Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Terrorists – Northern Ireland – Fiction”

AbstractNegotiation with non-ideological ethno-nationalist terrorists is more common and more successful than with other kinds of terrorists. Additional strategies for dealing with terrorists include combating, isolating, and mainstreaming. There are many arguments against negotiation with terrorists, but most of them do not apply to secret backchannel talks, which are usually the method of choice in first approaching these groups. The success of negotiation depends on the development of flexibility by both the terrorists and the authorities. These and other points are illustrated with case materials from the Northern Ireland peace process, and the analysis is extended, on a speculative basis, to negotiation with several Islamic terrorist groups.

One enduring question about terrorism is why individuals choose to join terrorist groups. Past studies have shown that terrorists are not always poor, and they can in fact come from more privileged groups in society. Risk sensitivity and prospect theory are approaches that can help explain some of the anomalies. They suggest that two types of group are likely to supply members for terrorist organizations in disproportionate numbers. One group consists of those who face a loss of status or position due to ongoing changes in society. A second group consists of those who have an opportunity to gain a major advance in status or position. Both groups are thus more likely or more willing to take risks such as joining dissident terrorists – either to maintain their position or to improve it. An analysis of the situation of Palestinian nationalists, nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Tamils in Sri Lanka provides support for the idea that sensitivity to risk can be an important factor in explaining the willingness of individuals to join terrorist groups.

Janet McNeill’s fiction has experienced a recent revival, led by London-based publisher Turnpike Books, which reissued three of her novels between 2014 and 2015, with a fourth due in autumn 2019. The Maiden Dinosaur (1964/2015) is her best-known book, and it depicts Northern Ireland at a transitional moment in its history, during the post-war period and preceding the recommencement of the Troubles. McNeill explores vestigial systems of power that endure in Northern Ireland amidst the shifting gender, class, religious, and political contexts of the early 1960s. This essay analyses her rendering of the middle-class Northern Protestant house, and argues that it is a metonym for patriarchal structures that pervade mid-century Belfast society. McNeill examines how the women of her generation manoeuvre within this circumscribed space, and her novel represents an aesthetic gesture of self-liberation.

This essay argues for the necessity of a critical reconsideration of Brian Friel's short fiction both because of its own merits and since its depiction of emplaced communities struggling with aspects of modernity anticipates such conflicts in the major plays. Although Friel does not believe that rural culture was ever pristine and unadulterated, he nonetheless hints how modernity's advent into his chosen milieu of northwestern Ireland/Northern Ireland can create problems among its inhabitants such as destruction of community. ‘The Diviner’ and ‘The Saucer of Larks’ valorize the organic epistemology practiced by inhabitants who are outsiders to a local culture but become more in tune with local rhythms and landscape — the flux of place identified by phenomenologist Edward Casey — than many of the original inhabitants. In some situations, such as those he explores in short stories such as ‘Kelly's Hall’ and ‘Among the Ruins’, he offers positive portrayals of mechanized culture's ability to unify communities when that new technology is properly controlled, while in others, such as ‘Foundry House’, ‘The Potato Gatherers’, and ‘Everything Neat and Tidy’, he shows the debilitating effects of technology.

Almost 50 years ago, in the events that happened during the so-called Bloody Sunday (Derry 1972, 30th January), 13 Catholic civilians were killed because of the actions of the British army during a civil rights march against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Other 13 civilians were injured. While the circumstances were unclear, these civilians were considered to be terrorists, which seemed to justify the gunfire. The findings on Bloody Sunday from two Tribunals of Inquiry (1972 and 1998-2010), and the reactions that their resulting reports raised are an excellent example of cultural impregnation in law. In this regard, it is possible to find a general notion of justice as truth. Guaranteeing such notion (or, at least, the willingness to ensure it) seemed to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland. Under the light of these events, the following pages aim to analyse how that legal culture of justice as truth is displayed in the two Bloody Sunday Tribunals of Inquiry as well as its contribution to the contestation of the British legal system or its legitimacy. This paper starts by reviewing previous studies about the conceptual framework of the analysis — it examines the concept of “legal culture” and the understanding of justice as truth, as well as the definition of Tribunal of Inquiry. Next, it argues cultural perceptions regarding Bloody Sunday Inquiries. The conclusions exposed reveal that the legal culture of justice as truth is also embodied in legalism and colonialism.

AbstractThe necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.

This article responds to debates about the “big, ambitious novel” and “hysterical realism” by challenging several prevailing scholarly orthodoxies about large-scale fiction: that whole world-building precludes the rendering of a single, feeling human; that mimesis and “hysterical” traits, like absurdity, are mutually exclusive; or that a whole-world view requires third-person narrative omniscience. The analysis centers on Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a novel set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland that connects a young woman's experience with gendered and sexual power to the behavior, prejudices, and tacit understandings that undergird a society locked in sectarian conflict. The article argues that the novel's form—a first-person, past-tense narration—lends the character-narrator unique credibility as a teller because she has both firsthand experience and the critical distance of hindsight. To avoid postures of certainty and authority that come with both political power and narrative omniscience, the narrator uses irony and self-consciousness to critique storyworld power dynamics and expectations of literary realism. Burns's big, ambitious novel reveals that conveying a whole world and portraying a single, feeling human are in fact mutually constitutive aims. Moreover, the digressive and often absurd narration is precisely what makes the storyworld a persuasively plausible, if not verisimilar, rendering of Troubles-era Northern Ireland. By linking nationalism to problems of gender and sexual politics at the time, Burns's novel issues a warning about the reactionary postures and polarization in the contemporary moment surrounding Brexit, the #MeToo movement, and surging violence in Northern Ireland.

ABSTRACTWe team teach an interdisciplinary political science and literature course titled “Violence and Reconciliation,” with case studies on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa and on debates about whether to develop a TRC in Northern Ireland. The course culminates in a two-week simulation in which students role play the experiences, strategies, and needs of victims, perpetrators, legal teams, government officials, and NGOs in the aftermath of a horrific event that has torn a society apart. We assessed the simulation through pre- and post-simulation writing exercises as well as observations of insights revealed by students during negotiations. We believe the simulation is an effective tool for helping students move from a scholarly engagement with the processes of restorative justice to employing them in response to hatred and violence. This article describes the simulation for use or adaptation in other courses.

This article explores the representation of Northern Irish unionists in British and Irish cinema by investigating a dominant way that the community has been portrayed in fiction films: as prison officers and orderlies. Specifically, Northern Irish unionists have been portrayed as prison officers and orderlies employed in the Maze and Armagh prisons during the period of republican unrest which culminated in hunger strikes in 1981, and a mass prison escape in 1983. The films that depict, to varying degrees, these characters as belonging to the Northern Irish unionist community include Some Mother’s Son (1996), H3 (2001), Silent Grace (2001), Hunger (2008) and Maze (2017). In these films, the typical representation of Northern Irish unionists reflects both the community’s general ‘othering’ in cinema and the film-makers’ primary interest in Irish nationalism when depicting Northern Ireland. Thus, unionist characters are usually depicted abjectly and feature only as adjuncts to narratives that are principally about Irish nationalists. This study aims to build upon a range of critical work in this area and to add to broader debates that have identified this cinematic deficit whereby Northern Irish unionists are depicted more critically and less frequently than Irish nationalists.

This paper focuses on Irish writer, playwright and television screenwriter Eugene McCabe’s fictional representation of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ in his trilogy Victims, published in the collection Heaven Lies about Us (2005). Living most of his life on his family farm on the Monaghan/Fermanagh border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, McCabe had a deep understanding of the historically entrenched hatreds, bigotry and fundamentalisms of its inhabitants, and his fiction reflects the human tragedy underlying the violence. This paper draws on an eco-philosophical framework to suggest that by capturing the entanglement between the natural and cultural place-world McCabe’s poetics offers, from a liberal humanist perspective, an indictment of anthropocentric patriarchy at the root of violent dispute. McCabe’s literary world, evoking natural and cultural landscapes, encapsulates the absurdity of isolating territories via false political borders, marginalizing the value of bioregion and diversity and ignoring the vital oneness of humanity. Thus, though McCabe’s short stories are indeed culturally and politically specific, in shedding light on the self-destructiveness of human behaviour they are ultimately timeless and universal.

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.

This article appraises developments in soundtracks of narrative fiction features based on the Northern Ireland Troubles, focusing on selected titles released in the post-ceasefire period that was consolidated by the Anglo-Irish (“Good Friday”) agreement of 1998. It does this with reference to earlier approaches to music and sound for Troubles-themed film, and by drawing on Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s sound-design-is-the-new-score proposition. The article advances “sonic gaze” as a pertinent critical lens through which to complement artistic appraisals of historical and contemporary soundtracks in light of political and colonial contexts and legacies. In comparison to earlier Troubles-themed film, a small number of narrative fiction features from the turn of the twenty-first century propose alternative positions and/or innovations in their overall sound design. Readings of Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998), Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) and ’71 (Yann Demange, 2014) interpret several significant soundtrack developments. These arise from the involvement of popular music producers, notably David Holmes, technological affordances (production and postproduction) and alternative artistic perspectives that interrupted a colonial-anthropological sonic gaze. The article concludes that Hunger comes closest to Liz Greene and Kulezic-Wilson’s theorisations on the integrated soundtrack and on narrative film’s potential for achieving a holistic audiovisual musicality.

This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction (No Bones, 2001; Little Constructions, 2007; Milkman, 2018) as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of (post-)sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by (or have fed themselves upon) an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though immersed in the world of the Troubles, paradoxically communicates “an idiosyncratic spatiotemporality” (Maureen Ruprecht Fadem’s phrase), namely an experience beyond the self-imposing, historical time limits. As such, it gains the ability to provide insightful commentaries on conflict-prone relations, the patterns of which can be repeatedly observed in Northern Ireland’s socio-political milieu. Overall, the main idea here is to discuss and present the narrative realm proposed by Burns as (in)determinate, liminal in terms of time and space, positioning readers between “then” and “now” of the region.

This article analyzes Seiffert’s Afterwards (2007), which, in marked contrast to her debut publication, The Dark Room (2001), has received scarce critical attention. Set in anodyne suburbia, Afterwards narrates the fate of two unglamorous ex-combatants and their trauma. Seiffert’s complex narrative binds together romance and PTSD in a double plot that intertwines the fate of a “squaddy” involved in a shooting incident in the Northern Ireland Troubles with that of a former RAF officer stationed in colonial Kenya. This article argues that beyond subjective issues of judgment, Seiffert shows an awareness that modern romance cannot combine with trauma, as the idea of healing is nonsensical in a world ruled by ethical uncertainty. Furthermore, Seiffert’s examination of trauma indicates that in fiction –as in life– author and reader have to confront questions of guilt, responsibility and the absence of forgiveness. Seiffert, drawing on ideas similar to Primo Levi’s, concludes the novel with the tragic irony that the more humane the perpetrator, the more distant closure becomes, leaving her main character locked in trauma and the reader ensnared in uncertainty.

Post-Traumatic Realism: Representations of History in Recent Irish NovelsThe aim of my essay is to describe major tendencies in contemporary Irish prose writing concerned with historical and political issues. The diversity of the themes and attitudes to the past necessitates a classification of the writings into several various groups of novels whereas my analysis of the modes of representing the intratextual universe paves the way for identifying a single literary convention (post-traumatic realism) which is typical of the works under discussion. Many of the quoted authors subscribe to historical revisionism which undermines the received historical narrative in Ireland and questions its aggressively nationalist model of patriotism. The novels by Sebastian Barry, Robert McLiam Wilson, Edna O’Brien or Julia O’Faolain, to name just a few, contest that model by demonstrating that it leads to violence, cultural stagnation and petrifying political divisions both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. In the age of the epistemological levelling of historiographic discourse and literary fiction the novels discussed in the essay meaningfully contribute to the debate over the Irish nation’s attitude to their own history and the need to conclude the painful chapters of the past connected with the Civil War as well as with the social and religious conflicts of the twentieth century. Realizm posttraumatyczny. Sposoby przedstawiania historii we współczesnych powieściach irlandzkich Celem niniejszego artykułu jest scharakteryzowanie głównych tendencji we współczesnej prozie irlandzkiej podejmującej tematykę historyczną i polityczną. Różnorodność tematów i postaw wobec przeszłości zmusza do wyodrębnienia co najmniej kilku odmiennych grup powieści, natomiast analiza sposobów prezentacji universum wewnątrztekstowego pozwala pokusić się o określenie jednej typowej konwencji literackiej, jaką w przypadku omawianych utworów jest realizm posttraumatyczny. Wielu z przytaczanych autorów wpisuje się także w nurt rewizjonizmu historycznego, który podważa zastaną narrację historyczną i obiegowy, nacechowany agresywnym nacjonalizmem model patriotyzmu. Powieści Sebastiana Barry’ego, Roberta McLiama Wilsona, Edny O’Brien czy Julii O’Faolain kontestują ów model, ukazując, że prowadzi on do przemocy, utrwalania podziałów politycznych i stagnacji kulturowej zarówno w Republice Irlandii, jak i w Irlandii Północnej. W dobie epistemologicznego równouprawnienia dyskursu historiograficznego i fikcji literackiej omawiane w artykule powieści konstruktywnie wpisują się w dyskusję nad stosunkiem narodu irlandzkiego do swojej historii, nad koniecznością zamknięcia raz na zawsze bolesnych rozdziałów związanych z wojną domową początku lat dwudziestych XX wieku i konfliktami na tle społecznym oraz religijnym.

