Unrest in Australia.
By Paul J Cella Posted in Culture — Comments (16) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
It has not attracted as much attention, but something similar to what happened some weeks ago in France is now happening in Australia: Urban strife with clear racial and religious undertones.
Four churches in Sydney’s southwest have been attacked in 24 hours as the city’s riots spread from race to religion.
A community hall linked to a Uniting church was burned to the ground early yesterday, carol-singers were spat on and church buildings peppered with gunfire. [. . .]
Police believe the attack on the hall, in the suburb of Auburn, was intended to destroy the Uniting church next door, while nearby St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, which has a primarily Chinese congregation, had all its front windows smashed. Three of the attacks were on churches within minutes of each other. The night before, Molotov cocktails were used in an attack on an Anglican church in Macquarie Fields in the city's far southwest.
The situation is complicated by the fact that a sizeable portion of the Arab population is Christian:
Arab Christians have suggested the attacks on churches may have been meant as a violent attempt to “shame” the city’s Lebanese Christian community into supporting Lebanese Muslims in the race-hate war, which began as a battle against young white males over use of suburban beaches.
But the statements of public officials leave little doubt about the unambiguous racial character of the violence.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma has called on people not to renounce their Australian identity in the face of intimidation by Lebanese gangs — even if it means being bashed.
His advice came after victims of rioting in Sydney told how they were asked if they were Australian before being attacked by large groups of Middle Eastern men. [. . .]
He said if he were approached by such a gang he would say he was “proudly Australian”, even if it meant being attacked.
We have, as well, the usual intimations, carefully veiled, of insufficient vigor from the politically correct bureaucracies that oversee the police:
The police response to the riots came under the spotlight last night when it emerged that officers were ordered to stay away from a gathering of Lebanese men in Sydney's west on Monday.
The Seven Network said a police incident report instructed officers to stay clear of Punchbowl Park, from where gangs later travelled to the riot hotspot of Cronulla.
Discerning observers have been anticipating this catastrophe for quite awhile: It does not require any great quality of prescience, but only some immunity to the virus of Liberalism, to predict that the social consequences of mass immigration will not all be happy. For a long time we the West have been content to imbibe the illusions projected before us by Liberalism — that all peoples are perfectly compatible, that the identity of a nation is infinitely elastic, that differences of culture and religion are ultimately superficial — and it is increasingly plain that our disillusionment will be shattering. It may even be fatal.
It is often answered that the solution to mass immigration is integration or assimilation; these words are repeated almost like an incantation. But the sad irony of this cast of mind — which has been aptly described as “right-wing Liberalism” — was perhaps captured best in a brilliant passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, in which he lamented the ceaseless “clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.” The right-Liberal removes the organ of national identity and demands the function of assimilation. He abets the liquidation of the very identity to which the immigrant is expected to assimilate.
Assimilation in the past came precisely because the American identity was affirmed without apology. Norman Podhoretz, in his book My Love Affair with America, gives us a good picture of this process when he describes, in his boyhood, the concerted and successful effort by a New York City public school teacher to eradicate his Yiddish accent. Podhoretz remarks that without this rather brutal force of assimilation, which essentially destroyed an element of his ethnic identity, his success in America would never have been possible. By giving young Norman a proper command of spoken English — and consequently, he notes, a love of the language — she set him on the path he later took to literary success. I ask the reader to consider the manifold obstacles we have subsequently erected in the path of any school teacher who aspires to such an undertaking in her, let us say, Hispanic students. Not merely do we now condemn such forceful assimilation, but we positively encourage its opposite.
The right-Liberal clamors for the very qualities he is rendering impossible. He censures the citizen who affirms the culture of his homeland against the culture of the foreigner; then turns around and assures us that the foreigner will naturally adopt, without pressure or incentive, the very culture the affirmation of which he has censured.
The results of the experiments in this dubious theory are slowly coming in — in Europe and now Australia.
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I say this because your translation of this reporting (even if I take it as your personal opinion) is pretty bad! Its selective and leads the reader to imply that "Middle-Eastern" gangs are the catalyst of this trouble. Are you aware of the fact that over 5000 angry white youths did the most damage in New South Wales? They send racist text images and beat up "arab" looking individuals on buses, trains and pretty much anywhere in sight? Are you aware of this at all? It's pretty sad when one tries to portray a horrible situation as a part of the many failings of liberalism. That has nothing to do with it!!! Its pure racial hatred and intolerance being manisfested by hoodlums and weak minded buffons in New South Wales whipped into a frenzy because of racism..isn't that worth commenting on? We have insular communities here..Amish, Orthodox Jews, Hmongs etc...they don't go around undermining our liberty and are not being attacked on buses or trains...Pls speak the truth in all respects when you touch on subjects like this because you do an injustice to your "conservative" position when you slant it!!
