Moore Logic, Less Sense

On the December 11, 2005, my wife and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary in, of all places, Cronulla.  On the previous day we had picnicked with friends at Oak Park beach and there were rumours circulating of a forthcoming ‘rumble’.  It seemed that certain ‘anglo boys’, aggrieved at years of provocation on the part of Lebanese ‘yoofs’ had decided to reclaim their heritage.

As I recall, my friends and I didn’t put too much credence in the rumours.  Even the next morning, when my wife and I arrived at Cronulla railway station for a trip to the city and were confronted by a large gang of noisy young men alighting from the recently arrived train, we didn’t make the connection.  Their demeanour seemed exuberant rather than threatening.

It wasn’t until we arrived back later that evening to find Cronulla in lock down that we realized what had transpired.  The response of the authorities was drastic and effective.  For the following week one could not get into Cronulla without passing through a police check. Patrols of no less than four officers were omnipresent.

There is no doubt that this was a shameful episode in Australia’s recent history but as Keith Windschuttle has pointed out ‘blame it on the multiculturalism’.  Years of the establishment mouthing multicultural platitudes and turning a blind eye to the festering sore of Lebanese ghettos had done its work.

So we do know that, on occasions, Australians are capable of mob violence against Muslims but this occasion was ten years ago and has not been repeated since.  Significantly, the Cronulla riot was a response, by a bunch of ‘surfie’ yobbos, to years of provocation.  It was not a mob reaction to a single, isolated incident.

And now here we have Clover Moore, on the anniversary of the Lindt café siege, jumping on the same ‘let’s not provoke an ugly right wing backlash against thousands of innocent Muslims by describing a terrorist attack as a terrorist attack’ bandwagon.

Monis displayed a black Islamic flag in the window of the café so authorities had every right, at the time, to assume this was a terrorist incident. After it became known that the gunman was, in fact, Monis, authorities had the knowledge, inter alia, of his form in writing abusive letters to the families of slain Australian servicemen to surmise that he might actually be an Islamic activist.

And they had the deaths of two innocent Australians to attest that his activism had now morphed into terrorism, deranged though he may have been.

Moore is quoted:

The very real risk that the siege might set off a chain reaction of tit-for-tat attacks on Muslim Australians, fanned by tabloid columnists, was quickly dampened by our multicultural, harmonious society.

What evidence does Moore have for the assertion that there was a very real risk of tit-for-tat attacks?   What tabloid columnists advocated such action? And in what way did our ‘harmonious multicultural society’ quickly spring into action to overcome this imminent threat?

The implication seems to be that as long as Monis was just a deranged Muslim, rather than a Muslim terrorist, the racist rednecks that the left insists are lurking in every corner of our society would invoke the better angels of their nature and lay off.

Logical? Only if tosh is your stock in trade.