New film confronts stereotypes - by Fran Vinall

Paul Basha is a 19-ish TAFE student filming a 5-8 minute movie for his class. He’s all smiles, attempting to coax conversation out of our awkwardly silent class, while our teacher runs around printing various things off. His friends stand in the corner, filming this interview, and they joke around, relaxed. "Are you a terrorist?" one mockingly asks Paul, who laughs heartily. Oh, and Paul is Lebanese. Don’t worry though, this isn’t going to be another "What is the problem with our Middle Eastern youth?" paranoia-infested article. Quite the opposite, in fact. Paul is filming a movie about his Lebanese family, in an attempt to disprove the prevalent all-Lebs-are-violent stereotype running rampant in Australia’s media.

The stereotype of the aggressive Lebanese gang has been around for a while, long before the Cronulla riots, but it was the riots which really sparked things up. It would be a hot day in July when the newspapers don’t present some story or another about a crime committed by someone of "Middle Eastern appearance." Yet when the perpetrator is Caucasian, his description of race in the papers goes mysteriously missing. There is a problem in many Sydney suburbs, with the Lebanese demographic being worryingly overrepresented in crime, yet the problem, caused by the media, is that this results in people assuming all Lebanese people are out to get you. Which, when you look at people like Paul, is obviously not the case. As he puts it, "There are some who ruin it for the rest of us, who are honest and hardworking." He maintains he and his family are not the "fully sick ones with the doof doof music."

Paul’s grandparents migrated to Australia before the civil war began tearing Lebanon apart. They moved because they wanted a change: "To raise the family in a non-third world country was probably good," says Paul. Paul himself wants one day to visit Lebanon, calling it the "Paris of the Middle East."

"It’s a very picturesque country," he says – but don’t worry, he has his priorities straight, citing the food as a good reason for visiting his grandparents homeland.

Paul believes the stereotyping of Lebanese in the media is due to a bad attitude by the media – they must have a story in their minds before they go out there, he says. A fair point, and somewhat true – journalists are often told their angle before they go to investigate a news item. How many times do you think one has been told, oh, it’s a Lebanese crime, go for that? He also says that his culture is an easy target, especially after the neurosis-inducing riots.

Paul himself has been relatively free from racism growing up – he attended Stannies (St. Stanislaus College) in Bathurst, and says he only ever received anything race orientated from friends, as a joke. Still, sometimes people will ask him where he’s from, and when he replies that he’s Lebanese, the reactions can be starkly different. The majority will be cool with it, but there are the occasional bad apples who will treat him with him a disdainful "oh," and walk away. "Sometimes it’s ok to say you’re Lebanese, but sometimes you’re ashamed," he says. "Most of the time, I’m ok with it." Since he is generation Y, Paul believes he has escaped much of the racism of earlier times. His uncles and grandparents however, received some trouble fitting in in a new country. "Too Aussie to be Lebanese, too Lebanese to be Aussie," Paul says.

His movie is a documentary about his family and Lebanese culture, which he has been working on for about a term. His migrant grandparents will be a particular focus of the movie. "I wanted to do something completely different," says Paul. The movie can be viewed on December 3, 2009 at the TAF Campus on Panorama Avenue, Bathurst, as part of the Bathurst Information, Arts and Technology Showcase.

Every country has its idiots - by Nick Wade

Today we were given the opportunity of interviewing Paul Basha on the subject of his short film which is currently in production. Paul’s film deals with the sensitive issue of racial stereotyping in Australia, in particular towards the Lebanese culture and people. Now before you turn away or stop reading thinking to yourself “yes, yes I’ve heard it all before”, what separates Paul from the rest of the drab crowd who constantly whine and bicker about racism is that Paul makes some damn fine points.

The point that hits closest to home for me is his reference to the minorities and basically how they are the root of all negative stereotyping. I can easily relate to this because when the world looks at Australia what do they see? They see middle aged men with beer guts and sausage stained singlets living in the middle of the desert and keeping kangaroos as pets. How many of us are actually like this? This was Paul’s main point, that because some drongos in Sydney with too much testosterone sparked a riot and because America is at war with the Middle East does this make every Lebanese person within Australia a criminal? His exact words were: “It’s the minorities ruining it for the majority.”

I can sympathise with this point of view as I’m sick to death of tourists coming to Australia and being disappointed that I don’t know how to surf, I don’t have a tan and of course most shocking I don’t have a pet kangaroo.

