Are Iranians Being Vilified (Published in Green Left Weekly)
Are Iranians being Vilified?
by Marcia Helene Hewitt UWA anthropology student.
Recently I was given a tutorial assignment of comparing one group of migrants in
I began my research by speaking to an Iranian boy of 17, someone born here, and who had been one of my music students ten years previously. He began to tell me how he had been made to get off of a bus in transit, detained for 3 hours and questioned. He told me that he had been arrested several times and then let go, admittedly, because he had been in a few fights in Northbridge. He said if he got into a fight with another Iranian, then he would be let go, but if he got into a fight with a ‘white’ then they would keep him overnight. The fact that he saw Anglo Australians as white, and himself non white, struck me. This lad was brought up in
I was so disturbed by what he had told me that I researched further and found that there had been a number of ASIO raids in Iranian households, with people held at gunpoint. How could this be happening in
I put a question to Prof. Chomsky on the Znet Web board , whether he thought that the
One of my friends is now afraid to receive political material from me because he says that anyone from the Middle East is now being watched closely (he is a double PhD academic) and doesn’t want to jeapordise me in any way! Isn’t it time that we, as a democratic community , do something about this kind of dangerous cultural attitude?
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