Justice delayed is justice denied...

Naturally, John Howard begs to differ.

I don't want Hicks here: PM

The Age
June 30, 2006 - 1:06PM

The Australian government has rejected calls for David Hicks to be returned home after America' highest court found military commissions set to try the Australian terror suspect are unlawful.

Prime Minister John Howard urged US authorities to find another forum to try Hicks, saying he had no sympathy for the Adelaide-born man who is facing trial accused of training as a terrorist with al-Qaeda.

Hicks' father, lawyers and politicians demanded Hicks be brought home after the US Supreme Court ruling overnight which found US military commissions to try Guantanamo Bay detainees are unlawful.

The Supreme Court justices voted five-three that the structure and procedures of the military commissions violated military justice codes and the Geneva Convention.

But Mr Howard said Hicks, who has been detained by the US at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for four-and-a-half years, should still be tried in the US.

Mr Howard said he was not embarrassed by the court ruling but admitted his government was wrongly advised that the military commissions were lawful.

[...]

Australian Democrats foreign affairs spokeswoman Natasha Stott Despoja said the Howard government should press for Hicks' immediate repatriation.

"The process has been judged illegal, it is an abrogation of international humanitarian law," Senator Stott Despoja said.

The Law Council of Australia's independent observer of the Hicks case, Lex Lasry QC, said there was a "very strong argument" that under a properly constituted court martial, or civilian court, there was no case for Hicks to answer.

Ignorance breeds distrust

By Waleed Aly
June 30, 2006

A study has found Westerners and Muslims view each other in much the same way, writes Waleed Aly.

Relations between Muslims and Westerners are at present in a state of crisis. I can say this, now, without significant fear of contradiction. With all their disagreements, even contemporary Muslims and Westerners seem to agree on that much. Except, for some unexplained reason, in Pakistan.

At least, that is the portrait painted by a Pew Global Attitudes Survey, released late last week, on how Westerners and Muslims view each other.

It's the first significant survey of its kind, spanning over 14,000 people in 13 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and America. And it makes for absorbing, compulsory reading for anyone interested in knowing to what extent the clash of civilisations is all in our heads.

To that end, the Pew survey unearthed some profoundly significant points of connection. Muslims overwhelmingly believe democracy can work well in the Muslim world. And perhaps most significantly in the contemporary political context, majorities in almost all countries are substantially concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism. In any struggle against such militancy, it seems most of the world, Muslims included, are on the same side. That speaks more to the possibility of an alliance of civilisations.

Certainly, there are enough differences in perspective to say the intercivilisational gulf will take some bridging. Each side is more inclined to blame the other for the world's woes than itself. Smaller percentages across the board hold both responsible. Yet, for all the glaring opposition of these views, they come ultimately from the same resistance to engaging in honest introspection (though this is less marked in the Western societies surveyed than their Muslim counterparts).

Perhaps as a result, Westerners and Muslims do not hold each other in especially high regard at present.

Western respondents tended to see Muslims as fanatical, violent, intolerant, and disrespectful towards women. This, frankly, is hardly a shock. What might surprise Western readers is that Muslim populations tend to think of them in precisely the same way - though they add that Westerners are selfish, immoral and greedy for good measure.

We should pause for reflection here. If Westerners immediately, and correctly, recognise that these Muslim perceptions of them are stereotyped nonsense, they may also be inclined to reconsider the accuracy of their own stereotyped view of Muslims. True, Westerners can point to cliches in support of their caricatures (terrorism, honour killings), but so can Muslims (military invasion, pornography). Each has some factual basis, but the result is a false, essentialised typecast of countless astonishingly diverse, complex societies.

There might be mutual hostility here, but there's a compelling symmetry, too. Indeed, paradoxically, these results may have highlighted some common ground from which an intercivilisational relationship can progress. Each may view the other as violent, intolerant and disrespecting of women, but at least everyone agrees these traits are worthy of condemnation. This implies that they may be the universal, or at least common, values on which further dialogue could be built.

But just as compellingly, the Pew survey demonstrates the importance of familiarity in such a process.

