More to the riots than racism:

By Andrew Bolt

Four attacks on churches in 24 hours remind us it's foolish to dismiss the riots in Sydney as just proof of white Australian racism. Yes, the scuffles at Cronulla on Sunday were brutal and cowardly. But they seemed in part driven not just by beer, but exasperation at the failure of police to deal with Lebanese gangs who'd harassed beachgoers for years. And only a few people were hurt and none seriously. Yet this was, to the usual suspects, confirmation of "our" racism - of the "racial exclusion" that La Trobe University's Professor Marilyn Lake yesterday said was "a deep part of our heritage".

But see now the far worse retaliation by Lebanese gangs. Over the past days we've seen a man stabbed in the back, a woman bashed in the face with a bat, businesses smashed and more than 100 cars wrecked. Now the gangs have allegedly burned the hall of a Uniting church - a church catering for Tongan Australians. They've smashed the windows of St Thomas's Anglican Church - attended by Chinese Australians. And they've allegedly shot up cars outside a carols service for mainly Maronite Christians - Australians of Middle Eastern background.

Each assault was against a proof of "our" welcome to people of other races. Those who say this strife is about nasty "us", as in white racists, are blind, or maybe racist themselves.

"We have a problem with law and order, not race hate" -- Saturday 18th. editorial in "The Australian" newspaper -- commenting on the reality that Australia's Left-leaning press is ignoring:

Among the 200 or so nations of the world, Australia is among the most diverse, tolerant, egalitarian and prosperous. To say, as some suggest, that we are unable to accommodate immigrants ignores the reality that about 20 per cent of us come from families where English is not the native language and who have been here for only one or two generations. And as for being insular, last year about 25 per cent of the population were born overseas, the highest proportion for a century. Australia is not a nation divided by religion, like Northern Ireland. Australia is not a nation split by race, like the US until the 1960s, or divided between tribes, like too many African and Balkan countries. Australia is not a nation where the social circumstances of an individual's birth inevitably defines their opportunities in life, like India. Naturally, this does not mean successfully accommodating millions of people of all sorts of faiths and ethnicities is always automatic. As the events of last week demonstrate, Sydney is suffering the results of alienation among the children of some Lebanese families who fled to Australia from the 1970s civil war in their country. But while an unacceptable situation - no group has any right to brawl and bully others in our community - this is an exception that largely proves the rule. We used to hear of problems among the children of Vietnamese refugees who also fled their country 30 years ago. But now the Vietnamese are just ordinary Australians. As are the vast majority of the Lebanese, and all the other Middle Eastern migrants who have arrived in the past 30 years.

But instead of putting the Cronulla riot in the overall context of migration, partisans are manipulating it to suit their own arguments. Some suggest that what we saw at Cronulla was a twisted expression of patriotism by young Australians outraged by an attack on lifesavers by youths of Middle Eastern - conveniently labelled Lebanese - origin. But there was no patriotism to be proud of displayed at Cronulla - just drunkenness, blood lust and blind prejudice. Just as bad, others ignore the catalyst for the conflict supplied by ethnic gang violence and have used the riots as an opportunity to sneer at ordinary Australians. Certainly people who have warned about violent gangs of young Lebanese men have been denounced as racists in the past. And this time elitists argued it was John Howard's fault, at least in part. On Tuesday, under blaring page one headlines, Melbourne's The Age announced that the Prime Minister "has refused to acknowledge the existence of underlying racism in Australia" - as if to suggest the supposed darkness of the Australian heart was self-evident. And on Thursday, The Sydney Morning Herald sought to show how Mr Howard had harmed our international standing. Again under page one headlines, it was considered startling news that some of the leaders at the East Asian summit had indulged in small talk over news of the Cronulla riots. Inside, the paper took the angle that Malaysia saw no place for Australia as a member of an East Asian community of nations. "Malaysia delivers a short, important, face slap", the headline read. The real story was the diplomatic triumph of just being involved at the summit, in large part due to the new Malaysian Prime Minister and other supportive southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia.

This was less inadequate analysis than puerile opportunism. The debate has nothing to do with blues on Sydney beaches. That we were at the East Asian summit at all demonstrates how relations have improved since former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad used to exclude Australia from every regional arrangement he could. It all demonstrates a desire to turn a law-and-order issue into a crisis of national identity and international diplomacy, and to blame Mr Howard for not denouncing Australians. In the way such arguments miss the point, they do us all a great disservice. That Sydney has a problem with gangs of young thugs demonstrates the way standards of policing and social order have slipped.

