The Cronulla Riots, the Complete Story

Poking among Human Rights Commission files for other reasons, I came across the surprising statistic that after the Cronulla’s “race riots” of December 2005 there were only 19 prosecutions and 14 convictions. Four men were jailed, one for nine months for his role in near-fatal stabbings of an Anglo, three were fined and seven escaped with bonds or community orders. Three-quarters of all those arrested and charged went home free.

What? Did the coppers go easy on the violent criminals, church arsonists and would-be killers, the trashers of shops and hundreds of cars, knowing that Labor’s then-premier Iemma needed to harvest votes in his Lakemba electorate? Did the coppers really lose or mislay key bits of evidence?[1] Or does something stink about that whole “Cronulla race riots” business?

Today there are burgeoning race riots against Jews, along with 662 anti-Semitic incidents last October-November alone, ranging from death and bomb threats to assaults. This makes analysis of the Cronulla riots more relevant.

The dust has had almost two decades to settle. What emerges is that the reality of the riots is poles apart from the distorted narrative of the “progressive” class. In this first essay, I’ll set out the Sunday afternoon beach riot by Aussies. Part 2 will detail the Lebanese riots over the ensuing Sunday and Monday nights, and Part 3 will cover the aftermath.

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Melbourne’s Watergardens shopping centre is barely 20km from Moonee Ponds as the crow flies, but the bus makes 66 stops as it wriggles through Labor’s northern electorates. Think Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong) and Victoria’s Deputy Premier Ben Carroll (Niddrie electorate). Not much suburbia of interest from the bus window, except that one 1970s bungalow flies an Australian flag. Is this flag a provocation, a kind of threat?

Part Two: The Lebanese revenge riots

Part III: Never let a good riot go to waste

Our flag aversion — lately reinforced by the Aboriginal Industry — might date back to that hot Sunday afternoon on December 11, 2005, on Cronulla Beach.[2] The crowd was reportedly 5000, but no-one knows who counted them and how. They arrived as Australian patriots pushing back against aggressive Lebanese-Australians who didn’t conform to easy-going beach culture. As one girl, Tegan, reported:

I’m a Shire girl. I’ve been going to Cronulla for years. I’d seen first hand how people get treated, not by the local Lebanese, but by the Lebanese Muslims that come in from places like Bankstown and Riverwood. They treat our beach like a sleazy nightclub. They treat young women like garbage. And as soon as you say anything, they are on their mobile phones to 50 of their closest friends and their mates come down and outnumber people. If it’s guys, they will beat them up. If it’s girls, they will terrorise them.

An eyewitness to Cronulla’s riot, Ryan Barclay, who happened to an academic, co-wrote a paper describing the pre-riot issues,

Males in packs would verbally abuse females or offer sexually explicit comments. Phrases, “You’re a slut”, “You Aussie slut”, “You should be raped” and so on, are reliably reported as comments made by Lebanese males to females. The young males walk around in groups of 10 to 15, sometimes more. Their haircuts and swarthy features help mark them out as different from the locals.

The scheduled protest-cum-BBQ and festival of beach hedonism arose because the previous Sunday a group of Lebanese bashed three volunteer lifesavers. The crowd, pushing back the following weekend, sported the Australian flag as cloaks, on clothes and hats, in face-paint and stick-on tattoos. In the morning of the day it all erupted the mood was good-hearted. People fraternised with police who were there pre-emptively in their hundreds. But from 1pm it became a “race riot” when some of the crowd, unprovoked, chased and bashed a handful of young men “of Middle Eastern appearance”. The instigators were beer-fuelled and some were neo-Nazis and race-baiters. Since Lebanese in groups had wisely stayed away, there were no big brawls but instead, sporadic and deplorable assaults on individuals who were mostly there by accident – some were not even of Arab background. In each case police stormed in and rescued the victims — hence few serious injuries were recorded, mostly from thrown bottles.

