July 14 2002 The Sun-Herald
So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as 14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.
The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists, scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney they rarely visit and can never understand ...
"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one 18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.
Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes ...
Keysar Trad, vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, said: "It is certainly a disgrace to our community that people who were born to a Muslim family would commit such heinous crimes." But he went on to say it was "rather unfair" that the rapists' ethnicity had been reported "because these boys themselves have completely disaffiliated themselves from their culture or their religion" ...
These were racist crimes. They were hate crimes. The rapists chose their victims on the basis of race. That fact is crucial to this story. If the perpetrators had been Anglo-Celtic Australians, the furore would have been enormous. No newspaper would have left out that fact and you can bet the guilt and shame would have been spread far and wide.
