From James Morrow at The Weekly James:
So yesterday’s “Books Not Bombs” march for Saddam in Sydney was a lot more peaceful than last week’s, which degenerated into an orgy of screaming and chair-flinging that had to be busted up by the cops. (Sounds a lot like the last family reunion I went to…) However, all was not quiet; the Stars-and-Stripes got torched, and even the Herald, which is normally highly circumspect about reporting the misdeeds of those who, shall we say, need a compass to say their bedtime prayers, notes:
Police made 10 arrests by late afternoon, although none related to crowd behaviour at the gathering. One naked woman who was not a protester was charged with obscene exposure, and a 15-year-old youth who was identified from police video footage faces charges related to burning papers at last week’s march.A further eight youths were charged after a breakaway group of about 50, chanting in Arabic, ran amok in Darling Harbour and then doubled back to the city.
This is being generous. The TV footage I saw on Channel Ten showed large numbers of Arab-looking high school kids in the crowd, mostly young toughs, and reportedly, they got into a scuffle with at least one media crew. (The ironies of a naked woman protesting against modernizing a culture with a hatred of naked women, and of protesters beating up the people who would help get their message, are too delicious and/or invigorating to contemplate). Even more, when confronted with a camera. one group of these kids started yelling sentiments along the lines of “We’re all Arab mates!” and “Saddam’s our mate, and we Arabs stick together!”
Stupidity like this just underlines the destructive nature of ethnic separatism in free socities. And the blowback from this explicit endorsement of the enemy is going to be tremendous, especially after last year’s epidemic of gang rapes in western Sydney by Lebanese teens. For all the worries that Muslim “leaders” here have about anti-Islamic and anti-Arab prejudice, they sure don’t seem to be doing a lot to stop their fellow hyphenated Australians (hyphenated by choice, it should be noted) from giving the so-called “majority culture” reason to be suspicious, to say the least.