North African and Middle Eastern Australians

Attacks in Spain, London, and Bali have increasingly associated people of "Middle Eastern appearance" with terrorism.^[14] A clearer picture of the impact of these events on Sydney's Muslim, Arabic, and Middle Eastern population emerged from data collected from a hotline between September 12, 2001, and November 11, 2001, by the Community Relations Commission for a Multicultural NSW, during which time 248 incidents were logged. There were seven categories of attack: physical assault; verbal assault; sexual assault; threat; racial discrimination or harassment, damage to property; and media attack. Half of all victims were female; seven out of ten were adults. The largest language groups to use the hotline were Arabic, consisting 52.4% of calls. 47.2% of the incidents occurred in public spaces.^[14]

On 11 December 2005, a violent mob of about five thousand young white Australians gathered on the beach at Cronulla,

One victim recalled how the violence erupted when a man deemed to be "of Middle Eastern appearance" was walking along the beachfront with his girlfriend and "two girls turned around and screamed ... 'get off our f__king beaches' [and then] the whole street turned on them"[16] The riots put the spotlight on two segments of Sydney's population (the white, Anglo-Celtic majority and a Middle Eastern minority) and two parts of the city: the Sutherland Shire Local Government Area (LGA), located in Sydney's southern suburbs where Cronulla Beach is located (known as the Shire); and the Canterbury and Bankstown LGAs, located in south-western Sydney, where most of the city's Lebanese and other Middle Eastern immigrants live.^[14] Middle Eastern males were tagged as criminal and un-Australian by the media brush of ethnic crime.^[14]

In one incident, two young men of Middle Eastern appearance, on their way for a swim, were mobbed and beaten on a train carriage, with both responding police officers and a nearby press photographer fearing there would be a killing.^[17]

The latest incident occurred in 2011, when the criminal lawyer of Middle Eastern background, Adam Houda,^[18] was arrested for refusing a frisk search and resisting arrest after having been approached by police, who suspected him of involvement in a recent robbery. These charges were thrown out of court by Judge John Connell, who stated, "At the end of the day, there were three men of Middle Eastern appearance walking along a suburban street, for all the police knew, minding their own business at an unexceptional time of day, in unexceptional clothing, except two of the men had hooded jumpers.^[19] The place they were in could not have raised a reasonable suspicion they were involved in the robberies."