why do refugees exist?

 

This is a question that is overlooked because, even though it is a simple four word question, it pries deep into the uncomfortable depths of our collective psyche and scratches the surface of terrible decisions that have been made to date. But by posing this question, perhaps we can connect the dots that make up a bigger and more complex picture and make more sense of a conversation that is often intentionally misleading.

 

To me, the truth is that we can’t think about why refugees exist without thinking about war and the displacement it creates. We can’t think about war without thinking about the insatiable human desire for power. We can’t think about power without thinking about how our Government’s have successively invested in a policy agenda which is concerned only with their re-election. We can’t think about our Government without thinking about our somewhat impotent vision of democracy allowed to flourish because of our general sense of malaise and comfort. We can’t think about our sense of comfort without acknowledging that we have, without even realising, been unanimously implicated in all sorts of crime.

 

The recent Chilcot inquiry in the UK into the Iraq war reveals a picture of illegality, deception with intent, and a lack of thought to post- conflict consequences. The Iraq war, a joint effort between the United States, the UK and us – all presumably freedom loving and liberal nations – cost hundreds of thousands of lives (soldier and civilian) and trillions of dollars. Even more disconcerting for the future of our world, is the power vacuum it created and the emergence of Daesh. We are now feeling the violence of the existence of such groups on territory all around the world, and I would say that we are feeling just a small portion of the beast unleashed by the arrogant, inadequate and completely self-motivated decision making of our leaders in the West. Elections may have been won on the grounds of a tough approach to national security and power preserved just a few more years. But at what cost? It came at the grave and unrecoverable cost to the peace and prosperity of much of the world.

 

And in all of this, the most immediate victims, and we must never forget this, are the civilians living in the now completely shattered and defunct nations of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries throughout the Middle East. These people are fleeing the beasts we have had a very large and indisputable hand in creating. And these are the people being locked in detention, because ironically we judge them to be too closely affiliated with radicalisation and terrorism – the monsters created by our own leadership.

 

And this is our world today – seemingly the inevitable product of structures which are driven by an insatiable and unchecked bid for power, lacking in any serious measures of accountability or kindness. To even begin to solve the problem of refugees and the mass displacement of people globally, it is not enough to ask that our political parties have onshore processing facilities, or that the media publishes the occasional good-news story of refugees who contribute to society – these are simple bandaid solutions, and if we’re serious, we must push for something much, much bigger.

 

We must ask for kindness in everything. We must value fairness for all human life, not just a fair go for people who look like us. We must have the capacity to see beyond the comforts of our daily life. We must build a society that values such ideals, so that our political candidates and decision makers become a reflection of these measures, not the beacons of entitlement and privilege they are today, who ultimately alienate us all.

 

The policies that our political leadership has arrived at, for the past few successive governments, have been flawed on at least three levels – ideological, deterrent and settlement.

 

Firstly, as I’ve mentioned so far, at the ideological level which absolves us of sin in the creation of refugees worldwide. This is seen in the inability by Howard and his administration to accept that the decision to go to war in Iraq, which can now undeniably be seen as the first domino to fall and set off the current widespread chaos, was based on flimsy ‘intelligence’ and was ultimately the product of a sordid bid for power. Even when the aftermath of Iraq and the entire region became apparent, Howard maintained that there was no lie sold to the people and that going to war was the right decision.

 

This ideological failing is perhaps the most dangerous and pervasive of failings, as it underpins and seeks to justify the lack of responsibility at the next two levels of policy – policy designed to act as a deterrent (like offshore processing centres on Manus Island and Nauru) and policy surrounding settlement and opportunities available to any refugees who do happen to make it into Australia.

 

Deterrent policy

As we all know, in Australia, both of our major parties are heavily invested in policies which they label as acting as a deterrent. Since the Rudd government, this deterrent policy has taken on many forms, but the latest and perhaps most morally objectionable is “Operation Sovereign Borders”. The Liberal party, under the leadership of Abbott, designed Operation Sovereign Borders in the image of ultimate cruelty. The narrative with Operation Sovereign Borders turned heavily to national security and, for the first time, our elected officials insisted that all operations needed to occur in secret – without the public’s knowledge or any ability to scrutinise. The Abbott government also introduced a rhetoric of war – of us at war with those in the ‘illegal people smuggling trade’ and the justification rests on the argument that, through heavy deterrent measures, we are saving lives at sea.

 

Unwittingly, the Government has taken the policies out of the realm of head, into heart, by introducing an element of morality, and conceding that it is the Governments’ responsibility to act in the interests of those who are desperate enough to risk their lives at sea. By this logic, we can raise other questions of morality – where is the ethical justification for brutalising the dignity and hopes of those who do manage to make it to our shores? Another element which quickly undoes the soundness of the argument of the government’s deterrent policies is that, as revealed by an Amnesty International report in 2015, Australian officials who were part of Operation Sovereign Borders paid USD $32000 to people smugglers to turn 65 asylum seekers back towards Indonesia. Funding the people smuggler trade is a funny way of smashing it.

 

Settlement policy

And for anyone who does, against all odds, land on Australian soil ‘illegally’, there is a vast set of policies designed to make life as difficult as possible. Asylum seekers on bridging visas have little chance to become integrated in society in a meaningful way, with many conditions imposed that prohibit employment and push people into poverty and into a reliance on charity and services. Remember that many of these people would be highly skilled individuals in their country of origin. By prohibiting people from contributing their knowledge and their expertise, such policy is effectively killing hope. There are currently no measures which are designed in a meaningful way to document people’s skill set once they are part of Australian society. We are effectively allowing a pool of potential to disappear, and more than that, to turn into despair instead of into creativity that could benefit all Australians. In addition to these demoralising conditions, is the heavy cloak of stereotypical judgement and the self-fulfilling prophecy of low expectations imposed on many new arrivals. There is an assumption of radicalisation and extremism, imposed mainly on young Muslim males, which would undoubtedly severely impact their view of themselves and their ability to contribute meaningfully to society. We are seeing this happen before our eyes, which is why we need ‘deradicalisation’ experts, like Anne Aly.

 

If we look at these latter two policy streams – our woeful deterrent policy and settlement policy, it becomes clear that neither could be justified without the original ideological belief that refugees are not a product of our collective failings globally. This has set the groundwork for allowing our government’s to wash their hands clean, and declare refugees as everyone else’s problem but ours, to treat them as an anomaly unrelated to the obsession with the centralisation of power and the resultant flagrant disposability of human life. This is a consistent and ongoing requirement for brutality and injustice to take place – it never comes out of thin air, there is always a careful laying down of the foundations for its justification. So much so that eventually, it is broadly accepted as the right way.

 

I want to end on I guess a note that is closer to home. My family migrated from Afghanistan to Australia in the mid-80s. This was around the time of the Soviet war (another power play between the then dominant powers, the USSR and the United States). In this war, the foundations of Afghanistan were crumbled. The Monarchy was destroyed, as was all infrastructure, law, order and eventually and most destructively to the human spirit, most of its culture. Through the destruction of its culture – with people who were influential in any sense (like artists, activists, and people who had any ability to conjure a spirit of cohesiveness) seen as a threat, and taken in the night, killed in broad day-light or fleeing for their lives to attempt to rebuild in nation’s foreign to them – Afghanistan became a former cusp of itself.

