Marce Cameron, Sydney
"Alan, it's not just a few Middle Eastern bastards at the weekend, it's thousands. Cronulla is a very long beach and it's been taken over by this scum. It's not a few causing trouble, it's all of them" - Sydney radio 2GB "shock jock" Alan Jones reading out an email on air three days before the Cronulla race riots.
Last December 11, thousands of Anglo-Australian racists, some waving Australian flags and signs with racist slogans, converged on Cronulla beach in the south east. The racist mob, urged on by neo-Nazi white supremacists, verbally abused and assaulted beach-goers of Middle Eastern appearance. The following two nights, dozens of outraged youths of Arab descent drove to Cronulla looking to retaliate.
The Cronulla riots erupted after a week-long campaign of incitement by the corporate media, in particular the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph, 2GB and 2UE. The trigger for the race riot was a minor incident: an alleged altercation between two off-duty Cronulla lifeguards and some Middle Eastern youths.
NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma responded by deploying 800 police to Sydney's eastern and southern beaches. Police used new powers, granted by an December 15 emergency sitting of the NSW parliament, to search people and cars, to confiscate cars and mobile phones (and check text messages) and to "lock down" popular beaches with police checkpoints. Entire suburbs also became out of bounds for non-residents.
Following the Cronulla riots, the political establishment and the corporate media launched an intensive campaign to deny what was obvious to a majority of Australians - that the mob violence against people of Middle Eastern appearance reflects an underlying racism which, on occasion, can easily be brought to the surface.
Prime Minister John Howard summed up this official denial by declaring a few days after the riots: "I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country". This was echoed by Iemma who, after first describing the riots as race-based, changed his view saying "I don't believe Australia is a racist country or Australians are racist".
The majority of Australians, however, don't agree. In an opinion poll in the December 20 Age, 75% of Australians "agreed there is underlying racism in Australia".
On December 18, with just a few days organising, some 3000 people took to the streets in Sydney in a vibrant "United Against Racism" march called by the National Union of Students and supported by many groups and individuals. Anti-racism protests were also held in Melbourne, where 2000 people marched, and in Brisbane, Newcastle and Adelaide.
Little wonder then that the Murdoch-owned Australian felt it necessary to suggest that anti-racist activists and sympathisers are just one more threat, along with Islamic terrorists, to Australia's supposedly racially harmonious society. The paper's December 22 editorial argued that "for many baby-boomers finding themselves in a post-theological world, anti-racism has become the new religion. In fact, there is a degree of racism in every society, and in every human being: to make one's mission the eradication of this ingrained element is an exercise in fanaticism."
The Australian would have us believe that progressive struggles to end racist oppression are nothing more than a futile "exercise in fanaticism". Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela should have known better because human beings are, apparently, inherently racist.
Contrary to the assertion that racism has always existed, the oppression of people based on the fetishisation of physical features, such as skin colour, is a relatively recent phenomenon, its origins in the capture of millions of black Africans to work as slaves on the sugar and cotton plantations of the Americas from the 16th century.
In Australia, racism thrives on the dispossession and the ongoing oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and Australia's existence as an island of wealth in a sea of Third World misery. From the theft of East Timor's oil to participation in the US-led plunder of Iraq, Australian corporations profit from exploiting the largely non-white peoples of the Third World.
Anti-racism
While fanned by the corporate media, the underlying cause of the outbreak of racist violence in Cronulla is the racist divide-and-rule political agenda of corporate Australia, its media mouthpieces and its two main political parties, the Liberal-National Coalition and the ALP. This corporate consensus is reflected in bipartisan support for the mandatory detention of refugees, the so-called "war on terror" and new federal and state terror laws which are aimed, in large part, at criminalising dissent.
When One Nation Party leader Pauline Hanson's racist policies threatened to spark a mass anti-racist movement in the late 1990s, the powers-that-be thought better and they contrived to remove her from the spotlight while incorporating her racist policies on refugees and Indigenous people into their own platform.
From the Tampa and "children overboard" fiascos, to the raids on the homes of alleged Muslim terror suspects in Sydney and Melbourne a month before the Cronulla riots, the Howard government and state Labor administrations have played the "race card" whenever they could since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York. Racism is the ideological basis for the so-called "war on terror", and the actual war of terror on Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is clear in NSW opposition leader Peter Debnam's strident criticism of the NSW police for not jailing more Middle-East background youths. Then, on January 20, Iemma caved in to Liberal Party pressure and announced the establishment of a permanent Middle-Eastern organised crime squad.
As Sydney Muslim community leader and Islamic Friendship Association president Keysar Trad told Green Left Weekly, the demonisation of Muslims in particular "has led to the marginalisation of the community in the workplace, in education and even in government services.
"When the Howard government, with the help of the [NSW Labor] state government, carried out the raids and arrests of so-called terror suspects just before the Cronulla riots, it diverted attention away from Howard's industrial relations changes, and Howard also attacked our civil liberties."
In this climate of fear and insecurity, the corporate elite's racist chickens are coming home to roost. But as Trad points out, "the anti-racism rallies were most heartening and most encouraging. People came to show their support for their fellow Australians. It must have made those who are playing the race card think twice."
From Green Left Weekly, January 25, 2006.
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