To take or not to take: the Australian refugee crisis

Recent events have once again brought to light the racism, bigotry and prejudice that pervades our society. It isn't a nice topic to talk about. Often people are confronted by their own shortcomings and react defensively instead of proactively. What do I mean by that? Well, instead of looking at themselves and wondering how they can improve their situation or their outlook, they become hostile to that which is other. We've all heard the adage that the best form of defence is attack. That's what happens. We see it over and over again, in the media and in social media.

In Australia, the recent attacks have been against Muslims, and the Islamic community generally, as they are seen as an easy scapegoat for the anger and fear people feel in reaction to the various worldwide incidents. Since 9/11 there has been an undercurrent of anti-Islamic posturing by a small minority of the population. This has grown and grown. In fact, it has grown to such an outrageous level that people aren't even ashamed of their discrimatory language. Posts, such as the one below, have become more commonplace. Some are so offensive, I could not bring myself to use them in this piece.

The problem with images such as this is that they allow people to justify their intolerance. If we look into what this image tells us, it is quite disturbing.

Firstly, "not taking in Syrian refugees and closing our borders is not being mean or heartless." Yes, it is. You are admitting that they are refugees, fleeing from their homeland with barely a possession amongst them, in need of assistance from foreign lands because they are in fear of rape, torture and even death if they stay in their country. Turning away people such as this is incredibly mean and heartless.

Secondly, "I lock my doors every night, not because I hate the people outside, but because I love the people inside." No, you lock your doors to keep robbers and murderers out. You lock your doors because you fear what would happen if you left them unlocked. Yes, you do that because you love your family but don't pretend that fear isn't a predominant factor.

This whole argument falls down when we look at a simple comparison: the child in danger on your doorstep. If a broken and bloody child arrived on your doorstep asking for help, what would you do? If we go by the logic of the above image, you should not unlock your door. They are not your family. They do no "belong" in your home. You have no responsibility towards the child. How many of you would actually say no to that child? So why do you feel that as a country it's ok for us to say no to the refugees when they are no different to that child on your doorstep?

People like guarantees. It's like when you buy a product from a shop, you want to know that it works, and if it doesn't you want to know that you can exchange it for a similar product or get your money back. Unfortunately, people don't come with guarantees. That frightens people. This is part of the reason why we have locks on our doors. Common sense tells us that 99% of the people outside our door aren't after our valuables or out to murder us as we sleep. We have locks to protect us from the 1%.

Given this, you might think that image we discussed was pretty accurate. Well, let's back it up. A lock can be unlocked to let some people in. We've already established that we'd probably let in the bleeding and bloody child. There's no guarantee that the child won't steal your wallet while they're in your house. You let them in because it's the right thing to do.

So now we are faced with potentially 12,000 Syrian refugees. Border control is the holder of the key to lock on our national door. They can let in those they deem to be an acceptable risk, just as we do with the child on our doorstep. They also keep out those they deem an unacceptable risk but here's the thing: there's no guarantee.

I wrote the above passage on my personal Facebook page. The people on my friends list who are very against taking refugees did not comment. I don't blame them. It can be hard to reevaluate your position. It can be confronting. It can be embarrassing. I don't think any of my Facebook friends are bad people. I don't think they are particularly racist or intolerant. I simply think they have been sucked in by the fearmongering done by the media and government.

The cynical side of me thinks the government has played this very well. They have been seen to be doing the right thing by saying they will take the refugees. They have also done little to quell the growing hysteria around the potential danger of the Islamic religion. This gives them an automatic out. Taking in refugees requires a lot of money from the government - from processing them to the benefits they receive until they are self sufficient - which could, in theory, be spent on other (much neglected) areas that would garner more support from the general public. Of course, governments being what they are, the spend would be nowhere near what the public think it should be and only a fraction of what they would have spent on bringing in refugees.

The media are in it for the story, not the truth. The story is what sells, whether it is based on fact or not. They will play one side of against the other and both sides off against the middle, all in the name of raising their own revenue. What sells the most copy? What will headline TV news? What will get shared on social media? Fear! Lots and lots of fear! The occasional good news story about a Muslim can't counter the vast reams of stories about terrorism at the hands of hard-line extremists who use religion to excuse their own bigotry.

