Met System Racist

By Adam Morton
April 29, 2006

INTERNATIONAL university students are launching an equal opportunity claim against the State Government, arguing rules banning them from travel concession fares are racially discriminatory.

The complaint to Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria will claim foreigners who use public transport pay hundreds of dollars more each year than their domestic classmates due to race.

Campaign spokesman Pradeep Subramaniam said the complaint could lead to Victoria's overseas student population — more than 50,000 last year — taking separate legal action against the state if it was not willing to compromise.

"It's clearly a case of racial discrimination. There's no other basis on which you cannot get concession if you are an undergraduate student," he said.

A daily inner-city Metcard costs $6.10 at full price or $3.20 with a concession. A monthly pass is $49.10 cheaper with a concession card than without.

The discrimination complaint, to be lodged next week, comes at a time of growing disquiet in the international student sector.

Australia's $7.5 billion foreign education market is slowing after years of rapid growth in the face of increased competition from Asia and Europe. Last month 60 overseas students at Central Queensland University's Melbourne campus threatened to go on hunger strike, accusing the university of milking them for upfront fees by examining and failing them on material they were never taught.

About 100 international students from different universities yesterday marched through the city before protesting outside Parliament.

They were inspired by a NSW tribunal last month finding similar travel concession rules in that state breached anti-discrimination laws. NSW and Victoria are the only states that require international students to pay full fare on trains, trams and buses. Victoria also bars postgraduate and part-time students from concessions.

Song Yee Ng, of the National Liaison Committee for International Students, said the fight for equality for foreign students had only just begun. "Even the state governments treat us like cash cows," she said.

Transport Minister Peter Batchelor's spokeswoman, Louise Perry, said overseas students qualified for travel concessions if they were refugees, on exchange programs or held Australian development scholarships.

She said postgraduate and part-time students with low-income health care cards from Centrelink also paid concession rates.

"The State Government is committed to providing public transport concessions to students who are in genuine need," she said.

Ms Perry said it was puzzling that students campaigned over comparatively minor transport fares while staying quiet about massive upfront university fees.

Ms Ng said international students contributed to the economy through GST and payroll tax.

Lest we forget the horror and stupidity of war

April 24, 2006

My grandfather, Charles Williams, served at Gallipoli, and later at the Western Front in France. He first met my grandmother after returning home, while fulfilling a personal pledge to find her family and tell of how her brother, a front-line mate, had died. They were married a year later.

A victim of mustard gas, he lived and worked the rest of his life with only one serviceable lung, a condition that, mysteriously, did not prevent him from serving in New Guinea during World War II. He died 60 years after his experience at Gallipoli, in 1975. Only in his final days, drugged with painkillers during the palliative stage of his hospitalisation, did he vividly recount the awfulness of his wartime years with family members, his rambling mind helplessly returning to the nightmarish horrors of his youth. Prior to this period, my grandfather was extremely reticent on the subject of wartime experiences, in spite of the irrepressible curiosity of his grandson. I learned, over time, that it was a subject he did not wish to speak of.

It is with him in mind that I appreciate, and fully endorse, the views of Alan Attwood (Opinion, 22/4) regarding the proper respect for Anzac Day services. Few of us now living, if any, can truly understand what it must have been like for those Australians who landed at Gallipoli in April 1915, or comprehend how sad and painful were the reminiscences of those who survived the senseless chaos of the long months that followed. Few of the multitude of flag-draped "mates" who annually descend upon Gallipoli, realistically, would understand the depth of fellowship engendered between young men constantly living with the threat of imminent death from shellfire or disease.

Attwood reminds us all that the original purpose of Anzac Day services was to set aside a time for veterans to gather and reflect upon their shared experiences, in sombre remembrance of their fallen comrades - not a recurring opportunity for "major event" organisers to entertain and awe members of the general public, or to perpetuate some jingoistic celebration of martial glory and national identity by mythologising a military campaign that was, in actuality, an unmitigated disaster for the invading forces, where more died from dysentery than battle wounds.

