Twenty years ago, Les Murray wrote a poem about women getting roasted, one by one, on the greasy spit of Australian public life. It began:
"In Australia, a lone woman
is being crucified by the Press
at any given moment."
Cast out, he wrote,
"… she goes down, overwhelmed
in the feasting grins of pressmen
and Press women …"
Then, "After the feeding frenzy
Sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick
Precedes the next selection."
![Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being hounded in the media and on social media for her comments on Australia Day.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170715022327im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/f/4/a/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxb6qh.png/1500039577720.jpg)
Not much has changed – though thanks to social media, the abuse is broader, more intense and intrusive, more sustained. Not so much a firing squad with timed attacks as constant assault by drone and sniper, air, land and sea.
In 1997, when Murray wrote his poem, it was Lindy Chamberlain, grieving mother who would not cry on cue.
In 2017, it is Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a 26-year-old mechanical engineer who argued her Muslim faith could be feminist, and wrote a Facebook post on Anzac Day about remembering other people fleeing from, and suffering as a result of, wars today. Some of this is provocative. Not ill-intentioned, but ill-timed. But hardly incendiary. You'll hear similar ideas about how to remember war debated among students and veterans alike.
The reaction has been lacking in all proportion and reason. In the past few weeks, a crowd bearing torches have gathered in the town square and jabbed fists in the air: Deport her! Sack her! Run her over! Shut her down! Seize her passport! Shut the gates! Pull up the drawbridge! Front-page stories, editorials, polls, a clogging of social media arteries.
What on earth is going on? Why the hysteria?
Les Murray told me on Friday that the poem still stands. "It is not about whether I like people," he said, "but about the fact that women get slaughtered in Australia. I don't like to see people being bullied, I know a bit about the dynamics of bullying, and women cop it."
![Yassmin Abdel-Magied being targeted in a racist campaign.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170715022327im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/8/l/y/t/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxb6qh.png/1500039577720.jpg)
Abdel-Magied's savaging has been so grotesque in its meanness, ugly in its intolerance and alarming in its violence, that it's obvious something else is going on, too – something has been legitimised and unleashed. And it seems to be hostility to Islam, as well as women.
Just two years ago, Abdel-Magied was made Queensland's Young Australian of the Year for her work in founding Youth Without Borders, an organisation that helps young people work for positive change in their communities. In Yassmin's own words, "I do not hold an elected office, I do not officially represent any racial or cultural group, and I have never been part of a political party, union or even political student organisation ... if a few words that I put together are enough to terrify institutions into attacking me … then one has to ask, what are they so afraid of?"
What, indeed?
Racism, sexism and Islamophobia make a potent brew. Almost 90,000 words, by one estimate, have been written about Abdel-Magied in three months. She gets daily death threats, has had to change her phone number and move house.
Then, when she said she was moving to London, trolls sent songs: "You are a c---." Others taunted her "funny hat" and asked why it took so long, adding "good bloody riddance"; now "London will be an Islamic shithole", "don't f---ing come back", "hope you never return".
It's important to note that the hate this young author has experienced is not just infantile, graceless "trolling". It has also been fuelled by powerful politicians and commentators. LNP backbencher George Christensen said she should consider "self-deportation". Liberal senator Eric Abetz said she should move to an "Arab dictatorship" and asked Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to sack her from the board of the Council on Australian-Arab Relations.
Then, in a new low, this week, commentator Prue MacSween said she would run her over if she had the chance.
"She says she's been betrayed by Australia and didn't feel safe in her own country. Well, actually she might have been right there, because if I had seen her I'd be tempted to run her over, mate.
"She says she's Australia's most-hated Muslim. She shouldn't flatter herself – what about all those Muslim terrorist parked in our jails? We don't give this flea a second thought any more since she's slinked away from this country in disgrace."
Charming.
And foolish – Abdel-Magied's most vehement critics are those who say they oppose extreme Islam. Most experts will tell you their best shot of doing this is through empowering progressive Muslims. But when one sticks their head above the parapet, they are shot down. So how many will want to enter the fray now? After all, Abdel-Magied is also attacked by conservative Muslims for who she is, how she looks and how she thinks.
Remember when we ostensibly invaded Afghanistan so Muslim women could be more free? We seem more comfortable with Muslim women being victims than being actors – even worse, assertive actors using their freedom to freely disagree.
This week, a multi-university report found Muslim women were the victims of two-thirds of all Islamaphobic attacks in Australia. Globally, when antipathy to and anxiety about Islam flares, it is the women who get burnt.
Last month a bag of vomit was thrown at Muslim women driving in Lancashire. A pregnant Muslim woman was kicked in the stomach in a UK supermarket and lost her baby. A Scottish Muslim woman visiting New York had her shirt set on fire when she was standing in the street. In Sydney in May, four women wearing the hijab were assaulted by a 39-year-old woman who said in court: "Only thing I did was ... hit a Muslim. I don't see any problem with that."
On Wednesday, Abdel-Magied tweeted: "Striving to always respond from a place of forgiveness and grace, inshallah."
Shame the rest of us don't do the same.
Julia Baird hosts the Drum on ABCTV.
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