The following article was written by Peter Wertheim AM in The Aus­trali­an, July 18, 2016.

Although the Senate votes are still being counted, much of the com­ment­ary in the wake of the federal election focused on the recru­des­cence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, which seems likely to win three or perhaps four Senate seats. Alarm bells rang out that this poses a renewed threat to the fabric of Australia’s peaceful, pluralist society.

Pauline Hanson has often denied that her views and her party’s policies have anything to do with racism or bigotry, but it is difficult to see how else one can char­ac­ter­ise her numerous public pro­nounce­ments attrib­ut­ing negative behaviour and traits to groups of people on account of their ethnic or religious back­ground, most recently “Asians” and “Muslims”.

As obnoxious and unfair as many people find such views, Pauline Hanson is far from Australia’s worst offender on this score. If her critics wish to be credible, they will need to be equally voci­fer­ous in con­demning racist and bigoted views emanating from quarters other than the radical right of politics.
Two years ago Hizb ut-Tahrir’s Sheikh Ismail al-Wahwah spewed forth a hate-filled public rant accusing “the Jews” of cor­rupt­ing the world, describ­ing them as “the most evil creature of Allah” and threat­en­ing that “the ember of jihad against the Jews will continue to burn. Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews”.

While Pauline Hanson can be accused of promoting racial hatred and bigotry, which impliedly licenses violence against its targets, she has not expressly promoted or condoned violence against any group, as al-Wahwah has done. In fact, she has condemned it. Nor does she claim a divine mandate for her views.
Far too many of Hanson’s detract­ors seem to lose their voice and their nerve when con­fron­ted with public expres­sions of racism and bigotry coming from within Muslim com­munit­ies. Social media sites for Muslim Village, Mission Islam and Islamo­pho­bia Register Australia have commonly included content or unmod­er­ated posted comments that are just as viciously racist, and sup­port­ive of racially motivated violence, as al-Wahwah’s.

The response from much of the community has been silence and indif­fer­ence, in stark contrast to the reaction to Pauline Hanson. It is important for political and community leaders to take a prin­cipled public stand against the promotion of hatred, and the express or implied licensing of violence, against any group based on race, religion or sexual ori­ent­a­tion. It is equally important that the stance is con­sist­ent, and that racism is called out from whichever part of society or the political spectrum it emerges.

As for One Nation, it is also important that state­ments of principle about the inad­miss­ib­il­ity of racism are accom­pan­ied by detailed critiques of its policies. Deep down, most Aus­trali­ans under­stand that shutting off migration, or choosing migrants on the basis of their ethnic or religious back­ground rather than their skills and capa­cit­ies, would produce a stag­nat­ing economy, fewer jobs, lower living standards, wider dis­par­it­ies in wealth, dimin­ished health­care and education, regional isolation and increased economic insec­ur­ity.

Far from restoring Australia to the imaginary golden age of the 1950s, One Nation’s policies would recreate the nightmare of the 1930s. Version two of Pauline Hanson is therefore as devoid of workable answers to Australia’s economic chal­lenges as was Version one. It should not take long for her, once again, to be found out on economic policy.

What is new is the fact that the negative con­cep­tion of groups on the basis of ethnicity and religion that underpins much of the Hanson worldview is no longer driven solely by fear and anger generated by economic insec­ur­ity. There is now the added dimension of fear and anger generated by physical insec­ur­ity and the threat of terrorism.

It would be foolish to deny the depth and breadth of ill-feeling towards Islam and, to a lesser extent Muslims, which currently exists in Australia as a con­sequence of acts of terrorism that have been committed in many parts of the world by self-iden­ti­fied Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course it is grot­esquely unfair to stig­mat­ise Muslims generally for these crimes or to suggest that such crimes epitomise Islam as a belief system.

Yet it is also true that Islamist terrorism draws on authentic, deeply rooted Islamic tra­di­tions of pros­elyt­isa­tion and religious super­ses­sion­ism — the ful­fil­ment of its self-des­ig­nated mission of bringing the whole world under its dis­pens­a­tion by means that do not neces­sar­ily exclude the use of violence, fear or deception. The public’s instincts about this phe­nomen­on are far more astute than the ludicrous intel­lec­tu­al con­tor­tions of those who insist that the actions of Islamists have nothing at all to do with Islam.
Oddly, One Nation does not have a coherent strategy to counter the threat posed by terrorism and extremist ideo­lo­gies, only a hodge-podge of largely symbolic measures, which will likely rad­ic­al­ise dis­af­fected young people in even greater numbers.

The patent inad­equacy of One Nation’s policies is no reason to dismiss the concerns that have given rise to those policies, and propelled Pauline Hanson back into the federal par­lia­ment. The fears of her sup­port­ers about their jobs and their chances of buying a home and for their overall future economic wellbeing are not at all irra­tion­al. Neither are their fears of Islamist terrorism.

These are not phobias. The threats to people’s economic and physical security are real. The fears are well-founded, even if One Nation’s policy answers are not. It will be the respons­ib­il­ity of the new gov­ern­ment and members of par­lia­ment to come up with answers that are more credible.

Peter Wertheim is the Executive Director of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry