Australia's Multicultural Disaster

Australia’s recent "race" riots were anything but, according to Keith Windschuttle, writing in The Australian. Mr. Windschuttle contends that the clashes between Lebanese Muslim immigrants and white native-born Australians had nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with culture. The root of the clashes, isn’t racism, Mr. Windschuttle says, it’s multiculturalism, an idea which had divided Australians by the very ethnic identities it was supposed to blur.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas. It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group. That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities. Those youths certainly can be blamed for trying to beat up a few outnumbered innocents but not for responding to people as ethnics in the first place.

Of course, the purpose of multiculturalism was never to bring people together or to erase the divisions of race and culture. The point of multiculturalism wherever it is implemented – and it is only implemented in Western countries – is to demonize European-descended peoples and erode Western culture. One must give credit where it is due, multiculturalism is the one leftist idea that actually does what it was designed to do.

Multicultural policy was always justified by the assumption that the xenophobia of old Australia was the problem. This presumption still reverberates in the voices of politicians and journalists who have responded to this week's events as if Australian youths are the real culprits. Hypocritically, they denounce racial stereotyping of ethnic groups but freely typecast Anglo Australia.

Multiculturalism is also at odds with the core tenets of liberal democracy, where rights inhere in the individual, not the collective, and where people's representatives are elected politicians, not self-appointed ethnic spokesmen or godfathers. Multiculturalism is a reversion to tribalism that is anachronistic in a modern, liberal, urban society.

In Sydney it has been plain for at least a decade that, instead of ethnic communities living happily in the diversity of social pluralism, multiculturalism has bred ethnic ghettos characterised by high levels of unemployment, welfare dependency, welfare abuse, crime and violence. The social engineers responsible should have been well aware of the likely outcome, especially for young men.

All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants. Ghetto culture for young men everywhere is characterised by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected and a feckless attitude towards work.

The Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers that led to this week's mass retaliation were nothing new.

This behaviour has been with us for more than a decade. When the former principal of Punchbowl Boys High, a school dominated by Lebanese Muslim youth, suffered a breakdown and sued the NSW government, he gave an insight to the local culture.

Between 1995 and 1999, students armed with knives had threatened classmates, teachers were assaulted and gangs invaded classrooms. On one occasion, the principal had a gun held to his head by a Lebanese gang member who threatened to shoot him. One of his students was convicted of murdering a Korean schoolboy and three other students were jailed for their roles in some of Sydney's most notorious gang rapes.

Of course, the provocations that led to the riots will be dismissed as irrelevant by the politically correct, multiculturalist elite. When non-whites riot, it’s because they are oppressed or under attack. But if whites behave the same way, it’s because they are - being white, ipso facto, racist and evil. This double standard produced the Cronulla riots. It will produce even more violence in the future. The solution to Australia’s riots will work just as well in France, Germany, and the United States: stop importing people from alien cultures, insist that those immigrants already there assimilate, and defend rigorously the values and traditions of Western culture.