Sydney police seize knives, brace for beach violence

By Jim Regan

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian police stepped up security
around Sydney’s beaches on Sunday, fearing another eruption of
racial violence after road-blocks found cars carrying knives,
while hate messages circulated by mobile phone.

Police patrolled beaches on horse-back and set up
checkpoints around some of the city’s favorite summer
playgrounds, including Bondi Beach, where the holiday mood was
infused by fears of fresh violence between whites and ethnic
Lebanese.

“I don’t think there will be any trouble today, not with
2,000 cops around,” Louise Simpson, a young mother with blonde
hair in pig-tails, said beneath a postcard blue sky on Cronulla
beach, where the violence first erupted a week ago.

“But what’s it going to be like in three or four weeks when
the cops go away?” she added as she walked with her husband and
daughter along the beach, with mounted police in the
background.

Cronulla’s mainly white beachside community burst into
rioting on December 11 after surfers turned on ethnic Lebanese
youth who they blamed for a recent attack on beach life guards.

The unrest revealed tensions between Sydney’s territorial
surfing sub-culture, united in surfing shorts and wrap-around
sunglasses, and ethnic Lebanese youths from poorer western
Sydney who have become regular beachgoers.

“We got a text message from our boys to come down today,
but we don’t want any trouble,” said a young ethnic Lebanese
man, Ahmad, who wore a camouflage baseball cap backwards and
long baggy shorts with a mobile phone clipped to them.

“We just want to meet the surfers,” said Ahmad who hails
from Punchbowl, a suburb populated by Lebanese immigrants and a
world away from wealthier seaside communities of Sydney.

He showed the text message: “All Arabs unite to let the
Aussies know we can’t be pushed around.”

KNUCKLE-DUSTERS

Police deployed another 500 police on Sydney beaches on
Sunday, taking the total security cordon to about 2,000, and
reiterated warnings for people to stay away from the seaside.

Overnight, four men attacked a 32-year-old man with an iron
bar near an east Sydney beach, police said, adding they had
seized knives, a hand spear, axe and knuckle-dusters from cars
stopped at seaside check-points.

White supremacists have added to the tension, along with
racist commentary broadcast on talk-back radio, though no one
has been killed or reported seriously injured in the clashes so
far.

Many Australians from both sides of Sydney’s cultural and
racial divide are trying to ease tensions, with the North
Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club inviting ethnic Lebanese to join
its ranks and to help launch a surf boat later on Sunday.

Someone had also written “PEACE” in huge letters made from
black electrical tape on the Cronulla sand. Another had
scratched “Sorry” along the high-water mark.

In Bondi, normally packed with sun-worshippers a week
before Christmas, special forces scoured the shallows in an
inflatable boat while police cars prowled the famous promenade.

“Bondi has never been this quiet. It’s sad to see such an
icon of Australia not being used because it’s here for
everyone,” said Dave Byron, taking part in a Hawaiian-themed
barbecue and surfing contest with fellow members of the Bondi
Longboard Club.

The club’s men wore floral shirts and sipped coffee while
the women swayed to Hawaiian music in grass skirts and
coconut-shell bras. But even this hedonism disguised a darker
reality.

Byron recalled his daughter was one of 88 Australians
killed in the 2002 Bali bombing, which brought home fears of
Islamist attacks to Australians and exacerbated divisions
between white and Muslim communities.

(Additional reporting by Michael Perry)