The problem of the national is among the main ones in works by English writer John Fowles. This can be seen both in his fiction works and essays. This article discusses the role of the image of the ‘internal’ Other in the process of building his concept of ‘Englishness’. In his essay On Being English but Not British, the writer analyzes the relations between Englishmen and the inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and puts the latter on a par with Australians and Americans, however, pointing out their interdependence with the English. The Welshmen Henry Breasley and David Jones act as the ‘internal’ Other in The Ebony Tower and A Maggot. They are endowed with typical Welsh characteristics such as a penchant for drinking, greed, and cunning. Both characters are presented through the perception of English characters, which allows the author to play with the stereotypes about the Welsh circulating among the English. There is an Irishman Dr. Grogan in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The protagonist Charles Smithson also attributes to him traits of the Irish national character such as talkativeness, foolishness, frivolity. At the same time, Grogan acts as a kind of arbiter, trying to explain the behavior of the characters from a scientific point of view. In Daniel Martin, actress Jenny appeals to her Scottish roots, but she does not take it seriously. That is why the main character also endows her with stereotypical features. However, she subsequently abandons them for the sake of ‘Americanness’, thus losing her identity. ‘Internal’ Others do not play a significant role in the writer’s conception of national identity. The writer focuses on the English characters, making the internal ‘others’ a kind of backdrop for them.

This article examines the relationship between Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) and the gender politics of the #MeToo movement. It argues that reading Milkman in light of #MeToo helps us understand the book’s depiction of sexual violence and illuminates an important, hidden history of the Northern Irish conflict. Drawing on a range of feminist scholars, it situates Milkman within a series of broader debates about the ‘cultural scaffolding’ of sexual violence and the historically masculinist logic of Irish nationalism. The article concludes by situating Milkman within a predominant thematic strain in recent Irish fiction; namely, the ‘retrospective mood’ whereby authors have sought to revisit the past and re-examine its legacies for the precarious peace of the present.

Common to many post-conflict societies, former political prisoners and combatants in Northern Ireland are often portrayed as security threats rather than as potential contributors to societal peacebuilding processes. This distrust limits their ability to contribute to the transitional landscape and additionally hinders desistance processes during their reentry from prison. Drawing from the work of Maruna, LeBel, and others on “wounded healers,” this article critically examines the restorative justice work of ex-prisoners who have become involved in leadership roles within community based restorative justice. It is argued that such practitioner work can help former combatants overcome many of the challenges typically associated with reentry, contributing to a “strength-based” approach to desistance, impacting factors such as employment, social bonds, internal narratives, and agency. This work also enables individuals to showcase their desistance to others, highlighting their “earned redemption” and encouraging society to acknowledge that reentry is a two-way street.

