Anti-cosmopolitanism and 'ethnic cleansing' at Cronulla

Cronulla on that summer Sunday afternoon wore t-shirts with the slogan 'ethnic cleansing unit'. If we do not dismiss this as mere hyperbole of bravado and misplaced humour, what might we learn by actually considering this declaration at its face value? By this we do not suggest that the rioters were engaged in genocide, any more than categorising the riot as a 'pogrom' means that people were killed (though it was largely good fortune, as well as valuable intervention by police and paramedics, that none were). The point is that, as with much hate crime, the motivation was to 'purge' a given area of certain categories of people, by driving numbers of them away and forcing the rest to make themselves as invisible as possible. This objective was in fact clearly and repeatedly stated in the racist hate utterances, or malediction, of the 'white' Cronulla rioters, and the purpose of this chapter it to analyse that theme as paradigmatically anti-cosmopolitan.