Racist Aussies clash with police in Cronulla. (Reuters)

Sydney, December 12, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Racial violence hiked for the second straight day in Australia Monday, December 12, prompting condemnations from Prime Minister John Howard and OIC chair Malaysia, in addition to Aussie Muslim leaders.

More than 30 people were wounded and 16 arrested in some of the worst racial violence in Australian history as riots spread from a Sydney beach Sunday afternoon to neighboring suburbs overnight.

Police said more than 5,000 white youths, some wrapped in Australian flags and chanting racist slurs, fought with police, attacked people they believed to be of Arab descent and assaulted a pair of paramedics trying to help people escape the riot, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Police fought back with batons and pepper spray.

One white teenager had the words "we grew here, you flew here" painted on his back. Someone had written "100% Aussie pride" in the sand. TV broadcasts showed a group of young women attacking another woman, whose ethnicity was not clear.

The violence shocked this city of 4 million which prides itself on being a cultural melting pot.

"What we have seen (Sunday) is something I thought I would never see in Australia and perhaps we have not seen in Australia in any of our life times and that is a mass call to violence based on race," Community Relations Commission chairman Stepan Kerkyasharian told Sky News.

"Our disgrace," said a front page headline in Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Below was a picture of white youths attacking a man who appeared to be of Arab descent on a train in Cronulla.

Aborigines rioted in the Sydney neighborhood of Redfern in February 2004 after blaming police for the death of a 17-year-old boy. Forty police were wounded, eight of them hospitalized, in a nine-hour street battle with residents.

"Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics," Howard said Monday.

Observers pointed the finger of blame at the Australian government for inciting the duel by repeatedly voicing warnings of possible attacks by Muslims on Australian soil and the recent issuance of anti-terror laws believed to be targeting immigrants from the Arab and Muslim countries.

Howard, however, dismissed any suggestion his government's recent warnings about the possibility of attacks by home-grown Islamic terrorists had fuelled the rampage.

Following the July 7 London attacks, Australia unveiled a series of new anti-terrorism laws under which suspects could be fitted with tracking devices.

The measures also included holding people for up to 14 days without charge and jail terms for inciting violence.

Howard has earlier defended his government's right to send spies into mosques and Islamic schools under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

"It is impossible to know how individuals react but everything this government's said about home-grown terrorism has been totally justified," he said, an apparent reference to the arrests last month of 18 Muslim men on terrorism charges.

One Muslim woman was harassed and had her headscarf ripped off by two white volunteer lifeguards at the beach of Cronulla a week ago.

Australia has never suffered a major peacetime attack on home soil.

Muslims, estimated at 300,000, make up just 1.5 percent of Australia's population of 20 million.

Howard dismissed his government's role in indirectly inciting the riots. (Reuters)

The Australian race riots targeting Middle Easterners showed that "extremism" is not unique, said Malaysia, the current chair of the world's biggest Islamic grouping Monday.

"It can exist in any community, in any religion," said Malaysian Foreign Miniser Syed Hamid Albar, whose country heads the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

"It shows that extremism is not peculiar to Muslims or to Asia or to Arab-looking people," he told reporters.

The OIC brings together 57 Muslim nations from across the globe.

Australia's Islamic leaders Monday condemned race fuelled violence in Sydney over the weekend.

The Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations (FAIR) described the riots as un-Australian, while a Queensland Islamic leader said the people needed to "get together and sort out the tensions," according to Australian Associated Press (AAP).

Sultan Deen, a spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland, said there was no excuse for such behavior which saw drunken mobs attacking people of Middle Eastern appearance at Sydney's Cronulla beach Sunday.

The president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, Keysar Trad, told AFP he disagreed with Baird's view that terrorism was the issue.

"This was just an ugly racist genie that was let out of the bottle and we have to put it back in the bottle," he said.