Reporter: Sally Neighbour
Date: 10/03/2008
NB: Please see Editor's Note, bottom of transcript.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: One night in December, a crowd of close to a thousand farmers, businesspeople, housewives and retirees converged on the Camden civic centre on the south-western outskirts of Sydney. It was packed to overflowing and there was no turning them away.
The issue that prompted the huge turnout was a planning application for a new school catering for 1200 students - not just any school, but a school for Muslims. And these residents weren’t having a bar of it.
WOMAN: Sure we are racist if you call it racist not accepting a community that also happens to bear, they’ve got terrorists amongst them, Okay? We can’t say they haven’t, they have. If we let them in here they want to be here because they can go and hide in all their country little farmhouses.
MAN 1: Between three and four you won’t be able to move in the streets of Camden for all the traffic it’s going to cause. That’s my objection to it. It’s a quiet place, it's a quiet community…
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Legitimate concerns over traffic and planning issues were drowned out by voices like these:
MAN 2: Filthy grubs. Dirty filthy grubs.
MAN 3: No-one wants you here.
MAN 4: F**k off wogs, go back to your own country Mohamed.
MAN 2: We pay our tax mate and we don't want ...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Since September 11, the Bali bombings and the war on terror, views like this have become commonplace.
MAN 6 (to man 2): There's better ways ...
MAN 2: They shouldn't be here, get rid of them, we don't want them ...
MAN 6 (to man 2): There's better ways.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Forty per cent of Australian Muslims were born here, but the message from this crowd is that being Australian doesn’t include being Muslim.
MAN 2: No-one wants them here, they’re all filthy grubs, they can all f**k off...
(Excerpt from Independent Centre of Research Australia (ICRA) Youth Forum):
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE (to boys): You were born in Australia?
BOY: Yeah.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: Raised in Australia?
BOY: Yeah.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: Ever been to Lebanon?
BOY: Nah.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: Never. So even though you’ve never been to Lebanon, even though you’ve never seen Lebanon, you’re still being called Lebanese. And you're born and raised in Australia. That's sad isn't it?
BOY: Yeah.
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: These schoolboys are all Australian-born, but when they refer to “Aussies”, they don’t mean themselves.
SCHOOLBOY 1: You know, Anglos, blue eyes, blonde hair, and we’re seen as, you know, wogs if you like.
SCHOOLBOY 2: It’s like you’re from a different country, like you don’t feel that you belong here, they don’t make you feel that you belong here.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: There’s mounting evidence that many young Muslims feel like foreigners in their own country. And some of their leaders are beginning to ring warning bells.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: You’re going to have a community that is so dis-attached from the wider community, a community that does not have a sense of belonging whatsoever. You’re going to see a generation of young people who have so much hatred and so much anger and so much frustration within them and when that happens you are basically on dangerous ground.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Australian Muslims recently celebrated the festival of Eid ul Adha, the most important day on the Islamic calendar.
Mosques around the country overflowed into the streets as hundreds of thousands gathered to pray. But some believe there’s precious little to celebrate about being a Muslim in Australia today. They report a deepening sense of alienation, especially among the young.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ihssan Wehbe): So they feel lost?
IHSSAN WEHBE, ISLAMIC DAWAH COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA: They feel lost, yeah.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ihssan Wehbe): And why is that?
IHSSAN WEHBE, ISLAMIC DAWAH COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA: They don’t feel like, you know, if the Australian people are saying to them, "Well go back to your own country," and they don’t have another country because they’re born here, where are they supposed to go?
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Ihssan Wehbe’s congregation meets every Friday in a rented hall at Sydney’s Chester Hill.
It’s organised by the Islamic Dawah Council of Australia, a community group that aims to keep young Muslims off the streets and out of trouble.
IHSSAN WEHBE, ISLAMIC DAWAH COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA (at meeting): My dear brothers in Islam, today's Khutbah is going to be about akhlaaq, and akhlaaq means character and manners. The prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wa Sallam said the only reason he has been sent was to perfect good character...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The communal prayer gives them a sense of belonging they often don’t feel. Because while for most Australians the so-called "war on terror" is largely political rhetoric, for Australian Muslims it’s personal.
(Discussion between Sally Neighbour and young men at Islamic Da'wah Centre of Australia (IDCA)):
WALID SABOURNE: It seems like every time something happens overseas whether it’s an attack, or a bombing, you sort of get blamed for it, we have to always defend it, you know miles and miles away. What have Muslims in Australia got to do with foreign policy overseas?
