December 16, 2005

"When Australian men do it to Australian women, it's O.K. When we do it, it's sleazy."

NYT on the riots in Australia.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 7:18 AM
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6 comments:

ShadyCharacter said...

What an absolutely fascinating article! No mention of the churches that have been burned, or the carollers that have been attacked. No mention of the hundreds of smashed windows and the violence of the response the next day from the Lebanese muslim mobs. Violence that is ongoing. From the Australian:

"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.

In response, members of the Arab Christian and Arab Muslim communities have called for a curfew for all Lebanese youths over the weekend.

Police believe the attack on the hall, in the suburb of Auburn, was intended to destroy the Uniting church next door, while nearby StThomas’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.

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. ...

Amjad Mehboob, head of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said he believed the violence had been committed by an extremist fringe of the Muslim community. “I wish we knew who they were. I wish we could engage with them so we can find out what their beliefs are, so we can deal with them,” he said."

Doesn't this seem on-topic and newsworthy?

Throw in a couple of digs at the conservative government (ie reporting as a fact that Howard spread lies about middle-easterners throwing children overboard in an attempt to "dehumanize" them to play to the racists that voted for him - you think Howard or his supporters might have a different take? We don't know from the article, do we?)

The problem with this article isn't that it's one-sided, it's that it, for whatever reason, doesn't even attempt to describe the entirety of the events of the last couple of weeks.

Plus, love the picture! They could have been just as inflamatory if they had put up a picture of a charred altar in one of those burned-out churches or if they had shown a Lebanese youth smashing a car window with a baseball bat. Wonder why they went with this picture...
And from the articles I've read the complaint women have on those beaches isn't that these "Lebanese youths" are using lame pick up lines in an attempt to score with the bikini clad women like the Aussie men, but that they are being harrased for their immodesty... That's a different animal and one not mentioned in the article. I wonder why?

12/16/05, 9:22 AM
Alcibiades said...

That's seems to be the view for PC public distribution. But as in Paris there appear to be a whole lot of unmentionables that the press has not...mentioned.

Here's a police officer's perspective.

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.
...
The Middle Eastern crime groups and their associates number in the thousands, not the hundreds as the government and senior police would have you believe. It is the biggest crime problem we have ever faced, and it is growing. Hardly a day goes past without some violent crime involving a “male of Middle Eastern appearance”, though I see lately that description is watered down now to include “and / or Mediterranean appearance”. To an operational policeman, there is a noticeable difference between an Italian and a Lebanese male.

That these groups of males can roam a city and assault, rob and intimidate at will can no longer be denied or excused. You need only to look at Paris and other European countries that have had mass immigration from Middle Eastern countries to see the sort of problems we can expect in years to come. My prediction is that within ten years, Middle Eastern crime groups will spread rapidly across Australia as they seek to expand their enterprises. There will be no-go areas in south-western Sydney, just like Paris.

Check out Tim Blair's coverage as well. Apparently rape and gang rape and harrassment of women is a constant problem in certain neighborhoods. And yeah, I'd call that more than sleazy.

12/16/05, 9:43 AM
ALH ipinions said...

There’s nothing unique or subtle about what happened in Australia.

I’ve often queried my white Australian friends who - with moral indignation from their lily white haven down under – accuse white Americans of virulent racism. Because I always suspected that such moral indignation is easy and perhaps comforting when there are virtually no blacks (non-white people) in their midst. Moreover, I found their criticisms of Americans especially hypocritical considering that these are people who have effectively forced Australia’s aboriginal population to live under Apartheid conditions; incidentally, with hardly a word of condemnation from the international community.

But with the recent influx of “minorities” from other parts of the world, many Australians are finding that they are no different than the American racists they despised.

12/16/05, 9:57 AM
Richard Dolan said...

Here's another perspective you're not likely to read about in the NY Times (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.

Posted by James C. Bennett at 06:06 PM | Add a comment (7) | TrackBack (0)
Quote of the Day: Mencken in 1923

12/16/05, 10:20 AM
goesh said...

Yup, it seems a number of facts were sort of passed by, but then muslim extremism is a very small minority view. We must not confuse all that is happening in Europe and places like Sweden and now Austrailia with the indescretions of impoverished, spunky youth.

12/16/05, 11:15 AM
Harkonnendog said...

Australians aren't racists. The Lebanese Muslims ARE racist. Look at the marriage rates for 2nd generation immigrants in Australia and every ethnic group marries outside their race at 80+% rates.
They are assimilated in less than two generations.
The Lebanese Muslims, on the other hand, marry outside their own group at a rate of less than 10%. They CHOOSE to reject other races, or rather other cultures.
What keeps getting lost in this discussion is that Lebanese Muslims have been aggressively harrassing people in this area for a long time, and the riots were a RESPONSE to their aggression.
That's not racism, imho.

12/16/05, 1:55 PM

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