 

In preparation for this conversation, I asked my mum to remind me how she felt when she realised that she had to leave behind all that she knew and move with her young family into a world of the unknown. She told me the story of how our family left Afghanistan one night, in an attempt to make it across the border into Pakistan, to avoid persecution. But this, within itself, attempting to leave the country during Soviet occupation, was a crime punishable by death. But my parents took the risk anyway, knowing that if they didn’t we would all be facing the very real threat of imprisonment or death, by not denouncing beliefs and pledging allegiance to the communism sweeping through the region at the time.

 

That night, she had dressed my sisters and I (all four of us, small girls under the age of 8 at the time) as poor street kids, attempting to disguise the family as gypsy’s, or what is known in Farsi as “kutchis”, simply travelling from one part of the country to another. She told me it was one of the longest nights of her life, knowing that things were extremely volatile at every single one of the many security checkpoints guarded by heavily armed men, which dotted the whole country at the time. What terrified her the most was our inability to act like street kids – she said we were pointing at goats in awe, doting on their cuteness and asking what they were.

 

This would have been a dead give away of our identity as city dwellers attempting to flee. But for some reason, my mum said, every one chose to ignore it, and luckily our fate wasn’t determined by us kids doting on goats. We made it across the border into Pakistan, where we stayed in a UN camp under tents for about a year and a half, before we were eventually accepted on humanitarian grounds and migrated to Australia.

 

I asked my mum what the camp was like, and she said something that surprised me. She said she could smell the scent of heaven there. I guess that safe haven, the protection of your life and that of your children’s after facing such danger is the closest to heaven a parent could get to.

 

I have almost known no other life than my life in Australia, as I was just on two years old when my family arrived here. Though my life story will always be guided by these early events, I’ve known what it is to live my dreams, to build something embedded in my roots and to share the story of my heart. But I feel like, in the 30 years or so that my family has been here, the world has changed so much. It feels difficult, like never before, to have hopeful conversations about the future of our planet.

 

We are living in a world that is more interconnected and smaller than ever before – where the consequences of all actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant at the time, snowball to reverberate globally. These are truly remarkable times. And in these times, to survive our own humanness, we have to find it in us to be truly remarkable too.

 

We need to draw on kindness, to uphold standards and expectations of courageous leadership, to become less complacent and more involved in our notion of democracy, and to understand the interconnected consequences of all actions – refugees are not created in a vacuum, but through a set of consecutive and preceding failings of the human spirit.

We must understand all of this, if for no other reason than because every parent and every child in the world deserves to smell the scent of heaven.

 

Who are our heroes?

Last week I was invited as a speaker at an event hosted by Open Space Contemporary Arts. I was asked to speak about what kind of inequities we face as a nation, and what kind of future I imagined for Australia. I thought the brief was straight forward enough, until I really started to think about the root of our problems. I realised that to answer a question of how we might overcome inequities, I needed to ask a bigger question of how we justify it, and this, I think, is tied into an even bigger question – how do we view ourselves as a society and what is the narrative that binds us?

This was a bigger feat than I thought, because to try to unravel the steps that precede injustice, felt like following a trail of questions that lead deeper and deeper into the shadowy realm of what motivates human behaviour. It turns out, I think, that inequity today is largely justified by a collective mythology we all subscribe to in the West, without truly acknowledging the breadth and depth of its reach, which enshrines our own immediate desire, our ego, as deity.

So with that as a framework to understanding our challenges living in the 21st century Western world, I wanted to start with a relatively simple question – who are our heroes?

Below is a copy of my speech on the day.

Every civilisation throughout history has its heroes – the beings which are held loftier than human beings. Who these heroes are, is based on that culture’s mythology – a powerful, and aspirational, story which shapes and defines those people. In our recent history, it was the universal religions of the monotheistic faiths that changed and shaped the world. Before that, in the ancient world, it was the heroes and deities of the polytheistic faiths who held man to account. And before that still, it was animism that set out the sustainable relationship between man and nature. Each has been an evolution of the system that preceded it, and has served humankind’s needs, as the world has grown increasingly complex and interconnected.

Despite their differences, and irrespective of whether we judge any of these systems as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, all were doctrines which intended to serve a seemingly innate and continued human function: to create a framework that expected a certain standard of behaviour and which compelled individuals to live in the image of, and accountable to, something beyond themselves. But today, in the increasingly secular and ‘rationalised’ 21^st century Western world, what is our mythology and who are our heroes?

In countries like Australia and all through the wealthy and developed Western world I would suggest that the biggest myth we subscribe to, is that we have no mythology. We increasingly view ourselves, or the best part of ourselves at least, as having risen above the ancient and improbable doctrines of creed. Whether this is true or not, is almost irrelevant. The question that is important for our future, that we must answer to ensure that we can negotiate the inequities and enormous challenges which face us as a global society, is, what now defines us and sets limits on our actions? What is the higher vision of ourselves?

I think we do have a mythology – one that can be followed as blindly and as fervently as any religion. And in that mythology – we are our own hero. The thing we worship and revere at the expense of almost everything else is ourselves, our ego. Our modern deities, then, the ones who we revere most, are the individuals with the most wealth and the most power. Capitalism, I think, is the creed we have developed with man at the helm, which validates ego as the ultimate master. By recognising our mythology and by thinking of our modern world in this way – a culture which values the centralisation of power and wealth – we can begin to explain why we value monoculture above diversity, why our democracy feels hollow, and why our notion of freedom is the strange bedfellow of destruction.

It was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in the mid to late 1800s, who predicted with astonishing accuracy the coming of a new mythology. He famously articulated this with the idea that “God is dead”. In his classic work of 1882, The Science of Joy, a central character, ‘the madman’ runs through the market place and cries out in frustrated realisation that “God is dead, and we have killed him, you and I!”. Nietzsche did not necessarily mean a literal death of God, but that, even within religious context, we were rationalising away the need for something beyond ourselves, or of being subordinate to another power or natural force. In another of his other classic texts, Thus spoke Zarathustra, the hero of the story, Zarathustra, comes to the realisation that all traditional sense of morality has died, and foresees the coming of the ‘ubermensch’ or the man above other men, the ‘overman’: “dead are all the Gods: now do we desire the overman to live”. This ‘overman’, Nietzsche suggests, will be his own hero, with a quest to function in a world where he or she is unaccountable to anything else.

It is no coincidence that Nietzsche predicted the rise of the ‘overman’ in an era where humanity was witnessing the birth pangs of industrialisation and capitalism in the Western world. This era has changed our landscape more rapidly in the space of a few decades, than evolution has over thousands of years.

This departure sets a new narrative for how we conduct ourselves in our world. I believe we are at a ‘critical juncture’ in our collective human story. When we have mastered our intelligence to the point that reliance on external forces has become disposable, we are left with little to hold sacred than ourselves.

Such a critical juncture in our collective thinking cannot take place without consequence. In my view, there are several areas where our modern mythology which glorifies ego as hero (lets call it the ‘ego-hero’), has profoundly impacted our vision of ourselves, and in turn, our world. By recognising the star role of the ego-hero in our mythology, we may be better able to comprehend the inequities of our society, and thus be in a position to affect change.

