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.

Although noise is a prelude to violence ONLINE_EAST rightfully noticed the question remains why none but young Australians from Serbian and Croatian descents were affected only?

Whatever the history, there are some latent tensions between tribes in Australia - not limited to Serbs and Croats. A noise/verbal assault is enough to bring it to the surface.

What is needed is to never hear the word multiculturalism again - at least the office was officially dumped yesterday by Howard, apparently.

Ban all the foreign flags, languages, dress, music, chants in public. Follow the Tunisian government and start ripping off hijabs.

A monoculture is the only answer. That's the only way to stop Australia splintering.

In a multicultural/multiracial melting pot all the foreign faces, languages, smells, dress and flags are visual assault at some level. Enough of "celebrating" this crap.

Here's the sequence of escalation:
1. Visual assault (foreign flags, dress, language, smells, etc)
2. Verbal/Noise assault
3. Physical assault

The only way Australia is going to survive is to proactively police steps 1 & 2 with zero tolerance on:
- visual uniformity
- noise/verbal assaults

We really do need to go over-the-top on monocultural civility, to keep all the tensions (that may never go away) under control so that:
- we all look reasonably similar and act the same
- we act civilised around each other

As much as I hate to quote her ... One Nation.

(angry because I just saw the Granville Boys' video)

There is a very informative article by Mr. P.Mulvey in The Age, 23 January-2007,p. News-5, "Racist or cool? Music fans differ on waiving the flag ".

Bearing his publication in mind for sharing it with the Forum had found an electronic version:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/to-flag-or-not-opinion-is-divided/2007/01/22/1169330830829.html

Although its worldwide Internet-assessable features were as understood altered -title was provided as "To flag or not? Option is divided" and a very same context was partitioned as well, a very constituent passage is left intact: "There was just a really, really horrible mentality," the 19-year-old said. "People were wearing the Australian flag and were a bit racist. There was a group of Middle Eastern people sitting down and they went up to them and said 'You're not Australians."

Therefore, playing a "One Nation" card is not synonymous to really creating a melting pot of a one nation, where possibilities to gain profession and being employed depend on personal merits rather than on inherited particular biological clan's privileges.

Come on, those young Australian born Croats, Serbs, and Greeks, who all speak perfect English, were chanting with accents!

Any white Australian who went to a multicultural school in Sydney's west will remember that Italians, Yugoslavs, Asians, Lebanese, all sat with only their own kind, with the few Australians (my school had about two Aussies per class of thirty) in between all the ethnic hatreds, wondering what was going on.

Cops were called up to stop gangs of Lebanese fighting Asians, Serbs dominated at my school so only a handful of Croats even went there, and it was just the Aussies without a herd, or pack, mentality.

It comes from their parents, they talk of old hatreds, but what alternative is there when self-hating leftists portray "Austraya" as a racist backwater.

How many people know that the so-called White Australia Policy was only a diction test, to speak English?

How many know that lots of our Chinese came during this time, ones who do speak a da language?

How many people know that racist policies exist in EVERY Asian nation?

Australia is one of, along with north-western European nations, the U.S, Canada, and N.Z, the most tolerant nations on earth.

But, again, because we imported those from racist cultures on mass, they stick together and stew in their ethnic hatreds.

And those academic departments don't help, by constantly portraying this paradise as racist.

Well, yes, parts of Sydney are racist indeed.

In fact, in some parts, just as it is in L.A and other slum holes, whites can be bashed for simply being in their territory (i.e, which is why we see the Lebanese flag on our map with words "Under New Management"), territorial madnesses from intolerant cultures.

"Bashing Aussies is what we do" any of you heard the song yet?

Do you know there are thousands of such race hate videos on You Tube by Lebanese Muslims?

The idea of these thugs thinking they'll be running Australia is a laugh. They are so incompetant they don't even own their own country, Syria does!

"Sociologists will be puzzled for decades ... given the relative harmoniousness within which Serbs and Croatians integrate in their respective homelands."

Another factor could be "multicultural hypersensitivity" (I just made that up). Sydney, I believe, has some 200 nations represented through migrants. Melbourne I guess is similar. This increasing strain on the "youthful yearning for cultural identity" perhaps makes them over-sensitive to any differences. They are pulled in so many cultural directions, they probably end up jacking the whole lot and over-reacting. Maybe they are just so tired of the diversity freak-show (with respect to the beauty of each within its own kind). They indulge the "celebrate diversity" party line, find its just a painful illusion, and return to their own kind - but now with decreased tolerance and a vigilant identity mindset.

Robert Putnam, Harvard political scientist:

""In the presence of diversity," said Putnam, "we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities we don't trust people who look like us" ... Welcome to the Brave New World our elites are creating for our children"

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52531

This all assumes that "their respective homelands" are not melting pots like Australia.

And this yesterday:

"A GROWING sense of English national identity has led to a significant decline in feelings of Britishness over the past decade, a report published today reveals."

http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=122122007

Cometh the turtles ...

"How many people know that the so-called White Australia Policy was only a diction test, to speak English?" - tell in a topic on Australian citizenship test, Benjamin.

I feel your post provocative rather than stupid.

Speaking of "they will run our country", kids you had been at school with reflected "tolerance" their parents were more experienced WITH

"How many people know that the so-called White Australia Policy was only a diction test, to speak English?" - tell in a topic on Australian citizenship test, Benjamin.

I feel your post provocative rather than stupid.

Speaking of "they will run our country", kids you had been at school with reflected "tolerance" their parents were more experienced WITH.