There are many reasons for this - dysfunctional families who do not discipline their sons, magistrates who think they are social workers, police who fear being labelled as bigoted brutes for enforcing the law and widespread acceptance of illegal drugs. But these are not problems unique to Sydney, or any other Australian city. And despite what the racists in our midst, as well as the Howard-haters, say, our national record in immigration is perhaps the defining achievement of Australia in our time. Cronulla witnessed disgraceful behaviour last weekend, but the riots did not demonstrate anything definitive about Australia.

Source

Countdown to conflict:

Long before race riots broke out last weekend, trouble was brewing on Sydney beaches. Lifesavers who volunteer at North Cronulla - that gorgeous beach in Sydney's south that was the setting for Puberty Blues - have been complaining for years about a weekend invasion. They don't mean by other freckled Anglo-Saxon sunseekers. It's the "young men of Middle Eastern appearance", the Arabs, predominantly from Lebanon, who arrive, en masse, in hotted-up cars, who rile them. These men - most of them still in their late teens or early 20s, who are Australian-born to Lebanese parents, often Muslim - come from the working-class western and southwestern suburbs, which have no beaches of their own.

With their dark skin, dark hair and gold chains, they are conspicuous in Cronulla, the jewel in the crown of the Sutherland Shire, where just 17 per cent of residents are foreign born (compared with a greater Sydney average of about 31 per cent) and where there is virtually no religious diversity (just 2.2 per cent of Sutherland residents practise a religion other than Christianity). The shire is also more affluent than its neighbours and is fast becoming a celebrity haven. Former Test cricket captain Steve Waugh lives there, as does swimmer Ian Thorpe, while celebrity chef Donna Hay was born there and went to a local high school.

The portrait is stunningly clear: the shire is a white, Anglo-Celtic, Christian heartland. But, ominously, this white sanctuary is hemmed in by the great Middle Eastern melting pots of Sydney: suburbs such as Bankstown, where half the residents are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. When the mercury climbs at the weekend, it is men and youths from these two very different groups who head for a single patch of sand at Cronulla beach. Shire locals say these Arabs have been "cruising for a bruising" for a while.

They allege the men taunt the lifesavers by stealing equipment and kicking balls at them. They annoy other beachgoers by claiming large sections of sand, from the water to the beach stairs, as a football pitch. They force people who are sunbaking to move by kicking up sand around them. They park illegally, blocking people's driveways, and tread all over people's towels. Or so it is alleged by local officials and beachgoers.

There is seething resentment, too, about their treatment of local girls, especially young girls, of Anglo-Saxon appearance, who say the boys stand over them as they sunbake, blocking the sun to get their attention and ogling their bikini-clad bodies. They leer, whistle and make appalling suggestions about how they might pass time on the beach, offering to have sex with the girls and asking if they are virgins. Again, so it is alleged. If the girls tell them to piss off, they turn nasty and call them sluts, whores and "skip" tarts.

There is no doubt anti-Arab feeling in the shire also can be traced to the violent rapes of young Anglo-Saxon girls by gangs of Lebanese boys in 2002, which culminated in the sentencing of Bilal Skaf to a maximum of 55 years in jail. There is anger, too, about Muslim leaders who have been seen on television preaching hatred against the West - such as Sheik Faiz Mohamad, who once said young women brought rape on themselves by wearing clothes that were "strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans" - and about Middle Eastern gang crime, including carjacking, drug trafficking and murder. This, then, was the landscape for the riots, which unfolded not over days but months and years.

During a long weekend last October, police were called to Cronulla three times to break up altercations between groups of these Arab boys and young male surfers clad in Celtic tattoos and boardshorts. Then, in November, three North Cronulla lifesavers were walking along the beach when four Middle Eastern youths began yelling at them in Arabic. Foul language was exchanged and the lifesavers were beaten up. One youth, aged 19, was pushed towards a metal fence spike that punctured the skin above his eyes. Another two, one of whom was just 15, suffered bad facial bruising. The bashings were widely publicised in Sydney, in the newspapers and on talkback radio. Soon, somebody had the idea that enough was enough and it was time to "take back" or defend a popular beach from the visiting hoons.

