Again well said.

You ask.

"Is their no place where one can enjoy a slice of pita in tranquillity?"

Speedway - except you'll have to settle for a hotdog, a beer and it gets a bit loud and dirty. Take yor family not your yob mates with their wind-up T shirts from the we-hate-those-bastards group.

Spare a thought for the other groups in these pointless conflicts - the police and ordinary people minding their own business.

Today's Serb Croat riot is brought to you by the word "M" for multiculturalism :)

ONE nation, ONE race ONE culture.... through Serbs and Croats and ever other ethnic group intermarrying.

POLICY should be directed at this goal, not at funding division and diversity.

past hatred?

Mirko.....said:

Sociologists will be puzzled for decades to come at how home grown Aussie kids who happen to have ethnic parents can be imbued with such animosity, after being raised in such a carefree, nonchalant and opportunity ridden place like Australia. This is especially given the relative harmoniousness within which Serbs and Croatians integrate in their respective homelands.

I’m tipping that the answer rests largely with the quest for pride and longing for acceptance. People, especially young people, want to feel good about themselves and to fit in. They yearn for a sense of connectedness, belonging and camaraderie; a desire to be treated well irrespective of their usefulness to others.

COMMENT:
Again..hooray, for realizing the problem..
1/ Parents passing on old hatreds.
2/ The need to belong/identify.

QUESTION: If Australia does NOT demonstrate she is something worth belonging to, where will these young people go ?
ANSWER: Simple.. to their ethnic identity, and history !

Mirko then goes off the rails (Paraphrase) "Oh, but lets not have Nationalism"

NOOOOO Mirko..lets not have JINGOISTIC and 'WE CAN NEVER DO WRONG' Nationalism. We need to have HONEST Nationalism which includes our Aussie values of
-'support the underdog' and
-Best and FAIRest.
-Recognition of our history warts and all.

I am surprised with an author’s surprise if any.

Everyone knows an answer to: since the dawn of colonization, Anglo-racist regime deploy segregation and apartheid as a very ground for continuing division and oppression of non-England-natives for very personal benefits.

Have A Wonderful Australia Day-2007!

Subconsciously, Mirko knows part of the answer to the tribal violence:

"Is their no place where one can enjoy a slice of pita in tranquillity?"

It's the noise.

Noise, taunts, and threats often preceed physical violence, as was the case in this instance. I may be wrong, but I thought I saw Tennis ads on TV encouraging patrons to "Make a Noise". Tennis, along with cricket, has observed and now encouraged increasingly loud barracking for your team.

Noise is known to cause aggression to its victims (the WHO and NSW Health Department know this). There has been a general rise in noise pollution in recent years, from doof-doof cars, to noisy iPods, playing music on phones, loud phone talkers, boorish behaviour, etc.

The result is that today's youth are living in a culture of accepted noise assault. And when everyone assaults everyone else with noise, everyone gets angry and the step to physical violence becomes small and indistinguishable from noise assault.

The culture of polite tennis fans is being handed over to loud tribal barracking. When they show the TV shots of these loud fans in the stands, take a look at the poor folk sitting in front of them - they're nervous system is so shot all they can manage is a wry smile.

Anyway, so long as sporting events and society in general permit this gradual eroding of quiet respect for the nerves of your fellow man, then the masses will get ever angrier.

What is needed is a calming policy: in society they should police noise pollution more seriously, and at sporting events they should encourage a return to more civilised cheering and applauding.

Obviously noise is only part of the problem of violence. But without a preceeding noise assault, violence is unlikely to happen.

Pass the pita please.