Of course for an interview it wasn’t actually what was being said that sold Paul's case for me, it was the fact that Paul entered with his two mates laughing and joking being able to talk about the sensitive issues calmly and with good humour. When asked, “What in your opinion is the biggest difference between Australia and Lebanon?” he was unable to think of an answer but instead gave similarities between the two saying “they are good people, easy going”.

While I don’t doubt there are Lebanese people out there who I wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t particularly get along with I’m certain there are just as many Australians that fit into the same category. At the end of the day Paul's point is that every country has its idiots and we have to all try our best to not them tarnish our nationality's reputation. This is what Paul's film aims to do and can be viewed on the 3rd of December at the TAFE Showcase.

Newspaper extinction - how sad

By Chelsie Webster

I just read an article that claimed conventional media such as newspapers and magazines will be "dead", as technology is taking over, and people are turning to reading the news online, blogging and of COURSE the awesome twitter updates - LOL!

Yeah, maybe. I don't really know how to respond to this. Lets face it - Australians are bloody lazy. I don't know many people who leap out of bed at 6am to go fetch the paper to be read over brekky. Okay, so maybe we get it delivered now - but I haven't put much faith in the deranged man who drives that crappy little red car around Bathurst, hurling the paper at targets. Personally, I read the paper - 3 kinds of paper. The Blayney Chronicle which is of course an exciting read, the Daily Telegraph for all things sport only, and the Western Advocate for laughs.

So the internet is a great place to access blogs - but blogs don't have the facts, and newspaper stories are most of the time 70% fact. How do we know that some random nobody blogger is telling the truth? Television has been around for a long time, if we wanted to get rid of newspapers, we would of decades ago when we started accessing the news on television. I don't believe that newspapers are going to go "extinct", many people love to read the paper or magazine of a coffee during their lunch break. No blog or internet will ever replace that.

But once again, I really don't care. As long as the TV is feeding me my sport news, I wouldn't care if the paper went extinct. But then again...how would we get the tab guide?

Kyle at it again! Chelsie Webster

I'm sure you've already heard. And if you were unfortunate enough to hear it live on air, then I think you're an idiot for listening to Kyle Sandilands in the first place. Naturally, Kyle has obviously become bored with his miserable, greasy life, and has decided to bring down the hard efforts of Magda Szubanski's weight loss, by saying she could lose more weight in a concentration camp. I must admit, he's really outdone himself this time. Not only offending one person, but the survivors of Hitler's concentration camps, any Jew, Jewish group, families of those who died in the concentration camps...oh the list goes on! Well done Kyle! You've successfully managed to get the whole population of Australia to vomit in our mouths a little.

But I must think to myself...does Kyle sit around, while eating 3 family sized pizzas, and think of outrageous things to say on air to offend people? I think he's playing a game with us Australia...the more people he offends, and the more media time he gets, he gets more points! And maybe his crappy singer wife will feed him a little more dinner at night! Or maybe its some geniuses at 2day fm who come up with these awesome ideas?

Honestly Kyle, you are fat and greasy. Since you think Magda could go lose a little more weight, maybe you can become the new face of Jenny Craig? No, please don't. Nobody likes looking at you - maybe that is why you are on the radio.

Hitler still killing years later - Nick Wade

A new advertisement set to be released on German television depicts Hitler in a steamy encounter with a woman and a tag line that reads “AIDS is a mass murderer”. The ad campaign is aimed to counter a fall in public awareness about the virus and promote safe sex.
For those of you who don’t find this to be utterly hilarious and stupid, stop reading now you obviously don’t understand basic humour. For those of you who wish to learn, listen closely. AIDS is tragic, and by itself is not funny, Hitler was a meanie and by himself is not funny. However Hitler + AIDS = Very funny. So you see this is my proven formula that two wrongs make a funny.

Dirk Silz creative director of the Das committee agency is quoted as saying “We asked ourselves what face we could give to the virus, and it couldn’t be a pretty face”. Well Dirk Silz your right, up until now I myself thought aids was a walk in the park, but if Hitler’s concerned it must be bad. On the bright side we may now have a cure to the deadly virus, I’m pretty sure last time Hitler got up to his devious old ways we rounded up an army of Allied troops and marched right on over there to give him a slap on the wrist. By my reasoning this trusted solution ought to work like a charm on the pesky old AIDS virus.