In today's society there is evidence of a culture of the 'empowered consumer' -- an image of the consumer as a citizen rather than a subordinate. In fact, human rights language is increasingly coming to the fore in the consumption debate. The consumer has been allocated rights by the United Nations whereby all human beings are born free and equal and have civil, political, economic and social rights (McGregor 44). However, as citizens we also have responsibilities of an environmental and social concern. Food retailing and equality of shopping provision is one such concern. Food is a basic right. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and have access to safe and nutritious food. Social exclusion refers to those in the population who are unable to participate in economic, political, social and cultural life. Social exclusion is different from, but related to, poverty since it further marginalises the most disadvantaged -- for example, those who cannot access a large supermarket. In keeping with the rights/responsibilities language, the consumer has a basic right to food and the retailer has the social responsibility to supply the needs of the consumer. It is in this respect that food is an ethical issue and has social justice implications. Inability to consume, or have access to, sufficient food of nutritional quality is a global concern. In North America the issue is one of 'food insecurity' or 'food poverty' due to inadequate finance to purchase sufficient food. In the United Kingdom the same problem arises within the context of access to food stores. This is identified as a 'food (shopping) desert', where due to restricted access social exclusion can arise. The term 'food deserts' was first used by the Low Income Project Team of the Nutrition Task Force in 1996 and was succinctly defined by Tessa Jowell (Government Health Minister) in 1997 when she stated that a food desert was an area "where people do not have easy access to healthy, fresh foods particularly if they are poor and have limited mobility". The term 'food desert' is an emotive one referring to a unique tool of social polarisation and exclusion (Lang 5). The issues compounding the problem include low income, locational policy of supermarkets with the acquisition of edge-of-town / out-of-town sites, consumer mobility, car ownership levels and food availability. This research study focuses on Northern Ireland -- a region of the UK on the periphery of Europe. The Province of Northern Ireland (Ulster) is a sparsely populated (122 people per km²), predominantly rural area with the highest unemployment and poverty statistics in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Northern Ireland has a proportionately high degree of non-car ownership (35%) which further complicates the equation since shopping is increasingly becoming a car-borne activity necessitating transportation to edge-of-town superstores. Those not able to avail themselves of large edge-of-town superstores are being socially excluded, since inner-city areas are becoming denuded of food stores. Those that do exist usually have a limited range of food items, usually non-perishable, or are specialist shops stocking high priced items. It is the aim of the study to identify the characteristics, extent and location of food deserts in both rural and urban areas of Northern Ireland. It is a particularly apt time to do so since Northern Ireland is experiencing a 'retail revolution' with the arrival of the major UK grocery multiples and subsequent situational policies to locate off-centre. Similarly, there are plans to curtail out-of-town developments which has been viewed by some smaller retailers as "too little, too late". With the above in mind, it is a timely study for Northern Ireland. Multiple research tools of both a qualitative and a quantitative nature have been employed including consumer focus groups, shopping diaries, comparative shopping exercises, consumer questionnaires and retail interviews. This will enable sufficient validation of results. The focus groups provide qualitative depth (Colquhoun 39) and serve to highlight the issues of shopping inequality from the point of view of different consumer groups which could be identified as potentially vulnerable in the food poverty stakes; the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed or low income families, lone-parent families and females in general; to whom falls the responsibility for provisioning the household, organising the kitchen and doing the household's cooking (Murcott 11). Basically, food is gendered -- women are mainly in charge (Vaines 13). The respondents in this study demonstrate exactly that point since 77% of the sample were female and reported that they were responsible for household shopping. This point is particularly prevalent with regard to access to cars. In fact over 50% of women in 1991-1993 either lived in households without a car or were non-drivers in a household with a car. Similarly, although there is a rising proportion of women who work they still do most of the shopping and spend twice as much time as men provisioning the household (Piachaud & Webb 18). Ultimately, anything that affects the purchaser also affects the purchasing experience -- in this case physical access to the foodstore. Comparative shopping exercises illustrate the availability and price indices of food and reiterate the price differences between the smaller independents, the local corner shops and the supermarkets. Initial research using the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's "Low Cost, Healthy Diet" (Leather 75) provides evidence of a cost differential of £1.41, or a 26% cost penalty by shopping at a corner store rather than a superstore. Availability among corner shops similarly compared unfavourably with the supermarkets, with the smallest stores offering minimal fresh fruit and vegetables and regularly offering no 'economy' branded equivalent to an established manufacturer's brand. This supports previous research which found that in areas where small shops do exist they offer only a limited overpriced range of processed foods (Elliott 5), and it is generally accepted that those who can shop at supermarkets can generally benefit from lower prices and more choice (Piachaud & Webb 32). The benefits of supermarkets are not therefore available to all. Shopping diaries further illustrate this point with the dichotomy existing where the lower-income consumer shops more frequently and locally than does her higher-income counterpart and it is these same consumers who patronise the smaller, often more expensive corner shop. Many consumers like the convenience of large supermarkets where they have access to a vast range of items and do not mind paying premium prices on some items for this convenience. Supermarkets do not offer low prices on all items, but do stock economy lines as well as premium priced items. The consumer questionnaire provides some quantitative analysis and statistical weight to the data and was analysed using the χ-square test on SPSS for Windows Version 8. With the χ-square test the important detail is the significance level (reported as a p-value). A p-value of less than 0.05 indicates that the two groups are significantly different at a confidence level of 95% -- in other words, it can be concluded that the author is 95% certain that the result is statistically significant and free from error. Four areas of the Province were sampled -- two rural and two urban. The sample was 77% female and the median age group fell between 45 to 54 years. The social class status was skewed towards the lower socio-economic classes and only 12% fell into social classes A or B. The mean household income was £151 to £200 per week. The survey was interviewer-assisted and pointed to some interesting correlations between levels of satisfaction with store location and distance travelled, product choice and the decision to continue shopping in the town centre. Thirty percent of the sample stated that they shop at off-centre complexes and 70% of the sampled households shop in the town centre or closer to home. This sample also provides evidence that shopping is largely a car-borne activity with 58% of the sample using the family car. Journey distance is significantly influenced by degree of satisfaction with locality: p<0.01 and is supported with the evidence that 64% of the respondents stated that they shop less than fifteen minutes from home. Similar relationships exist between reported satisfaction with locality and differing degrees of satisfaction for product choice: p<0.01. A significant bias similarly exists between those who continue to shop in the town centre after the advent of the UK multiples into Northern Ireland in 1996 and those who do not: p<0.05 with a bias towards those continuing to shop in the town centre reporting high satisfaction levels. Ultimately, perceived adequacy of shopping provision influences satisfaction with store locality: p<0.05. Although the majority of respondents' weekly shopping is conducted at a multiple there is still an identified need for the local corner shops and independents since approximately 29% of respondents buy essentials like bread, milk and other basic grocery provision there. In fact, 98% of those surveyed reported that every town centre should have a food store, and 82% noticed a reduction in the number of food stores locally in recent years. In a concluding open question in the survey attitudes towards off-centre supermarkets were gauged. Responses ranged from positive in nature ("better parking facilities") to indifferent ("I never bother with them") to negative ("they [out-of-town supermarkets] only suit people with cars" and "they hurt the small shopkeeper"). From a retail management point of view, the multiple stores perceive (or want the consumer to believe) that they have a "social responsibility" but suggest that it should be a coalition between retailers and councillors to rejuvenate the town centres and it is not their sole responsibility. The corner shops argue their business position has survived but allude to the fact that the migration to out-of-town sites by the supermarkets has "created a void in the town centre". The issue is complex. While it is true that the multiples have brought shoppers a number of benefits -- price, choice and quality -- they have also both directly (siting shops outside town centres and in high income areas) and indirectly (undermining the economies of small, local outlets) increased costs on disadvantaged consumers in terms of time, physical effort and transport. This has led to a degree of social exclusion amongst certain consumer groups, although this was not quantitatively expressed as significant via the medium of the questionnaire in this preliminary study. It should be remembered that food and mealtimes are imbued with social and cultural meaning (Lang 27) and that "food is a vehicle for social control" (7). In fact food desertification has been likened to the "food equivalent of disconnecting the water supply" (27) and initiatives should be considered to alleviate food poverty and rejuvenate town centres throughout the Province. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary with input from retailers, councillors, health promotion personnel and education bodies to bring about a policy to eradicate this form of social exclusion and disadvantage. References Colquhoun, A. "Food Retailing in Transition: Memories of Traditional Grocer Shops in the 1950s." Strugnell and Armstrong. Elliott, V. "Food Deserts Threaten Health of Poor and Old." 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Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. 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On 23 August 2005, John Howard, then Prime Minister, called together Muslim ‘representatives’ from around the nation for a Muslim Summit in response to the London bombings in July of that year. One of the outcomes of the two hour summit was a Statement of Principles committing Muslim communities in Australia to resist radicalisation and pursue a ‘moderate’ Islam. Since then the ill-defined term ‘moderate Muslim’ has been used in both the political and media discourse to refer to a preferred form of Islamic practice that does not challenge the hegemony of the nation state and that is coherent with the principles of secularism. Akbarzadeh and Smith conclude that the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ are used to describe Muslims whom Australians should not fear in contrast to ‘extremists’. Ironically, the policy direction towards regulating the practice of Islam in Australia in favour of a state defined ‘moderate’ Islam signals an attempt by the state to mediate the practice of religion, undermining the ethos of secularism as it is expressed in the Australian Constitution. It also – arguably – impacts upon the citizenship rights of Australian Muslims in so far as citizenship presents not just as a formal set of rights accorded to an individual but also to democratic participation: the ability of citizens to enjoy those rights at a substantive level. Based on the findings of research into how Australian Muslims and members of the broader community are responding to the political and media discourses on terrorism, this article examines the impact of these discourses on how Muslims are practicing citizenship and re-defining an Australian Muslim identity. Free Speech Free speech has been a hallmark of liberal democracies ever since its defence became part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Australian Constitution does not expressly contain a provision for free speech. The right to free speech in Australia is implied in Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 19 of which affirms: Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The ultimate recent endorsement of free speech rights, arguably associated with the radical free speech ‘open platform’ movement of the 1960s at the University of California Berkeley, constructs free speech as essential to human and civil liberties. Its approach has been expressed in terms such as: “I reject and detest XYZ views but will defend to the utmost a person’s right to express them”. An active defence of free speech is based on the observation that, unless held to account, “[Authorities] would grant free speech to those with whom they agree, but not to minorities whom they consider unorthodox or threatening” (“Online Archives of California”). Such minorities, differing from the majority view, do so as a right accorded to citizens. In very challenging circumstances – such as opposing the Cold War operations of the US Senate Anti-American Activities Committee – the free speech movement has been celebrated as holding fast (or embodying a ‘return’) to the true meaning of the American First Amendment. It was in public statements of unpopular and minority views, which opposed those of the majority, that the right to free speech could most non-controvertibly be demonstrated. Some have argued that such rights should be balanced by anti-vilification legislation, by prohibitions upon incitement to violence, and by considerations as to whether the organisation defended by the speaker was banned. In the latter case, there can be problems with excluding the defence of banned organisations from legitimate debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Sinn Fein was denounced in the UK as the ‘political wing of the IRA’ (the IRA being a banned organisation) and denied a speaking position in many forums, yet has proved to be an important party in the eventual reconciliation of the Northern Ireland divide. In effect, the banning of an organisation is a political act and such acts should best be interrogated through free speech and democratic debate. Arguably, such disputation is a responsibility of an involved citizenry. In general, liberal democracies such as Australia do not hesitate to claim that citizens have a right to free speech and that this is a right worth defending. There is a legitimate expectation by Australians of their rights as citizens to freedom of expression. For some Australian Muslims, however, the appeal to free speech seems a hollow one. Muslim citizens run the risk of being constructed as ‘un-Australian’ when they articulate their concerns or opinions. Calls by some Muslim leaders not to reprint the Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammed for example, met with a broader community backlash and drew responses that, typically, constructed Muslims as a threat to Australian cultural values of freedom and liberty. These kinds of responses to expressions by Australian Muslims of their deeply held convictions are rarely, if ever, interpreted as attempts to curtail Australian Muslims’ rights to free speech. There is a poor fit between what many Australian Muslims believe and what they feel the current climate in Australia allows them to say in the public domain. Positioned as the potential ‘enemy within’ in the evolving media and political discourse post September 11, they have been allocated restricted speaking positions on many subjects from the role and training of their Imams to the right to request Sharia courts (which could operate in parallel with Australian courts in the same way that Catholic divorce/annulment courts do). These social and political restrictions lead them to question whether Muslims enjoy citizenship rights on an equal footing with Australians from the broader community. The following comment from an Australian woman, an Iraqi refugee, made in a research interview demonstrates this: The media say that if you are Australian it means that you enjoy freedom, you enjoy the rights of citizenship. That is the idea of what it means to be Australian, that you do those things. But if you are a Muslim, you are not Australian. You are a people who are dangerous, a people who are suspicious, a people who do not want democracy—all the characteristics that make up terrorists. So yes, there is a difference, a big difference. And it is a feeling all Muslims have, not just me, whether you are at school, at work, and especially if you wear the hijab. (Translated from Arabic by Anne Aly) At the same time, Australian Muslims observe some members of the broader community making strong assertions about Muslims (often based on misunderstanding or misinformation) with very little in the way of censure or rebuke. For example, again in 2005, Liberal backbenchers Sophie Panopoulos and Bronwyn Bishop made an emotive plea for the banning of headscarves in public schools, drawing explicitly on the historically inherited image of Islam as a violent, backward and oppressive ideology that has no place in Western liberal democracy: I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validity … . Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom? (Panopoulos) Several studies attest to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, have been positioned as other in the political and media discourse (see for example Aly). The construct of Muslims as ‘out of place’ (Saniotis) denies them entry and representation in the public sphere: a key requisite for democratic participation according to Habermas (cited in Haas). This notion of a lack of a context for Muslim citizenship in Australian public spheres arises out of the popular construction of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive modes of being. Denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as political citizens, Australian Muslims must pursue alternative communicative spaces. Some respond by limiting their expressions to closed spheres of communication – a kind of enforced silence. Others respond by pursuing alternative media discourses that challenge the dominant stereotypes of Muslims in Western media and reinforce majority-world cultural views. Enforced Silence In closed spheres of discussion, Australian Muslims can openly share their perceptions about terrorism, the government and media. Speaking openly in public however, is not common practice and results in forced silence for fear of reprisal or being branded a terrorist: “if we jump up and go ‘oh how dare you say this, rah, rah’, he’ll be like ‘oh he’s going to go off, he’ll blow something up’”. One research participant recalled that when his work colleagues were discussing the September 11 attacks he decided not to partake in the conversation because it “might be taken against me”. The participant made this decision despite the fact that his colleagues were expressing the opinion that United States foreign policy was the likely cause for the attacks—an opinion with which he agreed. This suggests some support for the theory that the fear of social isolation may make Australian Muslims especially anxious or fearful of expressing opinions about terrorism in public discussions (Noelle-Neumann). However, it also suggests that the fear of social isolation for Muslims is not solely related to the expression of minority opinion, as theorised in Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence . Given that many members of the wider community shared the theory that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001 may have been a response to American foreign policy, this may well not be a minority view. Nonetheless, Australian Muslims hesitated to embrace it. Saniotis draws attention to the pressure on Australian Muslims to publicly distance themselves from the terrorist attacks of September 11 and to openly denounce the actions of terrorists. The extent to which Muslims were positioned as a threatening other was contingent on their ability to demonstrate that they too participated in the distal responses to the terrorist attacks—initial pity for the sufferer and eventual marginalisation and rejection of the perceived aggressor. Australian Muslims were