There may be many examples where we can apply the idea of the ego-hero in action, but I’ve chosen ones which I see as the most pressing, and which are perhaps most pertinent to me, in my experience as a migrant to Australia. I will go through them in turn, but they are:

1. we have nothing to apologise for (our ego-hero is telling us we are beyond reproach and absolved of sin, including, and especially of, the original sin of European invasion)
2. we have democracy (our ego-hero has convinced us to accept a version of democracy that surrenders power to our ‘deities’ – the most rich and powerful – without a real vehicle for influencing change)
3. we are free (our ego-hero narrative tells us that the only freedom that counts is that of free markets)

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Part 1 – We are beyond reproach

This belief is central to the core of our vision of ourselves. When the First Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788, with shiploads of European settlers, Australia’s first people were exposed to a harsh regime of racial oppression. The native population dropped by 90 percent. In Tasmania, the Indigenous population that had lived for over 10000 years in pure isolation, was wiped out by European colonisation almost down to the last man, woman and child, in the space of several years. Yet, we are rarely taught to accept this narrative as a part of our history. Our self-serving view of Australia as one of the most successful ‘multicultural melting pots’ in the world conveniently ignores that it was built on burning out large swathes of its original culture.

Our history largely is taught as beginning after European colonisation. There is a growing push to mute out this Indigenous history even further, with the Liberal Party instigating the review of the national curriculum out of the fear, to quote Christopher Pyne, that it has not properly “sold or talked about the benefits of Western civilisation.” Even more recently, Tony Abbott, when he was Prime Minister, argued that we could not continue to fund the ‘lifestyle choices’ of people in remote Indigenous communities, effectively arguing for another avenue to wipe out this culture even further by shutting down communities. In the same vein, now resigned, Liberal MP Dennis Jensen stated in February that the taxpayers of Australia can’t be expected to foot the bill for those who wish to live the lifestyle of the ‘noble savage’.

How have we managed to manipulate the reality of the violent eradication of Indigenous Australia into a narrative where Western values are actually the one under attack? This is a remarkable feat, only possible through the power of mythology. The one we have collectively subscribed to in the West – it tells us that monoculture is the best way. This subversive but pervasive reverence of monoculture, I think, comes from a deep seeded subconscious fear – one that challenges our ego-hero narrative.

The challenge is that different cultures have existed, and have existed powerfully and continually, throughout history, without a dependence on what our narrative has crowned as God – money and the ability to centralise power. This is why we can see those at the helm of our ego-driven mythology, our political class, let their real ambition occasionally slip out – create a nation where monoculture is valued and only money is important (hence the references to tax payer burdens at every turn). We do, however, occasionally pay lip service to diversity – with statements like, we’re a great multicultural society, or we have quotas for Indigenous people in our organisation. But the reality of action encouraged by the ego-hero is at complete odds with this idea of diversity.

Only those who conform to our broader myth get a ticket in, and those who don’t are punished. Look at what happened to Adam Goodes when he introduced a powerful idea of cultural diversity to the holy arena of AFL by celebrating a goal with an Indigenous war dance. He was brutalised because his action was a reminder to the rest of society that European settlement did try to reduce that power to nothingness. He was brutalised because it reminded us that perhaps there are sins that need absolving. He was brutalised because he challenged the ego-hero mythology we have enshrined as our religion.

Our tendency for war is justified, at least publicly, in a similar way. Our belief in the ego absolving us of all sin has managed to enable a narrative of using violence to liberate others. In reality, I think there are many layers beyond this publicly expressed sentiment, like imperialism and conquest of resources (all still related to the idea of ego-driven centralisation of power), but at least on a surface level, those we have empowered as our leaders have used our belief in ourselves above all else to effectively mobilise the narrative of the unapologetic hero to go to war – doing what it takes to protect our national interests and simultaneously achieving the noble feat of liberating others.

On the eve of invading Afghanistan, George Bush declared something to the affect of ‘today women are free’. There is even a George W Bush institute, which Lara Bush uses selflessly to help the women of Afghanistan, no doubt leading them to salvation. Similarly, Iraq and Syria have been invaded on the pretext of liberation.

The mythology of ego as our hero has allowed us to turn war into a favour.

Part 2 – We have real democracy

We have democracy in the West, but why is it that our democracy seems impotent? It is true that unlike many countries throughout the third world and the developing world, in the West, we do have freedom to identify with what we please, freedom to openly oppose establishments, freedom to ascribe to any religion, and freedom to vote for whoever we choose every three years without the threat of violence. So even though we have all this, why is it that when most of the population might be opposed to war, we still march into conflict? Why is it that even if a significant proportion of the population is against the dehumanising of people in detention centres, it is still the favoured method by both of our major political parties and takes place under a shroud of secrecy?

It’s because something precedes the values of democracy, and that is our even stronger belief in a system which worships ego. Our Western cultural mythology is embedded, before anything else, in the ethos of the individual and the ego. And as mentioned before, the wealthier and more powerful these individuals are, the greater our reverence to them. Why then, should we have any real expectation of this centralised power to hand itself over to meaningful democracy, which could only be truly spread by genuinely exercising the free and untainted will of people? When we have given the right signals to ego as our deity, we should not be surprised when the innately centralised nature of ego resists its own dilution, and does so effectively because we have empowered it to do so.

In her short essay but masterful essay, On the Abolition of all Political Parties, Simone Weil, a French philosopher of the mid 1900s, encapsulates an easy way for us to measure the validity of our democracy. She explains that the will of the majority – the underlying notion of democracy – is, in theory, good, because in taking a collective view on issues of importance, society is able to average out the sum of individual passions by neutralising the multitude of views until one prevails as justice and truth. However, and this is a big however, the collective will is only a valid indicator of truth and justice if in the expression of the peoples’ will, there are no external factors which induce a state of “collective passion”. Collective passion is a feeling of fervor that is spread by stoking things like fear and ego, and as Weil explains, is dangerous to democracy because it allows for entire countries to become unanimous in crime. Another requirement for democracy to function, according to Weil, is the ability for systems to incorporate the multitude of voices and views that it is built on to produce outcomes for the public.

I would say that our ego-hero culture creates a fertile breeding ground for the circumvention of true democracy. Firstly, collective passions are easily borne through an appeal to ego; think of the fear which is mobilised every time we are nearing an election. All of a sudden, refugees, the alien other, become an even bigger threat to our livelihood and advertisements appear on TV and on social media, telling us to be vigilant of terrorism and to be wary of our neighbour. It is possible then, that at present, the collective will of the nation is far away from truth and equity, implicating us all in crime.

Secondly, as mentioned earlier, the ego as our hero diminishes the importance of multiplicity and diversity, by believing in the centralisation of power. We expect that an all empowered singular voice will then perform the impossible feat of reflecting our diversity, asking for justice from within a two-party system which is inherently designed to make elected individuals conform to party politics. The core role for individuals in such systems then, is to work to win an election so that power can either be taken or continue uninterrupted, not to fight for diversity or for something as inconvenient to the ego as ‘truth and justice’.

Part 3 – We are free (our markets tell us so)

The idea of our freedom today is tied almost exclusively to our ability to consume, and very often at the expense of all other freedoms – like the freedom of people to live in peace, the freedom of other non-human inhabitants of our world, or the freedom of those in the developing world to be paid proportionately for their labour. The idea of wealth maximisation as a measure of the freedom of society comes from the capitalist ideology, so pervasive in our society now, that we don’t even think to question it. In 1776, Scottish economist Adam Smith published a landmark text The Wealth of the Nations. He made an argument in this text that creation of personal wealth and maximising profit is a moral good – because this private profit would then allow that individual to reinvest in society through employing others, for example. The more that wealth grew, the more people that private entrepreneur would be able to enrich. By deduction then, to follow ones selfish ambition for wealth acquisition, was actually, to be altruistic.

