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Anti Muslim Race Riots In Australia

Juan Cole 12/12/2005

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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.]

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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