Middle Eastern appearances: "Ethnic gangs", moral panic and media framing

This article details a moral panic in 1998-2000 about "ethnic gangs" in I S ydney's south-western suburbs and analyses its ideological construction of the links between ethnicity, youth and crime. It documents the racisms of l abelling and targeting of immigrant young people which misread, oversimplif y and misrepresent complex and class-related social realities as racial, an d the common-sense(1) sharing of these understandings, representations and practices by "mainstream" media, police and vocal representatives in state, local and "ethnic" politics. The data used in this analysis are largely co mprised of English-language media extracts, press, radio, television - both commercial and government-funded; and national, state and local in circula tion, supplemented by interview material, from an ethnographic pilot study, with Lebanese-Australian youth, Lebanese immigrant parents, ethnic communi ty workers, community leaders and police.