In essence, Smith’s text underpins every facet of our markets today – private profit above all else, and an unquestioning belief in free markets to settle inequity. But perhaps what was overlooked in this creed is the insatiability of the human desire for power – or the ego. Maybe Smith never imagined that this human propensity would create a situation where the first part of the equation was pursued aggressively – to maximise private profit, but not the second – to reinvest in society.

Perhaps in the 1700s it was beyond him to imagine that by 2016, 1 percent of the world would be wealthier than the other 99 percent combined, or that elaborate offshore tax havens and firms like Mossack Fonseca would exist, with a sole purpose to ensure the exact opposite of wealth distribution. Instead, we have a situation where, yes, the epic heroes of our time are becoming richer and even more untouchable in our narrative, but only at the expense of the rest of society. Billions of dollars annually of untaxed profits has been centralised into the hands of existing power, instead of distributed through the societies, whose people and natural resources were used to build that wealth, to eradicate poverty and invest in education.

Our current budget is built on this exact ethos – that reducing taxes for the richest and enabling them to increase their wealth and power is the best and most selfless thing for us all. Our government is using the mantra of ‘jobs and growth’ for us all, by reducing taxes and red tape for the rich, and a belief in the markets to redistribute wealth by subscribing to the idea that these benefits to those at the top will trickle down to the rest of us. But there is no evidence of this ever being the case, even in the United States, where heavy investment in such economic principles has taken place since the 70s. The only thing it will do is further ingrain inequality, as the wealthy hoard that wealth, not use it to stimulate the economy by providing ‘jobs and growth’.

Even the idea of posterity, of actions now aiding or hindering the quality of life of future generations, has been eradicated by the ego-hero. Every action – fiscal, social and political – is designed to satiate an immediate need, with little thought given to future implications. The driving impetus is to get rich quick, extract as much from the planet as possible now, and to devise policies which can meet the test of three year election cycle time frames, rather than to create strategies which withstand the test of time and act as an investment in future generations.

This inequity takes place because our mythology allows it to. So long as we see capitalism, the highest form of egoism, as altruism and something to be revered, we are investing in what the American spoken word poet of the 70s, Gil Scott Heron, called free-doom, not freedom. It is a system which is not exclusively confined to the realm of economics, but plays a prominent role in guiding the decisions of our political leadership, shaping our policies, and defining how we relate to one another.

Our unassailable belief in markets and wealth centralisation has allowed the devastation of the environment in the name of growth of the economy, and an open race in arms development, including nuclear proliferation. Our notion of individual freedom, our highest ideal, has lead to the two biggest threats to our very existence: environmental disaster, and the potential for nuclear war. Free-doom.

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So we are not free and we know it. That uneasy feeling we get from time to time is perhaps our own imprisonment speaking to us. We feel it when markets collapse and cause global waves of inequity and unrest, when the cycles of nature become unrecognisable, and when we produce populist leaders that swell in significance proportionally to the hatred they espouse.

Inequities and injustices that take place at any given time can be best understood by studying the overarching mythology that dominates that society at any given time. The worst atrocities have always been justified by the highest principles set by society. God has always been used to justify brutalising the godless. And just so today, we are not unique. Our mythology embedded in the ego as a central doctrine, with maximisation of wealth and power as its central tenant, has justified brutalising the vulnerable – whether it be the poor and the voiceless, or the systems of nature that govern the planet.

At this moment in our nation’s story, we are part of a world which is more globalised and interconnected than ever – we are not an island. The threats that face us are global and have the potential to have global consequences. But likewise, the solutions to our greatest problems are universal also, and rely on the same human ingenuity that brought us to this point, to get us out. Perhaps no one individual has all the answers. But I think it begins by questioning – questioning the notion that we subscribe to no mythology, questioning the validity and usefulness of our ego-hero, and seeing ourselves within a broader story of the universe to understand our place.

Our doom is not inevitable, there are many possibilities before us yet to unfold. We may be a step closer to salvation by acknowledging two simple but potentially profound things. Firstly, by acknowledging that we are no different to the billions of people before us who have roamed the planet throughout the chapters of human existence. Just as they each invested themselves in a doctrine aspiring to something higher, we are too. Secondly, by understanding that maybe we have just chosen the wrong thing within this doctrine to revere. Perhaps we need to make sure that we glorify not our ego, which has crowned us self-made gods, but that truly godlike part of us that seeks to manage and contain it. Maybe then we can redefine our hero.

I am hoping that the ultimate cathartic experience in our hero’s journey is yet to come.

 

My speech at the UN Youth Summit, on Faith and Human Rights

Yesterday, I spoke at the UN Youth Summit where the theme was “A Matter of Faith”. It was a very enriching experience, and I shared the panel with two inspiring and inspired people – Brad Chilcott and Anthony Venn-Brown. Each of us had the opportunity to speak about our view on faith and the transgression of human rights, and how the two are connected.

Me (second from right ) with the UN Youth Summit organisers and the other speakers on the day

It was a difficult speech for me to write, because I realised it was such a big topic which required a lot of breaking down to speak about it in a relatively straight forward way. But in the end, I felt I found a way to say what I needed to, and it felt pretty good to share it out loud.

Below is a transcript of my speech.

Hello and thank you for having me here.

So the theme is “a matter of faith”, and faith is such a broad topic which means so many different things to different people – both within a framework of religion, and outside of it. I thought that with a theme so broad, the best and most meaningful way for me to speak about it today, would be to share with you my own personal experience as a Muslim female, migrating to Australia from Afghanistan with my family when I was about one.

You see, I’ve always been very conscious of where religion can seemingly conflict with freedom or human rights. Both from the perspective of within my religion, where things didn’t always make sense to me – questioning things like why is it that women seem to draw the short straw when it comes to privileges within religion? And why can we justify exclusion, or even violence, in the name of religion? And at the same time, I was also very conscious of the potential to be perceived a certain way from the outside in – aware of all the assumptions that people make about Muslims and the religion in general, and the terrible abuses and human right violations that have followed on as a result. So, I was in a way from very early on, forced onto a tightrope, questioning things that seemed unjust within my religion and also defending my right to identify with Islam as my religion without being vilified by those on the outside.

But I’m so very glad that my life has revolved around this balancing act, even if it’s been confrontational at times. It’s put me in a position where I have taught myself to be comfortable with constantly unlearning things and relearning to try to go deeper beyond what the accepted narrative is to try to understand why things are the way they are and to make sense of the senseless.

In my own life, in trying to understand all the horror and oppression, the discrimination and the violation of dignity that occurs so closely with religion as its partner, I learnt that it was much more useful to just understand what it means to be human before anything else. You see, as I’ve gone on, I’ve started to realise that it is not so much a question purely of religion, because all different religions and all sorts of systems in general can justify atrocity in their name, and have done so throughout history. I realised that perhaps religion was a system that could be easily used to justify more worldly ambitions, like conquest and making sure that those at the top of power structures could stay there.

