A decade ago a toxic brew of anti-Muslim hatred, alcohol, social media foment, threats to the mono-cultural beach scene of the Sutherland Shire and the noxious shock jock-ery of, among others, Alan Jones, manifested in the Cronulla riots.
There’ve been inquiries and endless community consultations, conversations and parsing over the factors that contributed to one of the ugliest incidents, post-second world war, of racial violence in Australia.
Yes, we’ve had 10 years in which to heed the lessons of Cronulla – a decade in which much has happened globally, and in Australia, to heighten tensions between Islamic communities and the amorphous so-called Australian mainstream.
It’s a decade during which the shape of radical jihad has changed repeatedly so that now it presents in the form of Islamic State and the acts of terror, including in Australia, that are conducted in sympathy with – or explicitly in – its name.
And it’s a decade during which leaders of successive Australian governments have used military engagement, the rhetoric of national security, fears about Muslim asylum seekers and border control to bolster their electoral standing. They’ve been either cheered on or condemned as too soft by a reactionary media where nuance is non-existent, where you’re either for us and our supposedly unique way of life, or against us.
Critically, as the Guardian’s Paul Farrell has pointed out, the plans of an extreme-right group to commemorate the anniversary of the Cronulla riots in the Sutherland have garnered little local interest.
Cronulla has learnt. But has the rest of Australia?
Indeed, the sentiments expressed by the anti-Muslim haters at Cronulla a decade ago, replete with all of their symbols of exclusion – the Australian flag appropriated as the “Cronulla Cape” or otherwise used as a symbol of territorial exclusion and claim, the “Australian” rioters’ talk of themselves as “Anzacs” fighting an Infidel – have since been appropriated by more organised racists such as the toxic Reclaim Australia.
At recent “reclaim” rallies across Australia the flag has become a hideous distillation of Anglo-Australian racism. Meanwhile Anzac (whose mythology began with the invasion by Australians and New Zealanders of an obscure finger of the Ottomans in 1915, their defeat and retreat) continues to be misappropriated by the racists now, just as it was at Cronulla.
Australian political leaders have frequently conflated both the flag and Anzac with their own national security muscle-flexing and contemporary military deployments.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that anti-Muslim racists might occasionally appropriate them for their own malevolent, potentially violent, ends.
Anzac and Gallipoli were repeatedly summoned up at Cronulla on 11 December 2005.
Like this: “You’re standing on the soil that has been fought for by Australian Anzac diggers.”
And like this: “This is what our grandfathers fought for, to protect this, so we can enjoy it, and we don’t need these Lebanese or wogs to take it away from us.”
Never mind that the cannon fodder Anzacs took their orders as invaders from their empirical commanders or that they fought under the British flag. Truth has never interfered with Anzac’s hoary myths and it was never likely to with the mob at Cronulla or at the rallies across Australia run by the likes of Reclaim Australia.
At a recent rally at Melton, west of Melbourne, Reclaim demonstrators marched beneath a banner emblazoned with poppies, silhouettes of marching troops and the always evocative – but frequently misappropriated – words “Lest We Forget”.
At rallies elsewhere, bare-chested demonstrators sported Anzac tattoos and protesters held aloft a banner featuring an Anzac monument. Such protesters would use Anzac as another metaphor by which to distinguish themselves from the target of their venom – peaceful Muslim Australians who, they would claim with blasé generality, harbour potential terrorists.
The truth is more complex of course: the responsibility for combating radical jihad rests not just with the Australian Muslim communities, but with all Australians – opinion makers, religious leaders, community figures, law enforcers.
Radical jihad, in it current form, Isis, defies all sorts of convention and definition, not least in terms of its recruits and followers. Few things are certain. But one is: rioters, protesters, politicians and journalists who attack, rhetorically or otherwise, Muslims in Australia and elsewhere play into the hands of Isis recruiters.
We all, even former prime ministers, have responsibilities in this regard.
Proposing that Australians ought to declare “the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God” is hard to trump (pun intended) in terms of abrogated responsibility.
Words and symbols can be potent weapons.
Cronulla, after all, began 10 years ago with an exchange of heated words. Then came some punches. And a whole lot more words. And more violence that became a riot.
Australia has learnt plenty since. But it has heeded too little.
Perhaps there’ll never be another race riot in Cronulla. But what happened there a decade ago, many times multiplied, could easily occur elsewhere in Australia any time now.