Is it the beer?

AP (via the NYTimes) is reporting that:

Thousands of drunken white youths attacked people they believed were of Arab descent at a beach outside Sydney on Sunday in one of Australia's worst outbursts of ethnic violence.

The police had increased the number of officers patrolling the beach in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla on Sunday after cellphone text messages urged people to gather there to retaliate for the attack on the lifeguards.

The police said more than 5,000 white youths, some wrapped in Australian flags and chanting racist slurs, had fought with the police, attacked people they believed to be of Arab descent and assaulted a pair of paramedics trying to help people escape the riot. The police fought back with riot sticks and pepper spray.

Many of the youths had been drinking heavily, the police said. One white teenager had the words, "We grew here, you flew here," painted on his back. Television broadcasts showed a group of young women attacking another woman.

This is terrible.

Imagine, we Israelis have been attacked by Arabs, by men, women and kid Arabs. We have been bombed in buses, in restaurants and schools. And yes, they even attacked us on our beaches.

And except for one incident of a victory march by Kahane the night he got elected when Arabs in the Old City were pushed around and incidents in Hebron when shop stalls were overturned, I can't recall a similar incident of mass attacks (I am excluding Jewish terror operations which are in another category) by civilians against civilians.

Is it Australia? Is it Australians? Is it beer?

Or is it Western civilization, for better or worse, responding to Islamic terror, real or imagined?