Sepp Blatter of the FA seems to encapsulate the views of so many. He was faced with comments which he was told were racist. One of the footballers concerned said he was very offended and the other that he had used language which while unguarded, didn’t really amount to racially abusive terminology – at least not in that arena; the other guy should not be so sensitive, after all it was only during a game. Mr Blatter considered the matter, for however long it took him, and decided that John Terry was right, and that Anton Ferdinand had taken an innocent remark and blown it up out of all proportion. If it hadn’t been in front of the world’s press I would imagine he would have told Ferdinand to ‘Pull himself together and stop being such a wimp’, or something similar. The problem for Mr Blatter is that the rest of the world agrees that Ferdinand is justified in being upset. Sepp Blatter is wrong, so wrong in fact that his apology for upsetting anyone (if one considers that an apology is debatable) may not in fact help him escape the smear of ‘Racist’. At best he is misguided, at worst he has linked himself to the worst that football can offer.
Now change the scenario and the people concerned. Imagine if the taunts had been about Jews and or supporters of Israel. How many of the world’s media would have condemned Terry? I would suggest the answer is very few.
It is interesting to me that this is going on against a background of the Stephen Lawrence case: possibly the most groundbreaking race case of the last 20 years. The case which defined what racism is in Britain – and if one looks at it one can see that it has done a huge disservice to the cause of Jew baiting as a form of racism. If one cares to look carefully at what happened one can see that initially at least ‘racism’ equalled ‘black’. I am not saying that young black men were not unfairly discriminated against, indeed they were, and still are, but in all the media ‘tub thumping’ other ethnic groups, not just Jews, were lost in the mêlée.
In this world of trial by media Jews in particular are open to abuse so that we have now reached the situation where our detractors may use anti-semitic rhetoric with impunity. They decide what we are entitled to be offended by: they can tell us that we are either mad or over sensitive to be upset if they can imply that Jews control the banks and the world economy: they can accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel than the country in which they live: they can deny Jews the right to a homeland and call Israel a racist endeavour: they can hold Israel and Jews to a higher standard than any other group: they can compare the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis: and they can hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel.
And that my friends according to the EUMC definition is anti-semitism, a definition used by European police forces. We are not being oversensitive – we are being racially abused.
