With partners:
Student Snapshot 1
MALE STUDENT: What I don’t get, every time we do something bad we always get into trouble. But every day I see Aussies just, you know, driving around, I don’t know, they’re swearing and that. They say to the teachers… I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re walking around wagging and what do they say to them? Nothing.
Student Snapshot 2
MALE STUDENT: … the media… they show us as bad people through the news…
MALE STUDENT: And they always refer, “they are Lebbo”.
MALE STUDENT: Yeah, they are Lebbo and they mention our religion.
MALE STUDENT: “Oh they’re Muslims.” See they don’t go “oh a Christian man raped this girl.” It’s all “a Muslim man raped this girl.”
MALE STUDENT: … and every time a Lebanese or some Muslim person does something they get jailed, and if some Aussie would go kidnap a baby, they’d get…
MALE STUDENT: It would just say “a man kidnapped a kid”. If it was a Muslim, “an Arab kidnapped this kid”. They wouldn’t say a man.
MALE STUDENT: True, I agree with you there…
MALE STUDENT: We make a mistake they show it on the news. When other people make a mistake it’s never on the news…
Student Snapshot 3
FEMALE STUDENT: We are judged as tight-arses. Sorry, I don’t know why. We’re not, or the Lebanese people I know aren’t.
Student Snapshot 4
MALE STUDENT: (Non-Arabic): 9/11, what actually happened there, the media was blaming the whole Arabic community, and that's not actually true but - I'm not Arabic - but you shouldn't judge people, like you shouldn't judge the whole community just because one or two people done it, you haven't the right to . . . Not every single one of them went there and drove a plane into the buildings, it was only like twenty or thirty people so you can't blame every single person.
FEMALE STUDENT: Because Osama Bin Laden unfortunately was an Arab that kind of brings it upon us that we are too and like you’ve got some people in the society in Australia that think it shouldn’t matter what he was or whatever that it’s only him that did it not that every other Arab. But then you’ve got the other people, the other type of people who think negatively, that all Arabs are all like that.
Student Snapshot 5
FEMALE STUDENT 3: They think that us Lebanese people, the men are criminals, you know, they steal, they fight and everything and the ladies are forced to stay home and do nothing but stay home.
Student Snapshot 6
FEMALE STUDENT 11: Because of what’s happened in America with the terrorism, they think that Arabs and all Muslims, the Lebanese people, did it and they blamed us like straight away and they think bad of us but really we’re not like them.