This Ramadan, Australian Muslims began their month of fasting in a climate of extreme Islamophobia. From politicians, in the press and on social media, there is a barrage of anti-Muslim racism that makes it feel like we have dialled the clock back to the post-911 era, when the “clash of civilisations” rhetoric dominated and the “war on terror” was just beginning.
This time, though, it comes in the context of a growing and better organised far right, with Coalition voters flocking to One Nation’s more extreme brand of bigotry. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is now polling at 22 percent nationally, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll. In Victoria, where the party has historically struggled to gain a foothold, One Nation now ranks first in polls.
In a Sky News interview last week, Hanson unleashed an unchecked Islamophobic tirade in which she claimed there are “no good Muslims”. She went on to argue that Australians were afraid to visit Lakemba, the multicultural western Sydney suburb. She then used her “apology” for these comments to further slander Muslims, saying she was sorry if she “offended anyone out there that doesn't believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a caliphate”.
In February, racists repeatedly sent anonymous death threats to Lakemba Mosque. One letter threatened to “kill the Muslim filth race” and “deport all Muslim garbage” while also proclaiming “Praise Israel”. This letter also included a pointed threat against Palestine Action Group spokesperson Josh Lees, who, the letter claimed, “needs a bullit [sic]”. In the comments sections of Daily Telegraph articles about this on social media, hundreds of commenters spew similarly extreme racism.
Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who gunned down 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, was personally praised in the mosque letter. Tarrant was radicalised by the Australian far right and neo-Nazi movement that emerged during the war on terror. As the letters demonstrate, the current climate is producing more like him.
But Hanson alone is not responsible for this wave of Islamophobia. The Labor government and Liberal Party opposition promote and normalise these attitudes too.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rolled out the red carpet for the president of Israel, a man who belongs in The Hague for crimes against humanity. And he’s using the misfortune of the Australian women married to ISIS adherents (and their children) who are stuck in Syria—those the Murdoch press deride as “ISIS brides”—to ostentatiously deny basic rights to Muslims.
Then there were the scenes of Muslims being bashed by police in Sydney’s Town Hall Square. Labor Premier Chris Minns unleashed police violence on protesters opposing Israeli President Herzog’s visit. Minns has defended the decision by NSW police to assault Muslims praying after the demonstration, using the beginning of Ramadan to issue a new statement defending police actions. Muslim leaders in NSW have called for an independent investigation into police violence and an apology. Minns continues to resist calls for accountability while signalling his intent to further crack down on the Palestine solidarity movement, including banning the Arabic word “intifada”.
Meanwhile, newly minted federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor has launched an anti-immigration campaign, with Muslims as a particular target. A leaked draft Liberal immigration policy includes the proposal for a Trump-style ban on migration from 13 countries, including Somalia and Gaza. The Liberals remain coy about the policy, but Taylor has made it clear he believes “the numbers have been too high and standards too low”.
It’s not just the volume of immigration the Liberals intend to oppose but the “values” of those migrating that need to be changed. This anti-Muslim dog whistle harks back to the White Australia policy, as well as the dark days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. During the so-called war on terror, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism reached a fever pitch, whipped up by the media and politicians to justify the killing abroad and the crackdown on civil liberties at home. According to a Brown University report released in 2023, 4.5 million to 4.6 million people were killed as a result of the war on terror.
Dressed up in the neo-colonial language of a “civilising mission” to deliver democracy, freedom and human rights to the dark and backward masses, the wars were really about Western power, oil and empire. This time, the imperialist backdrop to the surge of Islamophobia is Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, Western support for the genocide and the longer-term escalation of military tensions between China and the US.
Since the so-called ceasefire, 603 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Trump’s Board of Peace to oversee the killing fields of Gaza includes no Palestinians but at least three people implicated in the Epstein files, as well as Israeli representatives. Unable to defend the indefensible, our rulers rely on vilifying the victims of these crimes. And they understand that such violence is a necessary part of defending Western interests against rivals, and want people to accept this in the name of advancing the national interest.
It’s no surprise then that One Nation is being bankrolled by the richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart. Nor that Albanese capitulates to racist talking points at the same time as he bleats about “lowering the temperature”: he understands the importance of racism as an ideological prop of the system, even if he also worries about its effect on Labor’s vote in some seats. And the capitalist class recognise that pointing the finger at Muslims or immigrants undercuts hostility that might otherwise be directed at them and helps prepare the population for the sorts of sacrifices that will be necessary to defend their interests abroad.
In the face of all this, we need to build resistance and a political alternative to racism and nationalism. Just as with the Voice referendum, Labor and the liberal media’s weak response—refusing even to name racism for what it is and hoping appeals to multiculturalism will be enough—is not sufficient to defeat anti-Muslim racism or defend migrants. We need a movement that will take on anti-Muslim racism and hostility to migrants head-on—one that recognises its roots in capitalism and imperialism, that sees class solidarity as the response to far-right bigotry. We need a stronger socialist movement.