From http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/frenchriotstranscript.html#STEPHEN%20STEIN
LIGHT:
Back briefly to patriotic assimilation -- tragically this ideal is on the wane in America, this so-called nation of immigrants. The multiculturalists and politicians pandering to ethnic blocks have demanded and overseen its demise. Americanization actually of course worked brilliantly for the great waves of immigration in the late 19th to middle-20th centuries, but there was never a European parallel.The ideal of a nationhood in Europe remains a paradoxical and complicated business. On the one hand, in some places the ideal the idea Blut and Boden, "the blood and soil," has not altogether vanished. Albeit watered down, it still persists in Germany, while in other places, such as France, the notion has persisted that Frenchness is so utterly attractive, to be part of la mission civilatrice so powerful, that transformation can be safely relied upon to a prayer of its own accord without proactive, conscious effort at acculturation or assimilation.
Perhaps that expectation seemed realistic because of the European refugees who came to France and desperately wished to find a place where they could be accepted or others who were culturally closer. This was certainly the case with Jews who survived the Holocaust and the hundreds of thousands who were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world after the birth of Israel, Eastern Europeans seeking escape from communism like the Hungarians in '56; we could back to the White Russians in the 1920s.
But the vast majority of immigrants was and is Muslim. And one could argue that the group of Muslim immigrants that France has represents the ultimate "unmeltable" minority. Again, this is a group that rejects French cultural values out of hand, and not only rejects them but wishes to subvert them.
So despite the sort of analysis . . . that one hears on NPR or reads in The New York Times, I would argue that it is possible to simultaneously accept that the "unmeltable" minorities do have legitimate grievances about racism and exploitation and that the -- why it's in some respects the response to economic [conditions] -- but also recognize that the standard progressive solutions are simply irrelevant in terms of removing the deepest cause of the conflict.
The fact is that there is a movement sweeping the Muslim world that has its own project, and the project of that -- the project is, as Frank has mentioned before, to conquer Europe as well as the entirety of the non-Muslim world for Islam, to make Islamic law universal. While violence and terror can weaken Western resolve, demographic change is the best weapon at hand.
And Gaffney from same:
...it is Tablighi Jamaat that is currently coming to the fore and saying to the French government, you need peace; we can make it happen; all you have to do is give us the territory, the "no-go" zones. You want to stay out from hereafter and we will administer it under Sharia...Yes, the question was to sort of further elaborate the point that I made about the Tablighi Jannaat in France parlaying with the government in much the way I think Steve was just talking about -- have the French government cede control, not just effective control but legal control over what I think Steve called Bantustans of sort of Islamic self-ruled communities.
This is a phenomenon that is at work around the world. In this book War Footing that I mentioned earlier, we talk about it in places like Africa where you see Islamist groups insisting that their communities be ruled by Sharia. When, as has been indicated, there is some pushback, they then translate themselves or trying to transform themselves into the protectors of all Muslims and thereby help endear themselves or at least legitimate themselves within their communities, not as fringe, not as zealots, not as ideologues but as the protectors of the faith.
this is all very insightful and cogent. But right now that possibility seems fairly remote.
Do you want to provide some cites that refutes the story other than your heartfelt feelings? Because it seems to me that Paul sort of has facts on his side while you only have outrage on yours.
By the way, how does you send racist text messages to people you presumably don't know? Do you just spam the Arab-O-Phone network or what?
No defense of the civility of the so-called "white" gangs can be sustained.
But just curious. If you read the links provided in the story, do you really come away thinking these people were provoked only by mindless racism? There does appear to be a history leading to and following from the beach riots that has something to do with issues of "assimilation".
I try to be even handed as much as possible but somehow some of the folks who post on this blog can't reconcile their "conservative" leanings with even-handedness while pointing the finger at others. Anyway, nuff said..if you have time pls go to
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific
and click the story headlined "Sydney police issue beach warning"...you'll see more background. Type the word "text" and you'll see what I am talking about.
but I don't have time to research your arguments for you and then present them to myself.
Thanks for playing, though.
....all yours. Regarding hatred and intolerance manifested by weak-minded buffoons, if you are inclined to pontificate about such matters, you might want consider precisely who touched off the intercommunal violence.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Middle Eastern gangs initiated this round of unpleasantness.
If you live in an echo chamber then it a foregone conclusion that you'd check to see the reality of any situation.
us because you're too lazy to present an argument.
before you take off we ought to try to trace back the situation where all of this actually begins. I have read several articles that say that the problem begins with gangs of 'a particular ethnic group' roaming the beaches harassing Australian women. In some cases it has been verbal assaults of "slut" and "whore" an demanding they cover themselves. Anecdotally it appears that in other case it has apparently been more than verbal.