So it’s been really important for me to question this, and I want you to think about ways to always question it too. Today, I want you to challenge yourself. I want you to think about violations that occur in the name of religion, not as purely a flaw of faith, but as though they are just one part of a bigger cycle, that goes a bit like this:

1. people in power (politically or financially, with wealth and privilege many of us could not imagine) want nothing more than to retain that power
2. that power would rather people be divided and in the dark, unquestioning and pliable
3. fear is the best way to make people feel vulnerable and therefore pliable. And just a side not on fear that I think is important to always be aware of – fear is an ancient and deeply embedded response in our psyche as humans, which was especially useful for our hunter gatherer ancestors roaming savannas and fields full of predators, and it is still is useful to us today to avert danger and to self preserve. But, it is also an instinct which can be easily tapped into and manipulated for all the wrong reasons by those with a vested interest to do so, as we see every election cycle domestically (surrounding conversation on refugees) and with Trump’s current presidential bid
4. and finally, religion is a convenient and established system to tap into to manipulate that fear and therefore to keep us pliable so that those at the top can continue to centralise their power

 

This is a vicious, but very real cycle in our world, that I believe we would do well to understand to make sense of atrocity, and to be able to distinguish religion as a root of evil from human nature and its natural propensity towards fear.

To try to work through that cycle a bit more, I’ll use a couple of examples that have been resonant in my life.

My family fled Afghanistan during the Cold War era in the 80s. This was a time when America and the Soviet Union were in a massive power struggle to emerge as the dominant force in a world that had just come out of WW2. The mobiliser of conflict around the world – all throughout South America and in Afghanistan – was the West versus the threat of communism. Afghanistan was used as a backdrop for this power play to unfold, and all the while, religion was used as a system to justify war. Within Afghanistan, local differences were manipulated – with different sects within Islam – Sunni and Shia – pitted against each other by the U.S. and the Soviets respectively, to fight out their war. The biggest victims of course, were the civilians – people being killed indiscriminately so that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union could emerge as the world superpower. The public perception in the West however, the one being fed to the masses, was that the Cold War was about defending liberty and a Western way of life. This Western way of life had, at this time newly more than ever, centred around consumerism and amassing of wealth. The late seventies was a time when bankers and big corporations were becoming particularly powerful, in part, due to the departure gold-standard system of finance. Freedom in the West, it seemed, was becoming tied to the notion of free markets and wealth, at the expense of all other rights.

This trend has only continued. One of the biggest moral challenges of our time is wealth inequality. An Oxfam report last year revealed that the richest 1% of the world have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Think about how this powerful elite can use its influence to skew systems – economic and political – to ensure that their wealth is maintained, while most of the world’s population suffers.

This big gap between the haves and the have-nots severely imbalances our world, and is not unrelated to the ability for those in power to stoke fear. It means that most of the world’s population is either living in poverty in the Third World or living in fear in the First World. In the First World, it means we become susceptible to the narrative of foreigners invading our shores, here to steal our precious little jobs, as our own Immigration Minister Peter Dutton bluntly said just a couple of weeks ago. But there is an elite and privileged few who feel very secure in knowing that things seem unstable. Think of the political security this general feeling of insecurity amongst the electorate provides to our major parties so close to election time. When we are fearful, we are more likely to vote for the party that seems the toughest – and both our major parties are doing an expert job of making sure they seem the most ruthless. A huge part of creating this fear has been to ensure that people associate refugees from Muslim backgrounds with the idea of terrorism and war.

Interestingly enough, the real wars we are engaged in around the world have used this dependence on fear of religion, particularly Islam, as motivation and justification. After 9/11, we followed unquestioningly into war in Afghanistan alongside the U.S. Not far behind was Iraq and now Syria. The narrative around all these wars has relied heavily on bringing religion as something we need to fear to the forefront. George Bush assured us the war against terror was the next Crusade – we needed to invade the Middle East because of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and because Islamic terrorists were gaining power and planning to attack our Western way of life. After over a decade of war in the region, that threat has only become very real. Through the dismantling of existing governments, power vacuums were created and filled by groups like ISIS, which offers one of the most brutalised visions of what religion can be constructed to be.

Of course, religion can be abused from within by those claiming to be adherents of that religion for their own means. The likes of ISIS and the Taliban, and even the Governments of nations like Saudi Arabia, use and abuse Islam to reinforce what they view as their legitimate claim to power. The Taliban used Islam as a means to justify not only a holy war against non-Muslims, but also to abuse the rights of people living within their power structure. Women were exposed to a brutal version of what the Taliban leaders interpreted as Islam – forced to cover their faces, and denied access to education and other basic rights. In all my thinking on this, the conclusion I come to, is that, yes, the way Islam is practiced today has many problems, which need to be addressed and reformed. But it would be a mistake to see this depravity exclusively as a misgiving of religion. It should be seen within the context of decades of war which has given the power cycle mentioned earlier an even more fertile breeding ground to exist.

But, it is not all doom in the game of religion and human nature. We should be encouraged by the fact that there are many living within the systems of fabricated Islam who are battling for a resurgence of its fairness – there are women in Saudi openly flouting the ban on females driving, there are scholars in Iran questioning the politicisation of Islam and making the extremely valid point that if religion is as valuable and divine as the clerics insist, then it should not be muddied by politics which is an essentially human game; and there are artists and film makers in Afghanistan putting their life on the line, simply for the sake of beauty.

So throughout my speech today, I have used Islam as an example of the vehicle used to enable the justification of atrocity, because it is something that I am close to, but it is not unique. More or less the same is true for all religions, and indeed belief systems, throughout history. Buddhist monks in Myanamar used Buddhism as a means to justify marginalising Muslim refugees in Rohingya communities, rendering them stateless. Christianity was used to ferociously justify the slavery of black people as a God given right. Catholicism was used throughout history to silence scientific pioneers, like Galileo, whose findings about the natural order of the world were at odds with the Church’s interpretation of the teachings of the Bible. While these are all different systems, what they all have in common is that they rely on the abuse of a distortion of belief, to justify the concentration of power in the hands of those in charge.

And this brings us full circle – there is something about being human that is always dangerously close to denying others their humanity in order to self preserve. This is independent of religion and this is the part we need to question. If it is left unchecked, it can be easily skewed to have us feeling justified in oppressing the rights of others, voting for political leaders who have stoked our natural human tendency of fear for their own personal gain, and believing the myth that amassing wealth at any expense is the great privilege of living in the civilised West.

So in my own thinking, I’ve had a few revelations. Real faith, the type that matters, encourages free-thinking and constant challenging of what has become the norm. There is a beauty and cohesion in this type of faith, that transcends all sorts of barriers, and which brings people together instead of tearing them apart. And by the very fact that we are human, this free-thinking will always be challenged by authority and power. But it is our duty, as individuals, to identify this power and to hold it to account.

A capacity to identify and challenge the power structures which behave like viruses, using  religion as the host agent to spread fear and demise, would perhaps mean that we could live in a world where many human rights would never be transgressed.

This is why I believe we need to take a moment, look our real enemy in the eye, and recognise our own character and our ‘humanness’ – our propensity to be fearful and to be seduced by power. I think, if we can do this, we might be closer to preserving our humanity.

