Australia’s current Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, made a number of ignorant and bigoted comments in recent weeks regarding the presence of Lebanese Muslims in Australia. He stated that the Liberal Party Prime Minister in the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser, made a mistake in allowing Lebanese to settle in the country, because a proportion of their grandchildren have been guilty of terrorism-related offences. Linking a particular ethnic group to terrorism, Dutton promoted xenophobic sentiments, and his boss, current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has stated his support for the Immigration Minister. As Omar Bensaidi, a philosophy and law student at Western Sydney University, explained in an article for The Guardian newspaper, Dutton’s misguided remarks did not appear out of thin air:
He is just another voice who continues to espouse a “common sense” political incorrectness that is somehow deemed heroic. He again privileges a baseless white anxiety that has, by force of repetition, and by the astounding rise of Donald Trump, come to turn the word “immigrant” into a threat or mistake.
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