Today’s events at Cronulla fill my heart with pride at being an Australian. Some 5 000 people came to the beach area today after simmering anger and disputes between beach users flared last week.

Two rival groups used text messages to urge attacks on each other. Some of the text messages encouraged people to carry out vigilante style attacks, and some messages had racial undertones. One of the messages had urged “Aussies” to take revenge against “Lebs and wogs”. Another urged locals to rally at points on the beach today to take retaliation against “Middle-Eastern” gangs.

North Cronulla Beach, in Sydney’s south, was the scene of two violent incidents last week – an attack on two lifesavers on Sunday and a brawl later in the week in which youths turned on a media crew.

In today’s fracas, according to the officer in charge of the police presence:

“People of Middle Eastern background that have been seen in the Cronulla area, a swarm of crowd has approached those people to hurl foul abuse and disgusting language and a most un-Australian approach to the way that the crowd has behaved,”

As well, an ambulance was attacked, and an ambulance office injured when hit on the head by a bottle, and another was cut by broken glass. Police were also attacked, pelted with beer bottles and had vehicles damaged. An ambulance spokesman said crews had treated at least five people after pockets of violence broke out among the crowd. Seven people have been arrested and four people have been charged. (Hopefully much use will be made of video and photos of the day and charmers such as those in the photos in this post will be dealt with by the law.)

Disgraceful isn’t it? The trouble was started by Lebanese youths alright, but the local yobbos did not have the right to take things into their own hands like they did today. Both sides of the fight are as bad as each other – and today’s problems should have been nipped in the bud earlier, with the police cracking down on the troublemakers immediately. (Our politicians seem scared to deal with racially motivated crime and civil disorder – so the police are told to hold back. The police should go in early and in force and weed out the troublemakers, particularly their leaders.)

It seems a lot of today’s action was fuelled by alcohol – many of the yobbos were drinking beer, and cans and bottles were used as weapons. I’m sure also that plenty of those involved travelled a long way from outside Cronulla to get involved in the trouble.

Unfortunately there seems to be a large hoon element in Australian society – they look for any excuse to either stir up or get involved in violence and vandalism. Cronulla is a reasonably affluent area, but we now know it is just as full of idiots as Macquarie Fields earlier this year (which was not a riot though), which at least has poverty and social disadvantage as something of an excuse (a very poor one though). The Lebanese community also has its share of dickheads …. and their families and leaders in their community need to work with police and other agencies to deal with them strongly (they acknowledge the problems in only a mealy mouthed way and more often than not offer half baked justifications for what is plain and simply just criminal, anti-social behaviour).

Update – according to Sky News just now, other parts of Eastern and Southern Sydney have turned into Bogan-ville, with violence spreading. The news on the TV showed some action from Brighton-le-Sands, and this report talks of troubles at Maroubra. Now, I strongly suspect what we are seeing now is purely and simply fuckwits causing trouble for the sake of causing trouble. It seems that its the Lebanese retaliating for today’s violence at Cronulla now.

Also, I see this great advertisment for Australia has made it overseas, with US , NZ, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, the Middle East, China, South Africa among others. No doubt the pride of young Australian manhood will be there for all to see around the world by tomorrow!

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