 

The article on the left illustrates perfectly the habit the general population have of tarring all with the same brush. It's common throughout history. Different groups, different eras. Same result. Apparently the message of "not all Muslims are terrorists" just isn't getting through. There are millions of Muslims around the world who absolutely detest what is happening in the name of their religion. Blaming every Muslim for ISIS/ISIL/Daesh is just like blaming every Christian for Westboro Baptist Church or the Crusades. It just doesn't make sense.

The article on the right illustrates that it is not just the Western Countries who come under attack from extremists. The Western-centric media was full of the awful attacks on Paris, as you would expect. Hardly a whisper was heard about the attacks in Beirut. An Islamic area being attacked by Islamic extremists doesn't rate in Western countries. Even though the attacks were carried out, or attributed to, the same base organisation, the attacks in Beirut were deemed, media-wise, as less relevant.

People need to see that the extremists are not the same as the moderates, just as they are in every other religion or ideology. By saturating the airwaves and newspapers with one event and not the other, we allow the misconception that this is a Christian versus Islamic battle when it is, in reality, an extremist versus the rest of the world battle.

In the end, we all must stand as one. Regardless of religion. Regardless of colour. Regardless of creed. We must put aside our reservations and unlock the door. We must trust our Border Control to weed out as many of the extremists hiding amongst the refugees as they can. We must trust our fellow citizens to not stand by and allow our children to be radicalised. We must trust our police and our justice system to deal with those who break our laws in an appropriate manner. But most of all, we must trust the refugees who do make it to our shores because, after all they have been through, don't they deserve that which we have enjoyed our entire lives?

A little dose of good news

This morning I woke, as every other morning, to the news of another tragedy that has devastated someones world. It broke my heart to hear of so many innocent lives, full of such promise and potential, cut short by the actions of a small group of war-mongers. I sat, with a tear in my eye, trawling through social media. Each post I saw spoke my own thoughts. They all reflected the anguish, the devastation, the grief and the overwhelming unjustness of it all.

All day, I knew that I would have to write something today. I did not know what I would write. I did not know what form it would take. When the World Trade Centre was attacked, I wrote poetry. I may yet follow that path later, but I could not form the semblance of anything like poetry today.

It was not until a friend lamented the plight of the human race that the idea of what I needed to write came to me. It did not leap at me as some thoughts have done. If crept slowly upon me, like a rising tide, until I could not help but be swept up in the notion.

That glimmer, that ray of hope in midst of almost overpowering darkness, was a small story that made me smile. It made me smile so much my heart ached with the beauty of it. My heart ached so much I cried at the simplicity of it.


Image from http://brazil-football.com

Prior to the recent Football World Cup held in Brazil, German midfielder Mesut Özi sponsored 11 surgeries for children suffering in the underfunded Brazilian health care system. That, in itself, is an amazing act of charity. From someone not even out of their 20s it is an awesome and worthwhile contribution he has made to the lives of those children and their families. Özi wasn't done, though. At the conclusion of the tournament, following his teams victory, he went on to donate a significant portion of his personal winnings to sponsor surgeries for 12 more children.

If you hadn't heard this story before now, don't feel bad. I hadn't either until I went searching for a feel good story and had to wade through page and pages and pages of depressing, gut wrenching, soul destroying news. The fact that this story wasn't headline news is sad, and doesn't surprise me, but maybe we can change how we experience the news that is delivered to us. You're reading this via perhaps the most powerful information dissemination resource known to mankind.

People aren't, on the whole, bad. They are born as a blank slate and their experience of the world shapes them into the adult they become. The fact that TV networks, newspapers, radio stations and the internet persist in filling every waking minute with stories of devastation and violence says just as much about us as it does about the news outlets.

We have the capacity for so much compassion and generosity, not just financial but of spirit, that those feel good stories should be the majority of the news, not a column filler or that last piece after the weather report. If we considered the human race to be a race for each other instead of against each other, the world would be a much safer, happy and fulfilled place to not only exist but to thrive.

News Coverage in the Modern Age

There was once a time when a disaster in a foreign country didn’t even make the news in your country, let alone have 24 hour picture coverage and journalists camping out to cover it. I’m not saying that was better than knowing what’s going on in the world. I’m not saying that was better than bringing it to people’s attention so they can help with recovery efforts in anyway they can. I am saying it’s better than the outrageous “news” coverage we get today.