The pioneering contribution of this research is that, for the first time, significant Muslim minorities in several European countries were surveyed specifically as a separate group. Unlike their co-religionists abroad who have little or no contact with Western society, European Muslims' views of Westerners were generally positive: largely describing them as tolerant, generous, and respectful towards women. They reject, by large majorities, the suggestion that Westerners are violent. They are also more likely to accept that Muslims are at least partly to blame for Muslim-Western hostilities than societies in Muslim homelands.

European Muslims occupy a precious middle ground in what is otherwise generally polarised terrain. Undoubtedly this is due to their inevitably more nuanced understanding of both Muslims and the West, which neatly demonstrates that if a gulf exists between the Muslim and Western worlds, it will be people whose knowledge and experience spans both that are capable of bridging it.

Australia is no exception to this rule. A study of Australian attitudes to Muslims published earlier this year by Kevin Dunn at the University of New South Wales found that younger people, who had more contact with Muslims than did older Australians, were less likely to view Islam as a threat. Familiarity, it seems, does not always breed contempt. It might be our best hope.

The clash of civilisations, therefore, feeds off foreignness - literally xenophobia - not reality. To a very real extent, it is in our heads. Certainly, it is in our hands.

Waleed Aly is a secondee solicitor at the Human Rights Law Resource Centre.

THIS is Scary...

So violence is all religion's fault?
By Barney Zwartz
June 17, 2006

Faith is no more likely to provoke bloodshed than secular ideologies, which come with their own share of absolutism, divisiveness and irrationality.

IN THE 1940s, Jehovah's Witnesses in the US were beaten, tarred, castrated and jailed because they believed that followers of Jesus should not salute a flag. Historian Martin Marty cites this 50 years later. To him it is evidence that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent.

He writes that it "can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena." For Marty, religion refers not to the ritual pledging of allegiance to a flag, but only to the Jehovah's Witnesses' refusal to do so.

There is clearly something wrong here. Surely the obvious conclusion is that fanatical nationalism can cause violence. Why does Marty blame religion? Marty is seduced by, and helping to cement, a myth so deeply rooted in Western society that it may be impossible to dig out, and that is the myth that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence.

Combating this conventional wisdom was the theme of an important international lecture by American theologian William Cavanaugh at Melbourne University this month, and I largely follow his argument.

This myth plays a valuable role for secularists. It helps them marginalise Christians and demonise Muslims, and creates a blind spot about violence by the West. It confirms an "us" (the rational, peace-making, secular West) against a "them" (violent fanatics in the Muslim world). To quote Cavanaugh: "Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peace-making and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality."

Most religious believers have bought this myth, too. They try to fight it by two arguments. First, they say that violence in the name of religion is really usually about politics or economics. Second, they claim that people who perpetrate violence, by definition — the Crusaders, for example — are not really religious. Australian Muslims constantly say this of terrorists: "These people aren't really Muslims, because Islam is a religion of peace." I understand their predicament, but the argument doesn't work.

First, it's impossible to separate religious motives from the rest to make religion innocent. So the first argument by defenders of religion shares the same flaw as the myth itself. How can you separate religion from politics in Islam when Muslims themselves make no such separation?

Second, it may be true that the Crusaders misappropriated Christianity, but they claimed it as their motive. Christianity can't be entirely excused. That's because it's not just a set of doctrines, it's a lived historical experience distinguished by the observable actions of Christians. So religion can and does contribute to violence. Where the myth is wrong is in saying religion is more violent than secular ideologies.

The argument has two prongs: to show how the myth is incoherent, and to show how it became so widely believed.

It's incoherent because the division between the religious and secular is artificial. It's a modern, Western invention to separate religion from culture, politics and economics. Scholars agree that it's impossible to define religion. Must it include belief in God or gods? If not, you can include Buddhism and Confucianism, but a whole lot of "secular" beliefs sneak in too, such as nationalism, which has been called the most powerful religion in the US.

The sociologists, political scientists, historians, theologians and others who have written since 9/11 attacking religion as violent just pretend this difficulty does not exist. Then they claim religion is prone to violence because it is absolutist, divisive, and/or irrational. They ignore overwhelming evidence that secular ideologies and institutions can be just as absolutist, divisive or irrational.