Many veterans, my grandfather included, did not appreciate the gradual process through which, over time, their fundamentally private stories were co-opted in the service of a blustering, bellicose patriotism, and, most of all, desired future generations to acknowledge the horror and essential stupidity of war. The great sacrifices their generation made would be wasted if current and future Australians do not share an abhorrence of war, and forever work more towards its reasonable avoidance rather than its glorification. They would want us to reflect upon the human tragedy that World War I was not, as hoped for at the time, the "war to end all wars" - that young people are still called up as cannon fodder whenever politicians tire of resolving differences through diplomacy or have grandiose visions of national destiny.

Lest we forget.
Peter Kartsounis, Footscray

I think we already have.

I hope this battle doesn't take place this year...

'Cause it did in 2005...

Dawn service a time for reflection, not spectacle

By Alan Attwood
April 22, 2006

In the beginning there was an eerie quiet. Before dawn on April 25, 1915, Australian troops packed into boats rowing towards the murky Gallipoli Peninsula were struck by the oppressive stillness. An engineer wrote later they expected, even hoped for, "all hell to be let loose every second, machine-guns, shrapnel, anything but this nerve-racking silence".

The first Anzac Day services, which began within the following decade, made a feature of silence. Many of these events were simple affairs, often open only to veterans; the first official dawn service was conducted at Sydney's Cenotaph in 1927. Services big or small followed a familiar pattern. In the pre-dawn darkness veterans would be ordered to "stand-to". Then came two minutes of silence, broken by a lone bugler.

It was simple; effective; replete with symbolism. So why have we allowed ceremonies to mark the nearest thing we have to an Australian national day to become tacky travesties of what they were meant to be? Modern Anzac Day services are in danger of succumbing to the Major Event syndrome, tricked up with scripts and soundtracks and special effects. Early on Tuesday afternoon, for example, ABC TV will telecast the dawn service from Anzac Cove along with a feature, Spirit Of Place, that, according to one program guide, includes "a musical performance and evocative lighting of the cliffs and gullies, set against images of the Gallipoli landing 91 years ago". What, no spouting fish?

The good news is that this time, unlike last year, there has been no brouhaha about John Farnham singing (or not) at Gallipoli. The bad news is that the swing towards showbiz spectaculars continues unabated. And, of course, there are the souvenirs. An establishment in the ACT has been advertising a "Sands of Gallipoli" plaque - "antique nickel finish metal plate on a wooden base featuring authentic sand collected from the beaches of Gallipoli". So now we know what all those trenching tools were for.

In recent times, there has been controversy about the impact of roadworks and the swelling tourist tide on the former battlefields. One positive aspect of last year's Farnham fuss was that it raised the question of what was, or wasn't, appropriate on the peninsula - even in a concert separate from the official commemorative service. New Zealand's PM put the kybosh on Whispering Jack but made it clear that her home-grown Finn brothers would also not be appropriate.

In the flood of letters and talkback calls debating this issue, two struck me as especially poignant. The first recalled a lone pilgrim to the peninsula starting to sing the Eric Bogle song And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda in the pre-dawn silence then, slowly, thousands participating in an improvised, and very moving, singalong. The second, rejecting the Disneyfication of the site, described the impact of "the grim sadness of the place; its silent melancholy".

The place is its own memorial. It doesn't need slick ceremonies. Nine years ahead of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings - an anniversary to send major event planners into a frenzy - is not too early to suggest that perhaps the peninsula should be given the Uluru treatment. Just as climbing the Rock, once practically compulsory for visitors, is now deemed to be disrespectful, so too could the Gallipoli site benefit from more reverence and simplicity, less sound and lights and PA systems. The story is so strong it does not need artificial aids.

