After Cronulla: Guns, Bats and a Two-Day Rampage

Few Australians outside Sydney’s Sutherland Shire realise the intensity and horrors of “Middle Eastern” rioting after the Cronulla “Aussie race riot” of 2005. NSW Police spent most of 2006 compiling a 112-page analysis, titled Strike Force Neil. While it diplomatically tries to equate the Aussie and the “Middle Eastern” rioters (mainly young Lebanese Muslims), its own facts, admissions and omissions tell another story. On page 32, for instance there is this (emphasis added):

Gangs of Middle Eastern men retaliating for what occurred in Cronulla went on a rampage, the like of which has never been seen in Australia…Innocent people were assaulted and property damaged on a scale far greater than we saw at Cronulla during the day of the 11th December.

And on page 49:

The [Middle Eastern] reprisal attacks on Sunday evening across the Cronulla, Brighton-Le-Sands and Maroubra areas which were mostly simultaneous, is (sic) unprecedented in public disorder anywhere in Australia. The attacks were well planned and coordinated. The offenders attacked in the dark of night fuelled by racist prejudice and anger, showing no fear of authority and no mercy to their unsuspecting victims“.

The Neil review said (page 7) the three-day riots were carrying “a clear message to the Australian community that our multicultural society has now entered a new phase of its development, similar to what has manifested itself overseas.” What the authors meant by “new phase” is obscure but their concern is unmistakeable. They continue that there was some racism among Cronulla people

but there is also evidence across Sydney of a significant level of violent criminality being committed by an element of the Middle Eastern community. This behaviour includes having no respect for the rule of law, intimidating and harassing members of the community on a regular basis.” (page 9).

Such official frankness as expressed in 2006 would be unthinkable in today’s age of identity politics.

Part One: a bad day at the beach

Part III: Never let a good riot go to waste

As it was, the “progressive” media and academia stuck to their narrative of white racist yobbos shaming Australia, making “Cronulla riots” synonymous with the victimhood of the Middle-East communities in western Sydney. To be generous to journalism, the report emerged in October 2006, some 11 months after the riots, by which time the media caravan had trundled on.[i]

The riotous nights of December 11-12 also saw church arson and vandalism, destruction of countless cars, even intimidation with gunfire of a primary school Christmas carol service.

Strike Force Neil’s 112 pages make no mention of church attacks, perhaps because those attackers were not identified and charged. The attacks might have just been too awful for the Neil report to mention, with a Labor government dedicated to multicultural vote-harvesting, the then-premier holding the Lebanese-Muslim dominated seat of Lakemba, and the next election imminent.

The most trenchant press account of church arson was co-written in The Australian by Nick Leys on December 15, 2005. (Mr Leys has gone on to a lower calling, on the ABC payroll fielding queries from often-disgruntled non-ABC hacks). His report cited four southwest Sydney churches attacked in 24 hours as the riots morphed from race to religion, with church buildings “peppered with gunfire”.

The piece described how Arab Christians saw the attacks as Lebanese Muslims’ violent attempts to inflame and shame Lebanese Christians into supporting them in a ‘race-hate’ war.

The sequence during the riots’ Christmas lead-up went like this, starting with the night of December 12:

# Arsonists burn down a Uniting Church hall at South Auburn. Police view the attack as a failed attempt to destroy the adjacent Uniting Church. The church’s Reverend Glenys Biddle says the destroyed hall had been an important part of the 100-strong community: “That is where the Tongan men sit around and sip kava and talk together. And there was a small chapel where a small group of people worshipped. They have lost not only a physical building but a sense of fellowship.”

# At St Joseph the Worker primary school in Auburn, parents and children aged 5 upwards are interrupted at a Christmas carols service by shots fired into teachers’ cars parked outside. When the families exit (mostly Lebanese, Filipino, Chinese and Anglos), Middle Eastern gangs harass and spit on them. The shootings force cancellation of carols at the Holy Spirit Primary School in Lakemba. Sydney Archbishop George Pell deplores the attack as ‘motivated by religious intolerance’.

Tuesday Dec 13:

# About 1am in South Auburn, thugs hurl bricks through ten windows at St Thomas’ Anglican Church, close by the Uniting Church hall that burnt down the previous day.

# At 1.30am arsonists break into St Alban’s Anglican church at Macquarie Fields by throwing bricks through a glass door. They firebomb the hall with three Molotov cocktails, throwing in two more that fail to ignite. The fires cause $10-15,000 damage, and several cars nearby are torched.

