A sudden outburst of race riots this past weekend in Sydney, Australia’s most eminent city, unveiled a deep-seated, highly combustible racial tension in the land down under.

The catalyst for Sunday’s violence occurred one week prior, when two lifeguards from Sydney’s eastern suburb of Cronulla were assaulted in what was believed to be an unprovoked attack by a large group of Middle Eastern men. The Cronulla attacks weren’t unprecedented; the affluent suburb has long been a hot-bed of deep-seated racial tension.

In the days following the attack, a bevy of text messages inciting revenge spread across Sydney’s suburbs. By the following Sunday, an angry and largely intoxicated crowd of about 5,000 had assembled in Cronulla looking for retribution. As emotions escalated and mob-mentality set in, thousands of the livid revelers began attacking anyone of Middle Eastern appearance. Many in the crowd grew more violent—pelting cars with rocks, smashing store windows and beating foreign-looking people.

As the day progressed, the violence overflowed into as many as eight adjoining suburbs in Sydney to the south and west. Muslims, mainly of Lebanese descent, retaliated, resulting in an escalation of tit-for-tat violence. With police unable to curb the violence during the day Monday, the rioters continued to wreak havoc into the night. Residents in one area said that 30 to 40 carloads of men converged on the suburb, many using baseball bats and other weapons to smash car windows and destroy personal property. Reports surfaced of parents and children being abused by men of Middle Eastern descent after they attended a Christmas carol service on Monday night—an attack apparently targeted specifically at Catholics because of their religion.

After 48 hours of lawlessness and unrestrained violence, New South Wales police were finally able to make some headway in containing the unrest on Tuesday when they tripled the number of officers patrolling the streets of Sydney’s southern suburbs. Tough new laws that will boost the strength of the N.S.W. police force are expected to be passed by the state parliament in an emergency session tomorrow. In addition, the penalty for rioting is to be raised from 5 years to 15 years in jail.

The Sydney race riots, it seems, have forced one of Australia’s ugliest secrets to the surface. Volatile pockets of racial tension exist in many of Australia’s largest and most popular cities. Even as the rioting raged in Sydney, other isolated but racially motivated attacks began cropping up in other states. In Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, a Middle East family was terrorized in their home by 11 angry men. In the southern city of Adelaide, a Lebanese taxi driver was punched by a passenger. In Melbourne, the offices of the Islamic Council of Victoria were vandalized for the second time this month.

There should be no doubt that an underlying racial tension exists in many cities across Australia. And under the right conditions, it is likely that race riots could break out on a massive scale.

More stringent laws and more police will likely bring an end to the riots in Sydney’s southern suburbs—for the time being. The racial tension fueling these riots will remain, however, and it will intensify!

In fact, many prominent leaders believe Sydney’s riots could be a catalyst for more violence. “Waleed Aly of the Victorian Islamic Association warned that events of the past few days could radicalize young Muslim men and encourage them to adopt more extreme forms of Islam” (Australian,December 14).

As news of the riots made headlines around the world, Australian Prime Minister John Howard tried to play down the racial element of the violence in order to prevent its escalation and to counteract the accusation that Australia is a “racist country.” “Violence, thuggery, loutish behavior, smashing people’s property, intimidating people—all of those things are breaches of the law and I don’t think the actions should be given some kind of special status because they occur against the background of this or that,” he said.

Contrary to Prime Minister Howard’s hopes, racial tension will increasingly plague the cities of the land down under. As a result of its liberal immigration laws, Australia, like America and Britain, has become a veritable melting pot of nationalities.

In our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, we explain that the nations of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom comprise the peoples of biblical Israel. This is important to understand, because the Bible contains specific prophecies concerning these nations. One of those prophecies discusses the problem these nations would have with immigration and the subsequent racial tension and violence.

Lax immigration policies and weak borders are playing an instrumental role in the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. God is cursing the nations of biblical Israel for their failure to hold fast to His laws. God is humbling us—imploring us to turn to Him. Unless the people of Israel repent, “strangers” (as Scripture calls them—Deuteronomy 28:43-46) will continue to pour through their ports of entry and “get above” them. Racial tension will only intensify. It is prophetic fulfillment.