Religion, not just race, stirs riots
By Peter Riddell, Church Times,
Peter Riddell,
Professor and Director of the Centre for Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Relations at London School of Theology.
It was published in Church Times, UK.
"The sectarian clashes in Sydney over the past week or so have severely tested popular images left over from the wonderful 2000 Olympics. Those games had cast Sydney as a multicultural Eden. Today, we see instead a battleground, in which drunken Anglo-Australian surfers have gone head-to-head with gangs of thuggish young, mainly Lebanese, males - "Lebs" in local parlance.
In Britain, we have a deeply ingrained set of images of Anglo-Australia, but know much less about the country's immigrant face, especially that from Lebanon. Lebanese immigration to Australia has deep roots, and has occurred in three main waves. The first took place from the 1880s, and brought thousands of educated, multilingual, mainly Christian Lebanese to Australia. The next wave followed the Second World War, and included many who were joining families who had preceded them. Again, they were predominantly Christian.
These early Lebanese immigrants settled throughout the towns and cities of Australia. They joined in the religious life of the nation, and shared social occasions with the majority Anglo-Australian society. At the same time, they enriched Australia with their customs and cultural patterns. Inter-community relations were good.
The third wave of Lebanese immigrants came with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. They were mainly Muslims, from much poorer backgrounds than their predecessors, and spread out far less in Australia, congregating more in particular suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. They were later to produce the imposing Lakemba mosque, home to the spiritual head of Australia's Muslims, the radical Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali.
SOME news sources point to a gradual build-up of tension between Lebanese Muslim and Anglo-Australian communities in Sydney in recent years. A widely reported experience of young Australian women is encapsulated in a recent press interview in The Australian, the national daily broadsheet, which detailed continuing harassment by "young Muslim men . . . comments on our appearances, racist comments on our Australian background, unwanted touching, being followed while walking home by groups of men in cars, sexually explicit remarks while alone, with friends or with boyfriends, unwanted called-out invitations to have sex with groups of them".
In 2001, there were several gang rapes by mainly Lebanese men of girls in their early teens, which raised the temperature of inter-community relations considerably. So, when two lifeguards on Sydney's Cronulla Beach were attacked by a dozen young Muslim males last week, and one was knocked unconscious, the spark was set to a dangerous mix..............."
At http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/churchtimes/website/pages.nsf/httppublicpages/813C76E1B08EB5A8802570DE003A6972