Police were forced to guard other churches, schools and halls against what Premier Iemma cautiously described only as “hooligans and criminals”.[ii] Both Arab Christians and Arab Muslims call for the imposition of weekend parental curfews on Lebanese youths.

In Part One, I described the four-hour Aussie beach riot of Sunday, December 11, at Cronulla. The Neil report continues with a timeline of the so-called reprisal or retaliatory riots by Middle Eastern men:

Dec 11, 5.20pm: First revenge riot – St George’s Hospital, where the afternoon’s injured are being treated, calls for police help against a big crowd of “Middle Eastern males” throwing bottles and damaging vehicles. In following hours mobs of 20-60, some carrying baseball bats, congregate in Sans Souci, Punchbowl and Arncliffe.

8pm: Large numbers gather at Punchbowl Park and Arncliffe, hurl abuse at heavily-outnumbered police, and take off in car convoys for Sutherland Shire (p45).

8.27pm: Sixty men intimidate locals at Brighton-Le-Sands.Police call for reinforcements as the mob swells.

8.40pm: At Brighton-Le-Sands RSL, a youth steals the Australian flag and a mob stomp, spit and urinate on it before they burn it (p46).

8.44pm: A dozen cars full of Middle Easterners shouting obscenities and racial taunts heads for Maroubra Beach. Passengers in one car throw a blazing device and set a parked car on fire. Police are able to stop only one car, containing 15-17yo’s with the driver unlicensed. Police merely confiscate the keys because of more serious rioting elsewhere.

A hundred men armed with baseball bats and other weapons continue riots at Maroubra, smashing over 50 parked cars. Local residents flee from public places to lock themselves in at home. Police urgently call reinforcements.

8.50pm: A Greek is accosted outside his Maroubra home and let go, but his car is then bashed with a baseball bat. When the owner runs towards his car, “he was struck in the face with a baseball bat and fell to the ground unconscious” (page 46).

Close to a dozen other locals are kicked, punched, hit with baseball bats and robbed of phones.

A man and a woman left their home in Maroubra to investigate a disturbance outside. They were examining both their motor vehicles which had been damaged when a Middle Eastern man struck the woman on the head with a baseball bat. Her friend came to her assistance and he too was attacked by another Middle Eastern man who kicked him. (page 46)

Meanwhile others are mobilising around Punchbowl into car convoys for Cronulla. Police deploy a 50-strong riot squad and numerous police stations call out their riot teams. At Cook Park and Kyeemagh when police check cars, 100-150 men throw bottles, rocks and concrete lumps at them and their cars. Police fight back with capsicum spray until riot police arrive (p47).

9.50pm: Six men from a crowd of 200 assault a Channel 9 cameraman, kicking and punching and removing his camera. Near Woolooware Golf Club a mob near-fatally stab a young man five times after chasing two women who flee into adjacent homes for safety. (I’ll detail this further below from other sources).

Two hundred men at Brighton-Le-Sands throw bottles at police and riot police are called in. A driver swerves towards police at a roadblock and is later arrested.

10.20pm: Police bring Maroubra under control, but rioting continues at Brighton-Le-Sands, with police cars damaged, including by a thrown supermarket shopping trolley. Cars full of men drive around the streets damaging parked cars with weapons.

It was reported that about 50 Middle Eastern males were armed with pieces of steel and timber and were coming up behind police lines. Police attempting to control the crowd were having projectiles thrown at them.

11pm: Rioting continues at Cronulla. A man goes outside to stop men bashing cars with baseball bats and is himself hit several times until he takes refuge in another house (page 47).

11.30pm: At Punchbowl Park men use cars to blockade the area. When a police car stops it is attacked while another 30-car convoy leaves through a gap to join others merging and  heading towards Cronulla. Police are unable to stop or control them (p49).

The situation that police had to manage and respond to on the 11th December 2005 is unprecedented in Australian policing history … The lack of serious or fatal injuries to victims can be attributed to the actions of individual police who appeared to have no regard for their own safety when endeavouring to protect people coming under attack. (page 50).

Monday December 12

1am: In Cronulla, men in four cars try to drag a driver from his car but he escapes.

