Hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims rising in Australia
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CANBERRA: Anti-Islamic “diatribes” only risks radicalizing young Muslims, a visiting US expert has warned as a major report found Muslims in Sydney experience discrimination at a rate three times greater than other Australians. A survey of about 600 Muslims in Sydney by Western Sydney and Charles Sturt Universities, and the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy, found that almost two thirds said they had been subjected to racism, with one in 10 reporting it happened “often or very often”. The report, released at a conference on Islam in Sydney on Monday, also found 97 per cent believed it was a good thing for society to be made up of people from different cultures, above the average of all Australians of 87 per cent. Professor John Esposito, the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in the US, and the keynote speaker at the conference, said discrimination faced by young Muslims risked driving them towards groups such as Islamic State. “One of the things that does wind up alienating some youth is the extent to which anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic diatribe, hate crimes, attacks on mosques make people feel alienated and marginalised from their societies,” he told the conference. “I think we do need to mobilise in terms of what happened in Paris and so on, but I think if we overplay that card we’re not looking at the root causes. Source: The Australian