As for Melbourne's official service at the Shrine, I have wished for years that they would do away with the sepulchral, rather banal commentary that precedes the unseen bugler. The immense power of the occasion comes from the gathering of strangers in the gloom; the flickering light of the flame, surrounded by pensive faces; and, above all, the enveloping darkness and silence that recall the conditions of the original heroic and tragically botched military operation.

The day and the way it is remembered has evolved over the past 91 years. The veterans of the first landing have all gone now. Technology has changed everything. No doubt there are computer whizzes around who reckon they could produce a powerful big-screen simulation of the events on Anzac Cove if given half a chance. They should politely be told to keep their memory sticks to themselves. And any major-eventer with plans for massed choirs or Russell Crowe reading some poetry should be reminded that this is a service, not an opening or closing ceremony. Silence can be the most powerful sound; also the hardest to achieve.

Early in the afternoon on Anzac Day there will be a call for silence at the MCG. A huge crowd is expected to witness the annual game between Essendon and Collingwood, which, in its way, has become an important part of the ritual of the day. This doesn't strike me as inappropriate - much less so, certainly, than showbiz presentations or souvenir plaques, complete with pilfered sand. After all, those early Anzacs loved a game of cards or cricket or footy. Any diversion would do. Anything to help them forget what followed that first nerve-stretching silence.

Alan Attwood is a Melbourne writer.

Don't you just love...

...Cartoonists.

No one can be a leader to all Muslims

By Waleed Aly

April 10, 2006

TO his supporters, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali is a tireless, selfless, charismatic community worker and scholar who gives hope and guidance to disadvantaged youth, and who bravely risked his life to rescue Australian hostage Douglas Wood from the clutches of terrorists in Iraq. To his opponents, he's the shady imam who doesn't speak English and relied on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery, to construct wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world through sodomy. When such an enigma is given the grand sounding title of Mufti of Australia, controversy is inevitable.

So there was a monotonous familiarity to speculation surfacing last week of a move by the Muslim Council of NSW to depose him. The council insists this is not its intention and that it supports al-Hilali, but al-Hilali's backers were out in force anyway, placing abusive calls to the council and warning it would be a huge mistake to undermine him.

So, the fervour in Sydney is undeniable. But the view from Victoria of this undignified scenery is utterly bemusing. For all the considerable public attention he has attracted over the years, and for all the unshakable support we are told he has in Lakemba, al-Hilali remains of more interest to tabloid columnists than to Victorian Muslims. All the voices in the debate are from Sydney. The arguments in defence of al-Hilali focus on his following in Sydney. Elsewhere, the conversation evokes little more than a giant, collective yawn.

The reality is that al-Hilali's controversy has more to do with the murky community politics of south-western Sydney than anything else. That might be fair enough if he was the mufti of Bankstown, but this is being played out on a national stage. Sydney is not yet Australia. It is madness that the rest of the nation's Muslims are involuntarily caught up in this mess.

The problem is not so much al-Hilali as it is the office of the Mufti of Australia. Traditionally, the job of a mufti is to be a source of religious guidance to the community on contemporary religious questions. But the reality in Australia, as in all Western countries, is that religious authority is radically decentralised. People tend to find someone local with whom they feel comfortable, or borrow from a range of religious sources to navigate their own path through the spiritual challenges of contemporary life.

No wonder so many Muslims are regularly bewildered by descriptions of al-Hilali as the "spiritual leader of Australia's 300,000 Muslims" (as though there is one) or "the nation's most senior Islamic cleric" (as though Islam were a church with a formal hierarchy). In truth, no one in Australia, however brilliant, fits these descriptions. Nor is it possible in a Muslim community as dizzyingly diverse as Australia's. In that context, the idea of a national mufti is utterly meaningless, which is why no other Western country has one.

Perhaps unwittingly, al-Hilali's supporters have admitted as much. Take Keysar Trad, who asserted that even if al-Hilali was deposed, this could not "undermine the sheikh's standing in the community". Or al-Hilali himself, who quipped: "A position does not make a man; a man makes a position." The fact is that no one seeks al-Hilali's guidance because he is called the Mufti of Australia. His support base will remain without the title, and his knockers will continue to malign him with it. The only difference it makes is that it falsely projects that Muslims across Australia have a sole religious representative.

With the position itself being such a nonsense, it should be abolished.

Waleed Aly, a Melbourne lawyer, is an executive member of the Islamic Council of Victoria.

This article originally appeared in The Australian.

Damned Politicians

Excerpts of an article from The Age. The full article discusses in further detail the similarities between the three religions of the book.

God of all things

By Andrew Stephens
April 9, 2006

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, the German philosopher, proclaimed in 1882 that God was dead. If that bold claim were true, we must have missed the funeral, because God has been very busy: the century-plus since Nietzsche has been drenched with war and calamity, yet graced with extraordinary developments in our understanding of the universe. Not to mention epic scientific, technological and social change.

[…]

While the faithful are being taught their very similar versions of the "one" God, with a hint of the devil thrown in, it is the intrusion of politics — inter-religious and international — that keeps them from harnessing the spiritual power of their united heritage and ethics. It seems unsurprising, then, that Buddhism, the philosophy-based path that has no god but many deities, is one of the fastest growing faiths in the West; and Hinduism, with its pantheon of beautifully coloured gods, no prophet, no founder and no creed, remains the third-biggest religion in the world.

[…]

With such common ground on God and evil among the major monotheistic religions, surely the tolerant co-existence that exists to a large extent can be furthered, with the same open-minded and searching quality evident in the scientific community, who are also trying to understand our existence?

Christianity, Islam and Judaism — whatever their deep and complex distinctions — each propound one unique God who made the universe. Each believes that the faithful should do God's will and live by certain rules, that a holy way of life should include acts of loving kindness, prayer, study of their holy text, and certain rituals. And each proposes some idea of heaven or an afterlife.

Contemporary life is difficult. In less developed nations it is the basic struggle to survive that makes life hard. In developed countries it is the struggle to find and practise basic values under the welter of rampant consumerism, galloping technological change and the incessant pressure of material concerns: acquiring money, possessions, status, beauty. Yet we crave meaning and spiritual happiness. In the West, writes Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche, it is important not to get caught in a "shopping mentality" with religion, but to follow one tradition with all your heart yet remain open and respectful to all the other religions.

[…]

The dearth of spiritual values we can attribute to our political leaders — honesty, justice, compassion, acceptance — is glaring. Author Mark Juergensmeyer says that when governments start to embrace moral values associated with religion, then a level of mutual interfaith trust and respect is possible between religions.

Looking beyond dogma to the shared spiritual goals that are the touchstones of religion is something Melbourne theologian and ethicist Rufus Black endorses. He says that one of the main ways of encouraging mutual tolerance is to move from an age of conversion to an age of conversation.

"The shift that we have to make in our world is to end this attempt to convert each other and to begin much more profoundly with conversations of much deeper mutual understanding. For that to happen we need to address the underlying social, political and economic circumstances that make fundamentalism attractive both in theIslamic and non-Islamic world."

This also involves getting those in the three big religions with a more tolerant vision to speak much more strongly, and for the media to stop "grossly simplifying" the world of religion. "The more subtle, complex ways of talking about God don't get much of an airing."

People such as Constant Mews, director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at Monash University, are working towards interfaith understanding. His own path in Christianity has been influenced by his exposure to Hinduism and Buddhism and today he is running a seminar on how those two faiths inform each other on ideas about the human mind and emotions.

More broadly, he says the three big one-God faiths need to go beyond their own narrow focus, beyond "mere toleration", and start understanding what each has to say about the oneness of God and their common goals.