obliged to declare their loyalty and commitment to Australia’s ally and, in this way, partake in the nationalistic responses to the threat of terrorism. At the same time however, Australian Muslims were positioned as an imagined enemy and a threat to national identity. Australian Muslims were therefore placed in a paradoxical bind- as Australians they were expected to respond as the victims of fear; as Muslims they were positioned as the objects of fear. Even in discussions where their opinions are congruent with the dominant opinion being expressed, Australian Muslims describe themselves as feeling apprehensive or anxious about expressing their opinions because of how these “might be taken”. Pursuing alternative discourses The overriding message from the research project’s Muslim participants was that the media, as a powerful purveyor of public opinion, had inculcated a perception of Muslims as a risk to Australia and Australians: an ‘enemy within’; the potential ‘home grown terrorist’. The daily experience of visibly-different Australian Muslims, however, is that they are more fearing than fear-inspiring. The Aly and Balnaves fear scale indicates that Australian Muslims have twice as many fear indicators as non-Muslims Australians. Disengagement from Western media and media that is seen to be influenced or controlled by the West is widespread among Australian Muslims who increasingly argue that the media institutions are motivated by an agenda that includes profit and the perpetuation of a negative stereotype of Muslims both in Australia and around the globe, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern affairs. The negative stereotypes of Muslims in the Australian media have inculcated a sense of victimhood which Muslims in Australia have used as the basis for a reconstruction of their identity and the creation of alternative narratives of belonging (Aly). Central to the notion of identity among Australian Muslims is a sense of having their citizenship rights curtailed by virtue of their faith: of being included in a general Western dismissal of Muslims’ rights and experiences. As one interviewee said: If you look at the Channel Al Jazeera for example, it’s a channel but they aren’t making up stories, they are taping videos in Iraqi, Palestine and other Muslim countries, and they just show it to people, that’s all they do. And then George Bush, you know, we hear on the news that George Bush was discussing with Tony Blair that he was thinking to bomb Al Jazeera so why would these people have their right to freedom and we don’t? So that’s why I think the people who are in power, they have the control over the media, and it’s a big political game. Because if it wasn’t then George Bush, he’s the symbol of politics, why would he want to bomb Al Jazeera for example? Amidst leaks and rumours (Timms) that the 2003 US bombing of Al Jazeera was a deliberate attack upon one of the few elements of the public sphere in which some Western-nationality Muslims have confidence, many elements of the mainstream Western media rose to Al Jazeera’s defence. For example, using an appeal to the right of citizens to engage in and consume free speech, the editors of influential US paper The Nation commented that: If the classified memo detailing President Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the headquarters of Al Jazeera is provided to The Nation, we will publish the relevant sections. Why is it so vital that this information be made available to the American people? Because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press—particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press—upon which that country was founded. (cited in Scahill) For other Australian Muslims, it is the fact that some media organisations have been listed as banned by the US that gives them their ultimate credibility. This is the case with Al Manar, for example. Feeling that they are denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as equal political citizens, Australian Muslims are pursuing alternative communicative spaces that support and reinforce their own cultural worldviews. The act of engaging with marginalised and alternative communicative spaces constitutes what Clifford terms ‘collective practices of displaced dwelling’. It is through these practices of displaced dwelling that Australian Muslims essentialise their diasporic identity and negotiate new identities based on common perceptions of injustice against Muslims. But you look at Al Jazeera they talk in the same tongue as the Western media in our language. And then you look again at something like Al Manar who talks of their own tongue. They do not use the other media’s ideas. They have been attacked by the Australians, been attacked by the Israelis and they have their own opinion. This statement came from an Australian Muslim of Jordanian background in her late forties. It reflects a growing trend towards engaging with media messages that coincide with and reinforce a sense of injustice. The Al Manar television station to which this participant refers is a Lebanese based station run by the militant Hezbollah movement and accessible to Australians via satellite. Much like Al Jazeera, Al Manar broadcasts images of Iraqi and Palestinian suffering and, in the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, graphic images of Lebanese casualties of Israeli air strikes. Unlike the Al Jazeera broadcasts, these images are formatted into video clips accompanied by music and lyrics such as “we do not fear America”. Despite political pressure including a decision by the US to list Al Manar as a terrorist organisation in December 2004, just one week after a French ban on the station because its programming had “a militant perspective with anti-Semitic connotations” (Jorisch), Al Manar continued to broadcast videos depicting the US as the “mother of terrorism”. In one particularly graphic sequence, the Statue of Liberty rises from the depths of the sea, wielding a knife in place of the torch and dripping in blood, her face altered to resemble a skull. As she rises out of the sea accompanied by music resembling a funeral march the following words in Arabic are emblazoned across the screen: On the dead bodies of millions of native Americans And through the enslavement of tens of millions Africans The US rose It pried into the affairs of most countries in the world After an extensive list of countries impacted by US foreign policy including China, Japan, Congo, Vietnam, Peru, Laos, Libya and Guatamala, the video comes to a gruelling halt with the words ‘America owes blood to all of humanity’. Another video juxtaposes images of Bush with Hitler with the caption ‘History repeats itself’. One website run by the Coalition against Media Terrorism refers to Al Manar as ‘the beacon of hatred’ and applauds the decisions by the French and US governments to ban the station. Al Manar defended itself against the bans stating on its website that they are attempts “to terrorise and silence thoughts that are not in line with the US and Israeli policies.” The station claims that it continues on its mission “to carry the message of defending our peoples’ rights, holy places and just causes…within internationally agreed professional laws and standards”. The particular brand of propaganda employed by Al Manar is gaining popularity among some Muslims in Australia largely because it affirms their own views and opinions and offers them opportunities to engage in an alternative public space in which Muslims are positioned as the victims and not the aggressors. Renegotiating an ‘Othered’ Identity The negative portrayal of Muslims as ‘other’ in the Australian media and in political discourse has resulted in Australian Muslims constructing alternative identities based on a common perception of injustice. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror”, the ethnic divisions within the Muslim diaspora are becoming less significant as Australian Muslims reconstruct their identity based on a notion of supporting each other in the face of a global alliance against Islam. Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia. This causes problems, however, since religious identity has no place in the liberal democratic model, which espouses secularism. This is particularly the case where that religion is sometimes constructed as being at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy; namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. This problematic creates a context in which Muslim Australians are not only denied their heterogeneity in the media and political discourse but are dealt with through an understanding of Islam that is constructed on the basis of a cultural and ideological clash between Islam and the West. Religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship. Such ‘essentialising practices’ as eliding considerable diversity into a single descriptor serves to reinforce and consolidate diasporic identity among Muslims in Australia, but does little to promote and assist participatory citizenship or to equip Muslims with the tools necessary to access the public sphere as political citizens of the secular state. In such circumstances, the moderate Muslim may be not so much a ‘preferred’ citizen as one whose rights has been constrained. Acknowledgment This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Bianca Smith. The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media (The Age and Herald Sun Newspapers). Melbourne: Monash University, 2005. Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. ”‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing Metrics of the Fear of Terrorism.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6 (2007): 113-122. Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Harvard UP, 1997. Haas, Tanni. “The Public Sphere as a Sphere of Publics: Rethinking Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Journal of Communication 54.1 (2004): 178- 84. Jorisch, Avi. J. “Al-Manar and the War in Iraq.” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5.2 (2003). Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24.2 (1974): 43-52. “Online Archives of California”. California Digital Library. n.d. Feb. 2008 < http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1199n498/?&query= %22open%20platform%22&brand=oac&hit.rank=1 >. Panopoulos, Sophie. Parliamentary debate, 5 Sep. 2005. Feb. 2008 < http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard >. Saniotis, Arthur. “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’.” Journal of Australian Studies 82 (2004): 49-58. Scahill, Jeremy. “The War on Al-Jazeera (Comment)”. 2005. The Nation. Feb. 2008 < http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/scahill >. Timms, Dominic. “Al-Jazeera Seeks Answers over Bombing Memo”. 2005. Media Guardian. Feb. 2008 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/23/iraq.iraqandthemedia >.

On 23 August 2005, John Howard, then Prime Minister, called together Muslim ‘representatives’ from around the nation for a Muslim Summit in response to the London bombings in July of that year. One of the outcomes of the two hour summit was a Statement of Principles committing Muslim communities in Australia to resist radicalisation and pursue a ‘moderate’ Islam. Since then the ill-defined term ‘moderate Muslim’ has been used in both the political and media discourse to refer to a preferred form of Islamic practice that does not challenge the hegemony of the nation state and that is coherent with the principles of secularism. Akbarzadeh and Smith conclude that the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ are used to describe Muslims whom Australians should not fear in contrast to ‘extremists’. Ironically, the policy direction towards regulating the practice of Islam in Australia in favour of a state defined ‘moderate’ Islam signals an attempt by the state to mediate the practice of religion, undermining the ethos of secularism as it is expressed in the Australian Constitution. It also – arguably – impacts upon the citizenship rights of Australian Muslims in so far as citizenship presents not just as a formal set of rights accorded to an individual but also to democratic participation: the ability of citizens to enjoy those rights at a substantive level. Based on the findings of research into how Australian Muslims and members of the broader community are responding to the political and media discourses on terrorism, this article examines the impact of these discourses on how Muslims are practicing citizenship and re-defining an Australian Muslim identity. Free Speech Free speech has been a hallmark of liberal democracies ever since its defence became part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Australian Constitution does not expressly contain a provision for free speech. The right to free speech in Australia is implied in Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 19 of which affirms: Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The ultimate recent endorsement of free speech rights, arguably associated with the radical free speech ‘open platform’ movement of the 1960s at the University of California Berkeley, constructs free speech as essential to human and civil liberties. Its approach has been expressed in terms such as: “I reject and detest XYZ views but will defend to the utmost a person’s right to express them”. An active defence of free speech is based on the observation that, unless held to account, “[Authorities] would grant free speech to those with whom they agree, but not to minorities whom they consider unorthodox or threatening” (“Online Archives of California”). Such minorities, differing from the majority view, do so as a right accorded to citizens. In very challenging circumstances – such as opposing the Cold War operations of the US Senate Anti-American Activities Committee – the free speech movement has been celebrated as holding fast (or embodying a ‘return’) to the true meaning of the American First Amendment. It was in public statements of unpopular and minority views, which opposed those of the majority, that the right to free speech could most non-controvertibly be demonstrated. Some have argued that such rights should be balanced by anti-vilification legislation, by prohibitions upon incitement to violence, and by considerations as to whether the organisation defended by the speaker was banned. In the latter case, there can be problems with excluding the defence of banned organisations from legitimate debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Sinn Fein was denounced in the UK as the ‘political wing of the IRA’ (the IRA being a banned organisation) and denied a speaking position in many forums, yet has proved to be an important party in the eventual reconciliation of the Northern Ireland divide. In effect, the banning of an organisation is a political act and such acts should best be interrogated through free speech and democratic debate. Arguably, such disputation is a responsibility of an involved citizenry. In general, liberal democracies such as Australia do not hesitate to claim that citizens have a right to free speech and that this is a right worth defending. There is a legitimate expectation by Australians of their rights as citizens to freedom of expression. For some Australian Muslims, however, the appeal to free speech seems a hollow one. Muslim citizens run the risk of being constructed as ‘un-Australian’ when they articulate their concerns or opinions. Calls by some Muslim leaders not to reprint the Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammed for example, met with a broader community backlash and drew responses that, typically, constructed Muslims as a threat to Australian cultural values of freedom and liberty. These kinds of responses to expressions by Australian Muslims of their deeply held convictions are rarely, if ever, interpreted as attempts to curtail Australian Muslims’ rights to free speech. There is a poor fit between what many Australian Muslims believe and what they feel the current climate in Australia allows them to say in the public domain. Positioned as the potential ‘enemy within’ in the evolving media and political discourse post September 11, they have been allocated restricted speaking positions on many subjects from the role and training of their Imams to the right to request Sharia courts (which could operate in parallel with Australian courts in the same way that Catholic divorce/annulment courts do). These social and political restrictions lead them to question whether Muslims enjoy citizenship rights on an equal footing with Australians from the broader community. The following comment from an Australian woman, an Iraqi refugee, made in a research interview demonstrates this: The media say that if you are Australian it means that you enjoy freedom, you enjoy the rights of citizenship. That is the idea of what it means to be Australian, that you do those things. But if you are a Muslim, you are not Australian. You are a people who are dangerous, a people who are suspicious, a people who do not want democracy—all the characteristics that make up terrorists. So yes, there is a difference, a big difference. And it is a feeling all Muslims have, not just me, whether you are at school, at work, and especially if you wear the hijab. (Translated from Arabic by Anne Aly) At the same time, Australian Muslims observe some members of the broader community making strong assertions about Muslims (often based on misunderstanding or misinformation) with very little in the way of censure or rebuke. For example, again in 2005, Liberal backbenchers Sophie Panopoulos and Bronwyn Bishop made an emotive plea for the banning of headscarves in public schools, drawing explicitly on the historically inherited image of Islam as a violent, backward and oppressive ideology that has no place in Western liberal democracy: I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validity … . Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom? (Panopoulos) Several studies attest to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, have been positioned as other in the political and media discourse (see for example Aly). The construct of Muslims as ‘out of place’ (Saniotis) denies them entry and representation in the public sphere: a key requisite for democratic participation according to Habermas (cited in Haas). This notion of a lack of a context for Muslim citizenship in Australian public spheres arises out of the popular construction of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive modes of being. Denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as political citizens, Australian Muslims must pursue alternative communicative spaces. Some respond by limiting their expressions to closed spheres of communication – a kind of enforced silence. Others respond by pursuing alternative media discourses that challenge the dominant stereotypes of Muslims in Western media and reinforce majority-world cultural views. Enforced Silence In closed spheres of discussion, Australian Muslims can openly share their perceptions about terrorism, the government and media. Speaking openly in public however, is not common practice and results in forced silence for fear of reprisal or being branded a terrorist: “if we jump up and go ‘oh how dare you say this, rah, rah’, he’ll be like ‘oh he’s going to go off, he’ll blow something up’”. One research participant recalled that when his work colleagues were discussing the September 11 attacks he decided not to partake in the conversation because it “might be taken against me”. The participant made this decision despite the fact that his colleagues were expressing the opinion that United States foreign policy was the likely cause for the attacks—an opinion with which he agreed. This suggests some support for the theory that the fear of social isolation may make Australian Muslims especially anxious or fearful of expressing opinions about terrorism in public discussions (Noelle-Neumann). However, it also suggests that the fear of social isolation for Muslims is not solely related to the expression of minority opinion, as theorised in Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence . Given that many members of the wider community shared the theory that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001 may have been a response to American foreign policy, this may well not be a minority view. Nonetheless, Australian Muslims hesitated to embrace it. Saniotis draws attention to the pressure on Australian Muslims to publicly distance themselves from the terrorist attacks of September 11 and to openly denounce the actions of terrorists. The extent to which Muslims were positioned as a threatening other was contingent on their ability to demonstrate that they too participated in the distal responses to the terrorist attacks—initial pity for the sufferer and eventual marginalisation and rejection of the perceived aggressor. Australian Muslims were obliged to declare their loyalty and commitment to Australia’s ally and, in this way, partake in the nationalistic responses to the threat of terrorism. At the same time however, Australian Muslims were positioned as an imagined enemy and a threat to national identity. Australian Muslims were therefore placed in a paradoxical bind- as Australians they were expected to respond as the victims of fear; as Muslims they were positioned as the objects of fear. Even in discussions where their opinions are congruent