I will use the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand as an example. I live in Australia (just across the ditch, as we say). The news broke almost immediately after it happened. The coverage continued all day and night on the TV on all the major stations. The next few days were also predominantly coverage from the earthquake site.

The first few hours of coverage did not bother me as there was new information coming out at a pretty consistent rate. The pictures may have been on a pretty high rotation but the information being presented was being updated. After about four hours, though, the information started being the same thing we’d already heard a few times already.

I know people are going to say, “what about all the shift workers, etc, who haven’t seen or heard the news; they need the information to be repeated.” I’m not saying don’t repeat the information but surely, after 4 hours, we don’t need constant live streaming from the networks. A simply 5 or 10 minute update every hour would have sufficed. Then, as major information came through, they could break from their scheduled programming for that.

Which brings me to my gripe over “breaking news”. The first or second time you tell people, it is breaking news. The fifth time it’s definitely not “breaking”, it’s just news. So many times I saw the networks have BREAKING NEWS plastered across the screen over footage and/or presentations of information that had been on for the last few hours.

I’m trying really hard, not to sound uncaring, but I know some of you will think that. It’s not that I don’t care about the people in the earthquake area. It’s not that I don’t care about the damage it caused. It’s that I don’t care for the TV stations constantly sensationalising everything and running something to the point of people tuning out.

The other problem I have is the sending of the masses of journalists to these disaster zones. Especially when they are not real journalists. They took up space on flights from Australia which could have gone to relatives or emergency service personnel. Not only that, they are not journalists. Take David Koch, from Channel 7’s Sunrise program, as an example. He is basically an accountant who has somehow managed to get a job as a breakfast TV host. He was flown over to report to on the disaster. He is NOT a journalist. The questions he asked (don’t know if he made his own questions, or the staff who write the questions are just incompetent) were juvenile. I’d expect the same sort of questions from lower high school kids. He (or his staff) did no research into the information they were presenting and made no effort to keep up with the updated information.

This effort of “Kochie’s” came off the back of his efforts in the Queensland floods where he clearly made a huge error, then had to come back and correct himself. He didn’t even say he’d gotten it wrong, though, he just said that someone from the premiers office (??? can’t quite remember the source of that information) had rung to tell him the updated information. This was probably true but the same information had gone out A FEW HOURS EARLIER in a news conference (shown on his network) by the Premier of Queensland (Anna Bligh) so if he or his staff had done their jobs properly then this retraction would not have been needed. It just went to make him look like an idiot for not knowing in the first place and for not admitting that he should have known when he had to update the information.

I’m not sure why the networks think we want to see half-arsed reporting. There are plenty of well-versed, TV friendly journalists out there who are a million times better than David Koch. They know what they’re talking about. They know what kinds of questions to ask to get the relevent information out of who they are asking. It reminds of the saying: You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. These TV hosts are not journalists and should stop pretending they are. And it’s not just Channel 7. It’s all the commercial networks in Australia (with the possible exception of SBS, which I don’t really see as a commercial network even though it is). They are all as bad as each other. I just happen to watch Channel 7 during these episodes.

I also object to the intrusion in these people’s lives who are basically doorstopped by these wanna-be journalists and asked to relive what has probably been the most traumatic event in their life. The general public knows that people are suffering. We can imagine but not know what they are going though, unless we have lived it ourselves. I don’t mind the occassional interview with a “victim” but it should be done after they’ve been given a basic psychological assessment as to weather they are ready to deal with some really quite intrusive questions. I also wonder if the people who are interviewed see the final version that goes to air and think, “that’s not how it was” or are just embarrassed to be seen in that state on international TV. In the moment, people don’t think like that. Some people may not want their emotional distress to be splashed across the TV but in the moment may not have the where-with-all to say no to the TV crew and “charming” host who has just lobbed up in their front garden or at the front door. Obviously, the networks need to get permission to air the stories but in that emotional state, how many of those people actually thought about what they were signing, or the implications of being made into a headline?

At the end of the day, the networks are going to do whatever they want but a little social responsibility and little intelligent journalism isn’t too much to ask for, is it?