Communists on Cronulla

How timely!

The God-less Communists of the International Committee of the Fourth International / World Socialist Web Site — well, one in particular, Fergus Michaels — have published a three-part analysis of last year’s Cronulla race ‘riot’:

Australia: Police report reveals real instigators of Cronulla race riots : Part 1 (November 30) | Part 2 (December 1) | Part 3 (December 2)

You can also read the Socialist Equality Party‘s account of Will Marshall‘s recent adventure in bourgeois democracy here.

A five-volume New South Wales police report released last month sheds light on the dangerous and reactionary forces that instigated, and were involved in, Sydney’s “Cronulla Riots” of December 11, 2005. On that day, approximately 5,000 people, mostly young, gathered on Cronulla beach, many draped in the Australian flag. They launched a nationalistic, alcohol- and drug-fuelled pogrom against anyone of Middle Eastern appearance, injuring more than 20 people, two of whom were stabbed.

Retaliatory attacks and violent clashes followed in some beach-side suburbs that evening and continued the next day. The state Labor government immediately invoked extraordinary police powers and “locked down” entire suburbs, placing them under a virtual state of police siege.

As the WSWS commented at the time, there was nothing spontaneous or accidental about the riots. A Socialist Equality Party statement pointed out that for an entire week, “right-wing radio and newspaper outlets whipped up a racialist campaign to ‘reclaim our beaches’ from ‘Lebanese gangs’”. The fomenting of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment was aimed at cutting directly across deepening opposition to the Iraq war, the Howard government’s industrial relations laws and declining working class living standards. The enormous class tensions and social unrest in Australian society were directed into a diseased and dangerous channel…

Now right-wing elements want to repeat the experience… only this time, they’ll be wearing bikinis.