1.15am: Cars in at least three convoys leave Cronulla. Police conclude that the convoys have been highly organised to maximise manpower “to carry out attacks” and thwart police counter-measures through unpredictability and coordination (p49). Later in the morning there is this message and others like it:

All Arabs unite as one, we will never back down to anyone, the aussies will feel the full force of the arabs as one brothers in arms. Unite now lets show them who’s boss destroy everything gather at Cronulla 18/12/2005 midday; spread the message to all arabs to meet up at the lighthouse (page 50).

Afternoon: Tension is ramping up with people in cars hurling abuse and some (Anglo) locals “arming themselves with improvised weapons in the Maroubra area.” Police gather all their available resources. They find and confiscate from Maroubra locals piles of improvised weapons, including milk crates stocked with bricks, two crates of Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, clubs and metre-long steel rods. Police disperse a crowd of 40-50 Anglo men.

Texts and rumours suggest that “Bra Boys” (surfers) from Maroubra will attack the Lakemba Mosque, causing mobilisation of previously unengaged Muslims. (page 51).

From 6pm: A protective crowd of 3000-4000 gather at the Mosque.

Police subsequently conclude it is unlikely any attack on the mosque was planned or intended and the Anglos’ Maroubra weapons caches were for defence against a repeat of Sunday night’s car convoys. Apparently the Bra Boys and the Muslims negotiate a peace deal – Comanchero bikers are even mentioned elsewhere.

From 6.30pm: Middle Eastern violence resumes. At Arncliffe they smash a car window and punch the woman driver and her friend, both needing hospital treatment.

7pm: At Brighton-Le-Sands, a dozen men, some armed with baseball bats, harass locals and drivers. At Arncliffe a mob of 150 gather outside the RSL, throw a brick at the first police car to arrive, and disperse by car to Lakemba. The crowd of thousands at Lakemba mosque continues to swell (p53).

9pm: Several convoys totalling more than 50 cars head for Cronulla. Police disperse some but others get through.

10pm: A Cronulla local tries to move his car to avoid vandalism and is attacked by as many as 15 men. He is hit with an iron bar and a bottle and bashed to the head and body, needing treatment for facial lacerations.

10.15pm: A dismounted motorcyclist is struck in the back with a thrown object but manages to ride off. Convoy cars block three highway lanes and surround a police car, enabling 20-30 of the cars to weave through to Cronulla. An officer discovers 150 men at Cronulla smashing windows. They disperse them with the help of Dog Squad reinforcements (page 52).

10.30pm-1.30am: The violence and random attacks contine:

There was a succession of incidents carried out by Middle Eastern men which is unprecedented so far as the level of violence that was used against unsuspecting innocent people. Over that three-hour period Middle Eastern men armed with baseball bats, metal bars and firearms randomly assaulted people in motor vehicles, outside their homes and walking on the streets. Some people who were assaulted had gone to the aid of other injured people and themselves became victims. Several reports were made of shots being fired at various locations, although there is no evidence of any person being shot. There were two incidents of attempts being made to run down police officers manning roadblocks. A large number of reports were received of private and business premises, as well as motor vehicles, being damaged…Six ambulances were requested to treat victims and there was one report of an ambulance requiring urgent assistance as it had come under attack. Transit officers were attacked at Carringbah Railway Station.(page 54)

10.58pm: A group of about 100 Middle Eastern men at Brighton-Le-Sands are assaulting motorists stopped at traffic lights. An ambulance is called and it also comes under attack. Police call in reinforcement but cars in the streets continue to be attacked with bats, fence palings, rocks and fire extinguishers. Men throw council bins at police cars and into shop windows.

11.30pm: A hotel employee is assaulted as he leaves work. Sporadic assaults continue in Cronulla, Bankstown and Liverpool until early on Tuesday.[iii]

The main policing failure is that squads diverted to monitor the angry crowd at the Lakemba Mosque leave open the route for convoys to attack Sutherland Shire.

Valiant attempts were made by police to stop the offenders in Cronulla but only a few [offenders] that individual police could manage were arrested. These officers put themselves at great risk in taking action, without concern for their personal safety. (page 53).

The report praises the police for “community consultations” with the mosque crowds without which the violence would have been a lot worse, it says.

Tuesday December 13 and onwards: Police investigations lead to charges against 51 Aussies stemming from the initial violence at Cronulla, and 53 Middle Easterners for the subsequent events of December 11-13. The number of charges are also roughly equalised. The Human Rights Commission’s Race Commissioner Tom Calma later summarised that there were only 19 prosecutions and 14 convictions. Four men were jailed, three were fined trivial sums, and seven escaped with bonds or community orders. Three-quarters of all those arrested and charged went home scot-free.

