Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been confronted by a portion of Sydney’s Muslim community, following his appearance at Lakemba Mosque on March 20.
The Prime Minister had been invited to the mosque by community leaders, alongside Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, to celebrate Eid.
During the visit he was shouted at by ‘a few’ of the 30,000 attendees throughout his speech, and again as he was leaving.
The provocation was described as a boiling point for a long-simmering frustration for Australia’s Islamic community, which, according to University of Wollongong muslim student, Myles Balde, had been largely ‘ignored.’
“If you go to a mosque, with a lot of Palestinian muslims, It’s one hundred per cent warranted, that you feel this lack of accountability from the government [when] putting in measures to keep us safe,” Mr Balde said.
Similar sentiments were echoed by Lakemba’s Lebanese Muslim Association in a statement to The Guardian, in which they emphasised a “community that is informed, engaged, and unafraid to speak directly.”
“Walking away from engagement has not advanced our community… it has not reduced Islamophobia here,” the statement continued.
Monash University’s ‘Mapping Social Cohesion Report,’ which serves to measure the rate of ‘social cohesion’ annually, reached its lowest score in six years in 2023. That figure has not increased in the two years since.
The statistics suggest that this stems from anti-Palestinian sentiment, with the period following October 2023 seeing a 1300 per cent increase in reported Islamophobic incidents, compared to the same period in 2022.
Additionally, the national register of Islamophobic incidents notes a significant increase since the beginning of 2023 in all in-person categories, from harassment and verbal threats to physical assault. This compares sharply to the eight years of previous reports between 2014 and 2021.
A letter from the Islamophobia Register directed to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has revealed that in the fortnight following the Bondi Beach mass shooting, there was a 740 per cent increase in reporting rates of in-person Islamophobic incidents. This is compared to a statistic that was already significantly higher than the average between 2014 and 2021.
The registry’s demographic statistics suggest that the violence against Islamic Australians holds much in common with other trends.
In a media release, the Islamophobia Registry has suggested that federal and state governments should not only ‘recognise Islamophobia against women and girls [and] fund intervention programs appropriately’, but give ‘urgent attention’ to the impact of Islamophobia.