The bashings were rightly condemned at home and abroad as a disgrace to Australia’s reputation, and it could be argued with a degree of certainty that the crowd’s ostentatious use of flags has contaminated the flag’s display and reputation ever since. But as journalist-author Paul Sheehan put it, “What was never reported, despite the thuggish element, was that for most people this was a protest against racism.”[3]

Shorthand for the afternoon’s disorder became “race riots” meaning “Aussie race riots”. Why the plural “riots”? Because Lebanese rioting took place on the nights of that Sunday and Monday. Those “Lebanese” race riots were a hundred times worse than Sunday afternoon’s beach affrays but have been effectively airbrushed by media, officialdom and academia. A one page “Fact Sheet”, for example, was put out by the Challenging Racism Project at Western Sydney University, via Georgetown University, four years ago. Excoriating the Aussie beach riot, it merely adds,

After the initial violence, efforts began from small numbers of young men of Middle Eastern heritage to retaliate, resulting in arrests on both sides.

I use the term “Lebanese” because that’s how the nightly rioters were described at the time, including by the Human Rights Commission’s Tom Calma, who was Race Commissioner.[4] If I’m racist to say so, so’s he. When I write “Lebanese” in this series of essays, I refer to the anti-social minority.

After 2005 the hundreds if not thousands of revenge rioters were officially re-named “men of Middle Eastern appearance”, as distinct from men of Australian, Chinese, Jewish or Scandinavian appearance.

The more time that elapses from December 2005, the more the Lebanese rioting disappears. Who even among well informed Quadrant readers is aware that on that Sunday night, a 16-year-old who had arrived from Lebanon at age six climbed on the Brighton-Le-Sands RSL club’s roof,[5] hauled down the Australian flag and delivered it to a mob of around 150 compatriots. The mob stomped, spat and pissed on the flag (Strike Force Neil police report, p46). A man produced a bottle of accelerant which he just happened to have handy and set the flag on fire, catching himself briefly alight in the process.

John Howard was Prime Minister at the time. He immediately flagged Cronulla (no pun intended) as an aberration to Australia’s tolerant and non-racist lifestyle: “I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people.” In contrast, the Left institutions, academia and ABC-led media brandished “Cronulla riots” as proof of Australia’s innate racism.

The trigger for the Sunday riot of December 11 was pulled the previous Sunday, December 4, when three lifesavers got into their fracas with eight Lebanese. Two lifesavers were taken to hospital by ambulance, the third was bruised. For locals, it was the last straw.

Stories about the fight have differed wildly. The NSW police spent 10 months compiling their report (Strike Force Neil) on the riots, and I’ll go with that account drawn from witnesses and participants.

The eight Lebanese for three hours had been hanging around the beach end of a ramp leading to the lifesavers’ clubrooms (why?). The three lifesavers returned from their shift on the beach and the groups accused each other of staring. One Lebanese, X, told them, “I’m allowed to [stare], now f–k off and leave our beach.” Lifesaver “Y” retorted, “I come down here out of my own spare time to save you dumb c—s from drowning, now piss off, you scum.” The eight Lebanese circled the lifesavers, X punched but missed, and the fight started. The police report says,

During the fight [a lifesaver] fell backwards on to the ground hitting his head. He was semi-conscious with blood coming from his head and appeared to be the most seriously injured. [The other two] were assaulted by being punched.

A witness saw a Lebanese punch a lifesaver in the face and also punch a by-stander’s face. The un-named Lebanese man initially lied to police that he was assisting the lifesavers, then was arrested for assault (p26).

With much trumpeting of its journalistic prowess, ABC Four Corners ran its version of the Cronulla crisis called “Riot and Revenge” on June 21, 2006, months before the police report came out.

Concerning the bashing, Four Corners enlisted as its own “facts” that the lifesavers “weren’t actually on patrol and they weren’t actually in their uniform”. The fight arose, it said, from “provocative insults from both sides”. I’d be more tolerant of the show’s errors except that the ABC labelled it’s version of events as “definitive”.

For the ABC, provoking and bashing lifesavers is apparently only bad if the lifesavers are actually on patrol and wearing bathers. Moreover it seems odd if the lifesavers, returning to their clubroom from their beach shift, somehow changed out of their togs before arriving. Not to be outdone, the Guardian later reported the lifesavers’ behaviour as “hardly admirable” — after it misread the Neil report and misquoted the lifesavers to ill-effect.

