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Us and Them

This week has seen the publication of Peter Manning's book "Us and Them" [Random House] - an analysis of how the media deals with "us" [the West] and "them" [Arabs, Muslims, etc.].

The book couldn't be more timely given the truly disgraceful hack-pieces by Piers Akeman [The Daily Telegraph] and Andrew Bolt [Herald-Sun] yesterday, Alan Jones' utterly contemptible piece on the radio last week that Muslims ought to be profiled for inspection at airports and the call by #1 Mr Intolerant himself, John Howard, for Muslims to learn English, adopt Australian values and treat their women better. And then there is News Limited with its appeal to the lowest common-denominator in profiling Muslims in all sorts of ways.

The Age yesterday published an article - "An election looms, so Howard incites moral panic" - by Amjid Muhammad. Read the perspective of someone in the Arab community here. We don't get the opportunity to read that viewpoint all that often! It is all too obvious that the Howard Government is already at work on Tampa II as the next election looms.

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