Are you like Jamal Rifi, Sheikh Malek Zeidan, Fatima Payman, Anne Aly and many other muslim and even non-muslim PoC “representatives” going to cherry pick issues that affect our communities in this white supremacist country for your personal convenience?
How long are you going to throw us eX-detainee refugees who arrived to this country by boat under the bus? Let us remind you that since the year 2000, the majority of eX-detainee refugees who arrived by boat to “Australia” come from muslim communities. Over the last few decades, every single eX-detainee refugee, muslim and non-muslim, adult or child who arrived by a leaky boat to seek asylum and subjected to detention torture in “Australia”, is a Person of Colour (PoC) affected by white supremacist border imperialism.
How can RISE eX-detainees forget the stained hands of Jamal Rifi who in 2013 was a member of the council “advising” the Federal Government on asylum seekers. In 2014, Jamal Rifi and Sheik Malek Zeidan visited Manus and Nauru refugee concentration camps run by the Australian government (just a few months before that the camps were administered by Jamal Rifi’s own “friend” Tony Burke), to try to convince over 60 Lebanese asylum seekers to self-deport (https://www.smh.com.au/national/go-home-community-leaders-tell-lebanese-asylum-seekers-20131228-300ox.html). Jamal Rifi even informed Australian media that the “majority” of them were “economic” refugees. At that time, Jamal Rifi himself admitted to the media that many of these Lebanese refugees were affected by “the spillover” from the war in Syria (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-06/lebanese-asylum-seekers-consider-returning-home-voluntarily/5186724)
Now Jamal Rifi is “shattered” that his friend, Australian Labor’s Immigration minister Tony Burke, who is again overseeing concentration camps that holds refugees, is not helping him to bring back “ISIS” families in Syria to so-called Australia (https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/doctor-working-to-bring-home-isis-brides-carrying-extra-passport-for-lost-boy-jailed-in-iraq-20260224-p5o4xc.html).
It’s deeply shameful that ALL “Australians” (white, muslim and PoC of all religions) have closed their eyes and been complicit in genocide, torture, rape and abuse and ignored the Australian government’s white supremacist and Islamaphobic refugee concentration camps and the deportation to torture and death of hundreds of our people who arrived by boat!
Are you White and PoC Australians, like the people in the USA with a white supremacist mindset, only going to react when a white Australian citizen is killed by border security to show basic human decency? With “community representatives” and “friends” like these, who needs enemies?
RISE eX-detainees