As if the topic of AIDS and Hitler wasn’t serious enough this whole situation could actually be breaching a much larger and in my opinion far more important issue. I speak of course about the age old debate of “how soon is too soon?” This question has plagued comedians the world over for generations and in a recent poll has been discovered to actually be a much more pressing issue than finding a cure for aids.

You see Hitler and his holocaust was roughly 70 years ago and yet it’s still not funny, where as the untimely death of Steve Irwin was a mere 3 years ago, his family lives on without him and despite this the situation is already hilariously funny. In my opinion the solution to this problem should be next on our scientists list of things to do, a quantifiable formula to determine exactly how long it takes before a tragic situation ceases to be heart rending and starts to be laughable.

Alice's nightmare a dream come true - Fran Vinall

Sydney Entertainment Centre
August 24, 2009
Alice Cooper’s ‘Theatre of Death tour’ was everything one would expect from a man who more or less single-handedly invented his own genre, shock rock. He was decapitated, hung, electrified and lethally injected, usually by a deranged nurse, played by his real-life daughter. He murdered (by strangling), murdered (by stabbing with a mike stand,) necrophiled, threw money and diamonds into the crowd while brandishing a sword and played with a very true-to-life model of his own head. His costumes included an outfit with 7 extra, spindly metal arms, a straightjacket, and a blinding suit completely covered in glittering silver sequins, with matching cane and hat. And all this decadent cavorting took place under huge, hovering letters spelling alice.

Naturally, the music was at least as good as the spectacle of a stage show – the ‘seated’ section of the crowd surged to their feet and head banged like crazy as Alice (whose real name is the even more gothic cool Vincent Damon Furnier,) growled out tune after classic tune. He deviated between sludging, shaking guitar in songs like ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ and ‘Cold Ethel,’ to soulful crooning, even *gasp* sitting down for ‘Only Women Bleed.’ Thankfully, he didn’t make the mistake many of his contempories have in trying to focus on more recent material, and dedicated himself instead to his roots, with a nice helping of Billion Dollar Babies, School’s Out, Killer and so on served up with a smattering of more recent releases, that didn’t sound overly out of place amongst the old school anthems. The band was superb, slicing out the rock with professionalism, while at the same time sounding like they were having fun – it takes a mighty fine combination of musicians to take the stage with Alice, and they did it with finesse.

The support band, Electric Mary, were annoying, sending forth wave after wave of indistinguishable rock which hailed to the great, classic rock n roll of the 70’s but didn’t quite get there. The front man was either wasted or acting wasted, the latter seeming more likely, as he told jokes that weren’t funny and tried a little too hard to impress us with how Aussie and cool he was.

I was a little worried pre-concert about the prospect of watching someone who has lived nearly 6 decades stagger about the stage – the fact that the majority of the audience were in the 40+ age bracket did nothing to disperse this – but I had nothing to worry about. The heavy lines accumulated over the past 59 years only added to Alice’s leering, Goth/serial killer look, and this man is one example of ageing, if not gracefully, then at least with style – even if it was slightly ironic to hear him belt out “I’m eighteen! I don’t know what to do!” The concert started, and finished, with the fiendishly catchy rock anthem ‘School’s Out’ - the oldies in the crowd even sung along! Alice Cooper proved to Sydney tonight that he truly is one of the great rock institutions.

