Aussies...is this true???

[carbonq]

August 14, 2006

A minority causes collateral damage to the way we live, writes Paul Sheehan.

One of the edges of the global clash between Muslims and the rest is a bottle shop in a small and ratty shopping mall in western Sydney. The owner of the bottle shop is suffering low-level but steady harassment from his neighbours, who want him gone. He's a Christian who has been told repeatedly: "This is a Muslim area," and he is selling alcohol, which is proscribed by Islam.

The one-hour parking zone outside the bottle shop is always occupied because local Muslims leave their cars there all day. The owner has written to the local council to complain, and nothing has been done. He does not want to be identified because he fears retribution. His reaction is sensible.

A friend of mine, Jenny D, used to live in Lakemba. She began receiving insults from people in the street, usually Muslim women wearing headscarves, and sometimes Muslim men. If she wore a short skirt, she could expect abuse or comment. She left Lakemba. Soon after, I moved to America, stayed away for 10 years, and thought nothing more of her story. But after I came back to Sydney I found Jenny's experience had been part of a larger pattern.

One particularly strong witness to this pattern was Judith, who managed an agency helping war widows, because she encountered "dozens" of cases where people were harassed by Muslim neighbours who wanted them gone. "It was common," she told me. "A lot of these ladies couldn't take it and moved out. It happened in Campsie, Belmore, Lakemba, Bankstown, Punchbowl ...

"It was everything ... throwing rubbish over the fence, screaming abuse, blocking the driveway, knocking fences down. One guy would throw coffee grains on the windows and bottles on the roof late at night ... I confronted some of them, and the men would call me a lot of names, mostly in Arabic."

Our Western multiracial ideals have been assaulted yet again this week, via the plan by Islamic jihadists to commit mass murder by blowing up airliners flying out of Heathrow Airport. Even in failure, the plot is producing immense collateral damage in disruption, fear and suspicion.

The collateral damage is particularly severe among the proverbial people "of Middle Eastern appearance". Apart from the majority of Muslims who are just trying to get on with the normalcy of live-and-let-live, most Australians do not appear to realise that the majority of immigrants from the Middle East are not Muslim but Christian. The harassed operator of the bottle shop, for instance, is an Arab Christian. The Maronite, Catholic and Orthodox Christians from Lebanon, the Christian Palestinians and Iraqis, and Coptics from Egypt, collectively outnumber Muslim immigrants from the Middle East in Australia.

This majority of Middle Eastern immigrants have been innocent bystanders in the cultural tensions in Sydney since the Cronulla riot and self-styled "intifada" that followed it in December. They are experiencing collateral damage just as Lebanon itself is suffering as Israel uses a sledgehammer on Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims, while causing enormous suffering to the Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims who had largely run Lebanon in partnership for many decades.

Anyone who traces the growth of problems in Sydney involving Muslims who began arriving from the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s must encounter a two-way street, though you would never know it from most reporting. Not just the failure of government policies, high unemployment, and Australian distrust, but numerous episodes of racism or aggressive insularity that arrived as part of the cultural baggage of some refugees. The open contempt some Muslims have for non-Muslims is a common thread throughout the world where Muslims communities rub against the kafirs, or non-believers.

This is especially so in Britain, where Western liberalism, freedom and the rule of law have been used as tools to help make it an operational centre of global jihad. A report by British intelligence estimates a quarter of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain support jihad at least somewhere in the world.

It is a place where fanatical intolerance hides in plain sight. On February 3, between 500 and 700 men marched from the Regent's Park mosque to the Danish embassy in Knightsbridge to protest against the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to Islam. Demonstrators carried posters stating "Exterminate those who slander Islam", "Be prepared for the REAL holocaust", "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Behead those who insult Islam".

No arrests were made. As a senior Scotland Yard officer explained after complaints by several British MPs: "We have to take the overall nature of the protesters into account. If they are overheated and emotional we don't go in. It's a risk assessment. If we went in to arrest one person with a banner the crowd would turn on us and people would get hurt."

The chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Asghar Bukhari, said this demonstration should have been stopped by police. "The protesters did not represent British Muslims," he told the BBC. "The placards and chants were disgraceful and disgusting. Muslims do not feel that way. I condemn them without reservation."

But he didn't have to confront the mob. Police in Sydney reached a similar conclusion in December, as an incident report prepared by Bankstown police made clear: "On the evening of 12/12/05 numerous vehicles were sighted congregating in the vicinity of Punchbowl Park situated on Rose Street, Punchbowl. These vehicles and the crowd that had gathered were suspected to be Middle Eastern criminals who have been involved in malicious damage and civil disobedience offences throughout the Sutherland Shire and St George areas. A direction was given to police about midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons."

The armed and dangerous enemies of tolerance were hiding in plain sight.

[carbonq]

December 22, 2005

For too long our politicians and police have turned their backs on a festering problem writes Miranda Devine.

FORGET Clover Moore as the Grinch of Sydney's Christmas. The "Lions of Lebanon" with their Glock pistols and Molotov cocktails have put her to shame this holy season. While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a decade and now number in their thousands.

