AUSTRALIAI: SYD: As fears of fresh riots gripped Sydney about warring beach tribes and the tensions behind the brutal race battles last weekend, this weekend there was less trouble and little to show of it really, accept for the empty beaches, loss of income for local businesses, limited freedom for the whole community and the brutality of the NSW Police Force.

It is said to be the lucky country, where the beach culture more than any other phenomenon symbolises all that is breezy, open and inclusive about Australia.

But the cocktail of fear, alienation and youthful anger spawned by the Howard Government's scapegoating of Muslim communities over the past five years. Pro-Government Mainstream media giants promoting nationalism, inciting violence and announcing the event time and place. Cronulla beach had some of the worst racial violence ever seen here and now threatens the traditional Christmas of sun, sand and surf.

Overkill

Summer was effectively cancelled along 125 miles of the New South Wales coast this weekend as the authorities urged people to avoid beaches for fear of revenge attacks by armed hooligans.

But some people think that this was overkill because of the recent introduction of new police powers and if you search the boot of every vehicle or the pockets of every person then you're bound to find more implements, personal drugs or minor things like bracelets you put on with spikes (traditionally Gothic fetish clothing symbols) etc.

If you take everyone's phone then you're bound to get information that is private and confidential and all that nonsense is very Un-Australian indeed.

So claims of more arrests and seizures are related to stronger police powers too. Seizures and arrests from stronger police powers appear at first glance to validate those powers however this is simply not true, just because there is less privacy and more arrests.

The violence could disrupt the annual Christmas Day pilgrimage to Bondi Beach, Australia's most famous strip of sand, by more than 50,000 British and Irish expatriates and tourists. Morris Iemma, the Labor leader of New South Wales, apologised for massive security measures across Sydney, its biggest police operation since the 2000 Sydney Olympics. 'It is a long-term fight to ensure the hooligans, thugs and criminals who create disorder will not win,' Iemma said.

He said nothing about both the Liberal Government and Opposition Labor party promoting it by scapegoating the Muslim and Islamic communities for the last five years. Suggesting they threw their children in the water and now it's the terrorist phenomenon. He seems to think the kids got the idea from somewhere else and that these people weren't described as terrorists but they were. This was a generation of kids that grew up under the radical Howard government's policies, used to politically manipulate the population with fear and the target was the Muslims and the Islamic communities.

Hooligans and thugs that see all Muslims and Islamic people as suspected terrorist's leave little room for consolation. Boiling point is more easily reached because of the persecution of the Muslim and Islamic communities on the one hand and the raising of suspicion, generated by the Howard government and the pro-government media giants constantly, on the other.

The civil unrest gripping Australia's biggest city began two weeks ago after allegedly two teenage lifeguards at North Cronulla beach, in south Sydney, were allegedly attacked by a Lebanese Australian gang.

Why I say allegedly is because no one yet knows of the bias of the 'umpires' or lifeguards on the beach and they too are known to have bias. So we must get to the bottom of exactly who started the argument if it is going to be broadcast in the 'national interest' above everything else, which it needn't have been? So why was it in the 'national interest' anyway? Seems like a local 'community' or 'police' issue to me.

There had allegedly been reported anecdotes of sporadic violence and intimidation at Cronulla by groups of Lebanese Australians over several years, possibly due to police not policing them according to Tim Priest an ex NSW policeman. But others say that the root cause could also be that police were working with Lebanese Crime Gangs and of course what comes with that is protection from arrest and prosecution.

That is not to say that there had not been anecdotes of sporadic violence and intimidation at Cronulla by groups of Australians over several years and names have come up like the Bra boys the alleged defenders of the beach, according to some locals 'it's their way or the highway'.

This alleged attack on the lifeguards, made it a big issue because lifeguards are one of the most iconic of Australian symbols and that went too far for many people especially racist nationalists.

'It was a culmination of so many things over so many years,' says Danny Hanley, a resident whose daughters Renae and Simone were killed in the Bali bombing. He blames it on many 'crimes against ordinary Australians'.

Referring to Indonesian state sanctioned terror for the war on terror, which is terror but that's another story.

The result last Sunday was an ugly trip into the dark side of the Australian Dream. Images flashed around the world of young mates, full of alcohol, beating up a luckless few as the sun shone and the surf rolled.

They were chanting as if at a sports event: 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi'. There were bursts of 'Waltzing Matilda' and Australian flags were waved in the assembled throngs.

Some groups attacked people with swarthy complexions. One youngster had written 'Love 'nulla, fuck Allah' on his T-shirt. Police waded in to defend people being assaulted simply because of their skin and hair colour.

Rumours spread that 'gangs' were travelling in by train from the western suburbs, and a crowd headed for the station to find only a handful of passengers. Even these bewildered visitors were not spared the crowd's wrath.

Elsewhere, young men smashed the windows of a car before the terrified occupants made a rapid escape. This was racist scapegoating at its worst: the two occupants were Bangladeshi exchange students living at Cronulla.

In a few hours' mayhem, the comfortable, familiar sense of a stable society was blown away, revealing something malignant and ugly underneath.

Over the next two nights, when the sun went down, convoys of young Lebanese with baseball bats, stones and iron bars made for the beachside suburb to exact revenge. Local people were challenged through a megaphone to come out and fight. This was a message: the police do not control the streets.