When groups of young Muslim men stalk the beaches of Sydney making sexually threatening comments against women in bathing costumes, as they indisputably do; and when they believe they act with the license of a sheik who claims that such women are responsible for their own sexual violation, is their religion, at least in part, to blame?
Source: Andrew West, The Sydney Morning Herald
People who riot and rampage need to be arrested and prosecuted regardless of their race, sex, religion, nationality or political persuasion. But it appears that the "rioters" in this case may have taken the law into their own hands to respond to a situation that the authorities have chosen to ignore for reasons of "multi-culturalism." Some evidence exists that persons of 'a particular ethnic group' have been given a pass on behaving to western civil standards because it is necessary to 'understand' that their standards are not the same as other Australians.
The Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau has published and distributed 50,000 copies of an 82-page handbook for Australian police officers, directing them on how to deal with people from all the unfamiliar cultures that an Australian policeman may encounter. A Sikh, for example, may receive a three-day reprieve from arrest if the arresting officer happens upon him while he is reading his holy scriptures -- a practice that takes fifty hours, and must not be interrupted. And Muslim husbands who beat their wives must be treated differently from other domestic violence cases, as a matter of cultural sensitivity: "In incidents such as domestic violence," says the handbook, "police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims."
Source: Robert Spencer, Frontpage Magazine
There is an argument to be made that had the authorities done their jobs in the first place, enforce Australian laws on all citizens and residents equally, then these riots may never have occurred.
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There is an argument to be made - " that had the authorities done their jobs in the first place, enforce Australian laws on all citizens and residents equally, then these riots may never have occurred."
Quite so, but the sources you quote are well wide of the mark (Id be concerned to quote Robert Spencer on any topic, but that's for anther thread)
Firstly, there is no evidence that persons of 'a particular ethnic group' have been given a pass. NSW Police and indeed all states, as well as New Zealand receive training via a publication called A Practical Reference to Religious Diversity for Operational Police and Emergency Services - but it contains none of the assertions that Spencer claims. In NSW, Task Force Gain directly targets the groups who your source claimed have been left alone for too long. It's been in effect since 2003.
"Task Force Gain was established to tackle serious crimes, such as the use of firearms, extortion, intimidation, drug trafficking and car rebirthing, to provide high-impact policing by targeting specific individuals and locations, to work with local area commands to build and maintain close links to communities served by the task force, and to operate a new community hotline, including the provision of Arabic-speaking operators. Task Force Gain has worked because of the close communication it has established with the communities it serves." http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/
I'd also like to add that it is a stretch to lay this at the feet of the Muslim community. The attack on the Cronulla Surf Life Savers that proved the catalyst for the violence later could very easily have been the act of Christians. We don't know and wont until they are caught and even then, it's irrelevant. Crimes should be punished - but never by mob rule. The text message sent urging people to attend was not overly specific either
"Aussies, get to the beach on Sunday to support Leb and wog bashing day. Bring your mates and let's show them that this is our beach and they are never welcome ... let's kill these boys."
The term wog loosely applies to anyone non-anglo, Italians and Greeks in particular. (who have adopted this derogatory slang for use almost as a term of endearment and more power to them for having done so) Hardly flag waving Muslims.
That said I do agree with you that the police should have enforced the laws of this country equally to prevent the riot, provided this included my fellow Anglo Saxons, the various white supremacy groups who attended the protest in particular.
Skinheads wearing boots, braces and neo-Nazi emblems were among the mob. Three far-right organisations: "Australia First Party", "Patriotic Youth League" (PYL) and the Newcastle-based "Blood and Honour" - all handed out pamphlets. PYL describes itself as a "radical nationalist" group with links to the German-based skinhead group Volksfront, British Nationalist Party and the New Zealand National Front.
Australia First's Dr Jim Saleam, who was jailed for 3 1/2 years in 1991 for possessing a firearm and organising a shotgun attack on the home of the African National Congress's Australian representative, said: "I wouldn't condone it, but I wouldn't condemn it," Dr Saleam said his members had recruited up to 120 people for the rally but denied they were involved in violence.
Targeting crime should include those who incite the violence. Period. And indeed if done so these riots may never have occurred. But blame for Cronulla isn't one way.
Damn, I gotta remember never to reply to anything this late and after pub closing time. I blame the amber fluid for the length of this.... Oops
from the tone of your comment you are there, and I am not, I will have to defer to your knowledge of the details. That being said apparently you agree in principle and I think that is important. Political correctness has invaded every aspect of our lives and in some cases as displaced common sense and it does not serve us well.
Even if Spenser overstates the details, the mere existence of A Practical Reference to Religious Diversity for Operational Police and Emergency Services is indicative of a mindset that law enforcement might today, or at some time in the future, have to take religious views into consideration; and I would contend that this opens the door for all sorts of "mischief."* I do not expect Catholics or Jews to be shown some special consideration or "understanding" when it comes to enforcing the law, and I see no reason why special consideration or "undertanding" need be extended to Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, etc.
