violence in cronulla - a recreation of... (MERGED)

[endlesseulogy]

Its taken me a very long time to formulate an opinion on this issue. Its been surprisingly hard. As i am a person of very little patriotism, i have not one bit of understanding for those too cool for school idiots parading around with Australian flags around their waist done up on heaps of alcohol (wow, it seems asthough all those lovely cultural sterotypes in foriegn movies and TV shows regarding Australia are starting to become a reality! It reminds me a bit of that old Simpsons episode where bart's antics send them on a expedition to Australia! )

I just dont see the use of patriotism. Sure you can have a certain pride in being from a certain country, but many people take it all too seriously. At the end of the day, we all share this tiny tiny Earth tucked in amongst a fucking gigantic universe. Us humans as a collective have a big superiority complex. When thinking about racial issues i like to use the yin and yang symbol as a catalyst for understanding.

^^ Its pretty simple. Black and White competing for space in a perfect circle. Both colours look so different, at totally opposite ends of the spectrum. But if you look a bit closer you will notice something. You will notice that they are infact the same. "what is explicitly two colours can at the same time be implicitly one." The point is, they both need eachother for survival. Black needs white just as much as white needs back. How would you know if you were a single white male if there were no single black males? Ofcourse by black i mean any race other then the white race. BLACK DEFINES WHITE AND WHITE DEFINES BLACK If you think of it in this way, the illusion of duality between people falls flat on its arse.

But i suppose they wont be teaching these vital things in school text books for many many many years (instead we get some vague politically correct diatribe about how racism is "bad".) so ill be more straight up.

In a certain regard this issue is connected to a vital failure in our education and immigration system. Immigration does work. It will take time and as a citizen of this country i wish to see things change. Immigrant youth have a large problem with assimilation. When someone leaves their home country at a younger age it effects them differently to people who leave the old country in their older years. They come here and find the culture VERY different. Lack of english skills often make it impossible to interact with the local culture. Even if a strong grasp of english is achived, they find it hard to connect culturally to Australians. Believe me, the devide is HUGE!

I spent much of my younger-mid teens living in many different parts of the world as my dad was always seeking work overseas. When i finally came back to live here in Australia, i even found it hard to see eye to eye with Australian "culture". Even to this day i still find it extreamly hard to understand Australian culture

I met many many Lebanese from Lebanon in my travels overseas and to tell you the truth they are a great bunch. Some of the most friendly (not to mention beautiful) people in the world. The Lebanese here are a different story. Its like dealing with a WHOLE other culture believe me. Comming here and dealing with trying to assimilate has warped many of their minds. This leads to alienation which eventually leads them to form some sort of gang where they start off as Lebanese but end up being dragged into the "dog eat dog" world of modern Australian culture. The results, as i said, causes much trouble for the Anglo-Australians.

Many of you will probably think i am trying to make excuses for these people. I promise you i am not. I am just going on what i have observed.

The hot-blooded Anglo-Australians on the other hand have been whipped up into some sort of ultra-patriotic, paranoid and insecure frenzy by the powers in Canberra who consistantly preach the breakdown of the devide, but in reality make it larger by putting the country on a virtul war footing with a often phantom and vague enemy. "The waaarr on Teeerrooorr" (George W Bush style) has proved to be one of the most theatrical events of all time. The media has absolutly LOVED every minute of it. It should be renamed : The War of Terror, on Terror.

The Government's crap about how we all really really love muslims/arabs in Australia blah blah blah is a joke. In the government's collective mind, thats how they want it to be. This is just to keep some sort of international image. Usually for self-centred finacial reasons such as trade and investment.

The reality is, minus the fairytale, many Australians are racist. The cameras are rolling and i dont think Howard can hide the furrows of worry this time.

 

[Donny Don't]

Funny shit

Fuck i laughed hard when i saw this pic :D

 

[bingey]

great post EE

reminds me of what a kida kid in primary school told me (ie here the "lebs" are morrocans or turks)

he just came back from turkey and told me the turks there were so nice.

I think a lot of people don't realize how hard it is to grow up different in a society , different culture , diferent way of thinking. in fact these differences are pretty minor but because every day their are underlined/ accentuated by other people , in the end they are all you can think of and your sole pride will be thse differences and you will end up a travesty of the original culture you were from , it's just a human defense mechanism.

you also see it with the blacks in the u.s , if the only blacks you see in the news or from people talk are the ones robbing and stealing eventually you will take pride in the same things.

lol @ that pic

 

[Pleonastic]

Actually that's an interesting point. Take London for example - how many Aussies have gone over there to live, and choose to go to "Aussie pubs"? How many Aussies will seek out other Aussies in London because it makes them feel comfortable? I'm not going to editorialise on that point - someone else can if they want. But it's something to think about...

 

[silvia saint]

you also see it with the blacks in the u.s , if the only blacks you see in the news or from people talk are the ones robbing and stealing eventually you will take pride in the same things.

so true, that is one of the reasons i loathe mainstream rap music. irresponsible fuckers.

 

[silvia saint]

Its taken me a very long time to formulate an opinion on this issue. Its been surprisingly hard. As i am a person of very little patriotism...

...I just dont see the use of patriotism. Sure you can have a certain pride in being from a certain country, but many people take it all too seriously.... The cameras are rolling and i dont think Howard can hide the furrows of worry this time.

the only mainstream sport i follow is football (soccer) and it's hard for me to enjoy the game sometimes (although i really dig it) because of the loyalty some supporters have to the point of hating other people just because they support the other side and come from another area.

i believe it was orwell who said something along the lines of "sport is just war without the blood and death", and he couldn't be closer to the truth.

i like a lot of the benefits i enjoy as being an australian, but as everyone knows this country is hardly a good role model for other countries and for this reason i am seriously unpatriotic.

i watched the 30 minute forum sbs had on last night and the liberal present still wouldn't say that the events on sunday were race related when they were nothing but. wtf? calm down silvia, he's a politician.

*edit* i spell better when i'm intoxicated

 

[Groovstarr]

everyones complaining about how it's not fair that lebanese are no longer made to feel welcome at Cronulla,


considering no white person has felt safe in Lakemba, Punchbowl or Bankstown at night-time for 10 years I think they should stop complaining

*edit* personal attack

I lived near Lakemba and occasionally would go there to eat some delicious Lebanese food. Not once in my countless times in the neighbourhood did I feel unsafe or see any violence.

*edit*

 

[Miss Peks]

Actually that's an interesting point. Take London for example - how many Aussies have gone over there to live, and choose to go to "Aussie pubs"? How many Aussies will seek out other Aussies in London because it makes them feel comfortable? I'm not going to editorialise on that point - someone else can if they want. But it's something to think about...

Sadly a lot of them do, same with Kiwi's, Sth Africans, Asians, Polish, Americans and Italians (although they seem to mix a bit more than the other minority groups).

My observations are that a fair chunk of Aussies that come over here move to Sth West London, or West London and a lot of them frequent places such as Walkabout, Redback and The Slug and the Lettuce (or as some geezer calls it The Slag and the Lettuce), because that's where most of the Expats go. Unless you make some sort of effort quick smart to move out of your comfort zones it is very easy to stick to expat communities and is also very possible not to even make any English friends, simply because the English seem to have a different sort of attitude and outlook towards things, although I have come across a couple of English guys that only had Aussie or Kiwi friends. I have a friend at work who has been here for a few months and until recently the only English people he'd spoken to were the customers that came in.

Sure it's cool to want to feel comfortable in your new home. Yes of course you are going to relate to other people of your own Nationality because then you don't feel like such an alien anymore (although I haven't really felt like this). However you're going to get along with the locals a lot better if you have the balls to step outside of your comfort zone and actually make some effort to integrate yourself in your new community (with the locals, not the expats from the country you came from!). Yes you can keep your identity and still feel like you're whatever nationality you are, yes you can mix with people of your own nationality and yes feel free to practice whatever religion you believe in, but remember that when in Rome do as the Romans do and respect the rules, customs and regulations of your new home. By isolating yourself from other nationalities it creates tension, a sense of them v's us and not a whole lot of understanding from either groups.

I do believe though that the situation in Sydney is quite different though, and will take a long time to fix, if it gets fixed.

 

[keystroke]

*edit* removed quote from edited post

I lived near Lakemba and occasionally would go there to eat some delicious Lebanese food. Not once in my countless times in the neighbourhood did I feel unsafe or see any violence.

*edit* removed quote from edited post.

oh, no, you must be right. because everyone obviously feels safe enough in Punchbowl and Bankstown at night-time, it must be because the locals there make everyone feel so welcome and are glad to have them walk their suburbs. Considering Officer Chops lives IN bankstown for 18 years, I've witnessed more violence against people there than anywhere else in Sydney


8(

 

[leperknight]

shane

 

[MazDan]

^^^^^^^^^ Thats not even Cronulla Beach.

 

[endlesseulogy]

LEBANESE youths and ethnic "lions" from Melbourne are preparing to join Sydney's race riots, with busloads of troublemakers rumoured to be heading north.

Expectations among the young Lebanese community in western Sydney that further trouble will develop over the weekend comes despite calls from their religious leaders, police and politicians for both sides to calm down.
One 22-year-old ethnic Lebanese man yesterday told The Australian he and his friends were ready for a turf war. "The boys reckon it'll be like a scene out of Braveheart," he said.

Sources within the Lebanese community said three busloads of young men from Melbourne - Lebanese, Serbians, Italians and Greeks - and more than 30 carloads were expected to arrive in Sydney today and tomorrow.

"I've talked to a few mates in Melbourne and I know that some of my other buddies have too," said a 29-year-old Lebanese man from Lidcombe, in Sydney's west.

"We're expecting about 30 cars and a couple of busloads of Leb, Serb, Italian and Greek lions to punch on with us."


Advertisement:
A Melbourne nightclub bouncer of Bosnian extraction also said word was "getting around" about groups of young men heading to Sydney to fight.
NSW police last night expressed concern about the possibility ethnic numbers would be bolstered by interstate visitors.

A Victorian police spokesman said the force was "monitoring the situation" but had no specific information about the plan.

Prominent Melbourne Muslim leader Waleed Aly yesterday discouraged his community from joining the fray. "It's a stupid thing to do," he said.

Gold Coast police are also bracing for trouble on Sunday, boosting on-duty numbers after text messages urged locals to "crack some skulls".

Police contingency plans have been made despite Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's view the text messages were a hoax.

...

 

[lostpunk5545]

Concessions are going to have to be made soon by both sides or this is not going to go away.

It's time for politicians and police to accept there is a problem and start working on mitigation rather than just holding onto a sinking ship.

Us white Australians obviously have some deep seated prejudices to deburden ourselves of and until that happens ethnic youths are going to feel disenfranchised. Unity will never be achieved as long as it is an outright us vs. them issue. Some serious discussion is going to have happen, violence just begets violence.

I'm not saying this is all our (white Australians) fault but there is a deep undercurrent here that has been stirred up. The problems are becoming apparent as they are deposited in the sand at our feet, visible now.

 

[Bent Mk2]

With regard to the rumours of busloads heading North, a Muslim leader in Mebourne was interviewed on the Today show this morning.

He suggested they don't go - not because it was wrong, but because it was a long way to go for a fight. 8) 8)

With 'leadership' like that, is it any wonder we're in that situation?

 

[CutHere]

With 'leadership' like that, is it any wonder we're in that situation?

But when they say "Muslim Leader" who does he lead exactly? Would we call Pauline Hanson a "White Leader"?

 

[katmeow]

The whole "Muslim Leader" situation is quite interesting. I was talking to a few of the muslim girls in my uni course who are quite involved in trying to push forward positive role models for young muslims and they told me that the fact that there is no real central authority in Islam, with tiered structures of authority below that (like Catholicism for example), you just tend to get people from all over the place labeling themselves as a spokesperson for the Islamic community.

Take Keysar Trad for example... he lost his position as President of the Lebanese Muslim Association so started up his own. If you notice when he gets interviewed now, it usually says "Found of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia".

 

[CutHere]

With regard to the rumours of busloads heading North, a Muslim leader in Mebourne was interviewed on the Today show this morning.

He suggested they don't go - not because it was wrong, but because it was a long way to go for a fight. 8) 8)

With 'leadership' like that, is it any wonder we're in that situation?

Oh I almost forgot to point out that Lebanon is the only Middle Eastern country which has a large Christian population (they used to have a majority). In fact, the majority of Lebanese living abroad (e.g. Australia) are Christian. So Islam doesn't really have much to do with the current problems at all.

 

[streetsurfer]

I did a search for "transsexual scientologists" and I got this page

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

Because the West is facing a concerted effort by Islamic jihadists, the motives and goals of whom are largely ignored by the Western media, to destroy the West and bring it forcibly into the Islamic world -- and to commit violence to that end even while their overall goal remains out of reach. That effort goes under the general rubric of jihad.

Jihad (in Arabic, "struggle") is a central duty of every Muslim. Modern Muslim theologians have spoken of many things as jihads: the struggle within the soul, defending the faith from critics, supporting its growth and defense financially, even migrating to non-Muslim lands for the purpose of spreading Islam. But violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Many passages of the Qur'an and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are used by jihad warriors today to justify their actions and gain new recruits. No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad. The theology of jihad, which denies unbelievers equality of human rights and dignity, is available today for anyone with the will and means to bring it to life.

Jihad Watch is dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology plays in the modern world, and to correcting popular misconceptions about the role of jihad and religion in modern-day conflicts. We hope to alert people of good will to the true nature of the present global conflict.

More...

I have to say as a gay man while I hate the concervitive bigots like bush and his lapdogs, Islam scares the fuck outa me. It may be from ignorence, I don't pretend to know anything about Islam and I certainly don't judge people by race but when you see shit like this:

http://www.ssonet.com.au/display.asp?ArticleID=4744

it scares me, Iran is what I see as islam controling a country, america is christianity... I would prefer neither but I would take the christian right anyday over this

THEY’LL KILL ME: AN IRANIAN TORTURE VICTIM’S STORY by Doug Ireland
HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS WORLDWIDE PROTESTED THE PUBLIC HANGING OF TWO GAY TEENAGERS IN IRAN IN JULY. NOW A GAY IRANIAN MAN WHO FLED TO TURKEY TELLS HIS STORY.

Amir is a 22-year-old gay Iranian who was arrested by Iran’s morality police as part of a massive internet entrapment campaign targeting gays. He was beaten and tortured while in custody, threatened with death, and lashed 100 times. He escaped from Iran in August, and is now in Turkey, where he awaits the granting of asylum by a gay-friendly country.

In a two-hour telephone interview from Turkey, Amir – through a translator – provided a terrifying, firsthand account of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s intense and extensive anti-gay crackdown, which swept up Amir and made him its victim. Here is Amir’s story:

Amir is from Shiraz, a city of more than a million people in south-western Iran that the Shah tried to make “the Paris of Iran” in the 1960s and 1970s. It attracted a not insignificant gay population which made Shiraz a favourite vacation spot for Iranian gays, but after the 1979 revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, Shiraz was targeted as a symbol of taaghoot (decadence). Amir’s father was killed by a gas attack in the Iran-Iraq war in 1987, becoming – in the Islamic Republic’s official parlance – a “martyr”, whose surviving family thus had the right to special benefits and treatment from the state.

Amir, who grew up with his mother, an older brother and two sisters, says “I’ve known I was gay since I was about 5 or 6 – I always preferred to play with girls. I had my first sexual experience with a man when I was 13. But nobody in my family knew I was gay.” Amir’s first arrest for being gay occurred two years ago. “I was at a private gay party, about 25 young people there, all of us close friends. One of the kids, Ahmed Reza – whose father was a colonel in the intelligence services, and who was known by the police to be gay – snitched on us, and alerted the authorities this private party was going to happen.

Ahmed waited until everyone was there, then called the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice, headed in Shiraz by Colonel Safaniya, who a few minutes later raided the party. The door opened, and the cops swarmed in, insulting us, screaming, “Who’s the bottom? Who’s the top?” and beating us, led by Colonel Javanmardi. When someone tried to stop them beating up the host of the party, they were hit with pepper spray. One of our party was a transsexual – the cops slapped her face so hard they busted her eardrum and she wound up in hospital. Ahmed Reza, the gay snitch, was identifying everyone as the cops beat us up.

“The cops took sheets, ripped them up and blindfolded us, threw us into a van, and took us to a holding cell in Interior Ministry headquarters – they knew us all by name,” Amir recounts. Iranians live in fear of the Interior Ministry, which has a reputation like that of the former Soviet KGB’s domestic bureau, and whose prisons strike fear in people’s hearts the way the infamous Lubianka once did.

Amir says, “I was the third person to be interrogated. The cops had seized videos taken at the party, in one of which I was reciting a poem. The cops told me to recite it again. ‘What poem?’ I said. They began beating me in the head and face. When I tried to deny I was gay, they took off my shoes and began beating the soles of my feet with cables – the pain was excruciating. I was still blindfolded. They had found dildos in the house where the party was – they beat me with them, stuffed them in my mouth. When I told them my father was a martyr [of the Iran-Iraq war] they beat me up even more, and harder. They took away my card [entitling Amir to martyr’s benefits] and said they’d tell the local university, where I was studying computers.”

At the same time, Amir continues, “They went to my house, seized my computer, found online homoerotic pictures of guys in it, and showed them to my mother. That’s how mother found out I was gay. Eventually I was tried and fined 100,000 tomens [or about $120, a large sum in Iran]. At the time he fined me, the judge told me, ‘If we send you to a physician who vouches that your rectum has been penetrated in any way, you will be sentenced to death.’”

Most of the anti-gay crackdown, Amir says, is conducted by the basiji. The basiji are a sort of unofficial para-police under the authority of the hardline Revolutionary Guards (called Pasdaran in Persian.) It is the basiji – thugs recruited from the criminal classes and the lumpen unemployed – who are assigned to be agentsprovocateurs, and are given the violent dirty work, so the regime can claim it wasn’t officially responsible. For example, during recent university strikes and demonstrations, it was the basiji who were charged with the defenestrations and the vicious beatings of rebellious students.

A year after his first arrest, an unrepentant Amir was in a Yahoo gay chat room on the web. “Someone came into the chat room and started messaging me, but I told him he wasn’t my type and gave him a description of the kind of guy I was looking to meet. A few minutes later, another guy started messaging me. We exchanged pix, and he sent me his web page right away – and he matched exactly all the descriptions I’d sent to the previous guy. It turned out later both guys were police agents – they had so many they could come up with one who matched the personal preferences of any gay guy in the chat rooms.

“With this second guy, I was really excited, and we made a date for that afternoon at a phone booth near Bagh-e-Safa bridge. When I got there, we started to walk away to talk and get to know each other. But within 30 seconds, I felt a hand laid on my shoulder from behind – it was an undercover agent in regular clothes, whose name turned out to be Ali Panahi. With two other basiji, he handcuffed me, forced me into a car, and took me back to the Intelligence Ministry headquarters, a very scary place. There I denied that I was gay, and denied that this had been a gay rendezvous – but they showed me a printout from the chat room of my messages and my pix.”

Then, Amir says, the torture began. “There was a metal chair in the middle of the room – they put a gas flame under the chair, and made me sit on it as the metal seat got hotter and hotter. They threatened to send me to an army barracks where all the soldiers were going to rape me. There was a soft drink bottle sitting on a table – Ali Panahi told one of the other basiji to take the bottle and shove it up my ass, screaming, ‘This will teach you not to want any more cock!’ I was so afraid of sitting in that metal chair as it got hotter and hotter that I confessed. Then they brought out my file, and told me that I was a ‘famous faggot’ in Shiraz. They beat me up so badly that I passed out, and was thrown, unconscious, into a holding cell.

“When I came to, I saw there were several dozen other gay guys in the cell with me. One of them told me that, after they had taken him in, they beat him and forced him to set up dates with people through chat rooms and each one of those people had been arrested – those were the other people in that cell with me.

“We were eventually all taken to court, and cross-examined. The judge sentenced four of us, including me, to public flogging. The news was printed all over the newspapers that a group of homosexuals had been arrested, with our names. I got 100 lashes – I passed out before the 100 lashes were over. When I woke up, my arms and legs were so numb that I fell over when they picked me up from the platform on which I’d been lashed. They had told me that, if I screamed, they would beat me even harder – so I was biting my arms so hard, to keep from screaming, that I left deep teeth wounds in my own arms.”

After this entrapment and public flogging, Amir’s life became unbearable – he was rousted regularly at his home by the basiji and by agents of the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice [which represses “moral deviance” – things like boys and girls walking around holding hands, women not wearing proper Islamic dress or wearing makeup, same-sex relations, and prostitution].

But after the hangings of two gay teens in the city of Mashad in July of thisyear – and the worldwide protests that followed those hangings – Amir says that things got even worse for him and other Iranian gays. Amir was under continual surveillance, harassed, and threatened: “After the Mashad incident, the ‘visits’ from the authorities became an almost daily occurrence. They would come to my house and threaten me. They knew everything about everything I did, about everywhere I went. They would tell me exactly what I had done each and every time I had left the house. It had gotten to the point where I was starting to suspect my own friends of spying on me. On one of these visits, Ali Panahi – the one who’d arrested me the last time – grabbed me by the hair and asked me if I’d suck his cock if he asked me to. One of my friends was raped by Ali Panahi, who fucked my friend in exchange for letting him go without a record.

“They would arrest me all the time, take me in for questioning in the middle of the day – when I left the house, they’d hassle me, ask me if I was going to go looking for dick, and tell me not to leave my house and to keep off the streets. In one of these arrests, Colonel Javanmardi told me that if they caught me again I would be put to death, ‘just like the boys in Mashad’. He said it just like that, very simply, very explicitly. He didn’t mince his words. We all know that the boys who were hanged in Mashad were gay – the rape charges against them were trumped up, just like the charges of theft and kidnapping against them. When you get arrested, you are forced by beatings, torture, and threats to confess to crimes you didn’t commit. It happens all the time, it happened to friends of mine.

“I could not get a job because of my case history. Since I was obviously gay I couldn’t get a job anywhere, and could not get a government job because of my record,” Amir says. By the last time the cops came to his house, Amir had decided to try to leave the country: “I invented an excuse, and told them I had to go to Tehran to take my higher university entrance exams. I already had a passport from three years ago. In Tehran I borrowed a little money from a friend and came to Turkey by bus. At the border, I really lucked out – I was terrified because I had a record, and not enough money to get out or pay a bribe.” But indolent border guards didn’t bother to check on him – they just took his passport, stamped it, and let him leave. That, says Amir, was about a month ago.

When asked what message he wants to send to the world about what’s happening in Iran, and what he thinks about his own future, Amir pauses, then says: “The situation of gays in Iran is dreadful. We have no rights at all. They would beat me up and tell me to confess to things I hadn’t done, and I would do it. The gays and lesbians in Iran are under unbelievable pressure – they need help, they need outside intervention. Things are really bad. Really bad! We are constantly harassed in public, walking down the street, going to the store, going home … anywhere and anywhere, everyone, everyone! One of my dear friends, Nima, committed suicide a month ago in Shiraz. He just couldn’t take it any more. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve run out of money. I don’t know what to do. I just hope they don’t send me back to Iran. They’ll kill me there.”

My profound gratitude to Dr Houman Sarshar for his generous translation and research assistance in the preparation of this article.

Doug Ireland is a long-time radical political journalist and media critic. He has been proudly out of the closet as a gay man since 1973, and has written extensively about gay political issues. More by Doug Ireland is available at his blog.


*edit* be aware that the pictures on links below are of a hanging

http://www.direland.typepad.com/direland/images/irangay_teens_1.jpg

http://www.coc.nl/documents/IranHangings3-GayEgypt2.JPG

http://www.gaycitynews.com/hanging/iranhanging.jpeg

 

[CutHere]

woah those posts don't belong in here at all -- they belong in their own thread and even then maybe in "Current Events & Politics".

Iran has nothing to do with Cronulla. Absolutely nothing to do with Cronulla. It's just anti-Islamic propoganda.

 

[THR!]

I don't think it's necessarily anti-Islamic, ... just a reflection of some of the terrible things that happen in our world. Makes for very sad reading, that's for sure.