News of the lifesavers’ bashing spread in the following week from press, TV and text messaging (pre-dating the smartphone era). This messaging urged “Skips” to “take back the beach” from the Lebanese. The most lurid texts urged “Leb-bashing” and “wog-bashing”. The media gave the worst anonymous messages a ton of airplay — not just via Alan Jones on 2GB but the Murdoch, Fairfax and other media.

Responding later to audience complaints, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found against Jones on three of eight complaints (ACMA Investigation Report 1485). The police, “progressive” media and academia have all lambasted Jones’ rhetoric as a prime cause of the riots, thus minimising any Lebanese culpability. It’s therefore worth inspecting the Jones detail here from ACMA.

The main ACMA ruling that Jones encouraged violence and vilified ethnics, concerned a broadcast on December 7, when Jones appeared to endorse a listener’s suggestion to invite bikie gangs to greet Lebanese thugs at Cronulla Station. The bikers would make the thugs (in the listener’s words)

scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs … so that we, their parents, family and friends can see who these bastards are. Australians old and new should not have to put up with this scum. (p16).

Jones also read a letter from a policeman:

unfortunately … the only language which Middle-Eastern youth understand is a good hiding … These Middle-Eastern people must be treated with a big stick, it’s the only thing they fear, they don’t fear fines and they laugh at the courts.

ACMA rejected Jones’ defence that the biker proposal was hypothetical. Jones later in the same program decried vigilantism in favour of reinforced police. One exchange went:

Listener F: now it’s all well and good that we band together and do something socially against this but we’ve got to be very careful about vigilante groups as good as they may sound at this particular time. Because we gotta remember that what’ll happen is or what may happen is that these types of rat-bags will start to utilise more lethal means to combat such activity.

Alan Jones: Yes. Look we’ve got to have appropriately trained law enforcement authorities to do the job … I think what we’re saying is that there is a gang problem and we want the police commissioner to direct resources to that problem and if he hasn’t got the resources, tell us what he needs and the taxpayer will be prepared to stump up extra money…(p19)

But ACMA said the disclaimers were spoken too far in time from the original offence.

A third-party text message Jones read on air on December 8 (as did other radio people and which the SMH and Murdoch press printed) has been almost universally used to damn Jones – especially academia’s so-called scholars who created a veritable industry of Cronulla hit-pieces about alleged “Aussie racism”. The anonymous message called on “every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support Leb and Wog Bashing Day”. The critics and academics all omit Jones’ own comments (emphasis added),

And the message urges Aussies yesterday to take revenge against Lebs and Wogs. Now, it’s got pretty nasty when you start talking like this… That’s what we’re heading to. That’s got to be stopped. And I say to all those young people: Hey, you’re not in charge of law and order; we do have law and order people. Boys, don’t get down there and come at this nonsense. This will only make things worse… If we don’t have enough police, get the police … we don’t condone that stuff, we’ve got to allow the police to do their job…(p30).

ACMA found for Jones and against the complainant. However, ACMA upheld a complaint where Jones generalised from vicious race-based pack rapes in Sydney to vilify Lebanese and Middle Easterners generally, e.g.

 we don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney. So let’s not get carried away with all this mealy-mouthed talk about there being two sides … I don’t hear people complaining about Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans, I’m sorry, but there’s this religious element in all of this…

…All across Sydney there is a universal concern that there are gangs, the gangs are of one ethnic composition, and they have one thing in mind…[Quoting a listener] ‘Alan, it’s not just a few Middle-Eastern bastards at the weekend, its thousands, Cronulla is a very long beach and it’s been taken over by this scum’ (p31).

Seldom quoted by the “progressives” are Lebanese texting the same week of December 4-11 such as

# All Lebo/wog brothers. Sunday midday. Must be at North Cronulla Park. These skippy Aussies want war: Bring ur guns and knives and lets show them how we do it.

# O fight each Aussie. Yulleh. Lets get hectic and turn gods country into wogs country. Habib will be cooking victory kebabs after. Tell all your cousins. (p35).

And after the December 11 riot:

All Arabs unite as one, we will never back down, the Aussies will feel the full force of the Arabs. Destroy everything, gather at Cronulla December 18 at midday – spread the word. Together exterminate the enemy at Cronulla. Send this to every lion of Lebanon.

