Posted on 12/20/2005 7:20:07 AM PST by smithone
Christmas occurs in the middle of Australia's hot summer and is therefore spent by many Australians at the beach. Last weekend, however, the famous beaches near Sydney were sparsely attended. Only local citizens were allowed to pass checkpoints regulating access to the sea. Even then police were checking motor vehicles for weapons and alcohol.
These extraordinary precautions were the official response to the beach riots of the previous weekend in which hundreds of people had been involved. In their way they are a very typical response of modern liberal policing -- to inconvenience the general public instead of cracking down on rioters and lawbreakers. Such methods help to explain why the riots happened in the first place.
But what exactly did happen? First reports were that several hundred people had ranged over the Cronulla beach, attacking men "of Middle Eastern appearance." It seemed like a "race riot" in the most straightforward sense: People were attacked because they looked "Middle Eastern." Neo-nazis shipped in some of the rioters, and many others undoubtedly came to Cronulla that day spoiling for a fight.
They were apparently responding to an incident the previous Sunday when a gang of Middle Easterners had badly beaten up two Australian beach lifeguards. This attack followed a series of lesser incidents on the beaches in which Middle Eastern youths had threatened families and directed racial and sexual slurs at sunbathing Australian girls. In the background were several recent gang-rapes in which the rapists had told their victims that they were being raped specifically because they were Australian. Cronulla's white rioters came prepared to exact revenge primarily for the lifeguards but for these other outrages, too.
Of course, the riots themselves provoked an immediate and indiscriminate revenge. Carloads of "Middle Eastern" men, armed and threatening, attacked passersby, destroyed shops, shot at churches and asked their victims if they were "Aussies" before proceeding to beat them up. "Men of Middle Eastern appearance" is, as it happens, a nervous official euphemism for Lebanese Muslims. They emigrated to Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, following the Lebanese civil war, and they have not assimilated as successfully as earlier Christian Lebanese immigrants or as other Muslim groups such as the Turks.
No sooner had the police brought the riots under control than the sociologists appeared on the scene to do their destructive work. Their thesis, amplified by sympathetic journalists, was that the latent racism of Australians had been brought out by the conservative governments that had exploited racial themes in political campaigning.
Phil Glendenning of the Catholic Edmund Rice Centre analyzed thus: "Through Hansonism, the Tampa incident, children overboard, weapons of mass destruction and the unfair targeting of people of Islamic background over issues like terrorism and Iraq, Australia's young people are growing up in a culture of fear of the other." (Pauline Hanson led an anti-immigration political party, and the Tampa was a ship containing migrants to which the Australian government refused entry.)
But the problem with this analysis is that overwhelming evidence suggests that Australians are today among the least racist or prejudiced people in the world. In a survey of prejudicial attitudes, they were asked which people they would least like to have as next door neighbors. Only 5 percent replied immigrants. Australians, both those of European and of Asian descent, marry out of their parents' ethnic groups. And in a recent poll only 33 percent of Australians thought that there was too much immigration -- and that figure has been falling since the Tampa incident, which effectively reassured the voters that the Howard government would not allow illegal immigration to run unchecked.
What, then, accounts for the apparent hostility of many Aussies to the Lebanese Muslims? Well, one interesting point -- as the historian Keith Windschuttle has observed -- is that the Lebanese Muslims are exceptional in not marrying out. Unlike Lebanese Christians who have played an important role in Australian life and who are held in good esteem by others, the post-1970s Lebanese immigrants are a community that is relatively self-enclosed.
That is in part because they arrived in Australia at a time when the government was pursuing a policy of multiculturalism. It encouraged the Lebanese to remain culturally separate and warehoused them in what are effectively ghettoes in Sydney. Unlike earlier generations of Lebanese, which felt social and official pressures to assimilate, they remained apart.
That separateness had consequences. They did less well in school and had high rates of unemployment. Naturally, they became resentful. The younger Lebanese Muslims developed a "rejectionist" culture in relation to Australia. (Hence the stories that the counter-rioters asked victims if they were Australian before beating them up.)
That culture -- like the culture of many of the French rioters of North African background -- was a gangsta rap culture. Because they brought some of the habits of a violent society with them from Lebanon -- and those habits were not softened by assimilation to the Australian way of life -- the areas where they lived became areas of high crime.
The third factor is the police failed to maintain law and order in these ghettoes. As in France, the immigrants were left pretty much to themselves and to the control of "community leaders." These police tactics were partly a response to a hostile and violent attitude of many Lebanese to the police and other expressions of the Australian state.
But it was also encouraged by the courts and the authorities that wanted the police to maintain good ethnic relations rather than to catch criminals. As a result other Australians began to feel that the police would not protect them against Lebanese criminals and were tempted to take measures to protect themselves. Those measures degenerated at Cronulla into indiscriminate violence that has to be suppressed and condemned.
If we don't learn the lessons of what led up to it, it is likely to be repeated -- and not just in Australia.
God help the first muslim that riots in my town...All I need is an excuse.
You shoot at my church or family - there will be rounds going back down range...
I certainly hope the Aussies can resolve this. I have never been to that country, but, from what I have heard from others who have visited, the Australians are wonderful people who don't deserve this kind of treatment by the ungrateful immigrants.
No they're a typical response in unnatural multiculturalist and multuiracialist states, which tend to be violent and unstable and generally require a militarized police state to keep people from cutting each others throats. This isn't rocket science, societies that believe the same rules and have the same moral values have less need of discipline being administered from outside. As an old Colonel Blimp rah-for-the-empire type O'Sullivan ought to know that. The problem with Lebos in Australia is that they're there, and when they and others flooding into Australia make up a certain percent of the population then Australia as Australia will cease to exist. O'Sullivan's helpful hints on how to lessen multicultural violence are irrelevant to the bigger picture, they are a typical example of a "conservative" response carefully tailored to stay within the bounds of debate allowed by political correctness; an offer to help administer the destruction of Australia more efficiently.
I think the most likely scenario would not involve whites but rather a different minority group such as Mexicans or blacks. It will be one hell of a fight. My money is on our local boys. They put the gang in Gansta.
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