Don't Recognise Ostraya Anymore?

Pleiades Mailbag
Here's one about Australia applying pressure on an Indonesian Film festival. Whatever happened to freedom of expression?

The director of a major Indonesian film festival has condemned Australia's decision to withdraw funding a day before it begins because it objects to the Australian films to be screened at the event.

Australia had promised the 10-day Jakarta International Film Festival $18,000 in July, but director Orlow Seunke said he was told by letter Thursday that the funding was being retracted.

"I think they've made a terrible mistake," he said.

Mr Seunke quoted the letter as saying that the films would not help develop relations between Indonesia and Australia.

"We have recently become aware that you intend to screen four Australian films... these films do not meet the objectives of the Australia-Indonesia Institute (AII) as set out in the guidelines," he quoted the letter as saying.

The letter, Mr Seunke said, mentioned the four Australian films being shown at the festival: The President vs David Hicks, Dhakiyarr vs The King, Garuda's Deadly Upgrade and We Have Decided Not to Die.

Only the first two films however were brought with AII assistance.

An Australian embassy spokeswoman confirmed that the funding was withdrawn because the films were deemed to "not assist in developing relations between Indonesia and Australia".

She said the money came from a public diplomacy program aimed at "improving the bilateral relationship" but could not comment further.

Mr Seunke said three of the films had already passed Indonesian censorship and that The President vs David Hicks had already been screened at festivals all over the world and on Australian television.

"Of course we have a gap now in the financing (but) for sure we're going to show the films and I hope many people are going to see them," he said.

Mr Seunke said he would not apply for funding from the AII next year "because they are not a reliable partner".

The popular festival is in its seventh year and is funded by an array of international and local donors. The AII has provided funding for the six previous festivals.

Stinks, no?
I was at a Birthday party for an old University friend tonight and we got talking about how fascist our government has become and how amazing it was that we as a populace were just sitting back letting it all happen. Another old University friend opined that Little Johnny was simply having his own back at a world that laughed at him and belittled him throughout his sad little life.

I can't really argue with that insight; and you know Little Johnny would deny that was his motivation; and you know he'd be lying because he's a lying rat; and the sad part is he's got a free hand to do whatever he damn well likes with his Upper House majority. If this doesn't disturb you, let me just remind you that Adolf came to power because he took the Reichstag hostage. Democracy isn't without faults that can be exploited by cunning rats like Adolf and Little Johnny. But as Winston Churchill famously said, it's the best of a bad lot.
And the funny thing is knowing all this, all we ever do is talk about it at parties or write about it on a blog. We are the weak, toothless gormless generation, failing to live up to our democratic responsibilities.

UPDATE:
Riots Every Day



Or so sang uncle Frank. Turns out we're straight bang in the midst of those moments in history once again. Indeed, what we've got going are 'race riots'.

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.

That's Paul Sheehan's take and there's more but I'll leave it for you to check out.
The Prime Minister condemned the attacks, but claimed we were not a racist country. Well of course he'd say that.

``I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country,'' Mr Howard said today following yesterday's race riots at Cronulla Beach.

``I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people.''

Up to 5,000 people descended on North Cronulla Beach, chanting racist slogans and attacking people of Middle Eastern appearance in what NSW Premier Morris Iemma today condemned as the ``ugly side of racism''.

The violence sparked apparent reprisal attacks late last night, with cars damaged at Maroubra Beach.

``Mob violence is always sickening,'' Mr Howard told reporters.

``Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics,'' he said.

``I believe yesterday's behaviour was completely unacceptable but I'm not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community.

``I think it's a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I'm simply not going to do so.''

And yes, it might look that way to our 'Fearful Leader'. Talk is cheap. Especially talk from a man who copped a lot of heat in 1987 for claiming that there were too many Asians coming into Australia. Australians might not be blanket racists, but Little Johnny?

More seriously, Australia by policy is not racist. That much we know. Yet in practice, we see all sorts of discriminatory things in our society that leads one to conclude that somebody is always looking to ostracise or persecute one group or another. There's no mystery in the angst of the disenfranchised and yet all we do seem to get is repeated stereotyping of 'The Lebs'. Meanwhile, the PM never quite puts his foot down against the likes of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, which brings about an unspoken permission for the crazies.

Which is why it's not so weird to discuss racism because the Police thought they saw Neo-Nazis joining the fray.

Neo-Nazis are believed to have been among those who took part in the race-fuelled violence at Cronulla in Sydney's south, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione says.

Up to 5,000 people descended on the beach yesterday as mobs yelling racist chants targeted people of Middle Eastern appearance.

Mr Scipione said police believed neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups were among the crowd.

"That in fact is something that we're following up," he told the Nine network. "Yes, that's the advice we've received."

One woman was pictured at Cronulla Beach holding a poster that read "Aussies fighting back." Her photo appeared in a Sydney News Limited newspaper today. She was advertising a group called the Patriotic Youth League.

The group, founded by former Newcastle student and One Nation activist Stuart McBeth in 2002, described itself as a "radical nationalist" group, News Ltd newspapers reported today.

It has links to the German-based skinhead group Volksfront, British Nationalist Party and the New Zealand National Front, the paper said.

The group has campaigned for the deportation of immigrants and for keeping foreign students out of universities.

Ah. Skinheads. What did Woody Allen say about Neo-Nazi groups? They'd understand baseball bats. Well, I guess that would only exacerbate things, but boy is it tempting when the rest of it is so sickening. It's really just so-o-o-o charming when you see this:

Yesterday's violence had been brewing for months. It came to a head last weekend when some Lebanese Australian men attacked members of the North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club after they asked the visitors to stop playing soccer because it was disturbing other beach users.

"Steely" - who did not want to identify himself "for fear the Lebs will come and shoot up my joint during the week" - said his children had been scared by Lebanese Australians coming in from the western suburbs.

"I've got a four-year-old girl and a boy who's 11, and they see these bastards come here and stand around the sea baths 'cos their women have got to swim in clothes and stuff, or they see them saying filthy things to our girls," he said. "That's not Australian. My granddad fought the Japs to see Australia safe from this sort of shit, and that's what I'm doing today."

Steely, the Japanese aren't about that "sort of shit", mate. It's shame some bullet missed somewhere in time, somewhere in history. What a missed opportunity that gave rise to the life and times of 'Steely'. What a moron. What a stupid fucking moron - but hey, the media love Steely already, for his statement is incendiary and hateful a media grab you'll get.

You have to wonder about a few things.
1) What kind of society have we become where this sort of thing happens? You have to wonder about this. This wasn't exactly imaginable 10 years ago. Now, it's unfolding in our 'Olympic City'.
2) What kind of Prime Minister have we got that won't condemn white supremacists?
3) What kind off future are we looking at if Australia is going to go down the alley of divide-and-conquer race relations a la The United states of America. Is this where Australians really want to go?
4) What exactly were they expecting when people kept banging the patriotism drum? Patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel, and by the looks of things we have aa lot of scoundrels in our society.
5) Media media media. it's a bit like Quantum Physics except the opposite you only get a wave function of idiocy and irrationality when the media does the watching.
6) Does this give the excuse to toughen police powers even more? And who is all of this activity targeting?
7) Will we be seeing more personal ads like this in the future?

photo

Are you a perfect Aryan maiden looking for her stormtrooper of love? Then look no further, because here I am. I am in to racial purity, protecting the white culture and bowling.

Look, these are just questions. Looking at the faces of the rioters, I think 'Sartre's hour of Resistance' is approaching faster than you expect.

UPDATE 2:
This link came in from Gragra. Check out this conclusion bit:

One theme that emerges from this paper and the experience of ethnic crime in Sydney in the last few years is the readiness of politicians to exploit fear of crime for their own political purposes. Political parties in Australia, and in many other countries, appear to fight to be tougher on crime than their opponents, even when so called progressive parties, such as the Labor party in NSW, are involved. Moreover, themedia, particularly the tabloid newspapers, are eager to give great headline space "often on their precious front pages" to crime, particularly ethnic crime, because it sell papers. Political opportunism and newspaper sensationalism have a vested interest in beating-up the ethnic crime issue.

It is partly for this reason that an investigation into Lebanese or Middle Eastern crime in Sydney is at the same time an investigation into racialisation of crime. That is, attitudes of racial prejudice, directly or indirectly, shape practices of individuals and institutions, including the labour market and the police. This is not to say that very thing is a consequence of police or media racism. To think this would be naive. What we are saying is that in order to understand the complex issue of "ethnic crime" in Sydney, we need to consider how the social construction of "ethnic" - say Lebanese - produces a discourse about ethnic crime that often reproduces racist stereotypes rather than challenges them.

The report dates to 25 April 2002. Sobering, really.