Indeed, Muhammad Kamal is keen to stress that, for much of history, the three big religions have co-operated harmoniously. "But when you think of religion as a political institution and reduce the kingdom of God into that political institution, then the differences arise.

Today, when some people — mainly in the media — focus on the differences rather than similarities, things become difficult. Arabs and Jews lived in Palestine or Israel for a long time peacefully. Politics created divisions and differences. The Middle East has been the centre of three major monotheistic religions and the followers of these religions lived for centuries together. In small neighbourhoods, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together, their children played together."

He pauses thoughtfully.

"People talk about the clash of civilisations but don't realise that we are deeply connected. Those who try to reduce God into a political institution reduce God from the absolute position into a human position. For me, this is the end of God."

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Why can't we all just get along?

Damned politicians.

Revealed: The Gospel of Judas

By Linda Morris
April 7, 2006 - 8:08AM

A 1700-year-old papyrus manuscript suggests history has misjudged the greatest villain of Christianity: Judas was under orders when he betrayed Jesus.

The only known surviving copy of the lost gospel of Judas portrays the treacherous disciple as a loyal deputy acting at the behest of his leader.

In fact, Judas sold Jesus out as an act of obedience not treachery, thereby fulfilling his theological destiny. Key passages from the third or fourth century Coptic manuscript were released by its publisher, the National Geographic Society, last night, a week before Easter, the holiest time of the Christian calendar.

The society, which is rumoured to have purchased publishing rights for more than $1 million, plans magazine articles, television specials and book deals amid concerns about the ethics of ancient acquisitions.

The society's panel of scholars has submitted the document to radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and spectral imaging and has declared it authentic.

The gospel of Judas is believed to be the work of gnostic Christians, a stream of Christian thinking declared heretical by early church fathers. It is a companion text to ancient scriptures unearthed in 1945, which have formed the basis of some assertions in Dan Brown's controversial bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

Australian biblical scholars said the document would be likely to provide a window on early Christianity, but did not threaten Christian teachings because while it was old, it did not date to the time of the Bible's Gospels.

"The text bears witness that to some people Judas was a misunderstood character," said Dr Malcolm Choat, a specialist in early Christianity at Macquarie University. "It fills in the picture but it doesn't make the picture."

But the Coptic Orthodox Church dismissed the document as "non-Christian babbling resulting from a group of people trying to create a false 'amalgam' between the Greek mythology and Far East religions with Christianity They were written by a group of people who were aliens to the main Christian stream of the early Christianity," the church's theological leader, Metropolitan Bishoy, said.

"These texts are neither reliable nor accurate Christian texts, as they are historically and logically alien to the main Christian thinking and philosophy of the early and present Christians."

The Judas gospel is a third or fourth century Coptic manuscript discovered in the desert near El Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s. It was sold to a dealer in illicit antiquities and languished in a safe deposit box in the US before falling into the hands of a Swiss foundation.

The Bible says Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans for a purse of 30 pieces of silver in the Garden of Gethsemane. He later hung himself.

According to limited extracts of the gospel of Judas offered to the Herald, Jesus explains Judas his role in the crucifixion: "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."

In other key passages released to the public, Jesus confides: "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal."

For his role Judas would be despised by the other disciples: "You will be cursed by the other generations and you will come to rule them." The gospel ends: "They [the arresting party] approached Judas and said to him. 'What are you doing? You are Jesus's disciple'. Judas answered them as they wished. And he received some money and handed over to him.

As well as the gospel of Judas, the newly discovered 66-page document also contained a text titled James, a letter of Peter to Philip, and a fragment of a fourth text scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.

Flawed media cover widens a great divide

By Michael Gawenda
April 3, 2006

THE great Israeli writer Amos Oz once wrote that while knowing history is probably a good thing, knowing too much is a form of tyranny. In the bitter conflict between Jews and Arabs, each side has known too much of its own history and nothing of the history of the other. This must mean that the national narrative of each side must be seriously flawed. Indeed, what it means in this conflict is that each side denies almost totally the historic narrative of the other.