TURNING now to the Aussie riot, the hot-heads, drunks, skinheads and supremacists besmirched the law-abiding majority, many of whom continued their Festive Season picnics, drinking and barbecues through the afternoon.

Tegan: “There were thousands of people. There were things that made us laugh. This one guy was in a crappy old Aussie ute playing, “I Come From a Land Down Under”, really loud. It was like he had this Aussie greatest hits CD…

…Most people were just like me, wandering around. I don’t know why they call it the Cronulla riots. It was a demonstration. Only a small part of the crowd got stupid. Mostly young guys … It was immediately branded a riot when most people didn’t do anything violent and we were protesting against violence.’

Had Tegan personally experienced abuse from Lebanese at Cronulla?

Yeah, a couple of times. If you ask any girls down here, if you did a survey, about 90 per cent of them would be able to tell you a story about being harassed by Lebanese or have a friend who had been harassed.[7]

Author Paul Sheehan interviewed local females who

portrayed a pattern of sleaze, intimidation and naked racism. One woman recounted to me an incident that occurred about a week before [11 December]: ‘A friend of my daughter’s was surrounded and abused by a large group of Lebanese. “Come on, f–r,” one of them said to her. “You know you want to s–k our c–s. We won’t let you, Aussie filth, you’re not clean enough.”

A 24-year old woman: ‘I was walking down the esplanade [at Cronulla] when a group of Lebanese surrounded me and blocked my path. One of them put his hand up my skirt and grabbed my crotch.[6]

Agitators with loud-hailers recited grievances against Lebanese to work up the crowd, and ugly incidents began at 1pm:

# A mob chased a dark-skinned man across a park and into the North Cronulla Hotel, where he was protected by police.

# At nearby Arncliffe RSL Club, “Middle Eastern” men put two pigs’ heads on the doorstep (p40). Make of that what you will.

# 1.30pm: Three Middle-Easterners, two men and a woman, are sitting on a beach wall and three Aussie women begin abusing them. “A large crowd gathered, commenced chanting and throwing sausages at them.” Police move in and stop the sausage assaults. (Neil, p40).

# 1.35pm: An agitator with a loud-hailer abuses two Middle-Easterners, and the crowd punch and kick them. Police escort the pair to safety and arrest one of the assaulters.

# 2.30pm: Three Aussie women verbally abuse two women, aged 17 and 18, as ‘Lebanese Muslims’. Police separate them but the two are further abused by the three near the North Cronulla Hotel, followed by kicking and punching — the police don’t say by whom but they arrest one of the three women who is later convicted of assault. (p40).

# 2.40pm: The crowd set upon the car of two Bangladeshi students who have unwittingly driven into the area. People throw bottles and jump on the roof. The students drive off with one broken side-window. Police charge one person with riot and affray.

3pm: Rumours spread that a trainload of Lebanese militants is arriving at the station. A large crowd runs there — including many kids no more than 12 to 15 as onlookers[8] –and  chases two men back into a carriage and begin seriously assaulting them. Police follow, beat back the perpetrators with batons and rescue the victims. Then they clear the crowd from the station with batons and capsicum spray and call for riot-squad reinforcements. (p41). This seems the worst incident of the day and I’ll deal further with it below.

3.19pm: A policeman in his car sees two men being kicked and punched by a large crowd. He uses capsicum spray to rescue them and take them to the car. The crowd throw bottles, injuring both men (hospitalisation needed) and extensively damaging the car. Seventeen rioters are charged.

Nearer the beach, a large crowd menace three Middle Easterners whom police escort to a restaurant for safety. About 200 people bang on the doors and break a window. Police use a rear exit to drive the men to safety (p43).

3.40pm: Riot police activated.

4.20pm: An ambulance collects three of the previously injured Middle Easterners and three others seeking safety. The crowd attack the ambulance and police escort (four of them mounted) with bottles. The bottles smash windows and one bottle comes through the sunroof and injures an ambulance man’s head. The patients get to the hospital after transfer to a second ambulance, and three rioters are charged.

After the ambulance leaves, the mob taunts police and one youth smashes a bottle near them. As the police arrest him, a mob of 500 surround them with spitting, taunts and abuse. Police remove the offender in a caged truck and lay assault and drug charges.

