Anti-Muslim Race Riots in Australia
The government of John Howard has belatedly called for religious tolerance in Australia after a race riot broke out there, wherein Australian surfers and rowdies directed violence against Lebanese and others.
This sort of riot against the Muslim minority is the dream of Muslim radicals, who can add the footage into their recruitment videos.
Some have suggested that the Howard government’s own rhetoric has contributed to violence against Muslims, but the government denies it.
[Some readers have written to say that these may have been race riots, but that they were anti-Lebanese in general, since there are more Christians than Muslims in the Australian Lebanese community. This is a valuable corrective. However, I saw press reports of gangs yanking off women’s headscarves, and my guess is that those were Muslim women and that the yanking was indicative of specifically anti-Muslim feelings. Moreover, although you and I know that most Lebanese in Australi are Christians, it is not clear that the surfer dudes did.]