The Neil report omits a number of major revenge crimes, such as this one: A 20-year-old in Cronulla on December 11 (presumably the evening) was set upon unprovoked by a carload of four Middle Easterners who stomped on his head and body and stole his phone. He suffered a fractured eye socket and nose, two stab wounds and trauma.

Sentencing the four to a maximum two years, a District Court judge in 2007 said he was allowing for their remorse and rehabilitation prospects.

A decade later, one of the four assailants was back in prison for punching a policewoman to the ground in a racial/religious melee at Hyde Park. Another was with his brother when the brother was fatally stabbed in a fracas at a Homebush night club in 2010.

Media interviews reveal many instances of the revenge rioters carrying and firing guns, though no-one was shot.[iv] Both a Lebanese rioter and religious leader remarked about guns being on display. In any event the shots fired into teachers’ cars during the carol service were hardly the work of Uniting Church terrorists. SBS quotes a rioter[v],

We went to Punchbowl Park, hundreds of cars, guys with knives , all the weapons we could grab, we weren’t going to stop until someone got hurt. One guy in the back [of their car], he had a gun — this is serious.

And a Muslim religious leader told the same program in regard to the crowd at Lakemba Mosque

I saw a lot of guns. One guy stands out, I happened to be between him and police, the gun was on the side of his belt, I pushed that guy away. Police were standing behind him, that was the trigger (sic) I was concerned about. Even up to now it is like bad dream.

The documentary quotes a principal of a boys’ high school with strong Lebanese cohort of kids, who expressed dismay at their aggressiveness. It happens that a predecessor principal a few years earlier had suffered a breakdown from violence there and sued the NSW government. He disclosed that 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. 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. 

The total of cars (and shopfronts) smashed on December 11-13 has never been published. Across each of half-dozen suburbs police and media have reported “up to 100” cars or guesses like “40-50”, e.g. “Two men stabbed and 100 cars damaged in apparent revenge attacks in Woolooware and Maroubra.”

Some householders around Cronulla armed themselves with baseball and cricket bats and steel bars, ready to defend their property, wives and children. In one instance they rushed out to assault a TV crew whom they mistook for rioters: ‘We thought you were those f***ers coming back for another go [at trashing their parked cars].’ The incident demonstrates the total breakdown of law and order, notwithstanding 450-plus police. “It was like something out of the wild west,” the TV man said.

The cars were trashed and people viciously assaulted at night out of view of TV cameras — unlike the Sunday Aussie mayhem recorded by multiple media. Newspapers these days do poorly at fielding late-night teams* and reporting to midnight deadlines, and reporters themselves didn’t want to risk serious danger from the lawless rioters. It is even difficult to find interviews, for example, of shopkeepers and householders bemoaning their vandalised premises and cars and the repair and insurance expenses, let alone the costs of vandalism to an entire street or precinct. Perhaps householders were too traumatised and/or intimidated to give interviews, or reporters don’t think a working family’s smashed car is any big deal. (*editor’s note: in the old days of ‘hot metal’ newspapers, stories breaking as late as 4am could still make the front page of final ‘city editions’. Today, with ever-shrinking advertising revenue and resulting newsroom layoffs, most daily papers struggle to cover news that breaks after 6pm.)

Certain ABC, SBS and other programs do reveal the revenge rioters’ mindset. Four Corners on June 21, 2006 ran an episode “Riot and Revenge” without the benefit of the considered Neil report but nevertheless billed by the ABC as the “definitive account”. Reporter Liz Jackson mentions, “Lakemba Mosque is the focal point of Islamic faith in Sydney. Directly over the road is the Lebanese Muslim Association.” Interviewee “Ali” was particularly incensed at Aussie T-shirts with slogans insulting Muhammed. We learn that rioters were also fired up by fake messages that a Muslim girl was beaten by rednecks and died from her injuries. Four Corners excerpts:

LIZ JACKSON: That night and the following night, under the cover of darkness, carloads of angry young men drove from the Western Suburbs to the beaches in and around Cronulla, smashing, bashing and stabbing. Do you feel bad about going down there at all?

ALI: Nah. I don’t feel bad.

LIZ JACKSON: Why not?

