Suburb in complete lockdown - Sydney Morning Herald - 12/18/2005

[Coastie for Truth]

The Sydney suburb of Brighton-le-Sands has been locked down to all but residents after a five men were nabbed in a car equipped to function as a petrol bomb factory.

The men, understood to have links to a white supremacist group, were found in a car carrying a 25-litre drum of petrol and equipment to make molotov cocktails.

Police also said the men had commando-style utility belts, helmets, police scanners and portable radios.

Earlier today, two other men armed with molotov cocktails were arrested aboard a bus bound for Bondi Beach.

The suburb, on Botany Bay in Sydney's south, is the first to have a total lockdown imposed on it under new police powers passed at an emergency sitting of parliament.

---snip---

[AGKISTRODON]

1. Do we know enough to form opinions yet?

We are a long way from Sydney, I hope we can be nonjudgmental, until we get enough facts.
From what I see so far, there are dirty hands, on both sides.
Best we can do for Australia is to hope for a just solution.

[phantom power]

4. I've formed one opinion...

that whatever's going on, it's not a good thing. Lockdowns, mobile bomb factories.... WTF?

[bemildred]

2. Not Muslims, I take it? nt

[dstone]

3. lockdown in Sydney suburb

You have to ask yourself " what makes 5000 normally laid-back Aussies go to the beach to protest in the first place, instead of surfing, swimming and having a good time. The intitial spark was the bashing of three lifesavers at Cronulla beach by a gang of approx 20 Lebanese Muslim men - it was really the straw that broke the camels back. These gangs have been a problem in many Sydney suburbs over the last 10yrs but Cronulla in particular because of the attraction of the beach and bikini clad girls. It is also the only Sydney beach that has a train line to it so it has visitors from many suburbs.Lebanese Muslims have committed many racially motivated attacks on local youths as well as youths in many other suburbs. They first enquire "are you Aussie?" What follows is a savage assault with weapons such as bats, knives, nail studded bats etc. Australians have been murdered for no other reason than that they are Anglo-Saxon looking in appearance. About 3yrs ago a series of gang rapes were committed on Australian girls that were some of the worst in our history. The girls were mostly schoolgirls in their mid-teens. After enquiring whether they were "Aussie" 8 to 14 Arab men/youths would rape them and force the girls to perform oral sex. Some of the offenders were caught and given heavy sentences. Newspapers puts the number of rape victims in the hundreds, not necessarily all gang rape victims, just isolated rape cases, but very few victims are willing to go through the ordeal of pressing charges. These figures are difficult to confirm. In Cronulla these gangs will walk through the outdoor shopping mall harassing alfresco diners by spitting in their food or coffee and attacking diners as they leave restaurants of an evening. Residents in beachside homes have been stabbed in their own yards by these youths. Weekend lifesavers are all volunteers on Australian beaches. The Lebanese harass them by trying to take their rescue gear and playing soccer through through their workstation. When the lifesavers were bashed they were told "this is our beach, F__k Off". This is a statement they have made to locals more and more frequently and it is now often followed by "this is our country now". Graffiti is appearing in local schools and public areas that simply says "Muslims TOA" That is -Take Over Australia. They are THE major crime gang in Australia and have even blasted a suburban police station with a shower of bullets from high-powered semi-automatic rifles. An off-duty policeman was attacked by Muslims of Middle-Eastern Appearance (not Lebanese} and murdered, but not before being mutilated. His ears and nose were hacked off before he was fatally stabbed and died at the scene. Constant intimidation of teenage Anglo-Aussie males occurs at the beach, sexual harassment of girls, who are told they are sluts simply because they are wearing bikini's, and foul language in front of families and walking over their beach towels has made a day at the beach less than enjoyable for many Australians. Australians do not have a gang culture so are always significantly outnumbered. Australia has strict gun-laws so very few Australians have any sort of fire-arm. The Lebanese Muslim gangs are armed with Glock pistols and other weapons - its a rather one-sided contest.
After the lifesavers were bashed 5000 mostly locals gathered at Cronulla the following Sunday to protest. Australian flags were out in force which is rare. After a few beers there were some ugly scenes where anyone of Lebanese appearance was bashed. About 6 people were taken to hospital with minor injuries and released. The response from the Lebanese gangs was to turn-up at night when everyone had left and slash and bash cars, bash lone members of the public, stab one man in the back as he walked home with two female companions and drive to another beach further north and do the same to another 70 vehicles and assault anyone they could find. This was followed by more of the same the following night - you'd think the police might have been ready the second time. Some sections reported "white supremacists" had infiltrated the mob of 5000. During the week one Muslim youth leader said the reason the Lebanese gangs were so violent was because they felt "superior to non-Muslims, hated the West and hated living in a Western country". Virtually all gang members are Australian born but label themselves Lebanese and use the war-cry "lions of Lebanon". More threats of violence led to police "locking-down" a number of beach-side suburbs this weekend. These are suburbs with multi-million dollar homes, beautiful beaches and are very popular destinations for tourists, locals and as a place to reside - at least until the very anti-social behaviour of a cultural group who have expressed no desire to integrate into Australian society but rather have made it clear they will take control of the entire nation. Something they will almost certainly accomplish simply by way of a rapidly growing population courtesy of families with as many as 20 plus children. Anglo-Australians and other non-Muslims tend to have one or two children. Australia's long history as a Western nation and U.S. ally has a future of about 25 years before it is neither.