DEAN MINAOUI: The situation’s like us and them now, you know it’s like when the American government was saying, "It’s either you’re with us or against us." There were people that were against the war and people that were against the war, they’ll think, "Well then, you’re one of them," you know. So if people don’t want, don’t like war, whatever, it’s like, "Well then, you follow the terrorists.”
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: These first generation Australians, whose parents fled civil wars in Lebanon and Palestine, endure daily hostility and abuse.
YAHYA SERHAN: Like every time you go somewhere you know you think people are looking at you or think, you know, someone is going to spit in your food if they’re making food for you at the shop or you know, it’s things like that.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ghaleb Alqudsi): Do you get called names?
GHALEB ALQUDSI: Badly.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ghaleb Alqudsi): Like what?
GHALEB ALQUDSI: Effing terrorist, effing Arab, go back to your country, you ugly fat shit and you foreign freak, is like. I don’t want to continue because it will just heartbreak me more.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ghaleb Alqudsi): And go back to your own country.
GHALEB ALQUDSI: Go back to your own country, you don’t belong here.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ghaleb Alqudsi): What's your country?
GHALEB ALQUDSI: I was born in Australia, of course. Oh well.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Being "of Middle Eastern appearance" means they’re also frequently targeted by the police and security services.
YAHYA SERHAN: Just stop you if you’re walking or get pulled over, you know. They just harass you, they just waste your time for no reason. They don’t even give you a fine, nothing you know, they just like it’s fun to them, or whatever you know.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Yahya Serhan): And what do they say when they’re doing that?
YAHYA SERHAN: Oh, you got any bombs in the car? Just stuff like that, you know.
WALID SABOURNE: I’ve had I’ve had a personal experience with ASIO where a I wrote an article in an Islamic newspaper or a magazine - nothing to do with terrorism or you know, just about the media and Islam - and I got a knock on my door by ASIO asking me why I wrote that letter or that article in the newspaper.
Now they’re going a bit too far I think, you know. I have every right to write in that Islamic newspaper and I got questioned by ASIO for a couple of hours about why I wrote that.
I don’t see why Muslim community should ever help ASIO. I don’t blame them for not helping ASIO because they’re not really with us they are against us so why should we help them?
(End of discussion)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The group runs a drop-in centre in its cramped office space nearby. They recently applied to the local council for a permit for a youth centre but got knocked back, leaving these boys with nowhere else to go.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Ihssan Wehbe): So these young people who feel lost, what’s going to happen to them if that feeling can’t be counteracted?
IHSSAN WEHBE, ISLAMIC DAWAH COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA: Well they’re going to have more issues naturally, and they’re going to have more problems and our community is going to have more problems. so that means the, you know, the division between us and the, you could say the other community because that’s how they’ve sort of placed us - us and them - you know there’s going to be a greater barrier until we can work out things. So you're going to maybe have more crime because they feel lost, they don’t know where to turn, maybe more killings, maybe God knows.
MAN (at Monash seminar): Okay, good morning all. I’d like to welcome you all to the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University…
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University recently completed a three-year study in conjunction with the Victoria Police. It found that Australia’s current approach to terrorism may be exacerbating the danger rather than reducing it.
WALEED ALY, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE: It seems to be characterised methodologically almost by a kind of belligerence; that is that we feel the more aggressive we can be, the harder we can be, then the better that is, that it’s better to err on the side of being aggressive than to err on the side of being soft.
Now I can understand where that comes from, it kind of makes intuitive sense. But the problem is that as we repeat that approach what we actually end up doing is exacerbating the problem. We set in motion drivers that move us towards greater radicalisation.
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE: In this sense the injudicious use of hard power can in fact feed the process of terrorism.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Associate Professor David Wright-Neville specialises in the psychology of terrorism. His research echoes studies worldwide which show that alienation is a critical factor in creating terrorists.
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE (at seminar): Nobody is born a terrorist. In any society, and if this triangle represents an area of society, only a few people will make the transition from membership in mainstream society to the point where they’ll involve themselves in violence here at the end of this transition.
Terrorism is a process, people pass through a series of processes. Along the way they cross what one might call the alienation threshold, at which point they begin to disengage from society and mix in groups of people who are similarly alienated, who have similar experiences, who feel collectively as if society is against them and excludes them from involvement in all mainstream activities...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: After alienation it’s a short step to the next threshold - the decision to use violence.
