Rudman's City: Our Muslim neighbours don't deserve suspicion

BY BRIAN RUDMAN

The world, we are told, will never be the same after the terrorist attacks in the United States. But one thing that hasn't changed is the need for a bogeyman - or bogeypeople - to blame.

Once it was the yellow peril, then the Germans - so nasty were they, that the British royals and popular German sausage both had to Anglicise their names.

For nearly half a century it was the turn of the commies. Now with them gone, the world of Islam seems to be filling the vacuum, a role it has filled in European minds from time to time since the ancient Crusades.

Already there has been a flood of letters to this paper venting religious and racial prejudice against "Muslim types" and Arabs and Palestinians - as though the hundreds of millions of people who fit into one or other of those categories are somehow to blame or, at best, not to be trusted.

In my naive liberal way I thought that just maybe a little of the outpouring of grief and compassion directed towards the American victims and their families from us Aucklanders might spill over towards the Afghan refugees due to arrive soon at the Mangere refugee centre.

Just maybe people would see the devastation that has wallpapered television screens for the past three days and see in the ruins a glimpse of what the whole of Afghanistan has been reduced to over past decades.

For the people of that country, the terror has not been a one-off event like in New York. They've been ducking mortars and missiles for 23 years.

No wonder they have finally fled their homeland. No wonder they've struggled across continents and oceans looking for a haven away from the mad bombers. They are the victims, like the occupants of the World Trade Center in New York.

Yet to my shame I read that here in Auckland Afghan community leaders feel the need to circulate a message advising their people to keep a low profile, especially if they are bearded or wear a turban, to avoid possible confrontation. They don't want to give Aucklanders the chance to abuse them.

I hope that the ignorant and bigoted letter-writers are all mouth and nothing else and our new citizens' fears are groundless.

But you can't blame them for being cautious after Jenny Shipley's outburst.

For a former Prime Minister to slander a leading Afghan refugee, Dr Najibullah Lafraie, as she did, gave a dangerous seal of approval to the nastiness now flowing from the letter-writers' pens.

Calling him the former leader of the most powerful guerrilla faction in Afghanistan, Mrs Shipley implied there might be terrorists hidden among the 150 refugees to be processed at Mangere, and called for more stringent vetting procedures for future asylum-seekers.

Mrs Shipley's attack on Dr Lafraie was subsequently rubbished by the victim and an outside expert, but by then the damage had been done. The stereotype of refugee as terrorist had been reinforced again, this time by one of the most important political figures in the land.

If there is a stereotypical Afghan, I like to think he's the one I encountered as a backpacker in 1970, riding on the back of lorries and rattling about in ancient buses across the grand mountainous landscapes of that historic land.

My stereotype is of drinking sweet tea with the friendly lorry driver, of conversations with well-read fellow diners in restaurants. They weren't the Muslim and I wasn't the infidel. Religion didn't come up. We were just fellow human beings enjoying each other's company.

That is surely how we should be regarding the refugees marooned on the Australian troopship Manoora, who are eventually destined to be processed at Mangere.

From all accounts they've been through hell to get here. They've left a country that has been bombed back to the Stone Age, a country from which more than three million have fled, and where more than a million have been killed.

The 150 who make it here don't need or deserve our abuse and suspicion. They need the same sort of compassion and sympathy we find so easy to direct towards the victims in New York.