Nothing we didn't know - Casey Macpherson

I found an article today in The Sydney Morning Herald titled ‘the downside: alert as infection rates soar’. It is a brief article filled with statistics on sexual intercourse in teenagers and how they are on the rise. The whole article being very straight out and dull, telling us nothing we didn’t already know. Although the final few paragraphs do bring up a point almost leading to the direction of how to fix this issue. ‘”Young people are becoming more experimental with their sexuality and they don’t see the barriers to it now that we did in previous years as it’s more acceptable in the community now,” Ms Michealson said. The readily availability of pornography and representations of teen and adult sexuality in advertising and popular culture could negatively influence the way children and teenages view sex, she said. “Young people who are not informed or ready for sex education are being inundated with messages encouraging sexual behaviour that they are not ready to process and do not understand the consequences of.”
This statement is one step away from the best way to fix this issue and start sex education at younger ages. Something I believe should have been done a long time ago, and don’t understand why it was not. It has been recognised that advertising and media play a big factor in the lowering age of children becoming involved in sexual activity, it is also recognised that those who aren’t informed don’t understand the consequences. This leaves us with two solutions, remove sex scenes or anything sexual what so ever from every movie, the internet, TV show and ads. Sexuality being one of the major features for ad’s, with profiteering soaring, in this money driven world I doubt sexual references will ever be banned within the advertising industry. This leaves one other option, start sex ed at an earlier age, I’m constantly hearing of year 7 students at my school ‘getting around’ with an array of people in ages up to 20, pretty messed up if you ask me. As far as I remember year 6 sexual education is sugar coated cartoons of ‘what’s happening to me’ and a brief mention of actual sex in the form of ‘where did I come from’s’ and it’s for grown up’s who love each other. What’s that going to do for someone when they leave the sugar coated world of primary school and enter high school. A 13 year old girl gets to high school and an older guy shows some interest in her, all of a sudden she is cool cause she is ‘in’ with older kids, young, impressionable girl is going to go a long with what is supposed to be cool, and what does she know of the risks of diseases, pregnancy and everything else sex brings? Nothing other than old wives tales that her friends older sibling who also hasn’t reached the time of sex ed that actually educates you, tells her.
I recently attended a sexual health presentation only showed to senior high school students filled with graphic images and extensive information on STI’s. Something that made the whole room cringe and many swear to abstinence. With most likely about 50%+ of the people in that room already sexually active it was scary how many questions were asked and how much new information was given. I suggest they show presentations like this to age groups as young as year 7, as isn’t it better for them to make their own informed decisions, than with no knowledge or understanding of what their getting into by become sexually active.

My big day - Kate Lucas

Last week, I went down to the Western Advocate and I was interviewed by Miriam Siers on the trip to Italy next year. My interview was in the paper today.

Basically, I got a grant from the Spastic Centre-what a name for an organisation that deals with disabled people-so I can go on the trip to Italy with school next year.

I’ve also agreed to take part in a program run by the Spastic Centre, called “Just Like You”. It’s where I go around to schools in the Central West and talk to the students in Year 5 about having a disability and what it’s like. I haven’t actually done a session yet.

Anyway, I haven’t really got anything else to say on that subject.

Two hundred and forty-five thousand - Siobhonn Shannon

Two hundred and forty-five thousand is one of the most important statistics in Australian medicine today. It’s a fairly obscure digit, and you’ll probably have forgotten all about it by the time you go to bed tonight, which is, when you think about it, painfully ironic. Two hundred and forty-five thousand is, in fact, the current number of Australian citizens affected by Alzheimer’s disease, and many of them can’t even remember their own names. The least you can do is remember a number for them.

Finally, decades of intense research have led to the discovery of three genes which increase an individual’s chance of developing dementia in old age. Scientists in France, Britain and Australia have been able to compare the DNA sequences of those both with and without the debilitating brain condition. Alzheimer’s is characterised by the build up of plaque-like lesions in the brain, which impair the functions of important connections within the brain, causing memory loss and occasionally, the ability to from even the simplest thoughts and ideas. According to one scientist working on the project, the study has shown new pathways within the brain which lead to the disease, and therefore, hopefully, new ways to avoid it. The most specific Alzheimer avoidance technique so far is ‘a healthy diet and exercise’, which is really not enough to make those seriously at risk, or even those who are in the early stages of the disease feel confident that they are doing all they can to preserve their mind.

My maternal great-grandmother (who died before I was born) had Alzheimer’s, and from the very little that I’ve been able to understand about a person whom I’ve never met, it is clear to me that the disease has a tremendously poisonous effect on not only those who suffer it, but their loved ones as well. Not only must they suffer the pain of watching someone close to them slip away before their eyes, they must also, in time, come to fear the hereditary characteristics of the illness. If your ancestor had Alzheimer’s, there is an slightly increased chance of you developing it in old age. You won’t necessarily end up with dementia, but an increasing the risk of something always brings it just a little closer to home. You could go outside and get hit by a bus, but at least your descendant’s chances of getting hit by a bus won’t be higher than anyone else’s.

My grandmother, my mother and I all look incredibly alike, and every time we get together, there is always a tiny, unspoken fear that our minds will one day be alike as well, in the worst possible way. So, for us, and the memory of my great-grandmother’s suffering, every scientific development is a brightening of the light at the end of the tunnel.