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE (at seminar): ...Once they’ve crossed the violence threshold they begin to ethically disengage from society and they’ll begin to contemplate killing others outside of that particular in-group into which they’ve gravitated.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to David Wright-Neville, at seminar): So how important is alienation in this process?
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE: Alienation is critically important. Most terrorist research shows that unless the person is alienated, coupled with feelings of humiliation, disempowerment and so on, it’s very unlikely that a person will become a terrorist.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: At this gym in Lidcombe in Sydney, almost everyone has a story about being targeted by the police or ASIO, being picked up for questioning, or having friends or family members raided or arrested.
They’re infuriated by incidents like the one at Camden, where pigs’ heads were dumped at the site of the proposed Islamic school.
AZZAM EL SAYED: That’s pathetic man, my daughter is asking me every day, she’s asking every person, "Why do they hate us so much?" She’s, I looked at her, what do I say to her? You know if I was there I would’ve just run into that crowd and ripped them apart for the simple fact that you’re scarring these children, you’re getting on their, preaching hate, throwing pigs’ heads and that. What kind of disgusting thing is that to do? ...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Outside they face routine suspicion and hostility. In here they find safety in numbers and physical strength, comfort in a strong sense of brotherhood and solace in their religion.
AZZAM EL SAYED: If there’s no religion, if there’s no God-fearing in their heart, they’re just going to turn to drugs, they’re going to turn to violence, they’re going to turn to anything they can find. So youse better hope that these Muslims do turn to their religion because once they turn to their religion they do not fornicate, they do not gamble, they do not drink, they do not hurt anyone, they do not swear. They grow a beard, they look, they’re peaceful people, that’s all they do. They pray five times a day, they pay their charity, they fast, that’s all they do. That’s a proper Muslim, that’s all he does.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Youth worker Fadi Rahman, who set up the gym, encourages the community to channel its aggravation into physical activity. As a result his centre boasts a swag of young prize fighters.
But Fadi Rahman too is deeply frustrated and disturbed about where some of his young charges will end up.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: People are asking the question, "Why is there anti-social behaviour? Why is it on such a great level?" I mean when you have a group of young people, a group, any group, take any group, put them under the microscope and put them under so much pressure and under so much scrutiny, eventually they’re going to rebel. And you are creating a generation that has deep-rooted hatred and anger and frustration towards the very place that they’re supposed to call home, and this is quite dangerous.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Zac Mallah has felt the full force of Australia’s counter-terrorism regime. He was the first person charged under the anti-terrorism laws introduced in 2002. Up on two counts of carrying out acts in preparation for a terrorist act, he was facing two life terms in jail.
ZAC MALLAH: I was labelled as EHR - Extreme High Risk - so I was shackled, padlocked, handcuffed with a back belt around me, orange overalls, like a terror suspect at Guantanamo Bay, in Australia, walking, catching four wheel drives, having the squad escort with shotguns back and forth to and from court, back to my cell.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Mallah first came into public view in 2002 when ASIO refused him a passport, apparently after he was overheard in an intercepted phone call discussing suicide bombings.
ZAC MALLAH (archive footage, 29 June, 2002): I am not a threat and if I was where’s the proof, where is the evidence?
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Mallah was just 18, had recently lost both parents to illness, and was working in a supermarket stacking shelves. The media lapped up the story and he lapped up the attention.
(Excerpt from media interview, 3 October 2003):
REPORTER: Are you an extremist?
ZAC MALLAH: I’m an extremist in my point of views, perspectives, concepts and theories. I’m not an extremist in the sense that I’m likely to engage in terrorist activities. So that’s what I mean by me as a Muslim extremist, I’ve got extreme point of views.
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Mallah’s home was raided in 2003 and police seized a gun and a note he’d written threatening to kill ASIO officers.
A police intelligence report dismissed Mallah as an "immature 18-year-old trying to impress his friends".
But later police mounted a covert sting and sent an undercover operative posing as a journalist who paid Mallah $3000 for a home-made suicide video and recorded him making further threats to ASIO.
(Excerpt from home-made video):
ZAC MALLAH: I therefore declare my own personal and individual jihad. My target is ASIO and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade…
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The police then charged him with two terrorism offences, each carrying life in prison.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Zac Mallah): Did you ever intend to become a suicide bomber?