[bemildred]

5. Do you write this stuff yourself?

Or is it copied from somewhere? I'm just curious. It's like a museum, a high-school diorama, of all the trite xenophobic propaganda cliches of the last 200 years.

[dstone]

6. beach lockdown

Wow bemildred, you're familiar with trite xenophobic propaganda cliches of the last 200 years! Im impressed. My piece hardly qualifies as xenophobic and its not copied - but at times I do feel 200yrs old. Australian's have been very accepting of the some 200 nationalities we have in this country. Multicuturalism is not loved by all, it is true, but it is certainly happily accepted by the overwhelming majority, including me. All of our migrant groups have been encouraged to celebrate their cultural identity and most do, others just leave their old life behind start afresh - after all, many have come from war-torn countries like the former Yugoslavia. Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sierra Leone etc. They have also assimilated (which almost became a dirty word for a long while) very weil. In many ways so have the Lebanese Muslims. They are more "Australian" than they realise - they love their football (rugby league}, cricket!, and old Aussie muscle cars. Unfortunately, when they have expressed in all froms of the media such dislike for the country they live in, its people, its values and its way of life and then carry out physical attacks over a prolonged period of time...even the most tolerant and accepting in the community begin to ask "have we simply got the mix wrong?" There is, after all, only one small group responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes and anti-social acts. They openly profess their "superiority" over their assault and rape victims based purely on their religion and they do inform us of the inevitability of Australia being a nation of Islam. Who knows, it might not be so bad. its a simple process to convert, thats all they want. And they do have the figures to back up their claims - and these come from the Australian Government's own census. In the 4 years between the last two censuses the Muslim population grew by 40%, it will be the dominant religion sometime this century if that trend continues - thats just maths, not a cliche or propaganda. History supports that trend in many other countries. Australia has a population of 20million. In the 1960's so did Egypt. Their population was made up of 12 million Muslims and 8 million Christians. There are now approx. 74million Muslims and 4 million Christians- thats just a simple fact. "Trite, xenophobic propaganda" - just observations really. of the country I live in.

[bemildred]

7. An outbreak of paranoid lunacy is more like it.

Juvenile gangs roving the streets full of testosterone fueled race and power fantasies. The Australian police seem to be doing their best to lock them all up, and I hope they succeed.

[dstone]

8. Police doing their best...10 years too late

Very poor policing over the last 10yrs is a major factor in what has happened during the last 2 weeks in Sydney. The Cronulla community has made repeated requests for more patrols over the years which would have led to much less resentment, at least in the beachside suburbs towards the Lebanese Muslim community. In recent days some members of this community have made a positive contribution to the problems that need to be addressed. Musllim women have shown courage and honesty in television interviews and letters to the editor in our major and local papers. They have called for calm from their sons, encouraged :Muslim women to confiscate mobile phones from their sons, take their car keys and keep them off the streets at night. The women of this culture are expressing exasperation at the resentment directed at them because of the show of what really is anarchy from young Lebanese Muslim men. Only one male Muslim leader has shown any honesty and a desire to confront the reality of the problems caused by religious leaders who promote "Muslim Superiority" - he is at least on public record as having acknowledged that this is what the gang members believe.
There is an excellent article called "The Rise of Middle Eastern Crime in Australia" by Tim Priest. You can find it through www.google.com.au The article appeared in Quadrant magazine and gives a good overview of how poor decisions at the state government level contributed to an ineffectual police force that is only equipped to deal with law-abiding citizens - its well worth a read.

[bemildred]

9. Right, the police are being bullied by immigrants and need lots more power

and authority to protect us from the foreigners. This is crap.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/php/article_view.php?article_id=581

[Matilda]

10. Unfortunately, most of it, at the least, is only too true.

It is a relatively small proportion of the Lebanese community involved, but they are very ugly
indeed. They came from Lebanon during the civil wars of the 1970s from Shiite areas, where they
had been oppressed for years. Poorly educated and unskilled, they turned to crime to survive,
but when they came to Australia, they brought a long-established pattern of behaviour with them.

Police Commissioner Peter Ryan was brought out from England by NSW Premier Bob Carr to clean up
the force - sadly for Sydney, ever since the days of the Vietnam War, when American servicemen
came to Sydney on R'n'R, a corrupt Premier, Bob Askin, allowed - no, actively encouraged (because
he himself benefitted from it) police involvement in drugs, prostitution and all the petty crimes
that go with the territory, and Sydney has never recovered. Peter Ryan was supposed to be a new
broom, sweeping all the old corrupt officers out and starting over with a different police
mentality. It turned out that Ryan, like his hirer, Premier Carr, was an expert at spin and a total
failure at actual achievement. So while endless figures were produced to show that crime was
falling and the cops were straight, out on the streets of the suburbs, nobody really felt safe. We
also had, and still have, a politically correct mentality that insists that telling the truth about
crime that is organised by certain ethnic groups amounts to racism and is not be tolerated.

Yes, we do have a seemingly endless cycle of ram raids, rapes, and racial vilification - not against
the Lebanese, but by them. The gang rapes by the Skaf brothers were the tip of the iceberg,
but new ground was broken in that for the first time, the media told the full truth about who
was involved and what was done. And the women are little better than their men - the teenage
rape victims were spat at and taunted in open court by the mothers, sisters and girlfriends of the
accused - no Muslim feminine modesty here.

And the violence at Cronulla was definitely caused by Lebanese and has been going on for years - it
just reached breaking point when two lifeguards were bashed for asking the offending Lebanese to
leave the beach. I don't condone the behaviour of drunken Anglos in their "defence" of the beach,
and the racists who got behind them and pushed for all they were worth are as abhorrent as the
Lebanese they were attacking. Lifeguards are very highly regarded here - off-duty they can be
yobs like any other young guys, but on the beaches they perform a valuable service, and it's all
voluntary, and that is why this particular pot boiled over. But the answer doesn't lie with just
arresting offenders and locking down suburbs; that is clearly only sweeping the problems out of
view.

There is no easy answer, and ours is not the only major city in the world trying to cope not just
with an influx of migrants from a different culture who don't want to integrate, but who also do
procreate at quite an alarming level. And when local communities anywhere feel threatened by
migrant populations, there is always going to be trouble. Unfortunately, most governments -
probably afraid of being called racist - lack the political will to deal with it.

But believe me, this isn't a little local fracas that will be over and done with by the New Year;
it's an ongoing and very serious problem with no short-term solutions in sight at all.

[bemildred]

11. That may well be so.

So you have a crime problem with certain immigrants, and your police department(s) are (apparently) incompetent to deal with it. The solution to that is not some pogroms and counter-pogroms, or a bigger dose of police repression and aggression, it is the reform of your police and legal systems so that they are competent to deal with the crimes in the proper way. This Tim Priest fellow is just an apologist for the Police and their failures to handle the issue well.

[Matilda]

12. I agree with you.

As I said earlier, arrests and lockdowns are not a long-term solution. There needs to be ongoing
liaison with the community, but it's also a fact that they're not dealing with a bunch of hyped-up
teenagers running a bit wild here. These guys are criminals, full of hate and extremely violent.
What needs to be looked at is trying to find a way to prevent the problem perpetuating itself, and
younger people being drawn into it.

And I hold no particular brief for Tim Priest. The Quadrant is quite a respectable journal, but it's
also right-wing in its orientation. And Priest is careful not to mention that the reason Peter
Ryan was brought over from the UK was because the police force, from the Commissioner down to the
lowest ranks, was corrupt. That Ryan failed to make a difference was due in part to his own
temperament and personality, but also to the fact that from the beginning he was undermined by his
own senior officers, and one of the most prominent of these was Tim Priest.

Priest has his own agenda, and he worked closely with talk-back host Alan Jones (think Rush Limbaugh)
to bring Ryan down. I don't know of all the activities the Lebanese are involved in, but I think
what Priest says is probably true. Certainly the ram-raids, gang rape, drive-by shootings and
harrassment of club patrons is known to all Sydneysiders; only those blinded by their own political
correctness would think otherwise. Racism is wrong in any form, but to deny that this particular
group of Lebanese Muslims is not up to its ears in violent crime is like saying the Mafia isn't
run by Italians. Thinking people know where to draw a line, but we shouldn't pretend it isn't
happening because of a fear of someone crying "racist."

[bemildred]

13. Fair enough.

I'm just saying that if there is criminal behavior, you need to focus on that, and not on the ethnic or religious background of the perps. There are plenty of "Lebanese Muslims" that are as nice as you could ask for.

Edit: and for what it's worth, there are plenty of worse places than Australia when it comes to these sort of issues.