| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| ANGELA was listening to the radio one morning when she heard a talkback host discussing the Howard Government’s 2002 “Be Alert Not Alarmed” fridge magnet campaign. So the bayside woman rang the station and asked the host to explain. “I thought, hang on. How alert and how aware are we meant to be? You can tell us to do all this stuff but what are we meant to look for?” she says. When Angela told the radio host she had seen a Muslim woman in a wheelchair in a shopping centre that was rarely frequented by Muslims and wondered if she might have a concealed bomb, he “went off his nut” at her. “He says, ‘excuse me are you saying people in wheelchairs should not go shopping because you’re going to think they’re Muslim and they’re going to blow you up?’ “ Callers rang in to berate her. “But that’s not what I was getting at,” says Angela. “I was trying to ask him how alert we’re meant to be.” The station contacted the then president of the Victorian Islamic Council, Yasser Soliman, for comment. They sent him a tape so he could hear the exchange and he agreed to go on air the following day. “I didn’t think she was a redneck,” he says. “I thought she was concerned. There was obviously confusion in the community and she was just trying to clarify things.” A call came later to Mr Soliman’s office in West Melbourne. Angela, who is in her late 30s and of Irish Catholic background, was on the line. She was ringing to thank him “for backing up how I felt”. Mr Soliman invited her to the mosque in Jeffcott Street, West Melbourne. She asked if she could bring her friend. Neither had been to a mosque. She told her husband she was going. “You know what he said? ‘Please don’t come home with a tea towel on your head’,” she laughs. He has been very supportive, she adds. Angela met a group of Muslim women attending a meeting and chatted about issues including the September 11 attacks. “We got to know a little about each other,” says Angela, who declines to give her surname because she fears harassment. “Look, I don’t know the full Muslim religion and they probably don’t know the full Catholic religion. But I got off my bum, which a lot of Australians don’t. I wanted to find out because . . . (people say) they’re bad people. They’re not. The ones I’ve met are definitely not.” Angela has visited Mr Soliman’s family with her 10-year-old daughter and son, seven, and has been back several times. She says his wife, Manar, is “great fun”. Angela’s husband gets on well with Mr Soliman. The children play happily with his seven-year-old son and twins, a boy and a girl, who are five. Angela later discovered that the only Muslims at her children’s school were asylum seekers. They needed a lift home. So she volunteered. Mr Soliman told the story of their friendship at a forum at the State Library last week on misuse of the term “un-Australian”, co-hosted by The Age and the OzProspect advisory panel. “It’s about perceptions; she (might) have seen Muslims as un-Australian,” Mr Soliman says. “And all of a sudden, when she met with us and other Muslims, she saw no difference. We’re just as human and as Australian as anybody else.” Angela fears the terror arrests will further harden attitudes in the community. “I think Australians are un-Australian, as in we’re not opening up our hearts to the Muslim people,” she says. “Do what I did. Get off (your) butt and go and meet these people.” The Sunday Age, 13-Nov-2005 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 