Their problem is that when they try to separate secular from religious violence, they refute their own distinctions. Marty, for example, lists five "features" of a religion, and shows how politics shares all five: both focus our ultimate concern, both build community, both appeal to myth and symbol (for example, national flags, war memorials), both use rites and ceremonies and both demand certain behaviours. In showing how closely intertwined the two are, Marty ends up demolishing any theoretical basis for separating them.

Mark Juergensmeyer, in his influential Terror in the Mind of God, says religious violence is particularly relentless because believers elevate it to a "cosmic war". But he admits that so do those involved in ideological and ethnic violence and he admits secular nationalism is a religion. How many Christians would be willing to kill for their faith? How many would be willing to kill for their country? Surveys in America show that the nation-state attracts far more absolutist fervour than Christianity. Many Christians there endorse slaughter on behalf of the nation as necessary, even laudable.

If this myth about religious violence is incoherent, why is it so widely believed? Because it's so useful. In domestic politics, it helps silence religious believers, who are told their faith is a private matter and must be kept out of politics. In foreign politics, the myth helps reinforce and justify Western attitudes, especially towards Muslims.

It helps frame the clash-of-civilisations world view, which says Muslims hate the West partly because they haven't been able to separate religion and politics. If you accept this, it helps the "us and them" attitude and lets the West sanitise its own actions. If Americans can write off Muslim resentment as irrational, they don't have to scrutinise their dealings with Muslims. Worse, it helps the clash of civilisations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine if President George Bush had called 9/11 a crime rather than a war, if the West hunted Osama bin Laden merely as a murderer. It would have given a much better sense of perspective and not let militants persuade other Muslims that this is a war against Islam.

But many in the West believe in such a war. Author Sam Harris ( The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason) actually suggests that if an Islamist regime gets nuclear weapons the West may need to launch a nuclear first strike. In other words, if we have to slaughter millions by a first strike, it will be the fault of the Muslims and their crazy religious beliefs. Harris says Muslims would misinterpret this "self-defence" as a genocidal crusade and plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust. To avoid this, he suggests the West will have to impose "benign dictatorships" on Muslim countries. And his book has been endorsed by such academic luminaries as Alan Dershowitz, Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer.

One doesn't have to be naive about either Islam or Christianity to see the danger of this secular myth. Harris may be an extreme example, but the myth of religious violence is still helping to shape policy in Western governments.

Barney Zwartz is religion editor of The Age.

This is scary...

'The people' no longer means all Australians

By Waleed Aly
June 13, 2006

The quality of a democracy can be gauged by the extent to which its electoral process is inclusive of maligned sectors of society. Democracy may be inherently majoritarian in nature, but if its core concept is that government derives legitimacy from the consent of its people, that legitimacy depends on every constituent, however peripheral or unsavoury, having the opportunity to speak through the ballot box. A democracy with iniquitous electoral laws is unworthy of the name.

That is why the bill amending our electoral laws warrants serious scrutiny. It does substantial philosophical damage to our conceptions of democracy, particularly in its proposal that all prisoners be stripped of the right to vote.

For Senator Eric Abetz, who originally championed the bill, the proposition is deliciously simple: "If you're not fit to walk the streets as deemed by the judicial system in this country, then chances are you're not a fit and proper person to cast a vote in relation to the future of your country." Democratic pearls should not be cast before civil society's swine, apparently. Prisoners don't deserve democracy.

There's a paradigm shift here. Suddenly, to vote is not a right of the people from which government derives its legitimacy; it is a privilege to be conferred at Canberra's discretion. That is the very opposite of democracy. When you take the philosophical step of tying voting rights to worthiness, it implies a government prerogative to make this judgement. The logical extension of this is to restrict the power to appoint the government to a government-authorised elite.

This fact is not avoided by the argument, put forward in recent parliamentary debates by Liberal backbencher Michael Johnson, that "people who commit serious offences against society, against the community, should forfeit their right to vote". Their transgressions do not render such people devoid of all rights. If we care about human rights - and the right to vote is one - then any derogation must be demonstrably necessary. Thus the state may deprive criminals of their liberty, but it cannot torture them. Similarly, the state may deprive us of a right to vote, but, according to the UN High Commissioner, only to the extent "necessary in a democratic society" for a public purpose.

