Muslim Australians still feeling the pressure

Greek Australian Muslim Tony Vlahos agrees that surveillance of Muslim communities should be done carefully and discretely, believing that a concentrated focus on security in Muslim-populated areas could have a counterproductive effect and breed hostility towards authorities.
"The community shouldn't be profiled just because they are Muslim. However, I do encourage the police and the government to engage with the Muslim community so as not to alienate then and so that if anything of concern does come up, people will not be hesitant to approach the police," he said.
Vlahos, a security consultant, converted to Islam in 2001, a mere six months from the 9/11 attacks that changed everything for Muslims around the world.
Over a decade since the infamous airplane crash on New York's World Trade Centre, Muslim Australians in Melbourne's northern suburbs, which includes suburbs such as Dallas and Broadmeadows, are still under police surveillance on the basis that the area is a potential terror hotspot due to the high concentration of Muslims residing there.
Maria Vamvakinou, Federal Member for Calwell, told Neos Kosmos last week that it was obvious to her constituents that the area was under surveillance. She added that it could have adverse impacts on the community, by making residents feel that they are being unnecessarily targeted and are being excluded from mainstream Australia.
Vamvakinou, whose electorate contains up to 18,000 Muslims, suggested that a funding program put in place to counter extremism and radicalism in Muslim communities should not be administered by the Federal Attorney General's Office. The department currently runs the program, worth $10 million, which targets community groups to encourage youth social interaction projects.
"Unfortunately, I did receive some negative attention when I told people I was Muslim , and even though I tried to correct people's misunderstanding about Islam and tried to tell that it was just a handful of terrorists making life harder for everyone else, there were always people who wanted to believe that Islam was a violent religion."
He said the backlash against Muslims was not helped by the media and the government. Post-9/11 and the Bali bombings, the high media coverage of radical Muslims impacted the mass majority of moderate, everyday Muslims.
Vlahos urges it is "lazy investigating" to target communities based on religion. The concentration of Muslims in places like Melbourne's northern suburbs is due to the need for migrants in these communities to receive support from people similar to themselves.
"We had the same thing with the Italians and Greeks who used to populate Brunswick, and now areas like Doncaster. New migrants in particular naturally want to stay in a place where they have easy access to familiar foods, places of worship and people who speak the same language as them."