Bruce Hill covers and comments (colorfully) on the sentence meted out to the leader of the Lebanese rape gang in Sydney. And the reaction of the local community.
The behaviour of the accused towards the girls during the trial was appalling, smirking and mouthing obscenities at them. I can't believe their attitude helped them much when the judge was considering the sentencing. When SBS (Australia's ethnic broadcaster) sent a camera crew round to the Lakemba Mosque to do an item on reactions to the sentence from the Lebanese community they got a pretty straightforward answer - they were beaten up! The mother of the guilty man issued an appeal for the Lebanese community not to "take the law into their own hands", and said the "cycle of violence" had to be broken. See? Gang-raping non-Muslim women on one hand, and being sentenced to a long prison sentence by the proper authorities afterwards are morally equivalent! Fuck me dead!The real question exercising everyone is to what extent should the ethnicity of the guilty be reported. For those of you who have come in late, a Lebanese rape gang terrorised parts of Sydney in the period leadingup to the Olympic Games. The testimony at the subsequent trials shows clearly that the accused felt that young white Australian non-Muslim females were whores and sluts and that they were in some sense entitled to rape them.
Bruce takes a good, hard look at why the ethnic identity of the attackers is important and why the focus on that aspect of the trial is not racist. Amazingly, as Bruce points out, Amir Butler agrees with him.
