Race riots shame Australia

Race riots shame Australia By: Khalid A-H Ansari December 14, 2005 A man threatens police at Cronulla Beach in Sydney AP Photo Sydney: What started as a seemingly innocuous face-off between two innocent Lebanese youths and a group of white right-wing Australians on a suburban Sydney beachfront last Sunday has reached a flashpoint, which has shaken the very foundations of Australia’s multicultural society.

The incident sparked off a retaliatory rampage by gangs of incensed Middle Easterners, brandishing handguns and rifles on a third night of violence and mob rule in Cronulla, Maroubra and Brighton le Sands that saw women molested, innocent residents and motorists terrorised, and cars and shops vandalised by hit-and-run guerilla tactics.

The riots have created panic among residents of the beachfront, many of whom are contemplating relocating since they no longer feel safe. A national television survey revealed yesterday that 76 per cent of the respondents felt the violence would continue.

Last night Sydney police, reinforced by state units, were in a state of readiness for more trouble, a sign on a wall proclaiming: “The war has just begun”.

Even as state premier Morris Iemma described the rioters as “rat bags” and “criminals”, the state parliament was recalled for an emergency sitting aimed at arming police with wider powers, similar to those during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.

The wave of attacks was fuelled by a series of text messages urging violence against men and women of Middle Eastern appearance by a 5,000-strong crowd at Cronulla.

A separate series of text messages urges locals to defend Sydney’s suburban beach strip. It is generally believed Lebanese gangs (‘louts’ according to some) of the area have been intent on making Cronulla beach their own private ethnic enclave.

While white supremist groups admitted involvement in the riots, political, religious and community leaders unanimously condemned Sunday’s senseless violence.

Far-Right groups accused of links to neo-Nazis have admitted mobilising more than 100 people to join the mob of drunken people on the rampage in Cronulla.

Three ultra-right wing organisations — Australia First, the Patriotic Youth League and the skinhead group Blood and Honour — are accused of handing out pamphlets at the rally.

Residents of the area and neighbouring suburbs continue to seethe with anger and police are bracing themselves for a renewed bout of fighting next Sunday.

Mobile phone text messages have been sent out calling upon “Aussies” and “Arabs” to avenge the injuries and bruised egos of last Sunday’s riot, described by Iemma as “the ugly face of racism”, which saw more than 20 people injured and 16 arrested.

Prime Minister John Howard was forced — rather belatedly — to reject suggestions that government warnings about homegrown terrorists fuelled the rampage, even as academics blamed talkback radio and the influence of Pauline Hanson’s now defunct One Nation party, even 9/11, the Middle East and Bali.

In the words of Ken Moroney, NSW Police Commissioner: “We have witnessed among the worst violence that I have ever seen in my policing service of 40 years. Never in my working life did I ever imagine a drunken mob turning on a woman, an innocent woman, who happened to stray on their path.”

There is a point of view that places blame for the riots at the feet of Howard’s support for the coalition war on Iraq.

Even as Howard denied there is underlying racism in Australia (however, he warned of the dangers of “tribalism”), historians, social scientists and political commentators agree that the riots are indicative of deep social divisions that have simmered under the surface for a long time.

As tension between rival ethnic groups escalated in a series of late-night revenge attacks on white Australian males, Sydney exploded into a second, then a third night of race warfare.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald: “Sunday’s images of young mates, full of alcohol, beating up a luckless few while the sun shone and the surf rolled into was a trip into the dark side of the Australian Dream.” The shining image of Australia being an egalitarian, multicultural, tolerant, laidback society has been seriously dented.

The riots have caused national soul-searching regarding what has come to be known as the Australian way of life.

While lambasting the drunken white rioters, whom it describes as ‘thugs’, The Australian, the country’s only national daily newspaper laments: “After half a century of welcoming millions of migrants from all over the world, the Cronulla riot is a stain on our national standard, and all it stands for.”

However, the most succinct, if simplistic, analysis came from a website reader. “In my mind,” he wrote, “it is not a case of Australians versus Lebanese – merely idiots versus idiots.”

Here's the antidote ...

Keith Windschuttle: It's not a race war, it's a clash of cultures

December 16, 2005

IT was inevitable, given the prevailing mind-set within government and the media, that Sydney's beachside violence this week would be called race riots. The NSW Premier, his ministers and many newspaper headlines all used the term. However, a more ungainly but nonetheless more accurate description would have been multicultural riots. For the doctrine of multiculturalism is really to blame.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas. It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group. That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities. Those youths certainly can be blamed for trying to beat up a few outnumbered innocents but not for responding to people as ethnics in the first place.