ZAC MALLAH: No.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Zac Mallah): Did you want to be a suicide bomber?
ZAC MALLAH: No.
...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Zac Mallah): So what were those threats about?
ZAC MALLAH: Oh, give me back my passport, I’m going to kill you, take you hostage, blah blah blah. All this rhetoric and all this talk…
...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Zac Mallah): The judge who presided over your trial said that in his view and he’s talking about you and I quote, "All he was, was a complete nuisance who created a ridiculous situation for himself in order to gain money." Would you agree with that?
ZAC MALLAH: (laughs) I agree with that, yeah, based on encouragement, based on ah being set up, based on being aided and abetted.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Mallah was found not guilty of terrorism.
ADAM HOUDA, ZAC MALLAH'S LAWYER (outside court, archive footage, 6 April 2005): Mr Mallah is very pleased by the verdict and ...
The judge found the police had acted illegally and improperly and described Mallah as a foolish and naïve young man who’d had no intention of carrying out his threats.
He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of threatening a Commonwealth officer and served a year and ten months in a high security jail.
ZAC MALLAH: You can’t mix with no-one because it’s segregation, it’s isolation, it’s separation from everyone in the jail system, held in solitary confinement on a 22-23 hour lock down, three days a week. It’s a total lock down, not even, you don’t even have the permission to even see the sun…
I felt like honestly I prayed to God that while I was in segro, please send me to Guantanamo Bay, let me be with the others.
Yep, Sally, this is an ankle bracelet issued from the Department of Corrective Services late last year in 2007 after I got released from prison the second time around...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Mallah was released from prison last August, after serving a second jail term for stalking and malicious damage, after smashing his cousin’s car window with a rock after an argument.
His release came just before APEC and Mallah was also issued with a personal restriction zone.
ZAC MALLAH: This is a red restriction zone for me, specifically, of areas that I can go into during APEC and areas that I can’t. Here we have a big large circle of Sydney CBD and airport, a restriction zone of the area where I can’t go into. And then it says here down on the bottom: warning area 100 metres before I even approach this. So even as soon as I’m here somewhere alarms go off and the Australian Federal Police and ASIO will be onto me straightaway. So I can’t hit the blue zone and as soon as I’m within the blue zone I’m gone, I’m straight back into jail.
Now come on, what part of not guilty don't they understand? Why am I getting all this? Why am I still being treated as a terror suspect?...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The Government still won’t give him a passport. When he took his case to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, he was forbidden from seeing some of the evidence against him.
ZAC MALLAH: It’s putrid. ASIO is putrid. The Australian Federal Police is putrid. The way they conduct their operations is pathetic, it’s very un-Australian.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Zac Mallah’s case and a string of others like it, in which terrorism charges have been dropped or dismissed because of mishandling or lack of evidence, only reinforces the sense of injustice felt by many Muslims.
For these young men it’s compounded by events overseas.
WALID SABOURNE: Every day hundreds of people, Muslims dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet one person dies you know in America or in England by a terrorist, you know, we’re terrorists. But when America hits the Middle East, you know, that’s freedom, human rights and democracy and when Muslims you know bomb America it’s terrorism.
It’s hypocrisy, double standards. We aren’t the ones going around with armies and raping you women and you know bombing you to pieces. We’re not the ones doing it. You are the ones doing it to us; we’re there getting slaughtered, we’re there defending ourselves we, we are the freedom fighters.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The worst-case scenario for Australia is the emergence of home-grown terrorist cells like those in the UK which pulled off the 2005 London bombings.
MAN (archive footage, July 2005): There is no doubt that we are dealing here with a new kind of terrorist; we are dealing with home-grown individuals.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: They flourished in poor, under-employed, ghetto-ised communities, already alienated from British society and further marginalised by the belligerent politics and policing of the war on terror. * (See Editor's Note, bottom of transcript.)
WOMAN (archive footage, July 2005): All indication right now shows that this is more or less a British-bred organisation.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The troubling question is: could it happen here?
MAN (at Monash University seminar): … Robert Lambert from the London Metropolitan Police and he’s been head of the Muslim Contact Unit of the Counter-terrorism command from 2002 to 2007…
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Australian terrorism watchers are eager to heed the lessons learned by their British counterparts during their decades-long conflict with the IRA.
