David Coady reviews A Brief History of Australian Terror, by Bobuq Sayed
A Brief History of Australian Terror
By Bobuq Sayed
ISBN
Reviewed by DAVID COADY
Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries out for a full-length book, updated to address the surge of Islamophobia since the beginning of the Gaza genocide.
Sayed briefly mentions that Islamophobia in Australia can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but his focus is on recent history, especially the history of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Sayed writes about the subject from a highly personal perspective. This is appropriate because it touches his identity closely, especially his identity as a Muslim person of colour; it is also an identity which is glaringly under-represented in Australian public debate. I think it is appropriate that this review should be equally personal. Of course, there is no shortage of people such as myself (white, straight, cis males, brought up in a mostly Christian culture) being given platforms to opine about this, and every other conceivable, topic. Nonetheless, this is the only perspective from which I can write, and any attempt to adopt an objective stance toward a highly subjective book would miss the point of it.
Sayed writes that “a white Australian could have made the exact same criticisms” of Australian Islamophobia that he and other people of colour have made “with none of the accompanying backlash (p. 35)”. That seems to me to be a slight exaggeration. What is true is that white Australians face much less backlash than non-white Australians when they speak out against Islamophobia. After all, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Antoinette Lattouf were sacked by the national broadcaster for hurting the feelings of Islamophobes and racists, while Laura Tingle was merely reprimanded and forced to undergo “counselling” for essentially the same thing. But less backlash is not no backlash, and many white Australians have been deterred from speaking out against Israel’s genocide, out of fear of negative social and professional consequences; and both the genocide itself and the repercussions for speaking out against it are, to a great extent, the product of Islamophobia. Yet, precisely because the backlash white people face for speaking out is less, our obligation to do so is all the greater, and the silence of many of us can only be understood as timidity and, in some cases, cowardice.
The backlash against people of colour who speak out is even greater when they have, like Sayed, been granted political asylum in Australia; in which case they are expected “to tow a respectful line” to the country that gave them sanctuary (p. 34). This expectation, of course, ignores Australia’s role in creating refugees in the first place. It is particularly outrageous to expect Afghan refugees, like Sayed, to refrain from criticising the Australian government, given that Australian troops have recently been found by the Brereton Report to have committed numerous atrocities against unarmed Afghans.
Sayed has the courage to talk about Australia as a perpetrator of terror and about Muslims as its victims. This is, of course, a reversal of conventional wisdom, according to which terrorism is, almost by definition, carried out by Muslim insurgents who “enact callous bloodshed against American and European powers for no reason other than their hatred of our freedom and our wealth” (p. 24). As Sayed says, the purveyors of this conventional wisdom are not only committed to a demonstrably false account of the actual motivations of those usually categorised as ‘terrorists’, they are also oblivious to the fact that the freedom and wealth which these ‘terrorists’ allegedly hate come to a great extent “at the expense of the rest of the world, whose resources, labour and land are expropriated” (p. 25).
Sayed is keenly aware of how dangerous this ignorance is. He points out that Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” is virtually unknown in America or elsewhere in the West. This letter makes it clear that 9/11 was, to a great extent, motivated by the occupation of Palestine. Sayed quotes bin Laden’s own words on the subject:
The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(p. 28)
Sayed is not an apologist for bin Laden. He objects to bin Laden’s frequent conflation of Zionism with Judaism, and suggests that it is due to such “legitimate shortcomings that the letter is largely discounted and that its intended audience, the American people, are mostly ignorant of the fact that it even exists” (pp. 28-29).
This seems unlikely. The conflation of Zionism with Judaism, so far from being peculiar to bin Laden and his followers, is absolutely pervasive in the West. This conflation has always been central to Zionist ideology, and it has been used for the last 76 years to promote Western hegemony in the Middle East, and to smear the Palestinian solidarity movement. Most people in the West are ignorant of the actual motives of bin Laden and other Muslim insurgents, not because those insurgents conflate Zionism with Judaism (most of them don’t), but because Western governments and media outlets conflate Zionism with Judaism (and anti-Zionism with anti-semitism). Hence, we are constantly told, and a depressing number of us actually seem to believe, that indigenous resistance to ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now genocide, must be motivated by anti-semitism. The lie that anti-semitism is principally a Muslim, rather than a European, phenomenon is central to contemporary Western Islamophobia.
Sayed is adept at identifying ways in which imperialists “dominate accounts of language and temporality” (p. 26). The automatic labelling of resistance to occupation as ‘terrorism’ is a particularly clear example of the former. Sayed says that “whether terrorism as a term is salvageable is yet to be seen (p. 12).” Unfortunately, Sayed doesn’t tell us how it could be salvaged. My own view is that the term is unsalvageable. It does no good; there seems to be nothing we can say with it that we can’t say equally well or better without it. And it does considerable harm, by systematically discrediting resistance to imperial aggression.
Public discussion of Palestine is a clear example of imperialists dominating accounts of temporality. Israel’s attack on Gaza is presented as a response to the Hamas attack of October 7 2023, while any discussion of what preceded the Hamas attack is frowned upon. Similarly, Israel’s behaviour is routinely justified by reference to the Holocaust (even though that had nothing to do with Palestinians), while few people in the West have even heard of the Nakba. In short, we can go back to October 7th, but no further, and we can go back to the early 40s, but not to 1948. Finally, we can go back to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, but not to subsequent millennia of largely Arab civilisation in Palestine.
Sayed is aware that not all victims of Islamophobia are Muslims. Anyone who can be racialized as Muslim is a potential target of Islamophobic hate. Sayed speaks of his family feeling compelled to try to pass as Italians, in order not to be identified as Muslims (p. 19). There is clearly a lot of overlap between Islamophobia and racism, but they are not the same thing.
It seems impossible to separate the racism from the Islamophobia in Australian attitudes to Palestinians. Islamophobia and racism work together to make Palestinians seem an undifferentiated mass, which makes it possible for us to ignore their slaughter.
Sayed has made an excellent contribution to an important topic. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this promising young writer.
DAVID COADY’s current work is on applied philosophy, especially applied epistemology. He has published on rumour, conspiracy theory, expertise, blogging, fake news, post-truth, extremism, and democratic theory. He has also published on the metaphysics of causation, the philosophy of law, climate change, cricket ethics, police ethics, fatphobia, the ethics of horror films, and ‘scientific’ whaling. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, the co-author of The Climate Change Debate: an Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry, the editor of Conspiracy Theories: the Philosophical Debate, the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy and of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology.