Nationalists boast of their role on the beach
![The Patriotic Youth League's Luke
Connors predicts more riots.](/web/20161204144405im_/http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/12/12/nationalist_narrowweb__300x434,0.jpg)
The Patriotic Youth League's Luke
Connors predicts more riots.
Photo: Michael Rayner
WHITE nationalist groups involved in the Cronulla riots have predicted further racial violence, naming the Melbourne suburbs of Heidelberg, Preston, Reservoir and Springvale as potential "hot spots".
The Patriotic Youth League, whose members handed out "Aussies Fighting Back" pamphlets at Cronulla, said it had been inundated with callers wanting to riot in Melbourne.
"If it wasn't for the massive police presence there already, and the fact that it's mainly confined to a peninsula, we really could have had a Paris situation on our hands (in Cronulla)," league spokesman Luke Connors said.
"I have had people calling me all through yesterday, and today, and all through the night, just asking me when Melbourne is going to erupt in riots because they want to go and join in." Founded in 2002 by former One Nation activist Stuart McBeth, the league requires members to be "radical nationalists" and strongly opposed to "non-discriminatory immigration".
While modelled on the youth wing of the extremist British National Party, Australian members are "expected to take regular exercise and to play some form of sport frequently".
The group is aligned with the Sydney-based academic Jim Saleam, who was jailed for three years in 1991 for organising the shotgun attack on the home of African National Congress representative in Australia Eddie Funde.
Dr Saleam, the NSW secretary of the ultra-nationalist Australia First Party, said yesterday the party was responsible for mobilising dozens of people to the Cronulla rally, with members distributing anti-immigration literature. "I'd say we'd be responsible for one in 45 or one in 50 of those who actually turned up," Dr Saleam said.
"But what happened was independent of any real political organisation. This is a people's rebellion, a civil uprising of a very significant number of the local population."
In the week leading up to Sunday's rally, Australia First formed by former federal Labor MP Graeme Campbell in 1996 had been encouraging members to go to Cronulla. A statement on its website called for patriots to attend the protest to demonstrate solidarity with the victims of "anti-Australian race and hate and violence".
Mr Connors said about 15 league members handed out literature to the Cronulla crowd, as well as buying drinks for some participants.
He said the league had 100 members nationally, with chapters in Ascot Vale and Eltham.
Mr McBeth lost his job with the Salvation Army after it was revealed he was an organiser of an anti-immigration rally in Newcastle earlier this year.
Dr Saleam denied neo-Nazi groups had been involved in the violence. But NSW Police Minister Carl Scully said a small number of white supremacists were involved in the riots.
Dr Saleam said the trigger for Sunday's riot was the frustration that "local Australians" felt about the lack of response from police and politicians to a "two-year campaign" of abuse and hate directed at Cronulla locals by Middle Eastern men from Sydney's western suburbs.
He described the Middle Eastern gangs as the "most extreme racists you can imagine".
"The other deep-seated factor that we struck among the crowd was a realisation that something has gone askew with Australia's immigration policies," he said.
"We haven't got an immigration policy. It's a population policy designed to change the internal make-up of Australia to resemble the nations of our so-called region."
Mr Connors said that "we have been warning people about this for ages and they just called us cranks".
"We said it's time to start to thinking about multiculturalism and they called us nazis," he said. "Well, hey, we were right and we wish we weren't because it will happen again. It will happen again and it will happen sooner."
Mr Connors predicted further outbreaks.
"'When you have areas which are majority Muslim, because they don't tend to adapt that well, or majority African or Middle Eastern extraction, and right next door you have an area which is 90 per cent Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Celtic, there is going to be friction," he said.
"West Heidelberg is a big one because you have a very large black working-class community next to a white middle-working-class community. That would be my best guess actually if it was going to start up in Melbourne.
"Also, out past Springvale, along the train line, there is that same sort of segregation going on, in working-class areas where they are competing for the same jobs and there is a high unemployment rate."
Dr Saleam predicted an increasing number of young Australians would become involved in "independent nationalistic activity".
White supremacist website Stormfront yesterday featured messages from people in the US, Britain and Canada supporting the Cronulla attacks.
Subscribe to The Age and save up to 35%*