Comparing The Fight Against Injustice In When Michael Met Mina And Freedom Stories

When Michael Met Mina and Freedom Stories both present the idea of fighting against injustice from a fictional and non-fiction standpoint. Discuss.

The heart-warming story of two young love-birds, with contradicting beliefs, in the fictional novel, When Michael Met Mina, by Randal Abdel-Fattah shares similar refugee and asylum seeker traits to that in the raw and truthful documentary series, Freedom Stories, directed by Steve Thomas. Throughout each of the stories it is clearly indicated that Mina, in When Michael Met Mina, and Shafiq, from Freedom Stories, fight against injustice. Mina does this by standing up for herself, her background and culture, at the pronouncement of her new piers stereotyping opinions and by continuing to push through
She has confidence to stand up against the biggest of bullies. Fleeing from Afghanistan, due to the Taliban, and arriving in Australia without a baby brother is hard enough. In addition to newly founded, prejudice organisation, Aussie Values and moving to a new school, these factors all result in Mina facing some of the most excruciating inequities available. On Mina’s first day she is already bombarded with rude and unnecessary racist comments as her piers joke that, ‘in Saudi Arabia, downloading movies count[s] as stealing,’ and that ‘Muslim countries’ would ‘wrist to wrist’ instead of high fiving. Followed by claims by the son of the founder of Aussie Values, Michael, who has already announced, ‘if you come by boat you’ve jumped the queue,’ before the school bell had even rung on Mina’s first day. This was only the beginning of many hazardous encounters with Aussie Values in the future. These gratuitous statements are discriminatory and prove how uneducated many Australians are. It shows great injustice to stereotype races so untruthfully. Mina’s entire family encounters further, unimaginable racism and stereotyping, with claims towards their Halal restaurant that ‘Halal certification money funds terrorism,’ this was only the beginning of a number of physical and verbal attacks on the restaurant. Resulting in Mina’s family being in constant fear that, ‘the media business will affect the restaurant.’ Throughout these injustice
When Michael met Mina is represented in a fictional format. This creates an appealing story for young people, as it is age relatable and includes parties and other things than the average teenager may also experience. Hard to dislike characters like Michael’s parents, who show ‘passion and eloquence’ and certainly ‘aren’t bad people’ help the readers to understand that good people are not always right, as ‘it’s hard to accept that nice people can be racist too.’ It allows readers to be informed that their role model’s beliefs are not always correct and it is important to create your own understanding, and not believe everything that the media says. Freedom Stories take a different approach, in representing the stories of real life refugees, in a non-fictional format. This provides a very confronting story that evokes strong sympathy, viewers can physically see and hear the trauma and how is has affected these people. Seeing Shafiq re-watch footage from the Woomera Immigration Centre and recalling memories, such as his lock number ‘148’ was much more confronting than just reading it, as Shafiq’s facial expressions and tone introduced a deeper and more intense emotional feeling. By representing refugee’s stories in a documentary formation it provided an accurate and factual story, from a non-bias perspective. Steve Thomas was responsible for truthfully explaining