Nothing about this amendment is necessary. Influential courts across three continents have said as much when considering similar legislation.

It will not, as some have suggested, deter the commission of crime, as though the prospect of imprisonment is less threatening. Nor is it necessary to prevent prisoners from becoming a lobby group as the Festival of Light argued before a Senate committee.

There is no evidence to support any of these rationalisations, which probably explains why, apart from those of the Festival of Light and the Liberal Party itself, every submission to the Senate vehemently opposed the bill. One of the few things it
will achieve is to violate Australia's human rights obligations.

But then, Abetz emphatically doesn't care. "The reliance on international treaties is usually the last resort of those that can't argue their case domestically," he retorts. Apparently we live in a nation where the idea of democracy is a rhetorical hook, yet lamentably, human rights are not.

In that case, Abetz might consider how comfortably this proposal sits with our own constitutional requirement that the government is elected by "the people". True, once upon a time "the people" did not include women, or Aborigines, but constitutional lawyers have long accepted that the concept would evolve with community standards. Are we prepared to concede those standards hold that prisoners are not people? How democratic are we?

In the arena of political argument, democracy is a rhetorical colossus. It permits those who have it a certain smugness at their comparative political enlightenment in the world. It confers moral authority in international affairs. Apparently, it even justifies ill-conceived military invasions. But that only increases the imperative for us to be vigilant about its quality. In that regard, this bill should sound the alarm. It seems democracy is more a good for export, than for domestic consumption.

Waleed Aly is a secondee solicitor at the Human Rights Law Resource Centre.

First they came for the Israelis . . .

So Britain's largest union of university lecturers has courageously bitten the bullet. Defying any spurious claims of latter-day "McCarthyism" or politically correct twaddle about "academic freedom", the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education has voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli academics and higher education institutions that do not publicly dissociate themselves from Israel's "apartheid policies" (The Age, 31/5).

About time, too, some might say. Although there are as many differences as there are similarities between the old white South African version of apartheid and the present Israeli version, when it comes to academic moral rectitude, near enough is close enough. But why stop with Israel?

Just this week, The Age's United States correspondent, Michael Gawenda, wrote about the wall the US is planning to build along the 1341-kilometre border with Mexico to stop the estimated 500,000 or more people coming into the US each year (Opinion, 29/5). At least Israel could argue some security rationale for its "apartheid wall", which has so offended the British academics: it has, after all, greatly reduced the number of suicide bombings in Israeli cities - but when last did a Mexican suicide bomber blow up a party of US schoolkids in a Texan steakhouse?

[...]

True, we don't have an "apartheid wall" in Australia - at least, not a full-blooded razor-wire-and-concrete job like the Israelis'. But we do have a "virtual" wall that is at least as effective: the so-called "exclusion zone" that has just been extended to make the whole of Australia and its outlying islands refugee-free.

And just in case any "illegal entrants" manage to breach those defences and pose a "terror threat" to our "relaxed and comfortable" Aussie way of life, we have a set of draconian "anti-terror" laws that place unprecedented restrictions on individual freedoms.

Some of these not only ape those in force in apartheid South Africa (detention without trial, for example), but - on the near-enough-is-close-enough principle that highlights superficial similarities while ignoring fundamental differences - would not be out of place on the statute books of the mercifully defunct totalitarian dictatorships of 20th-century Europe.

And, perhaps more to the point in terms of the present anti-Israel boycott, how are these morally sensitive British academics going to react to the putrid sore at the heart of Australia that Wadeye has opened up for all the world to see?

What we have seen at Wadeye in recent weeks paints a picture of race-based neglect, apathy and cynicism that has left Australia's indigenous population, after 200 years of white "occupation", as economically and socially disadvantaged and as devastated as South Africa's blacks were at the height of apartheid.

If Wadeye does not represent the fruits of 200 years of effective "apartheid" in Australia, then what does it represent?

So, Ye Guardians at the Gates of British Academe, can Australian academics now expect an ultimatum to "publicly dissociate" themselves from the "fascist, apartheid policies" of the Australian Government - or find themselves sent to Coventry with their fellow Israeli recalcitrants?

Or is that a club restricted to citizens of the Jewish state alone?

David Bernstein is an Age writer.