with the dominant opinion being expressed, Australian Muslims describe themselves as feeling apprehensive or anxious about expressing their opinions because of how these “might be taken”. Pursuing alternative discourses The overriding message from the research project’s Muslim participants was that the media, as a powerful purveyor of public opinion, had inculcated a perception of Muslims as a risk to Australia and Australians: an ‘enemy within’; the potential ‘home grown terrorist’. The daily experience of visibly-different Australian Muslims, however, is that they are more fearing than fear-inspiring. The Aly and Balnaves fear scale indicates that Australian Muslims have twice as many fear indicators as non-Muslims Australians. Disengagement from Western media and media that is seen to be influenced or controlled by the West is widespread among Australian Muslims who increasingly argue that the media institutions are motivated by an agenda that includes profit and the perpetuation of a negative stereotype of Muslims both in Australia and around the globe, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern affairs. The negative stereotypes of Muslims in the Australian media have inculcated a sense of victimhood which Muslims in Australia have used as the basis for a reconstruction of their identity and the creation of alternative narratives of belonging (Aly). Central to the notion of identity among Australian Muslims is a sense of having their citizenship rights curtailed by virtue of their faith: of being included in a general Western dismissal of Muslims’ rights and experiences. As one interviewee said: If you look at the Channel Al Jazeera for example, it’s a channel but they aren’t making up stories, they are taping videos in Iraqi, Palestine and other Muslim countries, and they just show it to people, that’s all they do. And then George Bush, you know, we hear on the news that George Bush was discussing with Tony Blair that he was thinking to bomb Al Jazeera so why would these people have their right to freedom and we don’t? So that’s why I think the people who are in power, they have the control over the media, and it’s a big political game. Because if it wasn’t then George Bush, he’s the symbol of politics, why would he want to bomb Al Jazeera for example? Amidst leaks and rumours (Timms) that the 2003 US bombing of Al Jazeera was a deliberate attack upon one of the few elements of the public sphere in which some Western-nationality Muslims have confidence, many elements of the mainstream Western media rose to Al Jazeera’s defence. For example, using an appeal to the right of citizens to engage in and consume free speech, the editors of influential US paper The Nation commented that: If the classified memo detailing President Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the headquarters of Al Jazeera is provided to The Nation, we will publish the relevant sections. Why is it so vital that this information be made available to the American people? Because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press—particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press—upon which that country was founded. (cited in Scahill) For other Australian Muslims, it is the fact that some media organisations have been listed as banned by the US that gives them their ultimate credibility. This is the case with Al Manar, for example. Feeling that they are denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as equal political citizens, Australian Muslims are pursuing alternative communicative spaces that support and reinforce their own cultural worldviews. The act of engaging with marginalised and alternative communicative spaces constitutes what Clifford terms ‘collective practices of displaced dwelling’. It is through these practices of displaced dwelling that Australian Muslims essentialise their diasporic identity and negotiate new identities based on common perceptions of injustice against Muslims. But you look at Al Jazeera they talk in the same tongue as the Western media in our language. And then you look again at something like Al Manar who talks of their own tongue. They do not use the other media’s ideas. They have been attacked by the Australians, been attacked by the Israelis and they have their own opinion. This statement came from an Australian Muslim of Jordanian background in her late forties. It reflects a growing trend towards engaging with media messages that coincide with and reinforce a sense of injustice. The Al Manar television station to which this participant refers is a Lebanese based station run by the militant Hezbollah movement and accessible to Australians via satellite. Much like Al Jazeera, Al Manar broadcasts images of Iraqi and Palestinian suffering and, in the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, graphic images of Lebanese casualties of Israeli air strikes. Unlike the Al Jazeera broadcasts, these images are formatted into video clips accompanied by music and lyrics such as “we do not fear America”. Despite political pressure including a decision by the US to list Al Manar as a terrorist organisation in December 2004, just one week after a French ban on the station because its programming had “a militant perspective with anti-Semitic connotations” (Jorisch), Al Manar continued to broadcast videos depicting the US as the “mother of terrorism”. In one particularly graphic sequence, the Statue of Liberty rises from the depths of the sea, wielding a knife in place of the torch and dripping in blood, her face altered to resemble a skull. As she rises out of the sea accompanied by music resembling a funeral march the following words in Arabic are emblazoned across the screen: On the dead bodies of millions of native Americans And through the enslavement of tens of millions Africans The US rose It pried into the affairs of most countries in the world After an extensive list of countries impacted by US foreign policy including China, Japan, Congo, Vietnam, Peru, Laos, Libya and Guatamala, the video comes to a gruelling halt with the words ‘America owes blood to all of humanity’. Another video juxtaposes images of Bush with Hitler with the caption ‘History repeats itself’. One website run by the Coalition against Media Terrorism refers to Al Manar as ‘the beacon of hatred’ and applauds the decisions by the French and US governments to ban the station. Al Manar defended itself against the bans stating on its website that they are attempts “to terrorise and silence thoughts that are not in line with the US and Israeli policies.” The station claims that it continues on its mission “to carry the message of defending our peoples’ rights, holy places and just causes…within internationally agreed professional laws and standards”. The particular brand of propaganda employed by Al Manar is gaining popularity among some Muslims in Australia largely because it affirms their own views and opinions and offers them opportunities to engage in an alternative public space in which Muslims are positioned as the victims and not the aggressors. Renegotiating an ‘Othered’ Identity The negative portrayal of Muslims as ‘other’ in the Australian media and in political discourse has resulted in Australian Muslims constructing alternative identities based on a common perception of injustice. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror”, the ethnic divisions within the Muslim diaspora are becoming less significant as Australian Muslims reconstruct their identity based on a notion of supporting each other in the face of a global alliance against Islam. Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia. This causes problems, however, since religious identity has no place in the liberal democratic model, which espouses secularism. This is particularly the case where that religion is sometimes constructed as being at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy; namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. This problematic creates a context in which Muslim Australians are not only denied their heterogeneity in the media and political discourse but are dealt with through an understanding of Islam that is constructed on the basis of a cultural and ideological clash between Islam and the West. Religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship. Such ‘essentialising practices’ as eliding considerable diversity into a single descriptor serves to reinforce and consolidate diasporic identity among Muslims in Australia, but does little to promote and assist participatory citizenship or to equip Muslims with the tools necessary to access the public sphere as political citizens of the secular state. In such circumstances, the moderate Muslim may be not so much a ‘preferred’ citizen as one whose rights has been constrained. Acknowledgment This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Bianca Smith. The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media (The Age and Herald Sun Newspapers). Melbourne: Monash University, 2005. Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. ”‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing Metrics of the Fear of Terrorism.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6 (2007): 113-122. Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Harvard UP, 1997. Haas, Tanni. “The Public Sphere as a Sphere of Publics: Rethinking Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Journal of Communication 54.1 (2004): 178- 84. Jorisch, Avi. J. “Al-Manar and the War in Iraq.” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5.2 (2003). Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24.2 (1974): 43-52. “Online Archives of California”. California Digital Library. n.d. Feb. 2008 http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1199n498/?&query= %22open%20platform%22&brand=oac&hit.rank=1>. Panopoulos, Sophie. Parliamentary debate, 5 Sep. 2005. Feb. 2008 http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard>. Saniotis, Arthur. “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’.” Journal of Australian Studies 82 (2004): 49-58. Scahill, Jeremy. “The War on Al-Jazeera (Comment)”. 2005. The Nation. Feb. 2008 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/scahill>. Timms, Dominic. “Al-Jazeera Seeks Answers over Bombing Memo”. 2005. Media Guardian. Feb. 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/23/iraq.iraqandthemedia>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. "‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php>. APA Style Aly, A., and L. Green. (Apr. 2008) "‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php>.