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I just received an email informing me that UEFA, the governing body of European football, is fining APOEL 40,000 Euros because of the racist behavior of some of its fans.
Be clear, everyone: that’s APOEL of Nicosia in Cyprus, not Hapoel of Tel Aviv in Israel.
But guess which club attracts protests from the likes of the Scottish Trades Union Congress? The one whose fans brandish fascist symbols or the one whose fans have a proud anti-racist tradition?
In a comment on my earlier post, David Schraub asks for a link to the SAHRC ruling which found Bongani Masuku guilty of hate speech. A copy of the ruling is pasted below.
Over a year ago, I wrote about an entry on Zionism for an encyclopedia published under a well-known, trusted imprint: the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism,” which carries the names of both Macmillan Reference USA (now owned by the Michigan-based Gale, Cengage Learning company) and the Macmillan Social Science Library. At the time, there was quite a storm and the publishers resolved to do something about it. Sadly, their compromise formula makes a bad situation worse, as I explain in this op-ed for the Jerusalem Post.
“Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals - moderate Muslims.” So says Michael Weiss in an excellent piece for The Daily News on the Swiss referendum which resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets in new mosques.
It bears saying again and again: far right parties are not our allies in the struggle against Islamism, but our deadly enemies. For these boneheads and their leaders, all Muslims - whether from Albania or Yemen, whether a teenage girl facing an arranged marriage or a cleric preaching hatred - are all the same, all just dirty foreigners.
Over at the CST blog, Dave Rich has an absolutely superb piece examining how racists of both leftist and rightist varieties will vilify a person not because of what they say, but because of what they are called. Barack Hussein Obama. Michael Abraham Levy. Rahm Israel Emanuel. Go and read it. And then savor the Woody Allen clip at the end - perhaps the greatest stand-up routine, like, ever?
“The next time the terms apartheid or oppression are used with reference to the Middle East, one must remember the intolerable conditions of Palestinians in most of the Arab countries,” writes Khaled Abu Toameh. He says:
Antisemitism was a prominent focus of the American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were John Mann, the British MP who has spearheaded the global parliamentary fight against antisemitism, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French author and philosopher who has never lost sight of the centrality of antisemitism in his dissection of Islamism and its related ills.
Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parks. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”
You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.
And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Last October, Z Word published my detailed report on the scandal of a member of the extreme right wing Olympia student fraternity, Dr. Martin Graf of the FPÖ, being elected as deputy president of the Austrian parliament.
Last March, the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders released a film about Islam entitled Fitna, an Arabic term which refers to civil strife. Unable to find a broadcaster because of the film’s blanket condemnation of Islam, Wilders ended up posting it on the internet. As Elif Kayi reported at the time, there were angry demonstrations around the world, including in Afghanistan, where Dutch troops were stationed with the NATO force. But the apocalypse did not come.
Terry Glavin has drawn my attention to a certain group of protesters at a demonstration about Gaza in the Canadian city of Calgary, which provides yet more proof of the murky overlap between the extremes of right and left.
The news wires are breathlessly churning out the story about the supermarket which refused to prepare a name-embossed cake for a three year old’s birthday - because he’s called Adolf Hitler Campbell.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
“Greetings from the national resistance, you left-wing police pig. ” These were the words which accompanied a deadly knife attack on Alois Mannichl, the police chief of the German town of Passau, last Saturday night.
Continue reading ‘Passau Stabbing Highlights Neo-Nazi Activism’
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Between 1969 and 1992, Klaus Emmerich was the correspondent of ORF, the Austrian state television channel, in Washington DC. He also worked also for the Vienna daily Die Presse and for German media. On October 5, Emmerich, who retired a few years ago, was asked by the discussion club 2 of ORF to comment on Barack Obama. “I wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man,“ he said “If you say that is a racist remark, that’s right, without a doubt!”
An ugly and extremely violent confrontation has, for the time being, been avoided in the Israeli Arab town of Umm al Fahm, near Haifa. Israel’s northern police command has decided to postpone a so-called “Jewish pride” march, organized by far right activists and scheduled for Monday, December 15.
Continue reading ‘Umm al Fahm Reprieved from Far Right Threat’
With Canada and Israel now having formally withdrawn from the UN’s 2009 Durban II conference, serious questions are emerging over the attendance of other democratic states.
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