ROBERT LAMBERT, LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE (at seminar): We’d developed an approach to terrorism in London and the phrase we had, I think holds true as an ideal model, was: communities defeat terrorism...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Scotland Yard veterans like Robert Lambert knew from the start of the current struggle that the political rhetoric was wrong.
ROBERT LAMBERT, LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE (at seminar): I guess the one phrase that was really playing badly with us was: You’re either with us or you're with the terrorists. You know, we did not think this was good counter-terrorism...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: In Britain, heavy-handed counter-terrorism policing has been used by the terrorists to justify attacks like the London bombings.
Australian experts are seeing troubling signs.
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, GLOBAL TERRORISM RESEARCH CENTRE: I don’t think we’re at that point here but there’s certainly a mood in some pockets of Sydney and Melbourne whereby the younger people feel as if they are under siege, that they are being monitored, they are being surveilled. We’re talking about isolated pockets of some communities where there is evidence of a steady escalation of radicalisation.
Now radicalisation in and of itself, or radicalism in and of itself, is not a problem but when it reaches a point of extremism when the radicalism and the radical ideas being advocated transform themselves into an agenda for perhaps violent change then you have a problem.
(Conversation in the street between police officers and man):
MAN: Ahmed (shaking hands with male officer).
MALE OFFICER: Errol.
AHMED: How are you?
MALE OFFICER: Good.
FEMALE OFFICER: How's (inaudible) ...
AHMED: Good, we're preparing for the festival ...
FEMALE OFFICER: Tomorrow. So you're expecting a few people?
AHMED: Yes, everyone's welcome.
FEMALE OFFICER: Yeah, it should be good. And what I like about it this year, it's really open, so that means ...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Eager to avoid the explosive scenes in Britain, the Victoria Police have abandoned the rhetoric of the war on terror in favour of a community policing approach.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Kieran Walshe): How important is community engagement and preserving social cohesion in counter-terrorism policing?”
KIERAN WALSHE, DEPUTY COMMISSIONER, VICTORIA POLICE: Oh look I think it’s the it’s the most important element that underpins the whole success in dealing with terrorism or terrorism-related issues. I think what you need to really do and what we're trying to do in Victoria Police is to focus on our new and emerging communities. We need to build a social cohesion structure or environment within all our communities… We really believe that it’s the communities that will have the most success in defeating terrorism.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The focus is on the northern suburbs of Melbourne, which is home to a large Muslim community and a growing population of refugees who’ve escaped from vicious religious and ethnic-based conflicts in Somalia and the Sudan. In their country the police are a force to be feared. Here, they coach basketball teams and help run homework programs - to the amazement of these recent arrivals.
REBECCA MANHOM: For example, like Crystal, the first time she came, she was like, "I’m a police officer". I didn’t believe it because like she start being so friendly and everything. I’m like, "Are you sure you’re a police?" She went like, "Yeah". I went, "How come you’re so good to us?" And she went like, "Yeah, that’s our job, we’re not here like to scare youse but we’re here just like to let youse learn about the life and system and everything." So yeah, it’s cool.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The police work closely with community groups like Victorian Arabic Social Services, which runs leadership, mentoring and training programs for youth.
These young men - some Australian-born, others recent refugees - have just passed their training to be lifeguards. They see no contradiction between being proud Australians and proud Muslims.
HAMAD ALLOUSH: For me it’s like say you’re proud the day you graduated from school and you’re proud the day you got the job. It’s just that I’m proud to be a Muslim. I’m, I just, I am proud to be a Muslim.
YASEIN YASSIN: I think now more than ever young Muslims feel a need to reconnect with their religion because of world events and I think that’s why they would feel as if, they’d feel proud of their religion, to show people that we’re not ashamed of it.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The Federal Police, who were heavily criticised for their handling of the Haneef case, also see the need for change. They’ve employed a Muslim mediator to address community concerns.
NESRINE MOJALED, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: And that's one thing our team works at trying to resolve on what the role of federal agents are, what they can and cannot do. So that’s where that concern came from. Because a lot of people in the community didn’t know how far a federal agent could go, what questions they could ask you, when could they serve you a warrant. Those were the concerns we were hearing from the community, because there was a fear that they felt that they didn’t have rights.
(Archive footage of young men gathered at Cronulla, 11 December 2005):
MAN 1: ... that's not a fair call mate, I was born here ...