These events have left a nasty blot on Australia's reputation - and its boast - of being a tolerant, all-embracing society. 'That was the ugliest manifestation of racism we have seen so far in this country,' said Keysar Trad, head of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

But the Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, re-elected last year on a hardline anti-immigration platform, claims the riots are criminal, not racial. 'I do not accept there is underlying racism here,' he said. 'Some of it is just incredibly bad behaviour fuelled by too much drink.'

Many Australians feel Howard is ignoring the problem. Others say his narrow response shows how well he has read Australia's mood. But by not condemning the racism, Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley have both arguably failed to show moral leadership.

Amanda Wise, of Macquarie University's Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, says: 'If a group of young people standing on a beach calling out "Let's kill all Lebs and wogs" is not racist, I don't know what is.'

Amid finger-pointing over who is to blame Australians are not questioning whether multiculturalism works they know it works and anyone who has chosen to undermine that is traitor to the Australian people and the Australian way of life.

There are fortunes to be won and lost no doubt

The ascent of Howard has given new authority to phone-in radio, shock jock, his preferred medium for reaching ordinary Australians. But Alan Jones, the Wallabies union coach, had taken a leading role in inciting last week's violence.

If I was one of those people damaged by this I'd be sending my claims to 2GB for the urgent attention of Mr Alan Jones and that may be the only thing that will stop him promoting his Nationalists point of view.

In the days before the riots, Jones of Radio 2GB warmed to callers who were inciting violence under a national banner and the spirit of Australia.

One caller named Charlie suggested all junior footballers in the Sutherland Shire, which includes Cronulla, should gather on the beach to support the lifesavers. 'Good stuff, good stuff,' Jones told him.

'I tell you who we want to encourage, Charlie, all the Pacific Island people because they don't take any nonsense. They are proud to be here - all those Samoans and Fijians and they say, "You step out of line, look out." And, of course, cowards always run, don't they?'

But when Berta - 'not of a Middle Eastern family' - rang to say there were two sides to the story she was cut off. Jones said: 'Let's not get too carried away, Berta. We don't have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney,' he said, referring to gang rapes five years ago involving Lebanese Muslims.

As if Australian's don't pack rape women and the Bulldogs football team are angels?

Brian Wilshire, 61, another 2GB presenter, was pulled off the air and forced to apologise on Friday for suggesting some Lebanese people were inbred, which gave them low IQs.

Rival broadcasters, politicians and community leaders believe shock jock radio stoked the racial tensions that have led to 101 people facing criminal charges. 'A number of presenters from the same station seem to have fuelled racism,' said Mr Trad of the Islamic group. 'They are fuelling racial division.'

There are an estimated 300,000 Muslims among the 20 million Australians. But just 600 of them live in Cronulla and the rest of the Sutherland Shire, a secluded area 40 minutes from central Sydney nicknamed the 'insular peninsula', which is separated from the rest of the cosmopolitan city by two rivers, an ocean and a national park.

It is where Britain's Captain James Cook dropped anchor in 1770, and generations of its residents are proud of its claim to be the birthplace of Australia.

The area represents the Howard's kind of patriotism - relaxed and comfortable - as well as the xenophobic fears stirred up by his government and Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration policy that he stole from the One Nation party in the Nineties.

'It's a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about,' Howard said. But last week's violence illustrates its parochialism and the territorial impulses of its residents.

Cronulla, the setting for the novel and film Puberty Blues, which explored the misogyny of white surf culture, is a parochial surfing stronghold, the scene of pitched battles between locals and interlopers since long boards arrived 40 years ago.

Jennifer Cornwall, who has just completed a history of the Sutherland Shire, says there have been confrontations between local surfers and those coming to Cronulla from the western suburbs of Sydney for decades. 'Really, it's partly about protecting your territory from outsiders and sticking with your mates,' she says.

Her view is that the violence is not just about race or any fundamental social breakdown. But the sharp differences between cultures, particularly of young men, in many parts of Sydney go back for many decades. In the Fifties and early Sixties, rival gangs were called Bodgies and Widgees and later Surfies, Sharpies and Whoies. Parallels can even be drawn between Sydney's new conflict and the seafront skirmishes between Britain's Mods and Rockers at Brighton in the Sixties.

But the bigotry of the ignorant Anglo-Saxon youths last week is different from that of some of their enemies in the disengaged and aggressive Lebanese gangs because of the Howard governments scapegoating of the Muslim and Islam community as suspects and alleged terrorists all the time in his war on terror, which is terror.

Constantly we've heard nothing but terror and the fear of it, used to manipulate political power, that has now backfired on the whole community, because it sets a very bad example of respect for all people no matter what race creed or colour.

Cronulla declared war on Australia

The indiscriminate retaliatory attacks by a gang of Lebanese men, has sickened law-abiding citizens too. And it has shocked an Australia that still considered itself the relaxed, sunburnt country portrayed in Dorothea MacKellar's iconic poem, My Country.

However it was Cronulla who had declared war on Australia. The Lebanese, Muslim and Islamic communities did not declare war on anyone.

In reality, Australia's national disquiet started more than 200 years ago when Cook and his crew confronted Aborigines in Botany Bay.

This has only added to a growing awareness that all is not well in the unlucky country. Shame on you John Howard shame!

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