None of this excuses or in any way justifies the actions of the mobs. Society must not tolerate mob violence as a means of dealing with its problems. But, if law enforcement does not protect all citizens equally then the results are predictable.
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* At the official website of the issuing agency the document is listed as under revision and not linked for online viewing.
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While sharing your attitude regarding the actions of the "thugs" that issued and responded to the email, I can't quite so easily discount evidence that there is more to the story than just pure racism.
Tim Priest, a retired detective, describes circumstances that extend well beyond a couple of life gaurds in a talk given on
November 12 to a Quadrant dinner in Sydney.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/php/article_view.php?article_id=581
...In the minds of the local population, the police were cowards and the message was, Lebs rule the streets. For a number of days, nothing was done to rectify this total breakdown of law and order. To the senior police in the area, it was more important to give the impression that local ethnic relations were never better. It was also important to Peter Ryan that no bad news stories appeared that may have given the impression that crime in any area was out of control. Had these hoodlums been arrested they would have filed IA complaints immediately via their Legal Aid lawyers and community leaders. To senior police, this was a cause for concern at the next Op Crime Review...
In hundreds upon hundreds of incidents police have backed down to Middle Eastern thugs and taken no action and allowed incidents to go unpunished. Again I stress the unbelievable influence that local politicians and religious leaders played in covering up the real state of play in the south-west...
As was the case in those days, we arrested every adult and teenager who had hampered our search. When it came to court, they were represented by Legal Aid, of course, who claimed that these people were innocent of the minor charges of public disorder and hindering police, because they were recent arrivals from a country where people have an historical hatred towards police, and that they also had poor communications skills and that the police had not executed the warrant in a manner that was acceptable to the Muslim occupants...The magistrate...threw the matter out, siding with the occupants and condemning the police...
I wonder whether the inventors of the racial hatred laws introduced during the golden years of multiculturalism ever took into account that we, the silent majority, would be the target of racial violence and hatred...
MANY OF YOU would have heard of the horrific problems in France with the outbreak of unprecedented crimes amongst an estimated five million Muslim immigrants. Middle Eastern males now make up 45,000 of the 90,000 inmates in French prisons. There are no-go areas in Paris for police and citizens alike. The rule of law has broken down so badly that when police went to one of these areas recently to round up three Islamic terrorists, they went in armoured vehicles, with heavy weaponry and over 1000 armed officers, just to arrest a few suspects. Why did it need such numbers? Because the threat of terrorist reprisal was minimal compared to the anticipated revolt by thousands of Middle Eastern and North African residents who have no respect for the rule of law in France and consider intrusions by police and authority a declaration of war.
The problems in Paris in Muslim communities are being replicated here in Sydney at an alarming rate. Paris has seen an explosion of rapes committed by Middle Eastern males on French women in the past fifteen years. The rapes are almost identical to those in Sydney. They are not only committed for sexual gratification but also with deep racial undertones along with threats of violence and retribution. What is more alarming is the identical reaction by some sections of the media and criminologists in France of downplaying the significance of race as an issue and even ganging up on those people who try to draw attention to the widening gulf between Middle Eastern youth and the rest of French society.
That is what we are seeing here. The usual suspects come out of their institutions and libraries to downplay and even cover up the growing problem of Middle Eastern crime. Why? My opinion, for what it's worth, is that these same social engineers have attempted to redefine our society. They have experimented with all manner of institutions, from prisons to mental institutions and recently to policing...
His talk is mostly anecdotal and at times opinionated, but it precedes the beach riots and I should think therefore it at least informs us of extant broader perceptions that are not patently racist, yet certainly supportive of the argument "that had the authorities done their jobs in the first place, enforce Australian laws on all citizens and residents equally, then these riots may never have occurred."
I'd be grateful if you would pop me an alert, because I be interested in filling in whatever deficeint hole exists in my education.
One Aussie observer suggests that the cause of the problem is not immigration per se or racial animosity, but instead the unique insularity of the Lebanese Muslims. Knowing little about Australia, I have no ability to judge whether his analysis withstands scrutiny, including particularly the distinction he draws between multi-culturalism (in his view, the source of the problem) and multi-racialism (in his view, a mistaken charge that lefty observers will be quick to make). In all events, it's certainly a different perspective on the Sydney riots that you are not likely to read in the NYTimes(article linked via instapundit):
Multi-culti Policy and the Sydney Beach Riots
Keith Windschuttle's op-ed in The Australian discusses the connection between Australian official multiculturalist policies over the past few decades and the failure of assimilation that led to the Sydney beach riots. Interestingly enough, as Windschuttle points out, the Anglosphere assimilation engine has continued to work in many cases in the face of official policy. Money quote:
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.
Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two.
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