Wednesday, December 21, 2005
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.