MAN 2: ... get the f**k out of here mate! Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
CROWD: Oi! Oi! Oi!
MAN 2: Aussie!
CROWD: Oi!
MAN 2: Aussie!
CROWD: Oi!
MAN 2: Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
CROWD: Oi! Oi! Oi!
MAN: F**k off, c***s!
MAN: ... terrible word, terrible word ...
MAN: You're gonna get killed ...
(Crowd shouting, people start pushing, screaming, police enter the scene.)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The Cronulla riots were the closest Australia has come to the ethnic and religious schisms that have torn Britain.
(Archive footage, 12 April, 2007):
REPORTER (outside court): What’s it like to be free mate?
YAHYA SERHAN (to reporter): What's it like to see your friend stab a man five times?
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Yahya Serhan was in the throng at Cronulla when the revenge attacks took place. He was charged with being an accessory after a stabbing and served nine months in jail.
YAHYA SERHAN: I can’t really remember much but I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time you know what I mean? Just people everywhere, that was it.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Yahya Serhan): What was the atmosphere like leading up to that?
YAHYA SERHAN: It was like guerilla warfare, sort of like, you get us, we get you, stupid things like that.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Yahya Serhan): And who were the two sides?
YAHYA SERHAN: Well Australians versus us, you know.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Yahya Serhan): Who were the Australians?
YAHYA SERHAN: Rednecks, redneck Australians, um, people against us, you know what I mean.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Walid Sabourne): Walid, why do you think that whole Cronulla thing happened? What do you think it was all about?
WALID SABOURNE: I think my personal opinion, like tension, that the Muslim community and Arabs and Middle Easterners, you know, attacked so much by the media that we wanted an outlet and that was a good excuse, just to attack; the white attack us, men attack us, we’ll go and attack their people and attack their belongings. That’s only my opinion.
(Excerpts of footage and images from Cronulla riots):
CROWD (chanting): "F**k off wogs! F**k off wogs! ...")
MAN: You go home you f*****g filthy c***s because we're going to f**k you up next time, you understand that? Look at this shit, mother f****r!
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Thankfully these scenes have not been repeated, but there’s little evidence that attitudes on either side have changed.
WOMAN (Camden, New South Wales, 4 November 2007): What about the Cronulla protest? The journalists and the TV made it out to be a riot. We can’t even protest, you class this as a riot, you should be ashamed of yourself. It was a protest, we have a right to protest. It stops here and it stops now. You can’t go and molest our girls. We have a right to go to the beach, it’s our tradition, and that’s taken away from us.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The NSW Police have followed the lead of Scotland Yard and set up a community contact unit under the counter-terrorism command.
(Excerpt from meeting):
NICK KALDAS, DEPUTY COMMISSIONER, NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE: Who do you think listens to that station normally? What sort of audience do they have?
MAN: I think all backgrounds, mainly Arabic ...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Deputy Commissioner Nick Kaldas, an Egyptian-born Arabic-speaker who has studied radicalisation, sees these troops as being on the front line, especially in Sydney’s south-west which is seen as a potential trouble-spot.
NICK KALDAS, DEPUTY COMMISSIONER, NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE: There’s certainly a concentration in that part of Sydney, south-west Sydney, and that concentration may not be reciprocated or replicated in other Australian capital cities. I don’t know for a fact but that’s certainly how it seems to me. It seems to have become a little bit of a hot bed, and it’s fertile ground for a very small minority, a very small minority I stress, that may be forming extremist views.
KEN MCKAY, MIDDLE EASTERN ORGANISED CRIME SQUAD, NEW SOUTH WALES (referring to time-line): Well this is just a time-line of the Cronulla riots. As you can see, this sets out when all the events occurred so that we were able to investigate every single incident that took place ...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Ken McKay heads the New South Wales Police Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad which was set up after the Cronulla riots. He’s concerned about a growing overlap between existing criminal groups and religious extremists.
KEN MCKAY, MIDDLE EASTERN ORGANISED CRIME SQUAD, NEW SOUTH WALES: Commonsense would dictate that if you can be influenced by others to commit serious, serious crimes in terms of shooting at people or shooting in drug deals or you know, well it’s not, common sense would tell you that you may be influenced into committing a terrorist act.