5.30pm: Police learn of the first convoys of Middle-Easterners assembling for revenge rioting

7pm: Three drunk and belligerent Aussies arrested at the beach.

That ends the police version of the Aussie Sunday afternoon riot. Apart from fists and feet, the weapons mentioned are bottles used as missiles. Significant injuries appear to total about half a dozen. However, much worse injuries or even possibly deaths were averted by police reacting quickly and strongly to rescue the victims.

Veteran reporter David King, at the time working for The Australian, was at the riot. “The thing I found most confronting was a big group of people chasing a young woman in a hijab and they were trying to rip her hijab off,” he said. “It was just horrific. She ran into a kiosk and the police helped her out. But there was a group outside chanting ‘Kill the Leb’ and climbing onto the kiosk – it was really frightening stuff.”

SBS interviewed a photographer “A” and police sergeant “C” who were involved first-hand in the train fracas. “A” said he got in the carriage and was amazed to see a mob running in to bash “two Middle East looking fellows”, kicking and punching while bottles flew  through the open windows.

“The rage was unbelievable, these guys getting kicked and bashed and punched, I had to put the camera down and say, ‘Get the fuck off, you’re going to kill him,’” “A” said.

“They paused, looked up at me, saw I wasn’t really a threat to them, just kept going. And then there was Sergeant C, old school, with his baton, [he] just started whacking everyone.

“They wanted blood and that’s what they got.”

Sgt C had a nickname for his baton: “Milo, because it’s amazing what a difference Milo makes.”

They would have died, those young blokes, or been very seriously injured, if we hadn’t gotten there when we did, they were just curled up in a ball, people hittin’ ’em. I yelled out to people to stop, but no one wanted to take heed, so I had to give them a reason and I gave them 134kg of animal connected to 26 inches of spun aluminium. That got them moving, and they weren’t happy … Some of the people down near the surf club were Italian and they were beaten just for having olive skin. Ridiculous.

The train victims — one a local, the other Russian — were “shaken up” rather than injured, C said.

The photographer in the train won a Walkley Award. But for Sgt C, there was a tragic sequel. NSW Police were about to award him a Commissioner’s Commendation for Courage, but revoked it after deciding he had used excessive force clearing the train and station. He continued to enjoy hero status among the Muslim community. In 2007 he was diagnosed with PTSD, had a violent breakdown and in 2009 left the force. He told the ABC in 2018, “I’ve lost my job that I always wanted to do, I’ve lost my 30-year marriage, my house, everything … everything I worked for since I was like 14. That’s a big burden to carry.”

A young Anglo who had been pictured jumping on the bonnet of a police car committed suicide two years later, after big legal defence debts and marital breakup from his Japanese wife. Such cases illustrate the suffering that riots generate long after the instigators have gone home.

Another young Aussie did a month’s jail for bashing a man with a beer bottle during a mob attack. A decade later he attributed his crime to beer and having himself been bashed a month earlier by Lebanese. He said he was not racist — he worked at the time at Habib Brothers Truck and Smash Repairs. His friendship circle was Muslim and multi-cultural and his Lebanese boss at the panel beaters stood by him during the court case. Another man, convicted of attacking three people in the train, a decade later was engaged to a Lebanese woman.

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

[1] See Barclay and West, 2006, who refer both to radio talkback claims of disappeared evidence and how “loss of police tapes made him [Labor Premier Iemma] look inept.” The Wood Royal Commission a few years earlier led to resignations in NSW Police up to Assistant Commissioner level. Its glossary includes “gutting” – in the context of ‘gutting a brief’ it means to remove documents from or otherwise weaken a brief so that prosecution will be unsuccessful or charges reduced.

[2] A mystery is that the BoM temperature gauge at Sydney Airport, just 13km north, recorded a maximum of only 20 degrees that day.

[3] Sheehan, Paul. Girls Like You. Pan Macmillan Australia. Kindle Edition.

[4] Calma 17/7/2006: “Lebanese youths were urging further reprisal attacks at Cronulla the following weekend – also through text messages.”

[5] Brighton-Le-Sands is 15km north of Cronulla.

[6] Op.cit. 1

[7] Ibid

[8] The reference to kids is from eyewitness Ryan Barclay. Op.cit. 1