From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli

The persecution and demonisation of Islam, and its followers, dates back to the First Holy Crusade in 1095 AD. It is high-time it stopped; certainly, there is no room for its ugly-face in Australia!

RELIGIOUS discrimination, and its proliferation, is hateful and divisive. In the 1950s and 60s Australian government employment advertisements carried the message: ‘Catholics and Jews need not apply’. Protestant and Catholic hatred of one for the other was normal. Neighbours did not talk with each other for years – if ever. In determination, the Catholic teaching sisters threatened to close their doors unless their students were given the same benefits (expressly, free writing books and materials) as those children attending state schools. Staring down the barrel of an educational crisis, the Menzies-led Liberal government begrudgingly capitulated. Religious discrimination had been going-on for years. In the early days of colonial settlement it was legal to shoot a Catholic priest if he were seen travelling on public transport.

The Holy Land Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Pope Urban 11 to reclaim Nicaea and Antioch, and to seize and free Jerusalem from Muslim control. Between 1095−1270 AD there were eight official, and numerous unofficial, Crusades. None were as effective as the first.

Recording the Muslim slaughter following the fall of Jerusalem (15 July 1099), in the Temple Mount area, Fulcher of Chartres (1059-1127) wrote, “In this temple 10,000 were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.”

The massacre was taught in Catholic schools as the ‘Sacking of the Saracens’; in the same way Catholics prayed for the ‘perfidious Jews’. Blatant religious disinformation, which many believed, was on both sides.

In Australia, the demonisation of Muslims is of pandemic proportion. (FYI: Islamism is not a form of the Muslim faith; nor is it an expression of Muslim piety; it is, rather, a political ideology, striving to derive legitimacy from Islam.) Exactly like Judaism and Christianity, Islam is an Abrahamic religion deriving from the patriarch, Abraham, a major biblical figure from the Old Testament.

RMIT University Professor, Anna Hickey-Moody’s social research report is chilling. She interviewed parents, particularly Muslim women, and heard – first-hand – the difficulties of religious living in Australia, “One of the mums was telling a story about someone driving past and rolling down the window, and pretending to shoot her with their fingers like a gun.”

“Another woman and her sister were in town in Adelaide and they saw an older woman that was struggling with her walking frame and they went to try and help her because they realised she wasn’t going to make it across the lights.

“When they got to the walking frame to try and help her, she looked at them with this visceral hate and said, ‘Get your hands of me you bitches, I’m just coming for you. I’m coming to tell you to get back where you came from’. Her sister burst into tears because she was so shocked. The older woman burst into laughter.”

“One Muslim woman in the Adelaide recalled the moment another women came right up to her face, and yelled, ‘Get out of here’.”

Chinese authorities deem organised religion a threat to party loyalty; however, Muslim minorities are subjected to a particularly draconian scrutiny. Fasting, and other religious practices, are viewed as signs of extremism, and thwarted.

Our silence could be interpreted as acquiescence. On that sobering note, I leave you to ponder the 1000-years of Islam’s demonisation.

PS: If you’re not Indigenous, you’re immigrant related!

Roland can be heard every Monday morning – 10.30 – on radio 3BA and contacted via [email protected].