From TIME Magazine
In almost any circumstance, pushing a police officer and kicking a police dog aren’t considered smart things to do. But does that behavior — even if it took place during the chaos and fury of a riot — deserve four years and one month in prison? Yes, say the Australian courts in what appears to be a draconian ruling for a country with a relatively progressive legal system.
Bear in mind it was no ordinary riot. Part of the worldwide protests that followed the publishing last September on YouTube of anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, the Sept. 15 riot turned Sydney’s central business district into a war zone where Muslim protesters attacked police, destroyed public property and carried placards reading “Behead all those who insult the Prophet.” And it took place in Hyde Park, a lush green space consecrated to monuments honoring Australia’s war dead, including Sydney’s largest ANZAC War Memorial, the Pool of Remembrance. The wheels of justice finally turned on May 9 when a 26-year-old Australian man, plumber Mahmoud Eid, became the first of 12 defendants to be jailed over the affray. On handing Eid the maximum sentence for kicking a police dog and pushing a female police officer, New South Wales deputy chief magistrate Jane Culver said she would have locked him up for longer if the law allowed it.
The trial and sentencing throw into sharp relief the gulf that exists between the mainstream Australian public and an at times vocal class of disaffected, ethnically Arab youth. The sprawling, low- and middle-income suburbs of Western Sydney may be a long way from the Parisian banlieues and the grimy streets of East London, but each is home to disaffected migrants and locally born second generations, who consider themselves socially excluded from, and culturally at odds with, their new countries.
Granted, they are in the minority. Sitting in Al Andalas Cafe, a popular North African haunt in the southwestern suburb of Lakemba, an Algerian-born migrant in his 40s who identified himself as Jugurtha sums up the predominant sentiment of a largely law-abiding local community when he says, “In France, Muslim people feel marginalized. Here, my main concerns are soccer training and the education of my kids.” In a nearby restaurant, 26-year-old waiter Bashir Ghazal condemns the violence. “I don’t support people going crazy like that,” he says.
