Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 42

38 Popular Culture Review we going to sink to those sorts of levels of us and them where everybody is a potential something or other, everybody is a dormant problem until they’re inflamed?”10 Many other leading Australians, both Muslims and non-Muslims, publicly denounced Niles. While suspicion of Australian Muslims has increased post-September 11, 2001, Australian Muslims further remonstrated via “the Islamic Council of Victoria submission to the Review of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)” (Cleland 2002, 2), in relation to new anti-terrorist laws which gave it increased powers. Leading Australian Muslim community leaders such as Alex Kouttub, secretary of Melbourne’s Australian Arabic Council, indicated that the raids had serious implications for mitigating civil liberties in Australia (Stephen, Green Left Weekly, November 6, 2002). ASIO had been accused by various Australian civil rights activists and legal experts of profiling Muslims during their raids on the households of Indonesian Muslims in October 2002. The Australian government quickly responded by defending the raids, and that ASIO had not deliberately targeted Muslims.11 Peter Me Mahon in Online Opinion, dated January 7, 2003, accuses the Australian prime minister, John Howard, of instigating a cynical “anti-terror” campaign in order to ensure his leadership position. For Me Mahon the campaign of fear aptly displayed by the Howard government after September 11 and the Bali bombings is “not in proportion to the real threat of terrorism, but it serves the direct interests of the mass media and the Howard government and they will try to perpetuate it.” In Mary Douglas’s words, such public manoeuvres are rooted in colonialists’ belief of the Other as “matter out of place” (1969). The present cultural uncertainty has evoked the question “How are we to protect ourselves from terrorists?” In attempting to answer this it must be emphasised that each culture produces its own forms of individual and collective strategies for offsetting ambiguity, as Jackson (1998) reminds us. One such strategy has been to focus on national borders. The significance of Australia’s fixation with borders and boundaries is elaborated in Ghassan Hage’s essay on ants (1998, 37-38). Ants per se, Hage tells us, are not undesirable when in their “correct” place, that is, outdoors. Only when ants invade our households are they viewed as pests fit for extermination. Carrol replaces ants with termites to suggest that even the prolific science of the pest exterminators is impotent due to termites’ resistance (2002, 94). In this domain, the analogy of nation states to bounded bodies ensures a reliance on xenophobic and exclusivist practices whenever national borders are threatened or are believed to be vulnerable by unwanted outsiders.12 On this theme Hirschfeld and Cams note: Uncertainty dominates the current environment, in sharp contrast to the clearer challenges of yesterday. We do not know whom we may fight years from now, and there are few