Cronulla riots

I'll confine myself to a few footnote observations on how this is being spun.

The Age's report this morning made mention of some rioters wearing swastika gear and Eureka flags, which I don't doubt, but they made no mention of the professionally printed banner clearly seen in last night's TV coverage, in which the anarchist 'A' featured. Selective observation? The Age also got very maiden-auntish over the fact that the rioters had been 'chanting obscenities'. Apparently chanted obscenities - a regular feature of every dreadlock-hippie anti-Howard protest - are only deemed noteworthy or offensive if it's drunken bogan thugs doing the chanting.

On Radio National this morning, Stephen Crittenden was naturally trying to put the riots into their 'proper' context, i.e., Howard's so-called 'War on Terror'. Don't even bother trying to follow that train of thought. Crittenden was speaking to Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chairman of the NSW Community Relations Commission, who rightly and vigorously condemned the riots, but who didn't hesitate to identify a cause, at least in the short term, in gangs of Lebanese 'thugs' trying to turn the Cronulla beach into their own 'comfort zone'. You could practically hear Crittenden falling off his chair as he lunged for the mike: he cut Kerkyasharian off mid-sentence with a stammering and irrelevant observation that he had spent lots of time at Cronulla beach and never seen any problems. So there.

Another footnote: as of this morning, the ABC no longer refers to "middle-eastern appearance", but "so-called Middle Eastern appearance".