You know if you feel that badly marginalised or isolated and you hate the community because of that, well you could understand that people may be influenced to, you know, possibly act in that fashion…
So what, what you need to do is really put all systems in place to engage that community to prevent the radicalisation both in crime and in terrorism and therefore to keep a lid on both the crime and both the terrorism so it’s, you know you’ve got to really make sure that you are addressing the radicalisation.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Out on the streets the police are working to build bridges with the Muslim community.
(Excerpt from conversation between police officer and little boy and his father, at community fair):
POLICE OFFICER: You need to smile man!
FATHER: It's too early for him! (laughing)
POLICE OFFICER: It's too early for me too (laughter).
(EXCERPT CONTINUED)
(Excerpt from conversation between police officer and men in barber):
POLICE OFFICER: How're you going brother? Hi Mohammed ...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Liaison officers like Gandhi Sindyan, himself a member of the Islamic community, do a crucial job, simply engaging with young Muslims.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES (to young man in barber's chair): Is he a good barber?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah.
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES: Yeah? You come here often?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah.
(Officer brushes hair from young man's neck).
BARBER: I can give you a job too!
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES: (laughs) No, it's alright man. Okay? ...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR (to Gandhi Sindyan): Do you think there’s a sense of victimhood among some of the young people?
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES: Yeah look honestly I think there is, yes. There is, you know because it’s so easy to be a victim. It’s so easy to sit back and say, you know, "I give up, everybody’s picking on me," you know. But I use that to empower myself. But once again this is how I operate but I can’t say that other young people in my community will have that same mentality.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE (at youth forum): I grew up in Mount Druitt and for those who don't know what Mount Druitt is like, it's a very rough area. And I remember growing up with my six brothers, it was quite hard to fit in, it was very hard. There was a lot of racism at the time because hardly anybody every heard of a Lebanese kid or a Muslim kid or an Islander kid. Islanders didn't exist at that time at all, in my days...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Youth worker Fadi Rahman is working with the police and local high schools to give disgruntled teenagers an outlet for their grievances, and hopefully to find some solutions.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE (at youth forum): ... you're allowed to say whatever you want. Whatever you think is happening to you personally or you see it before your eyes, I want you to say it. Don't hold it back.
At this session, a member of the counter-terrorism police community contact unit watches from the sidelines.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE (at youth forum): In school, in school. This is all about school.
BOY (at youth forum): Pick on you and call you names and stuff …
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Their complaints can’t be ignored because alienation is not just a state of mind. It also means high rates of early school leaving, unemployment, delinquency and crime.
BOY (at youth forum): ... they ignore you and all this stuff ...
...
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES (at youth forum): Yes, we always say we're victims, but what are we doing to show that we also are strong? We can go two ways about this. We can either sit down and give up or we can show them what we're made of. We can show them that, yes, this is our country. We love this country. This country has done so much for all of youse, has it not?
GROUP (at youth forum): Yes.
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES (at youth forum): Okay. You think if we were back in other countries in the middle east that they would look after us the same way?
GROUP (at youth forum): No.
GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES (at youth forum): Honestly ...
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: But for all the positive reinforcement, some of these young Muslim Australians are starting to feel they just can’t win.
MOHAMED TAHA (at forum): The way I see it as a young Australian, a Lebanese Muslim, this is how the media portrays it to us: If you’re growing up and you commit crimes, if you do bad, if you vandalise, if you steal, if you do all the bad stuff, what does the media call you? A Lebanese thug, yeah? And alright, the opposite of that - if you do good, if you grow your beard, if you wear the Islamic original dress and if you do everything good, they call you an extremist. So where is the line drawn between good and bad?
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: At times they seriously question whether they belong.
MOHAMED TAHA: At that point where you said, "Do we feel Australian?" During the period of the Cronulla riots I certainly didn’t you know. That same day I was watching the news when I got home, you know, we heard that, you know, Aussie gang was coming down to take us on or something like that. We got home, my parents were packing their bags. We just felt like we didn’t belong. We really sensed that we didn’t belong you know, this was it, we’re overboard, we’re heading off to Lebanon.
JOE ELALI: We don’t want this fight but some people are pushing us, some people are like, are pushing it to the limit where we’re going to start a war in this country. Like back in our country, there are wars already going on, we’re trying to stop, like, we’re back in this country, we’re thanking God that we’re still in this country...
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: Anybody who’s feeling the way that these young people are feeling is quite vulnerable. Now what happens after that, anything is possible. These are dangerous grounds. Young people are quite vulnerable as they are, plus having to put so much pressure on them makes them extremely vulnerable and extremely open to any other suggestions and any ideas. So you know, these are these are very, very dangerous grounds that we walk on at the moment.
(Excerpt from archive footage of rally at Camden, New South Wales, 4 November 2007):
WOMAN (to crowd, from balcony): Hello? Hello, my name is Judy. I’ve lived in Camden for 40 years (applause). I love this place. I’ve brought up three children and seven grandchildren and I hope many, many more. Our town is a special place, like every other town in New South Wales and throughout Australia. We have many people here tonight who are very, very upset at what is happening. And I do believe that they will hoodwink us. We are a test case. They have bought land at Picton. They have bought land at Goulburn. Watch out Australia!
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Camden in south-western Sydney – where residents are fighting a planned new Islamic school - could be any town in Australia.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN (in crowd): Where does it go from there?
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: These are hard-working, God-fearing folk, fiercely patriotic, proud of their heritage, and willing to fight for what they believe in.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN: If you want to go back to the heritage of the area, the farm that boundaries the property that they’ve bought, I’ve milked there every day or something like that, there are still furrow marks from the First Fleet, there’s still ploughs and things in those paddocks from the First Fleet, and they want to build this obstrosity that we have to look at. No thanks. At the end of the day I don’t want it, the community doesn’t want it. What more needs to be said? We don’t want it, end of story.
WOMAN: Muslims do not fit in in this town. We are Aussies, okay? We're John - it's the ex-MacArthur area and it still is MacArthur, and they’re not gonna take it away from us.
(END OF EXCERPT)
(Excerpt from Bankstown Council meeting):
MAN (in gallery): It’s a very divisive application because it divides our community ...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: In communities around Australia, it’s become a familiar scene. Here, it’s the residents of Bankstown opposing another planned Islamic school and council voting against it.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN: This is outrageous ...
SPEAKER: Order in the gallery!
MAN: ... brings the community together (applause from the crowd) instead of dividing it!
SPEAKER: Order!
(Man in the gallery and speaker talking loudly and simultaneously)
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: The councils insist these decisions are made strictly on planning grounds, but Muslim communities sense a depressing pattern of rejection, even more so when the expansion of a local brothel is approved at the same meeting.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN (interjecting): You support the brothel and reject our school.
SPEAKER: Order!
MAN: This is what the Council is doing.
SPEAKER: Order! I’ll have you removed if you continue sir…
MAN: ... unfair ...
SPEAKER: Order sir, you've been warned.
MAN: We are leaving sir, we are leaving sir.
(People stand up and leave, words are exchanged with security guard.)
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Nearby at Lidcombe, a similar scene is unfolding. Fadi Rahman and his boys are moving out of their gym and youth centre. The local council has rejected their application for a planning permit and issued an eviction notice. They’re now looking for new premises to continue their work with young Muslims.
FADI RAHMAN, ICRA YOUTH CENTRE: We try to create an environment for them where we can redirect their anger, redirect their frustration and to something much greater. I mean, what is more great than having a young person who has so much hatred and so much frustration against this system, against the very country that he was born and raised in? I move him away from that and free him that way to come in and say, "One day I want to fight for Australia, one day I’m going to be a world champion and I’m going to be representing Australia and I’m going to show them that I’m as Australian as all of them.
(Excerpt from Camden rally, continued):
WOMAN: Why don’t you give an Aussie cheer, all together?
MAN: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
CROWD: Oi! Oi! Oi!
MAN: Aussie!
CROWD: Oy!
MAN: Aussie!
CROWD: Oy!
MAN: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
CROWD: Oi! Oi! Oi!
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Just like Camden, communities all over the country are determined to preserve what they see as their Australian way of life.
But that determination can come at a cost.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN: We’re from Narellan, right, we're from Narellan, and they’re saying this is a Camden issue. Like f**k it is mate, we live next door to Camden, right? Now eh, we don’t want them here. Pretty soon mate, pretty soon you won’t be able to get bacon on your f*****g hamburgers anywhere no more, you know what I mean? Because of these grubs...
(END OF EXCERPT)
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: As police everywhere now acknowledge, it’s communities that defeat terrorism - but not through hostility and hatred.
(EXCERPT CONTINUED):
MAN: We don’t want them. Look how many people is here? F**k them all, get rid of them all...
(End of transcript)