Seeking refuge from our national asylum seeker policy

Strip away the politics of fear and, without even the need for a bleeding heart, we should be dismayed at the direction that our elected representatives have chosen to steer the course of our national story when it comes to our approach to asylum seekers. It takes no great intellectual feat to see that our asylum seeker policies to date have put us in a position which is unbefitting of a nation with wealth, privilege and progress that is unsurpassed by many. Instead, we are in a position where the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea, a comparatively poor and struggling nation, has ruled our Manus Island detention centre as illegal and unconstitutional for its repression of human rights. The response of our Government has been to wash its hands clean and declare it a PNG problem, and of our opposition, made so impotent by the fact that such poor and problematic policy was its own brainchild, to act, not as an opposition, but merely as an extension of the grimy tentacles of Government.

The travesty of this fact is not just confined behind the impenetrable walls of Manus Island’s detention centre, but leaves us with little real choice at the ballot box, engulfing us all in its depravity. But it does not have to be this way, and nor should it. We might have become indifferent to the fact by now, but we are owed a point of difference between our major parties that extends beyond ideological support of the elites of the banking sector or those of the unions.

So lets begin by imagining a different world – one devoid of political bravado and delusion. Here, our Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, might decide that PNG’s Supreme Court ruling was humiliation enough to end the game of appearing ‘tough’ on border protection by shunting off a problem we have largely dehumanised onto a nation with little capacity to manage it effectively. In this world, the ‘opposition’ might be brave enough to reverse its impotence on this issue by acknowledging its complicity in creating the travesty that is current asylum seeker policy, and endeavouring to provide a new alternative.

But sadly, reality is riddled with both political bravado and delusion, and devoid of any real opposition. Minister Dutton has declared the PNG court ruling as non-binding to Australia, absolving us of any sin and taken the opportunity to reiterate his party’s “stop the boats” mantra, albeit in a slightly wordier manner, reiterating that “no-one who attempts to travel to Australia illegally by boat will settle in Australia.” Perhaps it is unsurprising that the Liberal Party would utilise the plight of ‘the other’ as a way to manipulate voters at the ballot box – a tradition that was executed flawlessly by John Howard in the ‘children overboard’ saga, gifting him the ‘unwinnable’ election of 2001.

But the Labor party once provided a point of difference through its immigration policy. It was the Whitlam Government in the 1970s that achieved the breakthroughs that dismantled the last vestiges of White Australia policy, introduced the Racial Discrimination Act and propelled multiculturalism. It endeavoured to understand the world was changing, that Australia had a role as an enlightened and valuable player in the world arena, and acted on the realisation that people were more mobile than ever.

It was also Whitlam who granted PNG its full independence on September 16 1975, which had been an Australian colony since 1902. On the announcement of independence, Whitlam commented “by an extraordinary twist of history, Australia, herself once a colony, became one of the world’s last colonial powers. By this legislation, we not only divest ourselves of the last significant colony in the world, but we divest ourselves of our own colonial heritage. It should never be forgotten that in making our own former colony independent, we as Australians enhance our own independence. Australia was never truly free until Papua New Guinea became truly free”. But now, by another extraordinary twist of fate set into motion by a contemporary Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, who first negotiated deals with PNG authorities, we have reshackled PNG using our clout as a rich nation to throw millions of dollars at it to effectively bend its constitution to our will.

Perhaps Whitlam would never have imagined his own party in the future would manage to be complicit in holding PNG hostage in a way that reeks of the supposed bygone mentality of colonisation. Today, our representatives from both major political parties, will tell us that we are on the right path and that we have not broken any law that binds Australia. Open flouting of the UN human rights and refugee conventions we are signatory to aside, perhaps it is true that we are not legally bound by PNG’s Supreme Court ruling. But the presence, or absence, of laws alone is not a foolproof indicator of how we will be judged by history, nor should it be the sole test used by our ruling class to determine the fulfillment of their duty to lead our nation. After all, White Australia policy, the denial of women and the Indigenous population’s right to vote and indeed countless other laws (or absence of laws) have legalised repression and allowed for dark chapters in our collective human history.

The present day, apparently completely lawful, stain on our shared story is our approach to asylum seekers. In a political sense, it has been disguised as anything but this. Currently, both major parties are hiding behind a façade of acting in the best interests of would-be illegal asylum seekers as well as a defense of dismantling the people smuggler trade. But by using this line of reasoning they take their position into the realm of ‘morality’, and this only enables us to highlight the immorality of their position even further. The potential to save lives at sea does not morally justify brutalising the lives of those who do happen to survive.

Image from http://goo.gl/Ja5h5h

While the problem might now seem immensely complex, after years of vigorous politicisation of the issue, in my view it stems from a few simple areas that can be altered to instigate change.

The first is to infuse meaning into our notion democracy by expecting a choice. Is it so far in the realm of fantasy to expect debate and a point of difference between the major political parties on an issue to which our approach provides a glimpse into our national soul? If as a populous we start to increase expectations, this may change our political narrative, currently confined to the unedifying realm of fear and faux morality. One needs to look no further than Canada to see how a different narrative can change the caliber of political solutions. The Government of Justin Trudeau made sweeping changes to immigration policy in just the first few months of election. Within four months of election 25,000 Syrian refugees were admitted, with a pledge to resettle 10,000 more by the end of 2016. The conversation has changed to understanding the importance of the duty and responsibility richer nations owe to those who are suffering. This should remind us that there are available alternatives, and that our politics concerning refugees and asylum seekers does not have to be riddled with fear and negativity.

This brings us to our second area that we can influence change – we can identify and resist the politics of fear that have made us pliable to accepting brutality as necessary. Widening our scope of understanding is key to contextualising the arrival of broken and battered people onto our shores as a global phenomenon, and not a unique or targeted threat to our way of life. The world is in a state of globalised unrest which has led to the mass movement of people. If humanity alone is not a good enough reason to approach the plight of refugees without vilification, then perhaps responsibility can be more binding. We are partly responsible for the mass movement of people globally. We have been actively involved as allies in unjustifiable wars which have created reckless destruction and which have left gaping power vacuums now filled by groups like ISIS. Yet, the terrorism factor is one which is alluded to, if not outright mentioned, in a narrative intended not to make us sympathetic to the plight of those escaping violence, but instead to blur the lines between refugees and terrorists. We could address this by making another simple realisation – refugees arriving on our shores are the real victims of terrorism. After all, it is the monsters we have helped to create throughout the Middle East who have plundered their homes and killed their hopes.

And this brings me to my last point for creating change – we can hope. Hope might seem like a soft power, but it is not. We have the privilege of having the foundations of democracy in our country, and with that, when enough people hope, it collectively forms an impenetrable expectation of change – one too strong for anyone wishing to call themselves the leader of our nation to ignore.

So my hope is simply this – that we acknowledge that it is not the farfetched dream of a bleeding heart to create a humane and responsible approach to asylum seeker policy. We have just been fooled, for far too long, into believing that it is all too hard and that the only possible solution is the nightmare that both our major political parties are heavily invested in perpetuating. Our only fear should be becoming beholden to a false narrative of political convenience.

My hope is we have a choice – not just for ourselves when casting our vote – but more importantly, for those whose hopes have been made dispensable in the depravity that is our domestic politics.

My speech to migrant youth on ‘leadership’

Today I had the privilege of speaking to graduating students at Thebarton Senior College as the guest speaker at their awards ceremony. Most of the students at the College are from migrant or refugee backgrounds. This ceremony was to recognise the students who were the high achievers in their classes.

It was a really great thing to be a part of. I honestly believe that migrants and refugees have a strong voice and a big story to tell. Their suffering can be what shapes them into leaders.

