Nasty reality surfs in as ugly tribes collide

The battle on Cronulla Beach yesterday requires more than a little context. What happened has been brewing for a long time, well beyond Cronulla, and well beyond the beach culture.

The first clear hint of the undertow pushing this along came three years ago at the Coogee RSL, in 2002. Upstairs, the police from Waverley station were having their Christmas party. Downstairs, there was a 21st birthday party dominated by a beach gang known as the Bra Boys (from MarouBRA). The Bra Boys are basically Aussie surfer white boys, but with Pacific Islanders and others in the mix.

A brawl broke out, one of the ugliest and most unacceptable recorded in Sydney in many years involving police. The police were the victims. Those who left the Christmas party were confronted and mocked by a mob at the Bra Boys party. Other police went to their aid. It became what witnesses described as a "sea" of fighting men, with more than 120 involved. One police officer had his eye gouged and his sight permanently damaged. Thirty police reported injuries. Two had broken jaws. Several had their heads rammed into tables.

One of the worst incidents, and one of the few to lead to a conviction, involved a first-grade rugby league player, Reni Maitua, who at the time was with the Canterbury Bulldogs. He was one of several men at the Bra Boys party who dragged Constable Tim Allen from a lift and attacked him. Allen told them he was a police officer. Maitua responded by laughing and kicking him in the face while he was on the ground, breaking Allen′s nose. Maitua was later arrested and fined $2000. He served no time for the incident. The NSW Police Association described this decision by the magistrate, Janet Wahlquist, as a disgrace.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this ugly story is that it received only modest publicity. Yet it was far, far worse than what took place at Cronulla yesterday.

Context is everything. Cronulla will receive saturation coverage, which will balloon the events of yesterday into something more than they were - the actions of a minority of idiots. Just remember, this started small, then the media got involved. Thousands of people gathering on a beach singing Waltzing Matilda doesn′t materialise without a lot of media oxygen. But blame-the-media won′t do. This was and is a legitimate story that had to be covered.

Out there in Sydney, there is a huge cumulative weight of resentment and contempt at the constant provocations by Lebanese gangs - I′m not even going to bother with the simpering euphemism about "men of Middle Eastern appearance" when everybody knows what it means. It was evident on the beach at Cronulla yesterday.

As it happens, on Saturday, the leader of the Bra Boys bought into the Cronulla debate. Surf star Koby Abberton, who is facing a prison sentence for hindering a police investigation of a murder involving two other Bra Boys, called The Daily Telegraph to offer a view on why his home beach, Maroubra, was one of the few in Sydney not to have been trawled by Lebanese-Australian goons.
"The reason why it′s not happening at Maroubra is because of the Bra Boys," Abberton told the Telegraph. "Girls go to Cronulla, Bondi, everywhere else in Sydney and get harassed, but they come to Maroubra and nothing happens to them ... [Because] if these fellas come out to Maroubra and start something they know it′s going to be on, so they stay away."

What has happened on consecutive weekends has been displays of two unpalatable subcultures, the yobbo beach tribes, and the Lebanese gangsta tribes. The reactions to the Cronulla brawl will be predictable. The disgusting behaviour of the Aussie yobs, behaving even worse than the original provocateurs last week, will prompt a great deal of ululating about Australian′s undertow of racism. This will be countered by a demand for recognition that violent crime in Sydney is disproportionately dominated by Lebanese, Aborigines and Pacific Islanders and Australians have had a gutful of the pandering to these groups.

Both sides will be right. You only have to look at the events at Coogee RSL club in 2002 to know that Australian beach culture has its ugly underbelly. And it would be folly to airbrush away the reality that what started the Cronulla tensions was yet another provocation by the aggressive, repugnant Lebanese gangsta culture - itself an alien subculture within the Lebanese community - which has given Sydney dozens of shootings and murders, a spate of gang rapes, hundreds of sexual assaults, and thousands of deliberate racist provocations at Darling Harbour, the eastern and southern beaches and some of the big clubs in western Sydney, along with Canterbury Bulldogs rugby league matches.

At its worst, this culture had overtones of civil war, as the Kanaan gang sprayed the Lakemba police station with gunfire. One of those who took part in this attack was Saleh Jamal, now in jail in Lebanon on weapons charges. He has turned to Islamic fundamentalism and wanted to explode a terrorist bomb in Sydney before he fled the country.

The cops hate and fear the swarming packs of Lebanese who respond when some of their numbers are confronted, mobilising quickly via mobile phones and showing open contempt for Australian law. All this is the real world, as distinct from the world preferred by ideological academics who talk about "moral panic" and the oppression of Muslims. They will see only Australian racism as the problem.

Others will see only "Lebs". Cronulla yesterday proved it is not possible to airbrush the yob culture out of the picture, but the problem is not the figment of fertile imaginations. This has been too real for too long.