Hey Nick, I found your intolerance

When I wrote yesterday’s blog post, I wasn’t expecting much reaction, yet even this took me by surprise. Someone of twitter, someone with whom I have no connection at all, tweeted these responses:

The blog post that elicited that response on twitter is about my reasons for accepting the science of climate change. It’s not about multiculturalism or discrimination or intolerance or Islam. Regardless, this person has decided that it’s okay to challenge my writing, my point of view, my friends, and my ethnicity, and it is important to challenge the ideas, although not so much the personal. 

What’s fascinating is that the tweeter has taken a guess at my cultural origins, probably based on nothing more than my surname (although s/he could have read my previous blog posts, which spell it out), and has done so utterly out of context. S/he also accused me of not showing my face. Oh, how that accusation burns, coming from a twitter account with an egg for an avatar, and the twitter handle retarded muzi voodoo. (I tweet under my real name.)

I feel no need to justify my blog post or my existence to this git. This post is primarily to highlight that regardless of how happy and contented Australians are, there is an aggressive element of intolerance against Muslims that runs deep and profoundly stupid within our society. Followers of the Intolerance Cult – to paraphrase Tony Abbott and his ‘death cult’ - takes clumsy shots at anything that sounds even vaguely Middle Eastern or Muslim.

In today’s Australian, columnist Nick Cater’s opinion piece “Search for the missing intolerance” cites a new survey from the Scanlon Foundation, suggesting that perhaps we’re mostly happy little Aussie Vegemites living in one of the happiest places on the planet. 

Welcome to Disneyland. 

The overwhelming majority of Australians — 92 per cent — feel a sense of belonging. Nine out of 10 express pride in the Australian way of life. Eight out of 10 think this is a land of opportunity. Eight in 10 think ethnic diversity has been good for Australia. Six in 10 think the immigration level is about right or could be higher. “This is possibly the highest level of positive sentiment towards immigration in the Western world,” says Andrew Markus, the author.

Nick Cater goes on to suggest that as “racism” seems almost inconsequential in our happy-go-lucky utopia, we should be looking at casual racism, which he proposes is a less serious, almost trivial and usually accidental form of ethnic slight.

Since there is no evidence of institutional racism, we are told to be wary of “casual racism”, petty linguistic crimes that few of us are clever enough to be aware we are committing.

Mr Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre which, as the name suggests, is politically aligned with the Liberal Party. I imagine Mr Cater would be quite accepting of Attorney General George Brandis’s casually divisive language on QandA last night, when he continually referred to Muslim audience members as ‘leaders of their community’ – as opposed ‘leaders of our community’, which if Australia is as socially cohesive as the Scanlon study indicates, would be the same community. 

But that’s just “petty” and unimportant, right?

Actually, it’s an essential element of intolerance in Australia, particularly if you read the research presented by Scanlon Foundation’s 2014 Survey, and not just Mr Cater's summary. Intolerance comes in many forms and has many targets: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physicality, political leaning, social strata and more. While racial intolerance seems fairly low, religious intolerance towards Muslims is not, with 1 in 4 Aussies feeling negative towards Muslims. 

From the Summary, we see this:

Questions on attitude to Christian, Buddhist and Muslim faith groups find that, as in past surveys, a very small proportion are negative towards Christian and Buddhist faiths (close to 5%), but a proportion almost five times higher (close to 25%) towards Muslims.

Furthermore, on reading p50 of the study, 

First, when questions were asked in specific terms with regard to immigrants who have settled in Australia, there was a very low level of negative sentiment (at or below 11%), with one significant exception, the attitude to Muslims (44% negative).

Nick Cater should’ve looked just that little bit harder. The evidence of intolerance he is seeking is right there, in the key document of his own op-ed.

We may not be racist – although some Australians undoubtedly are – but we are a society divided.

I encourage you all to browse through the Scanlon Foundation 2014 Survey – there are some terrific insights lurking within.