In SMS messages sent from mobile phones and in emails, "Aussies" were urged to gather at Cronulla for a rally last Sunday. As happens in these days of quick, cheap communication, the messages - tens of thousands of them - soon were re-sent across Sydney, into the central coast and into Queensland. Some were quite tame, calling on locals to simply turn up and rally. But other self-proclaimed "Aussies" clearly had mischief in mind. "Who said Gallipoli wouldn't happen again!" said one message. "Rock up 2 Cronulla this Sunday were [sic] u can witness Aussies beatin [sic] Turks on the beach." Another urged: "This Sunday every f---ing Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog-bashing day. Bring your mates down and let's claim back our shire."

Sydney breakfast radio king Alan Jones, who has been accused of race-baiting, read these messages on air and, as if the issue were not already inflamed, added: "I don't hear people complaining about Catholics and Protestants." ....

At first it seemed as if peace had a chance. The day of the rally, last Sunday, started much like any other December weekend; the beach at Cronulla was hot and crowded but the atmosphere was pleasant, even carnival-like. Families carried Australian flags. There were sausage sizzles and a game of cricket between people who had met just that day. beach captain from North Cronulla Surf Lifesaving Club, who asked not to be named for fear of being targeted, was there from the start. "It was a kind of a party atmosphere to start with," he says. "Lots of people and flags and horns tooting. It seemed fine to me. But more and more people arrived, and there was drinking and some yelling, and you could start to feel the mood changing a bit." .....

As the crowd swelled to the thousands, some young men stripped naked to the waist and painted obscene slogans on their white skin about Allah and the prophet Mohammed. A local in an Australian-flag baseball cap, Glenn Steele - who now admits he got stupidly drunk and behaved like an idiot - bellowed at the crowd, telling them to "get Lebs off the beach".

As the temperature climbed and more beer was consumed, the crowds looked around for somebody to torment. "You could see them almost hunting kids with their eyes," says Stuart, a young Cronulla surfer who was hoping to see a fight. "Not everybody was into the violence but you could see the crowd, it was like at school, when you know somebody is going to have a fight, and you just follow them around." It wasn't long before some drunk yobs found a couple of innocent boys with dark skin sunbaking on the sand and the attack began. Elsewhere, two Lebanese boys who travelled to Cronulla to build bridges tried to reason with the crowd but were quickly set upon and beaten. Police, who had been on standby, herded the boys into the Northies hotel. By then the crowd was baying: "F--- off, Lebs" and "F--- off, wogs".....

As dusk fell on Monday, a group of furious young men, apparently Arabic, began gathering at Lakemba Mosque. A rumour went around that "ugly Aussies" were on the way to torch the place. The crowd spotted two "Europeans" across the street taking photographs of them. They were a photographer and journalist from The Australian who had parked in the service station and were watching the swelling crowd. As the crowd began moving towards them, police moved in, pushing the journalist by his head into the car, saying: "Get out of here, now!" The photographer had his camera taken and the digital memory card removed before he, too, was shoved into the car. A mob descended and began kicking and shaking the car, denting the panels. The photographer gunned the engine, crashed on to the road and sped away.

Now the crowd needed a new focus for its anger. A convoy of 50 or more cars, filled with youths and men, soon began travelling from the western suburbs to the beach areas, first to Maroubra, then to Cronulla. Men wielding baseball bats, knives and axe handles shouted out open windows, abusing Caucasians stuck in the traffic jams they caused. They ran red lights and abused police, then smashed more than 100 cars.

A man, tending to his wheelie [garbage] bins, was stabbed between the shoulder blades. A woman watched, horrified, as the head of a shovel came smashing through her bedroom window. A man caught outside a youth hostel was pummelled to the ground and beaten until he was unconscious. Witnesses in Brighton-Le-Sands and Maroubra reported seeing men carrying wooden clubs with nails driven through them. Knives and bats were found discarded in bushes.

Police tried to respond, stopping and searching cars as they approached the area. People of Arabic appearance were forced out of their vehicles, on to their knees, then their faces, to await arrest, with pistols drawn and pointed at their heads.

The retaliation for Sunday's riot was not confined to the beach suburbs, however. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, says shots were fired outside a service at an Auburn primary school and church staff later found bullet holes in their cars.....

NSW Opposition Leader Peter Debnam said Sydney was paying the price for a lack of police on the streets and a "softly, softly" approach by the state Labor Government towards gang violence. "This is a real disgrace and it didn't just come about this week," he said.

More here

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