In earlier periods, Lebanese immigrants were not defined as an ethnic group. Lebanon is one of the oldest sources of Australian migration. People have been coming from that country since the 1880s. They were never defined as aliens under the old White Australia Policy and their numbers gradually grew from 601 in 1891 to 2670 in 1933.

Until 1975, almost all were Maronites or Christian Lebanese. They prospered here, married into the local community and, within two generations, became largely indistinguishable from the Australian mainstream. One of their offspring, Nick Shehadie, a former lord mayor of Sydney and the husband of NSW Governor Marie Bashir, captained the Wallabies in three of 30 Tests for his country. How Australian can you get?

After 1975, the onset of civil war brought Lebanese Muslims here on grounds of humanitarian resettlement. At the same time, the policy of multiculturalism was initiated by the Whitlam government and entrenched under Malcolm Fraser. Multiculturalism began and, until recently, was regarded by most Australians as a civilised concept to ease immigrants into their new environment.

But it became corrupted by partisan politics. As former Labor government minister Barry Jones has admitted, immigration became "a tremendously important element" in building up a long-term, non-English-speaking political constituency for his party. In the 1980s immigration policy switched from national interest to ethnic preference, from demographic and labour market need to family reunion. In the name of cultural diversity, the bureaucrats in charge used welfare and housing policy to promote ethnic community building. This concentrated non-English-speaking immigrants in western and southwestern Sydney.

Most affected were the post-1975 Lebanese Muslims. By 2001, 73 per cent of all Lebanese in Australia were living in these Sydney suburbs.

Multicultural policy was always justified by the assumption that the xenophobia of old Australia was the problem. This presumption still reverberates in the voices of politicians and journalists who have responded to this week's events as if Australian youths are the real culprits. Hypocritically, they denounce racial stereotyping of ethnic groups but freely typecast Anglo Australia.

Multiculturalism is also at odds with the core tenets of liberal democracy, where rights inhere in the individual, not the collective, and where people's representatives are elected politicians, not self-appointed ethnic spokesmen or godfathers. Multiculturalism is a reversion to tribalism that is anachronistic in a modern, liberal, urban society.

In Sydney it has been plain for at least a decade that, instead of ethnic communities living happily in the diversity of social pluralism, multiculturalism has bred ethnic ghettos characterised by high levels of unemployment, welfare dependency, welfare abuse, crime and violence. The social engineers responsible should have been well aware of the likely outcome, especially for young men.

All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants. Ghetto culture for young men everywhere is characterised by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected and a feckless attitude towards work.

The Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers that led to this week's mass retaliation were nothing new.

This behaviour has been with us for more than a decade. When the former principal of Punchbowl Boys High, a school dominated by Lebanese Muslim youth, suffered a breakdown and sued the NSW government, he gave an insight to the local culture.

Between 1995 and 1999, students armed with knives had threatened classmates, teachers were assaulted and gangs invaded classrooms. On one occasion, the principal had a gun held to his head by a Lebanese gang member who threatened to shoot him. One of his students was convicted of murdering a Korean schoolboy and three other students were jailed for their roles in some of Sydney's most notorious gang rapes.

In 1997, during a house fire in another Sydney ethnic ghetto at Auburn, known as Little Lebanon, police and firefighters were attacked by youths hurling rocks. An ambulance had a window shot out, ensuring all future ambulance calls to the locality were accompanied by police escort. Little Lebanon was a concentration of Muslim families from the same rural district who had come to Australia first as refugees, then as chain immigrants.

At the same time as all of this was going on, however, most Anglo Australians were giving the lie to the stereotype of latent racism. Outside the ethnic enclaves, instead of racist or ethnocentric attitudes to newcomers, old Australians were working with, marrying and having children with them.

Studies by Monash University's Bob Birrell of the most revealing test of immigrant integration, the marriage rate, showed that by the end of the '90s less than 10 per cent of second-generation marriages of people of European descent were to someone from their parents' country. Much the same was true of immigrants from south and east Asia. Only 6 per cent of Indians married within their ethnic group, as did only 18 per cent of Chinese. In short, most immigrants, whatever their race, married Australians of other nationalities.

However, for the Lebanese, of whom most of marriageable age were Muslims, these figures were reversed. No less than 74 per cent of Lebanese brides and 61 per cent of Lebanese grooms married within their own ethnic group. Moreover, these figures had increased since the early '90s, when they were about six percentage points lower. This pattern may have fulfilled the community-building objective sought by Lebanese political and religious leaders, but it has been a disaster for their constituents' relationship with the rest of Australia.

Put this week's beachside violence into its political and social context, and the conclusion is clear. It is not race that is the problem but culture. Multiracialism has been a success in contemporary Australia but multiculturalism has been an abject failure.

Keith Windschuttle's most recent book is The White Australia Policy (Macleay Press, 2004).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.