Australian riots
There’s more than enough blame to go around, said Tony Parkinson in the Melbourne Age. The race riots that rocked Sydney this week weren’t the fault of the whites only, or the Lebanese only: The police, the media, the government, just about all of us are involved somehow. The ostensible cause was the mugging of two white lifeguards by a Lebanese gang, “seeking to rule by fear the streets of their adopted home.” Talk radio shows hammered away at the crime, whipping Sydneysiders into a frenzy of anger. A few days later, a “baying pack of drunken boofheads, susceptible to the worst excesses of phony patriotism,” descended on the beach and beat up any “Leb” they could find. Lebanese gangs then ratcheted up the violence by trashing suburban neighborhoods. Such bigotry—on both sides—is “un-Australian.”
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