Institute of Criminology Sydney | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This book examines public worrying over "ethnic crime." How did the airborne terror attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, exacerbate existing tendencies to stereotype Arabs and Muslims as backward, inassimilable, without respect for Western laws and values, and complicit with barbarism and terrorism? Bin Laden in the Suburbs argues that we are witnessing the emergence of the "Arab Other" as the pre-eminent "folk devil" of our time. This Arab Other functions in the national imagination to prop up the project of national belonging. It has little to do with the lived experiences of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim Australians, and everything to do with a host of social anxieties which overlap in a series of moral panics. Bin Laden in the Suburbs analyses a decisive moment in the history of multiculturalism in Australia.