Here is a copy of my speech:

Firstly, thank you so much for having me here to share some of my thoughts and experiences with you.

And congratulations to all of you for your achievements and for your hard work. It takes determination and commitment to rise above, and its fantastic that this is being recognised and encouraged by your school – you should be very proud.

I hope this is the beginning of a long stretch of achievement and recognition in each of your lives.

I want to tell you why it’s important to me that I’m here talking to all of you today. You may feel that in some ways, you have the odds stacked against you – you may feel you may be a target of racism or hatred because of a language barrier, skin colour, religion or gender – but I have been where you are, and I want to tell you why you are in a position to make the odds work in your favour. I want to tell you that, no different to any other young person in Australia, you are the future of this country. Your only barrier to success is how you interpret and respond to the challenges you will undoubtedly be faced with in life.

So just a little about me. Like many of you, I come from a family of migrants. My family migrated to Australia from Afghanistan, 29 years ago, when my sisters and I were all very young. My parents left behind their life, their family, their belongings – everything that they knew – because they wanted us to have a chance at life. They knew they had to escape the conflict of that time (Soviet occupied Afghanistan) just to survive. This story of fleeing violence and experiencing loss for a chance at a better future, is one that resonates with most of you, I’m sure. But even in a new home, away from violence or war, there are other challenges. Challenges that you will need to be conscious of, and negotiate with the right spirit, so that you can continue to succeed all throughout your life.

One of my earliest memories is from when I was about 4 years old and going for a walk with my mum, who wears a headscarf. I remember a lady riding her bicycle who stopped, specifically to aggressively shout at my mum, and to tell her that she was disgusting for following the “devil’s religion”. I remember my mum telling me to ignore her and not to be frightened. You see, I was 4, and I was witnessing my mother being abused for who she was (and I took it to heart and very personally, it might as well have been me that she was yelling at). It was the first time I would be conscious of even being ‘different’. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a moment that defined me.

Instead of crying or being frightened, a normal and expected response from any young child – I responded by begging my mum to let me wear a headscarf to school the very next day, because I wanted to be just like my mum, who has always had the strongest spirit and endless generosity in her, and to show that lady on the bicycle (even if I never saw her again, and in fact, I never did) that she was wrong about my mum, and that she was wrong about me. In some ways I owe that woman a favour – at a very young age, she made me realise that I had choices on how to respond to negativity and assumptions. I didn’t have to believe the hatred in her words. I could choose my response, and set expectations for myself that transcended what others assumed me to be.

The same is true for you, in today’s world. It’s true that the world is a very different place now, than what it was 15 or 20 years ago when I was growing up. It seems now that Islam is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, and that those of different skin colour, or with an accent, or who wear different clothes, are increasingly the targets of attack. It might seem to you that the world is becoming a difficult place for people who are different to achieve, but I don’t believe that to be true. Just like 25 years ago when I was that young girl, there was a fear of what’s different, there always will be until the end of time. Your job, amongst it all, is to make sure that the fear does not define you. Your job is to make your differences be the thing that makes you shine.

I want to share with you briefly, how I’m attempting to do exactly this. So after I got through high school, the same point many of you are nearly at today, I went to uni and studied a chemistry degree and then completed Honours in Chemistry. I tried to get a job in a lab when I finished uni, but the people who interviewed me told me that they wouldn’t give me the job because I was too ‘interesting’ for it, and I would get bored, leave quickly and then they would have to go through the interview process again. So this made me realise, that maybe I was too interesting for a job in a lab!

I applied for a job outside of my field, not really expecting to hear anything, but thinking it was worth a shot, and to my surprise I got it. I was employed in a highly competitive graduate training program by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and moved to Canberra for 8 months. I was transferred with that job to Melbourne, where I spent another 6 years doing high-level policy analysis that helped to shape and reform the communications landscape in the country. While I was living interstate, I discovered my real passion – writing. I freelanced as a journalist, writing opinion pieces on the experiences of Muslims in Australia. I just wrote about anything that I cared about.

This led me to serve on boards – for Writers Victoria, the Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre and Melbourne University’s Social Equity Institute. I met amazing people, and I opened myself up completely to learning. I challenged everything I knew about myself. But after 6 or so years away, I was ready to come back to Adelaide. I missed my connection with my family, and I wanted to be back home. And importantly, I realised that I needed to be doing something that was more closely aligned to who I was – something more meaningful to me than what I was doing. Despite the opportunities for career progression, the wonderful perks and the great people I was working with – I needed more. I handed in my resignation, and I came back to Adelaide.

I had no real plan for when I got here. My only plan was to follow my heart and to live every day telling a story that was more closely aligned to who I was. I moved back in with my mum and dad at 28, and just threw myself into the family restaurant business. I knew being involved in the family restaurant was a good starting point to be doing something that meant more to me, because it was a way to tell the story of who I was.

So it’s been about two years now that I’ve been back in Adelaide, and it was a real challenge at first, but I kept working at it, because I believed in the reasons why I was here. I know I believed in it, because I even turned down a job offer with Fairfax to work as a cadet journalist in Melbourne (even though I thought this was my ultimate dream job!). I believe in what my family does – sharing our culture and our story through authentic food, all my mum’s recipes passed down through her family. So I worked full time for my parents, and helped keep things running at their restaurant, and decided to open my own with my sisters in the city. We’re opening another in February at Flinders University.

My family restaurants have won several awards, and are featured in magazines, books and blogs nationally and internationally. It feels a bit strange that it should be so widely recognised, but I honestly believe it’s simply because there is a genuineness to it – one that sticks to sharing the rich cultural history of my country and which takes pride in all the beautiful things about my family’s story.

Here in Adelaide, I was recently appointed as a board member for the Committee for Adelaide. I see my purpose on that board as being to make sure that the broader community doesn’t forget that our country is made up of many different ethnicities, and that it’s greatness today is in a large part because of the hard work of many of these people.

So I promised myself that my idea of success would always be measured by how aligned I feel with the story of my heart, and how connected I feel to what I’m doing, and how much I feel like I am learning and growing. I’ve found that now, and not because it was easy, but because I’ve given up a lot of what the general idea of success was to take risks and do what I feel best tells my story. Even though it has been long hours, and a lot of physical work and, of course at times stress, I feel the most fulfilled now than I ever have. I also know that to feel satisfied, I can never be complacent and that I will always be looking to continue to grow and to sustain a feeling of learning.

I have realised that when you find ways to be true to yourself, to express the most genuine parts of you, and when you work relentlessly at what you do, then success is a by-product that follows on quite naturally. I see my future as one dedicated to being an active part of Adelaide and using my strengths to shape our future positively (through my family businesses, writing and donating my time to various organisations that I share a vision with).

So from that small girl, who first realised she was different, only because a stranger pointed it out to her – to the person I am today, I have learnt a few lessons along the way. I want to share 3 key things with you.

