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November 02, 2006
The politics of fear is mentioned, and briefly explored, here. The politics involves an appeal to Australian values that are counterposed to Islamophobia and to disrespect, intolerance and exclusion of islam and Muslim-Australians.
Sharpe
Postmodernism and its critique of Eurocentrrism often gets rapped over the knuckles by conservatives for talking about the other, but its value can be seen in this cartoon. In his Orientalism (1978), which was about the power relations between the coloniser and the colonised, Edward Said argued that the Occident both fears and fantasises about possessing the exotic East.
In the post 9/11 war on terror, and based on this new logic, the West now fantasises that the Middle East is evil.---the enemy who is jealous of our values. What are these? They are universal values ---tolerance, inclusion, freedom, fraternity (mateship) ---that are given an Australian colouring (mateship for fraternity). Equality is rarely mentioned.
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