This is not an original insight, which is not surprising given that the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians has been subjected to more analysis and scrutiny than perhaps any other conflict in the past century.

It is a conflict burdened by too many insights, too many opinions, too many facts. Around 400 extra journalists came to Israel to cover last week's elections, joining close to 600 Jerusalem-based reporters who regularly report on the Middle East for newspapers and television around the world. That's a lot of journalists in a country the size of a half a dozen Melbourne outer suburbs.

It would be fair to say that a significant proportion of us journalists who flew into Jerusalem in the past week or so did not come with the burden of too much history weighing heavily on our shoulders. This is not meant as a criticism. We journalists are not historians but rather imperfect and often bewildered people trying to do the impossible: make sense of a conflict that is suffused with great passion and great hatred. And bitterly disputed competing historic narratives.

The best journalists acknowledge their limitations and, where possible, make explicit their prejudices. This means making as clear as possible the paradigm through which they are reporting the conflict. The best journalists resist the enormous pressure on them in a world of media fragmentation and fierce competition to be bold and to "know what's happening". The best journalists admit to doubt and at times, total bewilderment. They tread warily.

It is hard to tread warily in a world of 24-hour cable news services. One day in Ramallah, an American cable network crew did a two-minute report from the Palestinian Legislative Council building to which their "fixer" had brought them and where he had lined up a couple of Hamas spokesmen.

Not all journalists who report from the West Bank or Gaza use fixers, mostly Arab Israelis who know their way around, have contacts in the various Palestinian factions and can line up people for interviews. But most visiting journalists, especially TV reporters — and a fair number of Jerusalem-based correspondents — use fixers.

It is impossible to say just how much this affects the reporting of the Palestinians, but that it does have an effect is beyond doubt. Given the language barriers and the chaos and tension of occupation, the feuding militias and the presence of armed gangs, it is inevitable that the fixer will, to a greater or less extent, be our eyes and ears.

Having met the spokesmen, the cameras rolled and the journalist asked a question: what would be your preferred outcome in the Israeli elections? This is not a terrible question, and it is certainly nowhere near as silly, for instance, as asking a Palestinian who has been stuck at a military checkpoint for hours because of a security alert, how he or she feels.

But it is a question that will inevitably elicit a predictable response and that will allow the journalist to state on camera, with some authority, that the new Hamas Government has no interest in the election outcome, a bold statement, the boldness of which is simply not justified.

Amos Oz, who helped found the Peace Now movement in 1977, also once said that the tragedy of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is that it involves two peoples with equally valid national aspirations, which is another way of saying that each of their historical narratives have moral and ethical force.

When it comes to reporting this conflict, not only do a lot of journalists know little about these narratives, but for obvious and non-malign reasons, they quickly conclude that the Palestinian story, whatever the history, is one that has led them to great suffering and dispossession, which means the Israeli story must be about conquest and occupation of stolen land.

The paradigm is one of victims and victimisers, helpless and hopeless Palestinians on the one hand and brutal occupiers and oppressors on the other. One narrative is true and tragic and one narrative is false, an example of the colonialist's lies and propaganda.

One result of seeing the conflict through this paradigm is that by reducing Palestinians to victims, their leaders are reduced to victims as well and are excused from taking any responsibility for their political failings, for the corruption that they encouraged and from which they personally benefited, from taking responsibility for the opportunities they passed up to improve the lives of their long-suffering people and perhaps even give the Palestinians the state that is so clearly their right.

Why is it that for all the hundreds of journalists covering the conflict, there was no great attempt to expose the massive corruption of Fatah under Yasser Arafat, which most journalists knew about and which led to the squandering of billions of aid dollars that could have been spent, should have been spent, to give the Palestinians an economic future?

The answer seems obvious.

United States correspondent Michael Gawenda is in Israel to report on the election.