ALI: ‘Cause I wanted to get my revenge…

 LIZ JACKSON: And then what?

ALI: Like, to start the fight, like, to start a war…

 LIZ JACKSON: Did you think about whether or not the people that you might get revenge against were the same people that might have done it?

ALI: Like, we wanted to give it to the same people. Like, it’s too hard, you can’t find them. So we done it to other people. So they hit innocent people like, that went there, and so we might as well do the same thing…

LIZ JACKSON: On Sunday night, straight after watching the TV news, some of their friends went down to Punchbowl Park.

“ABDUL”: Well, it wasn’t gonna be good. You know, you don’t go down in the pitch black of darkness to debate ways of bringing people to peace and stopping the issue and saying, “Hey, let’s try and show a positive image,” or do something positive. You don’t do that in the darkness of night…

 “E” (a law student): They had to respond. If you don’t respond to that situation, what’s going to happen is that you actual …Your mum, your sisters and all that, they’re going to be scared to walk in the street. Because if they’re going to walk in the street and there’s no-one there to protect them, they’re gonna be, they’re gonna be scared.

LIZ JACKSON: So you have to react to that situation.

“E”: I dunno, I’m not saying it’s correct what they did. I’m against innocent people getting hit and all that, but you can’t just sit there and just take it. I mean, you’ve gotta respond to that situation and protect yourself…What I say is the person that instigates the fight is the most – the person to blame the most. If you start the trouble, if you fire the first bullet, that’s the most, that’s the most devastating.[vi]

It was a miracle the riots involved no fatalities. Consider “Tim”, a 26-year-old mechanic, on the night of December 11. He and new date “Jane”, a 21-year-old disability worker left the Woolooware Golf Club at 10pm and were accosted by a five men who piled out of a car while  screaming “Get those Aussie dogs” and “Get those f***g Aussie sluts”. Tim gave Jane time to run before he was punched to the ground, kicked in the head and stabbed twice in the thigh and three times in the torso with a hunting knife, so violently that the 9.8cm blade broke off in his back. He spent weeks in hospital hovering between life and death. After years of follow-up medical care he and Jane married in 2009.

The driver of the attackers’ car, a dope and meth user, was the sole occupant charged, notwithstanding the gravity of the group’s crime. Sentenced to 13 months, he was released in nine months — long before victim Tim had fully recovered. How — or perhaps why — police failed to catch his confreres in the car is a mystery.

Four Corners provided another example, that of “Jack” and a female flatmate who went outside to check after hearing the sound of breaking glass. They encountered a mob of 30-40 carloads of rioters and 40-50 on foot, many armed with bats and other weapons.

Jack: “I was struck from behind and I heard my flatmate cry out and she’d gotten a baseball bat to the head, and while she was down another assailant had come from behind and kicked her. And when I got to where I could see her, she was getting back to her feet and she still wasn’t answering, she was holding her head in both of her hands. And in the street light I could see that there was blood starting to come from between her fingers.”

Tomorrow in Part Three: The Aftermath

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[i] There have been credible allegations that police were ordered to deal gingerly with the rioters. Leaders would doubtless respond that police lacked numbers and resources to tackle mobs also carrying guns.

[ii] In 2015, Iemma lost to Linda Burney in his plan to contest the federal seat of Barton.

[iii] “Subsequently, on December 12, 2005, a group of Lebanese-Australians arrived at Punchbowl Park armed with guns, matches, baseball bats, knives, chains and iron bars; when they departed they left messages written on the roadway along with crude Lebanese flags: ‘AUSSIE TO DIE, INTIFADA, IT’S WAR, SUNDAY COWARDS DIE, SOLDIERS RIZE, NEVER REST ASSI DOG, YOU CAME IN CHAINS U CONVICT DOGS, WE FEAR NO OZY PIGS’.

Author Paul Sheehan writes, “Sexual aggression was a subtext… During the rampage, a parked car with three girls inside was approached, the door pulled open, and the girls told, ‘We are going to rape you, you Aussie sluts.’” Sheehan, Paul. Girls Like You . Pan Macmillan Australia. Kindle Edition.

[iv] Strike Force Neil: “Several reports were made of shots being fired…” (p53).

[v] The video seems corrupted and is hard to play on Safari, but plays on Chrome.

[vi] The excerpts are not in sequence. Four Corners didn’t ask “E” how his tribal payback philosophy squared with his university law studies.