This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the Cronulla riot – the event that made Australian flag capes, Southern Cross tattoos and the Sydney beachside suburb synonymous with virulent racism.

Around 5,000 people gathered at North Cronulla beach to participate in an anti-Lebanese demonstration on 11 December. They chanted “Fuck off Lebs!” and “Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!” They sang the national anthem and “Waltzing Matilda”, while draped in hundreds of Australian flags, Australian flag towels and Australian flag swimsuits. Fascist leaflets were distributed liberally.

At 11am, the congregation found its first victim. An 18-year-old man of Middle Eastern appearance, who had planned to go for a swim, was punched and forced to flee a surging mob. He took shelter in the nearby Northies Hotel. The violence continued for the next six hours.

Mustafa, a 19-year-old who was bashed and later admitted to Sutherland Hospital, told the Sydney Morning Herald, “They threw bottles, broken bottles, food, anything they could get their hands on. And what were we doing? We were there for a swim”.

A woman had her headscarf ripped off as she fled into the North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club. A 13-year-old nipper from the club yelled, “Get her!” On his back, a variation of a racist slogan was written: “We grew here, you flew here.”

Two paramedics were injured as they tried to get her and other victims out safely. Another man wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “Ethnic cleansing unit”. A train that pulled into Cronulla station was invaded and two more men were bashed.

Some victims were defiant. One man calling himself Moot said, “We are going to have the last laugh. I got beaten up by 50 people. I am half Lebanese, part-Aboriginal. I am more Australian than the Anglos”.

By the end of the day, 26 people had been injured. Most of these were people whom the mob deemed to be Middle Eastern, but they included some of Italian and Bangladeshi background, as well as ambulance and police officers who got in the way. Many others were abused, threatened and chased out of Cronulla.

The 5,000-strong racist riot did not come out of nowhere. The cauldron had been prepared by a years-long campaign of anti-Muslim and anti-Lebanese rhetoric.

Islamophobia

After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Western governments lashed out against the Muslim world: invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a massive ramping up of domestic security apparatuses and the profiling, harassment and vilification of Muslims everywhere.

Reinforcing all this in Australia was an increasingly hysterical campaign against refugees. Liberal prime minister John Howard became known as a master of playing the race card to shore up his government and distract from his attacks on unionists, students and welfare recipients.

Howard had not had it all his own way; massive demonstrations against the Iraq war and a rising refugee movement had pushed back some of his racist agenda. In the wake of the London bombing in July 2005, the government embarked on a renewed offensive. Howard claimed that mainstream Muslim leaders had not been “as strong in denouncing these acts as they should have been” (a line of attack today widely used against Australia’s grand mufti).

Fears were raised about the failure of Muslims to “integrate” and speak English. The government introduced citizenship tests to ensure “Australian values” (whatever they were) would be upheld. Howard described the burqa as “confronting”, accused Muslims of holding jihadist views and extreme opinions about women. He said that this was “not a problem that we have ever faced with other immigrant communities” and was “unique to Muslims”.

Treasurer Peter Costello lampooned “mushy multiculturalism”, while Liberal MP Dana Vale claimed that whites in Australia were aborting themselves “almost out of existence” and that there was a real possibility of Australia “becoming a Muslim country”.

A month before the Cronulla riot, a series of anti-terror raids took place, with all the usual media hype. These conveniently took place around the same time that Howard pushed through his WorkChoices laws – one of the biggest attacks on workers and unions in Australian history.

Howard was greatly aided in his campaign to whip up a nationalist and racist frenzy by the Labor Party. As Louise O’Shea wrote in Socialist Alternative magazine in 2007, “If sycophantic me-tooism was an Olympic sport, [Labor leader] Kim Beazley would be a multiple gold medallist. As it is, he has to content himself with his second event – howling like a racist maniac”.

Labor consistently attacked Howard from the right, demanding the citizenship test be expanded even to tourists, that more money be given to ASIO and that a Department of Homeland Security be established.

Lebanese-bashing

While Islamophobia formed the backdrop to the riot, the major theme in the lead-up to the Cronulla riot was a hatred of Lebanese. Again, this came on the back of a campaign by politicians and the media.

Since the mid-1990s, the NSW Labor government under Bob Carr had campaigned on law and order issues as a way of trying to maintain some popular support while privatising assets, cosying up to developers and attacking workers’ rights. The campaign always had a racist edge and focused heavily on so-called “ethnic gangs”.

In 1998, following the killing of schoolboy Edward Lee in Punchbowl in Sydney’s west, Carr and the police declared it was the start of the “Lebanese crime war”. The whole Canterbury-Bankstown area, which has a large Arab community, was designated “the hub of Lebanese crime” and depicted as a den of drugs, violence, gangs and shootings.

The attacks on Lebanese went into overdrive after two highly publicised gang rapes in the early 2000s. The perpetrators were all declared to be part of Lebanese gangs. The media went on a rampage, portraying Lebanese men as savage, sexist brutes all out to molest “our” (i.e. white) women. This classic racist trope is as old as slavery, frequently deployed against Aboriginal men and more recently against the single male Muslim refugees fleeing Syria.

The outrage over sexism and crime was selective and cynical. Crime was at a 30-year low in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, while in Carr’s own electorate of Maroubra (which takes in the beachside suburbs to the north of Cronulla) it was on the rise. Crime statistics show that Arabic-speaking people don’t commit any more crime than people of Anglo-Saxon background and that sexual violence in Canterbury-Bankstown was no more prevalent than anywhere else in the state.

But politicians and the media were never going to let the truth get in the way of a good moral panic.

shock jocks

In the week preceding the riot there were a few minor scuffles between groups of Lebanese friends (“gangs”, they were subsequently dubbed) and Cronulla lifeguards, who seemed to enjoy asserting their authority over the “outsiders”.

Things escalated quickly as sections of the media whipped up frenzy about Lebanese thugs bashing lifeguards and harassing women on the beach. Text messages began circulating throughout the very white, relatively well-off and notoriously insular area. Then Alan Jones, a right wing radio shock jock, jumped in.

“This Sunday, every Aussie in [Sutherland] Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and Wog bashing day.” That is the text message that Jones read out again and again on his top rating radio show. It was combined with hours of unending racist vitriol directed against Middle Eastern youth in Cronulla, who were labelled “scum”, “mongrels”, “bastards” and “human pollution”. Jones openly urged violent vigilantism, decrying the impotence of police and at one point calling on bikie gangs to come to Cronulla to deal with the Lebanese.

Jones might be on the right of the political spectrum, but he is no fringe dweller. He is a very well-connected member of the Australian ruling class and considered a close friend of many prime ministers.

In 2007, a day after Australia’s notoriously weak media regulator found he was likely to have encouraged violence and vilification of Australia’s Middle Eastern community, John Howard backed him as “an outstanding broadcaster”. Kevin Rudd, leader of the ALP at the time, also defended Jones. His actions, after all, were merely the logical extension of their policies and rhetoric in previous years.

The rabid right

The response from the political and media establishment to the Cronulla riot was in many ways as shocking as the riot itself. John Howard gave a green light to every racist by sympathising with the rioters:

“I believe yesterday’s behaviour was completely unacceptable but I’m not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community. I think it’s a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I’m simply not going to do so … Plus there’s an accumulated sense of grievance – the full extent of which I don’t pretend to know.”

Other Liberal MPs openly defended the racism. Bruce Baird said, “I can understand at one level people’s frustration because they all feel that the beaches belong to them and it is a Sutherland Shire thing and when anybody disturbs the equilibrium, given all the events that have happened since September 11, I just think that’s the match that sets alight the fuel”.

Labor premier Morris Iemma did condemn the racism, but then blamed the Middle Eastern victims for bringing it on themselves: “The incidents that occurred the week before were just as ugly, thuggish and cowardly. Now, let’s remember how this started, that was, a cowardly attack on an Australian icon”. Virtually no one anywhere in the mainstream would come out unequivocally on the side of the Lebanese against racism.

The response

It’s hardly surprising then, that some Lebanese took matters into their own hands over the next two nights to enact some revenge for the hurt and humiliation suffered in Cronulla, and for the years of vilification which had led to it.

Hundreds of people packed into convoys of cars from Lakemba and headed toward Cronulla and other beachside suburbs known for their racism. In Maroubra, about 100 parked cars were smashed up with baseball bats and other weapons. Fights broke out in several different locations. One man was stabbed, but survived.

In a particularly daring and symbolic act that earned him the unbridled hostility of every “respectable” figure in society, Hadi Khawaja stole an Australian flag from Brighton-le-Sands RSL and burnt it in the street. He was later jailed for three months and forced to walk Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda track in a display of repentance for his sins against Australian patriotism.

These revenge attacks led almost everyone, including many on the left, to label both sides equally bad as the other. That was a mistake. As Ben Hillier wrote in Socialist Alternative magazine at the time:

“[C]an you imagine what would have happened if those ‘Middle Eastern men’ hadn’t driven down to the beach and publicly vented some frustration? It would have meant that in a city of four million people, in the face of a race riot (sponsored by civilised gentlemen like Alan Jones), there was absolutely no organised response. To say, ‘I support the fight against racism, but I don’t support that’ effectively means that we support absolutely nothing … Forget broken windows. How can the left ever be rebuilt if, at the first sign of oppressed people resisting, we place conditions on our support?”

Fortunately, the left did organise an anti-racist demonstration of a few thousand in the city the week after the Cronulla riot. There was also one held in Melbourne. The great disappointment was that we were too small to mobilise thousands of anti-racists in Cronulla itself on 11 December, to confront and defeat the racists before they were able to carry out their attacks.

The main lesson of Cronulla is that it was not a freak phenomenon caused by some drunken louts on the beach – it was an event years in the making by a racist establishment with an interest in demonising Muslims and people from the Middle East. Those at the top of society who stoked the racism that led to Cronulla bear the main responsibility for this sickening episode in Australian history. They preside over even greater racist violence in their treatment of refugees, their bombing of Iraq and Syria and their daily harassment of Australian Muslims.

While some of the anti-Lebanese rhetoric has faded today, Islamophobia is stronger than ever. The conditions that gave rise to the Cronulla riot still exist. We need to organise to confront both the so-called “legitimate” racism of the Australian state and the “illegitimate” street-level racism that it spawns.