December 21, 2005

James Fulford writes: The riots on the Cronulla beaches, and elsewhere in Sydney,  were small potatoes compared to the North African riots in France, or even the looting and violence of Hurricane Katrina.

For one thing, they were held in much nicer weather. Australia, the (formerly) "Lucky Country", has miles and miles of sunlit beaches, which are wonderful to surf on, but occasionally spoiled by the people you meet.

Specifically, the spoilers are the Lebanese Muslim community, resident in Australia, but not part of the Australian nation, and not assimilated at all.

There has been major trouble with Lebanese gangs, ruling the streets in Lebanese neighborhoods, with the police cowering in their station houses.

On the beaches, for quite some time, young Lebanese men have been to sexually harassing Australian women and taunting them: 'Yeah, you're a skip, you're a slut', "Skip " being Lebanese slang for a normal white Australian, like gringo or "White boy" in the US.

Theodore Dalrymple has described the actions of a similar Muslim immigrant group in England:

"They satisfy their sexual needs with prostitutes and those whom they quite openly call "white sluts." (Many a young white female patient of mine has described being taunted in this fashion as she walked through a street inhabited by Muslims.)

And that, not "white racism" is the background for the riots. The fact that a group of Lebanese Muslims had beaten three lifeguards unconscious, and police had done nothing about it was the immediate cause, but there's a backstory.

In recent years, the racially motivated gang-rapes committed on white Australian girls by Lebanese men have led to further justifiable anger and suspicion. As Mark Steyn put it

"From opposite ends of the planet, there are nevertheless many similarities: non-Muslim women are hectored and insulted in the streets of both Clichy-sous-Bois and Brighton-le-Sands. The only difference is that, in Oz, the 'white youths' decided to have a go back."

But…how did a part of Lebanon, and the worse part at that, come to be settled in Australia?

In the US, it was the Immigration Act of 1965, in Australia, it was the end of the White Australia policy, and an official push for multiculturalism led by a member of the 1970's Australian government named Al Grassby. That's what Drew Fraser explains below.

[Previously by Andrew Fraser: "Rethinking the White Australia Policy"]

Throughout the Anglosphere, multiracialism remains an article of faith for the cosmopolitan managerial and professional classes. But recent immigrant-related violence may have convinced many, if not most ordinary Australians that the decision to abandon the historic White Australia  immigration policy was a catastrophic mistake.

Certainly, it is now obvious that the high-minded social engineers who transformed Australia into a colony of the Third World made a fateful, if unwitting, choice. We can be a free society or a multiracial society. But we cannot be both.

Mass Third World immigration is a form of forced integration. Following in the footsteps of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s which cleansed so many large American cities of their white populations, state-sponsored multiracialism in Australia has become a compulsory revolution imposed from on high.

Indeed, non-white immigration into every Western society is now treated as a fundamental civil right attached to humanity at large. Accordingly, anti-discrimination laws have effectively abolished both freedom of association and the rights of private property. Racial and religious vilifications laws soon followed, restricting our freedom of expression. More recently, Australian anti-terrorism and sedition laws have completed the transformation of the old Anglo-Saxon "constitution of liberty" into an ever-more intrusive "constitution of control."

Last week, in New South Wales, the outbreak of open hostilities in what has become a long-running, low-intensity civil war has led the state government to assert the power to lock-down whole suburbs as if they were prisons, to confiscate private property and to throw people into jail without any right to bail.

For years now, we have been assured that Australia has become a harmonious multicultural paradise wherein persons and "communities" of every race and creed will live happily ever after. But as the long-simmering conflict in Cronulla between white Australian beach-goers and marauding Lebanese Muslim gangs has boiled over into the public domain, the ideological guardians of official multiculturalism have a problem.

The reality is that multiracialism worked only so long as the host population, the Anglo-Australian people, were prepared to acquiesce in the steady erosion of their distinctive, ethnocultural national identity and, ultimately, the loss of their homeland. When thousands of white Australians gathered on the beach at Cronulla to defend their turf, the foundations of the multiculturalist regime were shaken as never before, even in the late 1990s heyday of the anti-immigration One Nation party.

The rise of One Nation exposed the vast gulf between the political class and ordinary white Australians, especially those in the outer suburbs of the major cities. The Cronulla rebellion revealed an even more disturbing gap: namely, the disconnect between the reality of the situation our political and intellectual elites have created and their understanding of it.

Politicians such as Prime Minister John Howard, Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley, and Premier of New South Wales Morris Iemma have been unanimous in their condemnation of the riots and disorders in the past week or so as criminal acts. Therefore, they say, this is a problem for the police and the courts.

Undoubtedly, the loutish behaviour of the relatively few drunken hooligans at the Cronulla demonstration was the sort of problem that police can and do deal with regularly.

But the guerrilla-style, hit-and-run attacks on persons and property in beach-side suburbs and beyond perpetrated by organized Muslim gangs travelling across Sydney in motorized convoys cannot be classified simply as criminal acts.

The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College suggests the sort of organized gang warfare waged by young Muslims in Sydney can be understood better as "mutated forms of urban insurgency." This form of warfare involving non-state actors is too complicated to be treated as a strictly law enforcement problem that can be solved by the police.

There is obviously a criminal dimension to the activities of Muslim street gangs. But the problem is also a "half-political national security" challenge. It is now obvious that Lebanese gangs are political actors who plan and implement coercive intimidation, creating instability, fostering corruption and exploiting the root causes of violence to achieve both commercial and political purposes.

The white Australians who gathered in Cronulla to demand respect for their beach and their local community had no political leadership. The few scattered white nationalists present had no public voice or role in the protest and were quickly demonized by the media as neo-Nazis.

Contrast that with the respect accorded to the many Muslim and Lebanese lobby groups. They were immediately invited to act as negotiating partners with police and governmental bodies. In other words, Muslims and other racial, religious and ethnic groups in Australia have established colonies with a recognized right to organize politically and to articulate and advance their own distinctive interests.

The leaders of these colonies, both here and overseas, are eager to expand the territorial reach, economic wealth and political influence in Australia of their respective peoples.

Muslim colonists, in particular, have managed to turn substantial areas of Sydney into no-go areas for the police.  Indeed, there are reports that the police, fearing that they might "antagonize" the Lebanese "youths," allowed gang members to organise the convoys that left Punchbowl to attack Cronulla early last week.

White Australians, by contrast, have no "community" leaders prepared to foster white racial identity; nor do they possess the organizational resources to defend their own ethnocultural and political interests. On the contrary, white politicians compete with each other to come down like a ton of bricks on white "racists" daring to denounce the dispossession of their own people.

Even intellectuals such as Keith Windschuttle, the "conservative" historian, are no better. He insists that the recent outbreak of violence is the product of multiculturalist policies fostering ethnic ghettoes, not of multiracialism per se. [Keith Windschuttle: Ghetto youth a multiculturalist legacy, December 16, 2005, The Australian]

Thus, like the politicians, Australian intellectuals refuse to recognise the reality of racial conflict. But the truth is that ethnic differences are not just a question of malleable cultural differences. Race does matter.

Gang warfare is not the only, and certainly not the best way in which non-white colonies can set out to displace white Australians. But intractable racial differences help to explain the differences between the Lebanese Muslim approach to colonisation and that adopted by, say, East Asians.

There is a significant difference in cognitive ability between Lebanese and East Asians. The average IQ in Lebanon is 86 while East Asians score around 105. The two racial groups also differ in temperament and behaviour with the Lebanese much more likely to display poor impulse control.

Those facts go a long way towards an explanation of why Lebanese Muslims are more likely to resort to brute force in asserting their personal and ethnic interests than East Asians. In contrast, Chinese immigrants and their children now dominate the competition for university places in Australia precisely because they possess the cognitive skills and behavioural disposition to devise more subtle strategies to advance their individual and collective interests.

Either way, white Australians are now left leaderless and disorganised, forced to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the state apparatus that has abandoned them grows ever more remote and oppressive, threatening to crush any organized Australian resistance to the multiracialist regime with all the repressive means at its disposal.

In these circumstances, Australian patriots have good reason to curse the memory of Al Grassby (Australia's "father of multiculturalism" who championed Third World immigration and the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975) along with his faceless bureaucratic predecessors.

But for their suicidal pursuit of a multiracialist utopia, Australia would still be one of the world's most successful, ethnically homogeneous, and freest societies.

Instead, we face the prospect of an ever-more insidious form of soft totalitarianism—forever invoking the ideology of universal human rights to subvert the history, traditions and ethnocultural identity of the Australian nation.

This is the paradox that the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny". Mass immigration is bringing it here, as throughout the Western world.

Drew Fraser [email him] is a professor of constitutional law and history at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.