Madam, - Searching for culprits following the recent race riots in her native Australia, Germaine Greer rounds up the usual suspects - the white working-class - and proceeds to heap vituperation on their shaven heads in a manner every bit as lazy and obnoxious as the racist stereotyping she is so quick to deplore when applied to "men of Middle-Eastern appearance" (December 17th).
If the trouble that flared on Cronulla beach is indeed the product of an incipient Anglo-Saxon bigotry - "universal ignorance and working-class frustration ... reinforced by an unshakeable conviction of British superiority" - then how does she account for the recent conflagrations in France, where there is not a Union Jack to be seen?
Does Ms Greer believe repeated use of pejoratives like "redneck" as crude code for the kind of people she views with such lip-curling disdain sheds any light on this dark corner of Australian society? Surely we can learn more from these disturbances other than the banal offering that if you scratch the surface of the average sunburned, tattooed, tinny-drinking Bruce you find, perfectly naturally, a maddened fascist hell-bent on bashing "bloody Lebs".
Yet this reductive cartooning is all most mainstream commentators have to offer when faced by the failure of their pet ideologies, falling back on the stock cliches of the illiberal Left to explain why their big ideas have run aground on the reefs of reality.
It has fallen to another columnist in your newspaper, Mr Kevin Myers, to dig deeper and disinter the uncomfortable truth that, when confronted with large scale immigration and the inevitable difficulties in assimilating these migrants, if the fears and resentments of the native populace, however nebulous, are not addressed and are instead airily waved away as "racist" by the ruling elites, then these animosities eventually find alternative and violent expression.
That if a host country does not insist on some basic level of integration for newcomers then a process of Balkanisation begins, which leads to communities living geographically yards away from each other who are in cultural terms, continents apart. Without this commonality of shared experience the immigrant will feel little loyalty to or affinity with his new home.
Multiculturalism, it has been said, is a country club which excludes the white working class. While it continues to do so, the ugly and dispiriting scenes witnessed in Sydney might be re-enacted on our own streets in the future.
I, for one, hope not. - Yours, etc,
PHILIP DONNELLY, Brookfield Avenue, Maynooth, Co Kildare.