1. You are different to the majority, but never apologise for that. Understand who you are, your history, your culture – know yourself. Make conscious decisions about what parts of your culture are beautiful and will serve you well – like connection to community, family, parents, generosity in spirit amongst your friends. Share those parts with everyone around you. Reject and resist the parts that don’t serve you or anyone well, and which are not a real, but invented, part of any faith – like patriarchy or, especially as females, shame.
2. Find what you love to do, and find ways to do this every day. Try to think outside of snapchatting, or Facebook or Instagram. I’m thinking more about the stuff that makes your heart and mind whir and that makes you feel alive. Whether its arts, reading, running, writing, maths, the environment, helping those in need, cooking – whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, but find what you love to do and do it with all your heart and feel yourself grow when you do it. Always find ways to tell the story of who you are – that’s what keeps us alive and feeling validated.
3. Know that you have everything in you that you need to be a leader, to set a good example to your siblings, to your community, but also to those outside of the community – to the whole country. There are no limits on your success. Never place yourself in a box, where your only competition is those who speak the same language as you or have the same religion as you. You are just as much the future of Australia, as any other young person in this country. In fact, you have a very big story to tell. But it is up to you to interpret any suffering, loss or disadvantage, into a story of kindness, gratitude and opportunity.

And finally, I believe that now, more than ever, the country needs intelligent, kind and selfless leadership from those who are part of minority communities. You are that next generation, and everyone is in fact, waiting for you to shine. It might seem like there is a lot of negativity, but, believe me, everyone wants to share in something positive, genuine and special. Each and every one of you, by virtue of the path that your life has taken so far, has a very strong story in you. It is up to you to find a positive and meaningful way to express any suffering, loss or disadvantage you may have been through.

So my message to you today comes down simply to this, find a way to continue your achievement of today, long into the future. The world is waiting. The only thing that can truly stop you from doing that, is you.

Self-serving humanitarianism

Sometimes the scope of the questions we ask are too narrow to create meaningful solutions. As the tragedy of the refugee crisis unfolds globally, we are left confused and almost helplessly fumbling for answers. I would contend that the reason that we find ourselves so overwhelmed to respond as a nation, or even globally, is because we are not asking the right questions. Our understanding of the current refugee crisis conveniently begins where it suits our conscious for it to begin.

We enter the discussion of solving the problem at an unsustainable and bandaid-fix point – the point where we petition our leaders to have compassion and to accept more refugees onto our shores. While accepting more refugees is indeed a worthy and necessary step in the short term, it is not something we should feel self-congratulatory about. To me, to create a sustainable long term solution, we first need to have a more authentic and difficult discussion about our contribution to the current crisis.

The ongoing debate surrounding asylum seekers is almost universally hijacked by political point scoring and fear mongering, and on the rare occasion that it is not, our push for humanitarianism seems unauthentic and gratuitous without acknowledging the broader issue of our involvement in war across the Middle East. The bulk of refugees in the world today are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The one thing each of these nations has in common is that they are countries subject to wars waged by the United States and its allies, including us. We might be tempted to say that these are countries in which Islamic extremism exists and which we have a moral duty to stamp out. But we do not have to delve too far into our collective history to, not unreasonably, speculate on which came first – widespread Islamic extremism or Western intervention and dismantling of established systems?

Image of mass movement of Syrian refugees. Courtesy of  http://ind.pn/N3bi4i

To me, the pictures of a small boy washed lifeless and face down onto the shore of a Turkish holiday resort, are more than a tragedy. Twenty-nine years ago, when my mother and father decided that confronting a potentially brutal and uncertain future was a more attractive option than staying in Afghanistan and facing certain persecution, my family became refugees. Uncles and other relatives had already been taken in the night, never to be heard from again. We travelled across the border into Pakistan, disguised as poor villagers, my mother doing her best to hush four excitable young girls, all under the age of eight, as they nervously confronted armed and volatile security checkpoints. Once we had escaped the often political, and always senseless, persecutions of Cold War Afghanistan, we eventually migrated to Australia by 1987. But by this point, I had spent the first two years of my life living out a story that conflicting world powers, not my parents, had chosen for me.

My family was not escaping a civil war, or the Taliban. The Taliban was not yet an entity. We were fleeing the violence arising from the great power struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States being played out in Afghanistan. It was this very conflict that destroyed the established monarch and political structures of Afghanistan, and gave rise to the power vacuum that greatly proliferated the terrible depravity of today’s extremist Islam in the region.

To this day, Afghanistan is a victim of the smashing down of established order by Western powers, who had no regard for the plight of the people and were driven by a need to increase their strangle hold of power by empire building. Many good men, women and children, have lost their lives in the name of this dubious cause.

Even though almost three decades have passed since my family migrated from Afghanistan, my history is an important and relevant factor to the story of mass migration and immeasurable suffering we are seeing today. Because, in reality, not much has changed.

The obsession for conquest and the resultant muscle flexing for domination of the world’s resources remain to this day. Our successive governments’ unabashed confidence in dismantling Sadam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, or the current disarmament of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, stems from manipulation of the public’s resounding faith in democracy and the preservation of human rights. It also largely ignores the inconvenient truth that the Taliban, Sadam Hussein and ISIS are all products of some form of ‘strategic’ negotiation, funding or weapon supply from the United States and allies. But perhaps enough time has passed now for us to reflect and realise that there is a great irony in enforcing liberation, and that if anything, through our support of American led interventions, we have been actively involved in creating the injustice of yesterday and of the future. In every case so far, the manipulation of localised and sectarian differences has inflamed tensions and created a situation more dire after intervention than before.

Because of the privilege of distance, we have the unique ability to, not only ignore the disastrous consequences of war, but to glorify it. In reality, the wars raging throughout the Middle East have created the refugees who are washing up on shores around the world, and not always alive. We should not separate the refugee crisis from our active and ongoing support of conflict around the world.

Our almost bipolar domestic response to the crisis in Syria is striking. We should be loudly contending the contradiction of a newsfeed containing an article about our Government’s planned increase of Syrian refugee intake, while simultaneously reporting  Abbott giving the go ahead to our escalated involvement in the war in Syria. The last few years of war in the region tells us, in no uncertain terms, that civilian casualties as a result of Western led interventions are a regular occurrence, and across the Middle East civilian ‘collateral’ is in the thousands. This is only the primary effect of war on civilians. The secondary and ongoing effect of our wars are the devastation of infrastructure, a lack of access to education, resounding poverty, the constant fear of violence and the creation of power vacuums that give rise to fundamentalism and depravity in many forms. That we can somehow be exposed to a conversation in which partaking in war is presented as an act of compassion, is a tragedy of our time.

 

 Image of residents inspecting damage from US air strikes. Courtesy of http://cbsn.ws/1FzgFx3

Our idea of humanitarianism today seems incomplete and should be challenged. It has become a bandaid-fix to problems that world powers have consistently been complicit in creating in our name, and which we have ultimately become expert in denying. To then position ourselves as the saviours of those whose lives we have had a hand in destroying, is to add an extra layer of immorality and self-gratuitousness to an already depraved situation.

An interim, but incomplete, solution is indeed to respond with open hearts and to provide shelter and asylum to those fleeing desperate situations. A longer term and more encompassing solution begins with acknowledging the hubris and the failure of the West in its mentality of conquest.

It is the responsibility of every person in the world living in safety to understand that there is a way forward beyond the limited scope that has been presented to us. A way in which we are not susceptible to the confusion and fear embedded in our psyche by the manipulative politicisation of an alien ‘other’ whose bombing into submission we can somehow justify as being for the greater good.

Only then can we begin to unravel the dark contradiction of providing a safe haven to the displaced people we have helped to create. Only then, might we stand a chance of living in a world where every parent can choose how their child will spend their formative years.

We owe that to every small child in the world.