Edited for new details
The rioting began Sunday on Cronulla Beach ...Carloads of young Arab men then struck back in several Sydney suburbs Sunday and Monday nights, fighting with police and smashing the windows of stores, homes and parked cars. Nearly 40 people were injured and 27 arrested in the melees, police said.
Racial tensions in Australia have been rising in recent years, largely because of...the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and deadly bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in October 2002.
They also were heightened by a gang rape case in 2002 in which prosecutors and witnesses said members of a Lebanese gang hurled racial abuse at their rape victims, all of whom were white. The ringleader, Bilal Skaf, was sentenced to 55 years, an unusually severe sentence for the country. Consistent with the stories now coming out of many other white Australian girls similarly raped, then threatened with worse if they told.
In an attempt to keep the peace, lawmakers in New South Wales, where Sydney is located, will meet Thursday to pass laws giving officers tough new powers to crack down on rioters, including ordering bars to shut and erecting roadblocks to effectively seal off suburbs. State leader Morris Iemma said he would urge lawmakers to pass legislation increasing prison sentences for riot offenses. He also said police would be given special "lockdown" powers to stop convoys from forming and driving into communities to carry out acts of retribution.
Iemma said the rioters had "effectively declared war on our society and we won't be found wanting in our response."
On Monday, police said they discovered weapons including firebombs and rocks on the roofs of some houses in the beachside suburb of Maroubra. Who exactly lives in those houses, pray tell? Some of those arrested were armed with machetes and baseball bats.
In the 2001 census, nearly a quarter of Australia's 20 million people said they were born overseas. The country has about 300,000 Muslims, most in lower income suburbs of large cities. Sydney also has a large community of Lebanese who mostly live in a cluster of lower-income neighborhoods close to the city's Olympic sports complex.
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