Racist rapes: Finally the truth comes out (Arabs/Muslims rape aussies)

So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as 14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.

The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists, scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney they rarely visit and can never understand.

This newspaper was the first to report the story, which had been common knowledge in police and media circles, and it has never censored the race element.

Even last week, with the conviction of two brothers for their part in the gang rape of Miss D, who was 16 when she was held at gunpoint in a Greenacre park, there were media outlets that downplayed the story and air-brushed race from it.

Yet the victims have been crying out for the truth to be told. In court on Friday, one victim gave another a card on which she had written

In August, when Judge Megan Latham handed out laughably lenient sentences to three men in one gang rape case, which were later more than doubled on appeal, she made a special point of debunking the race link: "There is no evidence before me of any racial element in the commission of these offences," she said. "There is nothing said or done by the offenders which provides the slightest basis for imputing to them some discrimination in terms of the nationality of their victims."

Except that later one of the victims complained her victim impact statement had been "censored" of any "ethnic" references by prosecutors intent on a plea bargain. She was convinced she was raped because of her ethnicity. "You deserve it because you're an Australian," the rapists told her during the five-hour attack.

"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one 18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.

Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes.

"They're very brave, very strong and very courageous young women," said Salvation Army Major Joyce Harmer, who held the hands of many of the victims through the trials. "They knew this was something they had to do."

There were encouraging signs by the end of the week that some Muslim community leaders were talking of "Muslims accepting responsibility that they may have failed to do things that would have prevented these things from happening", as Amjad Mehboob, chief executive for the Federation of Islamic Councils, told ABC Radio on Friday.

Keysar Trad, vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, said: "It is certainly a disgrace to our community that people who were born to a Muslim family would commit such heinous crimes." But he went on to say it was "rather unfair" that the rapists' ethnicity had been reported "because these boys themselves have completely disaffiliated themselves from their culture or their religion".

Yes, it is unfair that the vast bulk of law-abiding Lebanese Muslim boys and men should be smeared by association. But their temporary discomfort may be necessary so that the powerful social tool of shame is applied to the families and communities that nurtured the rapists, gave them succour and brought them up with such a hatred of Australia's dominant culture and contempt for its women that they think of an 18-year-old girl, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, sitting on a train reading a book, as a slut.

These were racist crimes. They were hate crimes. The rapists chose their victims on the basis of race. That fact is crucial to this story. If the perpetrators had been Anglo-Celtic Australians, the furore would have been enormous. No newspaper would have left out that fact and you can bet the guilt and shame would have been spread far and wide.

If they had small .22s in their purses they would shoot the balls off that ... " Neophyte, if anyone did that it would have such an effect. It would be like a reign of terror for rapists in Sydney. But it won't happen. To start with, the use of handguns is extremely rare in Australia (by law abiding people that is). It was always near-impossible to get a licence, and if you did, one of the conditions were that you had to keep all ammunition separately from the gun. For cultural reasons, Arab men in Aust are more likely to have hand guns. The ones who are criminals obvious have them, but so do the regular guys. They often have jobs like taxi driving and running petrol stations late at night, where violent robbery is common. Actually, N. you might like to know the only man in NSW who did the obvious thing in the face of sexual assaults. He was Morgan Said, who in May 1997, learnt that his niece (very young, 5?, I forget) had been raped. The perp was one of these types who had repeated convictions, and was always been released from prison so he could have "counselling". (True!) Said, himself a serving police officer, knew that there would be no justice, only more soft-soap for the rapist. So he paid him a visit and shot him right in the head.

Morgan Said went to trial for murder, but the jury wouldn't convict him. You see, in 1997, the patience of the great Australian public had been sorely tried. Every time one put the on radio or read a paper, there was another pedophile on the loose, or a rapist enjoying a new form of prison sentence called "weekend detention." A lot of us ... er, I mean a lot of them, were actually glad that at least one child rapist got an informal death penalty. (He was a repeat offender, he was never going to change.) Morgan Said was interviewed and just said it straight: "I sleep well at night. It was justice." The press was very hostile to Morgan, but he won in the court of public opinion. If it wasn't for the fact that he is an Arab and a Muslim, you might even like him yourself.

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