Attached is a breakthrough piece by academics Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason and well worth reading all the way through, reposting and discussing. These scholars have proven very systematically that there was not only a domestic but an international set of parallel steps that diverse governments took not only to curtail civil liberties in certain key ways but to demonize Muslims as a “fifth column.” What is stunning to me in reading it (and the language is admirably clear, not too academic) is how consistent these steps were from country to country. To which one must put the standard question: “cui bono?” or: who benefits? Now that the Pentagon’s employees are 65% contractors — who rely for their profits on a hyped “fifth column” set of fears and an ever-escalating “war on terror” — I think the answer is fairly clear. What I do not understand is the mechanism by which one government imitates the actions of another in an entirely different society — that is, why Australia should, given its relative freedom from lobbying pressures, be driven to take the same steps that the US congress would, with its financial dependency on those very industries that depend on hyping this threat… But please read, consider and repost…

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Vol 43, No 1, March 2007, Journal of Sociology, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. (© 2007 The Australian Sociological Association)

Download “The resistible rise of Islamophobia Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and  Australia before 11 September 2001″ by Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason