Sydney gang rapes trigger race tension

A gang rape trial that culminated in one of the longest prison sentences in Australian history has triggered accusations of racism and inflamed ethnic tensions in Sydney's volatile outlying suburbs.

The gang leader, known only as X, was jailed for 55 years for his part in the rapes, which were carried out by 14 youths, all of Lebanese Muslim origin. The group terrorised western Sydney in August 2000, attacking seven women during a three-week spree that was planned and co-ordinated by mobile phone.

The men's ethnic background has been highlighted by police and politicians, who insist that they specifically targeted white Australian girls. The sentence, harsher than the penalty handed down to most multiple murderers, has sparked a furious debate and exposed deep cracks in Sydney's tolerant veneer.

A backlash is already taking place in the deprived western suburbs, which one community leader described as a tinder-box. Muslim women have been harassed, and some have had their veils ripped off. A television camera crew was beaten up outside a mosque after conducting interviews following Friday prayers.

In the arguments raging in pubs and offices, no one disputes that the rapists are wicked and their crimes repugnant. One 18-year-old girl was lured from a railway station and assaulted up to 25 times by 14 men. The trial judge called the ringleader "a menace to civilised society" and said the rapes were of a nature usually seen only in war zones.

What some are questioning, though, is whether the rapes were racially motivated – and whether the punishment fits the crime. Many white Australians were enraged by the notion that foreigners were "raping our women". Police were at pains to point out that the offenders were of "Middle Eastern appearance" and that all the victims were white.

When the first defendants stood trial last year, any racial motive was rejected. But the judge trying the latest batch, Justice Michael Finnane, disagreed. He noted that one victim, according to her testimony, was called "an Aussie pig", while another was told she would be raped "Leb-style". Another girl was asked if she preferred giving oral sex to Lebanese or Australian men.

Those three remarks were enough to convince the tabloid press and much of the public that the rapes were fuelled by hatred of white Australians. Some claimed that the case was proof that multiculturalism was not working. The state opposition leader, John Brogden, said of the ringleader, who was 18 at the time: "I hope he rots in jail." Other Australians are dismayed that the actions of one group of men are being seized on to stigmatise an entire community – in many cases by people who vehemently opposed the arrival of Middle Eastern asylum seekers. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicolas Cowdery, QC, has said it was gang culture that fostered the rapes, not race or religion.

Lawyers say the sentence given to X, who was ordered to serve a minimum of 40 years, is disproportionate and, far from acting as a deterrent, could increase the likelihood of rape victims being killed. They point to the age of the offender, who will be over 60 when he leaves jail, and ask how rehabilitation fits into this scheme. The sentence is more severe than the terms being served by some of Australia's most notorious criminals, including Julian Knight, who shot seven people dead on a Melbourne street in 1987, and Jeffrey Hardy, who raped eight children and two disabled adults at knifepoint in 1998.

As some have noted, gang rape is not a new phenomenon in Australia. Perpetrated by just about every community, including the Anglo-Celtic majority, it has been a scar on society since convict days. Many Sydneysiders recall the three Murphy brothers, who abducted a nurse in 1986, raped her for two hours and left her bleeding to death. One detail they probably do not recall is that the Murphys were Irish Catholics. That fact never featured in the case.

Check this out in Canada's National Post, not much chance of the left wingers in Canada agreeing with it.
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?id=848D07EE-9976-491F-86E6-7E3043DCA11D

Mark Steyn
National Post

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Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. I suppose I ought to say "Lebanese-Australian" Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian. During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be "f---ed Leb style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian pig."

But, inevitably, it's the heavy sentence that's "controversial." After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?" Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:

"As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions."

Indeed. Many's the time, labouring under the burden of some or other ghastly Ottawa policy, I've thought of pinning some gal down and sodomizing her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for "root causes." Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few.

Mr. Reimers, though, will be happy to know his view is echoed across the hemispheres. Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country's rapes were committed by "non-Western" immigrants -- a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands "rape is scarcely punished" because it is generally believed that "it is women who are responsible for rape."

So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a little different in Scandinavia? Not at all! Rather, the professor insisted, "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Or to modify Queen Victoria's wedding-night advice to her daughter: Lie back and think of Yemen.

France? Well, I can't bring you any ethnic rape statistics from the Fifth Republic because the authorities go to great lengths not to keep any. But, even though the phenomenon of immigrant gang rape does not exist, there's already a word for it: the "tournante" -- or "take your turn." Last year, 11 Muslim men were arrested for enjoying a grand old tournante with a 14-year old girl in a cellar.

Denmark? "Three quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes," says Peter Skaarup, chairman of the People's Party, a member of the governing coalition.

Well, you get the idea. Whether or not Muslim cultures are more prone to rape is a question we shall explore another day. What's interesting is how easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed within the usual pieties. Norwegian women must learn to be, in a very real sense, less "exclusionary." Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism.

After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before. America was asking for it: like those Norwegian women, it was being "provocative." My friend thought the multiculti apologists were treating America as a metaphorical rape victim. But, even so, it comes as a surprise to realize they do exactly the same to actual rape victims. After the O.J. verdict, it was noted by some feminists that "race trumped gender." What we've seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the Western elites is unshakeable. Even President Bush, in the month after September 11th, felt obliged to line up a series of photo-ops so he could declare that "Islam is peace" while surrounded by representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization which objected, on the grounds of "ethnic and religious stereotyping," to the prosecution of two men in Chicago for the "honour killing" of their female cousin.

On this "Islam is peace" business, Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Goettingen University in Germany, gave a helpful speech a few months back: "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them," he said. "The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought." Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or "House of Peace."

On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. The "Muslim world" -- the arc stretching from North Africa through South Asia -- is economically, militarily, scientifically and artistically irrelevant. But, looked at through the prism of Norwegian rape or French crime, the idea of a Dar al-Islam doesn't sound so ridiculous. The "code of silence" that surrounds rape in tightly knit Muslim families is, so to speak, amplified by the broader "code of silence" surrounding multicultural issues in the West. If all cultures are of equal value, how do you point out any defects?

As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and Britain get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combine with the worst attributes of Western culture -- licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class turns squeamishly away.

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we're no longer capable of being "judgmental" and "discriminating." We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, we're slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations.

Islam For All reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years' time the majority of Holland's children (the population under 18) will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in western Europe since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now.

Or as Charles Johnson, whose excellent "Little Green Footballs" Web site turns up dozens of fascinating Islamic tidbits every day, suggested: "Maybe we should start a betting pool: Which European country will be the first to institute shari'a?"

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