Islamophobes in Australia

I grew up near Camden, NSW, so when I noticed this story the other day, my ears pricked up (figuratively speaking).

Essentially, the Qu’uranic Society Dar Tahfez El-Quran had lodged a planning application with Camden Municipal Council for an Islamic school that would cater for around 1200 students. The main reasons appeared to be: (1) it would occupy grazing land; (2) it would increase traffic; (3) it could potentially alter the cultural make-up of the area.

Note that there are quite a number of Christian schools in the Camden municipality, at least one of which was recently built (it wasn’t actually a new school, but new buildings for an existing school) which did take up prime agricultural land and definitely increased traffic in the area, but I don’t recall there being any controversy about that at the time. In addition, the local high school was moved a couple of years ago, and apparently the proposed school was quite close to the high school. Again, I don’t recall any problems being raised about prime grazing land or traffic when the new high school site was approved.

Camden also has some slightly odd planning restrictions, based on (at least, so I remember being told as a kid) Macarthur’s notes from one of the high flood years. Camden is surrounded by floodplains, and before the most recent drought, I remember being cut off from school for a couple of days every year during the annual floods. Apparently Macarthur took notes of the water’s height during these annual floods, the land is known definitively as floodplain, and there are supposedly restrictions on building there. (One of these days I’ve got to get myself to the Planning Office in Sydney and check out the actual zoning for those areas.)

Anyway, the council’s decision is in.

The council decided, unanimously, to reject the application. The mayor, Chris Patterson, said:

“It is a site issue, clearly a site issue … we said all along religious issues, nationalistic issues, will not be entered into.”

He also encouraged the Qu’uranic Society Dar Tahfez El-Quran to resubmit the plans if they found a different site.

I can kind of believe that there may have been real planning issues, but I don’t completely believe that the council was not affected by the social side quite as much as the mayor says.

I also find state MP Chris Lynn’s statements that Camden is not racist fairly laughable. I think someone needs to give Chris Lynn some lessons about racism. Sorry mate, but this sounds pretty racist to me:

tensions reached a climax in November when two pigs’ heads were rammed onto metal stakes and an Australian flag was draped between them at the proposed site.

So is this, from a resident:

“I’ve been rolled before and we came out here for the quiet life. The fact is that Camden has been a strongly white community for a long time and the people here are scared. I’m not a racist person – that’s just a statement of fact.”

(Saying it’s not racist doesn’t make it not racist, by the way. A racist fact is no less racist because it’s a fact!)

And, of course, the pig heads and the “we want the quiet life” statements of racism are in addition to the fact that the protesters cheered the council’s decision. Again: it’s an expression of racism – people just haven’t really cared one way or another about the other schools that have been built in the past 10 years or so, the difference is that this one is Islamic. That’s racist!

The thing is, the resident who made that comment is probably right: Camden is a strongly white community, and people probably are scared. That it’s true is no excuse. It just means they’ve been able to hide their racism for a long time, in much the same way I mentioned in the post below.

This story now has some international attention, although I doubt that will make any difference (except to Australia’s image).

One thing that I found funny in that BBC piece, though, was the “children would have to be bussed in from Sydney, an hour away” thing … ummm … actually, probably most of them would come from about half an hour away, maybe Bankstown-ish. BBC’s Nick Bryant needs to learn something about the geography of the place he’s reporting from.

[First posted here.]