Date: 19/09/2001
Sticks and stones, they tell us, break our bones, but words never hurt us. The old saw doesn't work in worlds where media images and the instant replay feed words into the ways we see ourselves and our relationships with others.
Words and images connect and frame part of the deeds we are prepared to see as legitimate. The culture of our conversations provides the small change of anti-social capital which may unify mobs into racism and prejudice.
When I was a child growing up in England during World War II, the enemy in film, news and even children's books was clearly the Nazi, the Hun, aka Germans.
With bomber planes overhead most nights, it was easy to believe that those who made that war on us were not human or people like us. In times of war, nations demonise the enemy to create an Other who can be killed without regret, and to make it seem ethical to kill others.
In 1939, the unthinking application of rules meant my Jewish mother and baby self, refugees from Hitler, were moved with other such aliens away from the English coast in case we signalled Nazi submarines. At one school I was teased and bullied for being a German and cried out that I was Austrian to exculpate myself. Being an outsider of dubious provenance was sometimes painful.
Last week the echoes continued. I was standing in a supermarket queue and half- heard a conversation between young women at the checkout. One was making jokes about a terrorist maybe wanting to elope with the second. She turned to me and explained the jokes were because the other girl was a Muslim. I told her that it was not OK to tease Muslims as they were not responsible for what happened in the USA and that it could upset the other person, but she did it again, failing to understand that her humour was racist and painful. I told the young Muslim woman that I thought such teasing was wrong and apologised for it. She made a comment about racism but also tried to laugh it off.
I let it go, because pushing the issue may have made her situation worse, but realised that the perpetrator, like many other non-Muslim Australians, had no idea of how damaging such comments could be, let alone the possible policy fallout. This is reflected in many talk-back callers whose opposition to the Tampa refugees is related to the refugees' presumably Muslim connections. Interestingly, many Australian Jewish organisations were the first to express concern about turning away the boats, as they understood the consequences.
We need to remember the connections between apparently simple interpersonal perpetrations of prejudice and the attitudes which support war.
By naming Muslims as a single category as the enemy, we diminish recognition of our common humanity and make a "them" whom we can endorse killing. This also hardens our ability for compassion when their civilians suffer collateral damage, as their deaths and suffering can be ignored as less valuable than the dead who, like us, have names, faces and pictures of grieving relatives. We see this imbalance of words already, in the way that Israeli bomb casualties are more often named and the Palestinians are just numbers.
I ask that each of us insert a short pause before we use the term Muslim to make sure we are not generalising and becoming part of grand prejudicial diatribes. Whether the people we talk about are terrorists, perpetrators of rape, refugees or fellow workers, their religious affiliations are mostly irrelevant to the topic of conversation and our judgment. The Koran does not in itself recommend mindless violence, the degradation of women or many of the other sins that zealots ascribe to it. As happens with the Christian and Jewish bibles, there are many interpretations and sects that do awful acts in its name.
Eva Cox is a social analyst, academic and writer.
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