An outcry over Muslim rapists proceeded though the rapists were Christian

Evidence

The Ontario ‘Sharia debate’ began life as a moral panic. That is to say, a small event came to stand in for a crisis of giant proportions, one on to which was projected social anxieties about Muslim bodies. Parenthetically, it is noteworthy that such media-orchestrated panics are traceable in every Western country since 2001. For example, widespread condemnation of bodies marked as ‘Muslim,’ and heightened support for punitive measures against them, followed the media-foregrounded gang rape of a white Australian woman by Lebanese males in Sydney, Australia. As Binoy Kampmark has shown, the rape case became a point of departure for public commentary on the dangers of multiculturalism and on the evil Islam posed for the West, in spite of the fact that the rapists were Christians. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 344

Categorization

• CANDY: A genuinely striking nugget: the Sydney gang-rape moral panic cast as Islamic evil men who were actually Christians — disarming for dinner-table conversation.
• XREF: Connects to the documented 2011 Therese debate and to scholarship (Poynting, Noble) on gendered moral panics over Lebanese masculinity.
• SHARE: The Kampmark documentation of the Sydney 2000 gang rape panic is narrow enough that only a reader closely following Islamophobia moral-panic literature would want the citation.