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Unrest in Australia.

It has not attracted as much attention, but something similar to what happened some weeks ago in France is now happening in Australia: Urban strife with clear racial and religious undertones.
Four churches in Sydney’s southwest have been attacked in 24 hours as the city’s riots spread from race to religion.

A community hall linked to a Uniting church was burned to the ground early yesterday, carol-singers were spat on and church buildings peppered with gunfire. [. . .]

Police believe the attack on the hall, in the suburb of Auburn, was intended to destroy the Uniting church next door, while nearby St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, which has a primarily Chinese congregation, had all its front windows smashed. Three of the attacks were on churches within minutes of each other. The night before, Molotov cocktails were used in an attack on an Anglican church in Macquarie Fields in the city's far southwest.

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Dec 16th, 2005: 11:15:39

The situation is complicated by the fact that a sizeable portion of the Arab population is Christian:
Arab Christians have suggested the attacks on churches may have been meant as a violent attempt to “shame” the city’s Lebanese Christian community into supporting Lebanese Muslims in the race-hate war, which began as a battle against young white males over use of suburban beaches.
But the statements of public officials leave little doubt about the unambiguous racial character of the violence.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma has called on people not to renounce their Australian identity in the face of intimidation by Lebanese gangs — even if it means being bashed.

His advice came after victims of rioting in Sydney told how they were asked if they were Australian before being attacked by large groups of Middle Eastern men. [. . .]

He said if he were approached by such a gang he would say he was “proudly Australian”, even if it meant being attacked.

We have, as well, the usual intimations, carefully veiled, of insufficient vigor from the politically correct bureaucracies that oversee the police:
The police response to the riots came under the spotlight last night when it emerged that officers were ordered to stay away from a gathering of Lebanese men in Sydney's west on Monday.

The Seven Network said a police incident report instructed officers to stay clear of Punchbowl Park, from where gangs later travelled to the riot hotspot of Cronulla.

Discerning observers have been anticipating this catastrophe for quite awhile: It does not require any great quality of prescience, but only some immunity to the virus of Liberalism, to predict that the social consequences of mass immigration will not all be happy. For a long time we the West have been content to imbibe the illusions projected before us by Liberalism — that all peoples are perfectly compatible, that the identity of a nation is infinitely elastic, that differences of culture and religion are ultimately superficial — and it is increasingly plain that our disillusionment will be shattering. It may even be fatal.

It is often answered that the solution to mass immigration is integration or assimilation; these words are repeated almost like an incantation. But the sad irony of this cast of mind — which has been aptly described as “right-wing Liberalism” — was perhaps captured best in a brilliant passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, in which he lamented the ceaseless “clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.” The right-Liberal removes the organ of national identity and demands the function of assimilation. He abets the liquidation of the very identity to which the immigrant is expected to assimilate.

Assimilation in the past came precisely because the American identity was affirmed without apology. Norman Podhoretz, in his book My Love Affair with America, gives us a good picture of this process when he describes, in his boyhood, the concerted and successful effort by a New York City public school teacher to eradicate his Yiddish accent. Podhoretz remarks that without this rather brutal force of assimilation, which essentially destroyed an element of his ethnic identity, his success in America would never have been possible. By giving young Norman a proper command of spoken English — and consequently, he notes, a love of the language — she set him on the path he later took to literary success. I ask the reader to consider the manifold obstacles we have subsequently erected in the path of any school teacher who aspires to such an undertaking in her, let us say, Hispanic students. Not merely do we now condemn such forceful assimilation, but we positively encourage its opposite.

The right-Liberal clamors for the very qualities he is rendering impossible. He censures the citizen who affirms the culture of his homeland against the culture of the foreigner; then turns around and assures us that the foreigner will naturally adopt, without pressure or incentive, the very culture the affirmation of which he has censured.

The results of the experiments in this dubious theory are slowly coming in — in Europe and now Australia.

Full discussion: http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/12/16/111539/31