So when parents and children attending Christmas carols on Monday night, December 12, at St Joseph the Worker Primary School in South Auburn were abused and spat on by "young men of Middle Eastern appearance", there were no police to protect them. Not even when the sounds of gunshots echoed inside the church, and parked cars were pumped full of bullets. "Police were called by a number of parents and the principal, but they were unable to attend because they were needed elsewhere," said Cardinal George Pell in a statement.

The police were busy that night - Sydney's mini Kristallnacht "night of the broken glass" - as carloads of men drove east from Lakemba and Punchbowl to systematically attack whole streets of parked cars with bats and machetes. Identified by police as being of the proverbial Middle-Eastern appearance - code for Lebanese Muslim, despite the fact many are second-generation Australians - they also stabbed a man, smashed a woman's head with a bat, attacked another woman in a pizza shop and a man who was putting out his rubbish.

They were extracting revenge for the riot the day before on Cronulla beach when a protest against continuing intimidation of beachgoers by thugs described as Lebanese turned ugly and drunken racists attacked passers-by suspected of being "Lebs".

The retaliation from the gangs of the south-west was a calculated show of strength, with victims reportedly being asked if they were "Australian" before being attacked. Over the next 24 hours another three churches in Sydney's south-west were attacked.

With police unable to guarantee safety, Holy Spirit College at Lakemba cancelled its carols service. Other schools in the south-west cancelled concerts and end-of-year presentations or hired security guards.

Thus the lead-up to Christmas this year has been notable for a rash of cancellations of traditional yuletide activities. The North Cronulla surf carnival was called off. As was the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club's annual Christmas cheer party, and a carols concert expected to draw 3000 people to Coogee beach.

Rather than a problem of race, religion or multiculturalism, Sydney is suffering from a longstanding crime problem. It is a textbook case of how soft policing and lenient magistrates embolden successive waves of criminals, infecting other people who might otherwise have been law-abiding.

The roots of the problem can be traced back to Telopea Street, Punchbowl, in 1998 when a Korean schoolboy, Edward Lee, 14, was stabbed to death because he went to the wrong house for a birthday party and looked at the wrong people in the wrong way. He didn't know that a notorious group of extended Lebanese-Muslim families, descended from the lawless hill tribes of Northern Lebanon, lived in Telopea Street.

When police arrived they were surrounded and intimidated by about 100 people. For two years they seemed incapable of solving the crime, despite at least 20 witnesses.

Lee's mother, Soobin, searching for clues to the death of her only child, went doorknocking in Telopea Street and the inhabitants laughed in her face. His father took to sleeping on top of his son's grave and weeping.

Eventually a youth, who was 15 at the time of the stabbing, was charged with Lee's killing. In 2003, the youth, who had said "f---ing Asian deserved it" after the stabbing, was sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in jail. His friend, now-jailed triple murderer Michael Kanaan, received a three-year sentence for being an accessory after the fact.

But Lee's killing had brought unwanted police attention to Telopea Street's criminal activities, which included drugs and car rebirthing rackets. Soon Lakemba police station was attacked with machine-gun fire, death threats were made to police on their radio network and a police car was shot at as it travelled down Telopea Street. Kanaan was acquitted this year of the attack on the police station, which prosecutors said was to teach police a lesson for "hassling Lebanese people". An alleged accomplice skipped bail and was arrested in Lebanon on terrorism charges. No one has been brought to justice over the attack.

The police commissioner of the time, Peter Ryan, talked tough and did little.

Seven years later, the police are still running scared.

Last week, Channel Seven reported it had obtained a police incident report instructing police officers to stay away from Punchbowl Park that Monday night, where a group of men were congregating before heading to Maroubra.

The report said "a direction was given to police about midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons".

The Police Minister, Carl Scully, told reporters he defended the decision not to confront the group. Superintendent John Richardson was quoted saying a car crew sent to Punchbowl Park, where 10 cars and 40 men had gathered, was "ordered to withdraw and observe from afar. There was no trouble and sending police in would only cause trouble."

Setting the example of an astonishing lack of nerve, the Premier, Morris Iemma, told Sydneysiders to stay away from the beach for safety and then cancelled his Christmas media reception which had been scheduled for last Wednesday night. He appeared in every media appearance like a rabbit frozen in the spotlight, perhaps frightened of alienating Lebanese Muslims in his electorate of Lakemba.

That Iemma's electorate is at war with former premier Bob Carr's former electorate of Maroubra is a handy synchronicity. It highlights the ALP's long-term culpability in creating the monster that is plaguing the city, its history of ethnic branch-stacking and "whatever it takes" tactics to shore up support in the heartland electorates of the south-west, its policy of spin and cover-up which is at last coming undone.

As one passenger last week told taxi driver Adrian Neylan, who has chronicled the violence on his weblog, "the gangs have won".

Indeed they have, but the recent display of official cowardice in the face of the criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west is just a taste of the way Sydney has been run for a decade.

[thicky]

it happened to an anonymous person all true stories.

you claimed it happened to YOU

[thicky]

you claimed it happened to YOU

[carbonq]

Props go out to 1982
Go go go go
We be rockin hard for the whole damn crew
That's you

[derekmac]

Interesting read. Enjoy your 5 day vacation for Racism.