The Muslim ghettosby Keith Windschuttle 16 December, 2005 IT was inevitable, given the prevailing mind-set within government and the media, that Sydney's beachside violence this week would be called race riots. The New South Wales...
You really should read this ... but given your one-sided preaching, it might hit a bit too close to home ...
Sneers from those who think they're above it all By Michael Duffy December 17, 2005
A YEAR ago someone came up with the term "conspicuous compbuttion" to describe the public expression of fake concern for others. This week we've seen its opposite, which might be called "conspicuous contempt". Critics from ethnic melting pots such as Turramurra and Woollahra have been lining up to abuse white-bread Cronulla. I suspect this might have more to do with clbutt than race.
It's always been important for those of us in the educated middle clbutt to show we're different from the mbuttes. Status is crucial to our sense of idenbreasty, and was traditionally butterted by superior wealth and taste. But this has become less easy with the spread of mbutt culture and prosperity. Our enthusiastic use of the derogatory term "McMansion" to describe prole housing reflects the depressing fact that a plumber in Bella Vista lives in a better house than a solicitor in Paddington does. For several decades now, our status has been under siege.
So thank goodness for morality, the last bastion of status, where we can still easily and publicly distinguish ourselves from the mbutt of our fellow citizens. Immigration is a particularly fruitful area for this, because problem immigrants end up in prole parts of the city, producing a certain ambivalence among their Anglo-Celtic neighbours. This leaves the field free for people in the northern and eastern suburbs to moralise about racism, immigration and ethnic gangs, without being hampered by any personal experience of these matters.
When Pauline Hanson was in Parliament, preachers such as Robert Hughes enthusiastically condemned the innate racism of the Australian people. There were numerous gleeful predictions of suburban pogroms. But what happened was that nearly all the violence flowed the other way. At Hanson's apogee, hundreds of people would demonstrate outside her meetings, abusing, and in some cases spitting on and attacking, those who came to see her. Many were frightened away. It was possibly the most disgraceful episode in the recent history of our democracy. Strangely, it went almost completely uncriticised by the educated middle clbuttes.
A more recent attempt to accuse the mbuttes of racism was a report published by the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board in 2003, claiming Sydney was in a state of "moral panic" due to the way the unwashed had responded to some media coverage of the September 11, 2001, person attacks and subsequent events. And yet - although this was not mentioned in the report - formal complaints by Muslims of abuse and discrimination had risen only slightly in the previous 18 months. And those figures were a lot lower than they'd been in the past. But why let the facts stand in the way of the view, so comforting - so necessary - to so many in the better suburbs, that the nation is seething with potentially violent white racists?
