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RIOT ROUNDUP
Nothing puts a country on the map like a good, old-fashioned riot—practically everybody has heard of France nowadays—so let’s see what foreign types are saying about Australia in the wake of our beachside violence:
* The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola is a big-picture guy (the riots “have sparked an extraordinary level of soul-searching across this island country”), which is just as well, because he sure sucks on the details. For example:
Cronulla Beach, a suburb ...
The suburb is Cronulla.
Authorities arrested 18 Islamic radicals in Sydney and Melbourne last month ... Among their plans, according to testimony and evidence presented in court, were a bomb attack on a nuclear power plant in Sydney ...
They’d have to build one first. Australia doesn’t have a nuclear power plant; there’s a small research reactor out Lucas Heights way, but that’s it.
At least one man in the crowd wore a shirt that read, “Osama Bin Laden Doesn’t Surf.”
I’ve seen that shirt. It actually reads: “Osama Don’t Surf.”
Members of Howard’s Conservative Party ...
John Howard leads the Liberal Party. Stick to uncheckably vast generalisations, Anthony (“The dispatch of soldiers to Iraq has jarred the national psyche”).
* John O’Sullivan in Chicago’s Sun-Times is right on the facts and sound in his analysis; but I would say that, being a fellow evil conservative and all. Lefties might find one or two points of disagreement. (Via Matt Roles)
* Farish A. Noor, in Pakistan’s Daily Times, thinks the riots are linked to massacres that took place thousands of kilometres away during the 19th century:
One should not forget that on the island of Tasmania, for instance, the aborigines were herded and ‘culled’ like vermin a century ago, and that this deliberate wiping out of the aborigines accounts for their near-invisibility in their own country today.
Noor is based in Germany; people can be difficult to spot at that distance. Readers N. R. Watson and Jehanzeb Chohan set him to rights.
* And Stan Ritova of the Fiji Times writes a detailed and utterly charming piece in which he visits Fijians who’ve lived at Cronulla since 1978.
UPDATE. Evil Pundit and Currency Lad review last Sunday’s Commies Against Howard rally.
UPDATE II. Miranda Devine:
While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs of Sydney’s south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a decade and now number in their thousands.
Read the whole thing; included is a mention of Adrian the cabbie.
I blame the pernicious influence of the Manson Family for all these problems. That and Cronulla’s most vicious gang, the Ladyboy Lebs.
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2005 12 21 at 03:12 PM • permalinkYou missed one more detail he screwed up:
“this island country”
Australia is a pretty big island, some people call it a continent.
Posted by Bob from Ohio on 2005 12 21 at 03:31 PM • permalinkReading the O/S press online is instructive. The belief that Sydney is Australia is quite widespread, even in Sydney, as is the idea that the beach represents something to Australians other than a place where there is a lot of sand, water and smelly people tempting great whites to come in and get them. The Sydney sewers are emptied just off shore, so perhaps the event was caused by an easterly wind.
“One should not forget that on the island of Tasmania, for instance, the aborigines were herded and ‘culled’ like vermin a century ago,”
If he means the ‘black line’ they caught only an old man and a young boy. Also they didn’t cull anyone - simply moved them to an island in Bass Straight.
Maybe what happened in Tasmania wasn’t particularly enlightened by todays standards - but a cull? - get stuffed NOOR.
Posted by Ralph Wiggum on 2005 12 21 at 07:08 PM • permalinkThese right wing yobbos need to exercise their grey cells before their mouths.
Die you hair black, and put on false beards. wear tshirts with death to the Infidel in arabic. Keep shouting “allahu akbar. Then you can wonder around Marubra, Smashing up a few cars and bringing terror to the infidels and the police will leave you alone and arrest no one.
Ah the wonders of multiculturism!I notice the Post quotes Amanda Wise from Macquarie University’s Center for Research on Social Inclusion, who recently provided the Guardian’s Bernard O’Riordan with a similar potted analysis of the polluted Australian psyche.
Oh what fun is must be, the life of a social scientist, dressing up politics and prejudices as expert opinion.
The sad fact is that the reaction to the Cronulla demonstration (which was itself a reaction to thuggish behaviour) was increased thuggish behaviour (over the next couple of nights particularly) - which to many observers is proof that “Australians” prejudiced view of “lebs” and “muslims” is spot on.
Anthony Faiola, ...strapping, straw-haired lifeguards and locals heading to the shore in their pick-up trucks for a cold lager with their mates.
Why is it these guys simply cannot get their minds around a simple concept? They are not pick-up trucks. They are utes. U-T-E ute. The pick-up trucks are for Friday nights. They usually have roofs.
Speaking about the international reaction how about the
Foster’s advertisement in Russian humorist journal UdaffMy translation:
Churkas (a decorative for the Central Asian and Transcaucasian Muslims) do not fucked off in Paris: the Sharia Law.But they got they deserve in Sydney:the Law of Foster.
Foster’s sponsored Australia Day in Udaff Journal
#14
Anthony Faiola, ...strapping, straw-haired lifeguards and locals heading to the shore in their pick-up trucks for a cold lager with their mates.
Why is it these guys simply cannot get their minds around a simple concept? They are not pick-up trucks. They are utes. U-T-E ute. The pick-up trucks are for Friday nights. They usually have roofs.
Geoff, do you mean shaggin’ wagons? (That’s a panel-van.)
This is a Ute
This is a one tonner, also known as a ute in Aus.
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Farish A. Noor is based in Germany, is he? Seems like he ought to be aware that certain Germans did a fair amount of herding and culling, too, and a damn sight more recently than a century ago.