Soccer legend Thierry Henry, who is black and brings a European’s eyes to working in the United States, says yes.
Henry has called on the game’s authorities to come down heavily on players and fans who are found guilty of racist abuse, as he has called for points deductions to be used as the ultimate punishment.
“The solution to this issue for me would be to take points away from team, that is the only solution,” Henry said. “I have not experienced racist abuse in America. It is very different here.”
Henry is currently a striker with the New York Red Bulls. Previously, the Frenchman plied his trade in London with Arsenal and at Barcelona, collecting trophies along the way. He remains Arsenal’s all-time leading scorer.
Soccer is far and away the most popular sport in Europe, and it’s a major money maker. Premiere League leaders Manchester United this week became the first sports franchise to top the $3 billion mark, breaking a world record while holding its spot as the most valuable sports franchise in the world (the Dallas Cowboys are a distant second, and more than $1 billion behind United). European soccer has seen a number of racial rows in the past year or two. These incidents have included players hurling racial slurs at fellow players, and fans heaping abuse on players. One notorious case involved Chelsea captain John Terry, and even the UK police got involved.
The problem of Europe’s racism is far from limited to the soccer pitch. Melanie Phillips writes that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the UK.
With the row then still raging over the Lib Dem MP David Ward’s attack upon Jews for not learning the lessons of the Holocaust and oppressing the Palestinians, the Sunday Times published last weekend a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a demonic builder walling up Palestinians with cement stained red with their blood.
The cartoon included anti-Semitic tropes.
The cartoon was monstrous because it portrayed Netanyahu as a psychopath using the blood of Palestinians to cement them into the evil wall he was building.
It thus fused antisemitic images and grotesque lies about Israel — an infernal cocktail which is now the mandatory accessory of the British intelligentsia, even as this cocktail incites violence and mass murder by Arabs and Muslims across the world.
Murdering innocents and using their blood for demonic purposes is the essence of the ancient antisemitic ‘blood libel’, which fuelled the medieval Christian pogroms and is now regularly used in the Arab and Muslim world to incite its demented hatred of Jews.
The paper is apologizing, but how did the cartoon make it to print in the first place?
The answer is simple and disturbing: Despite its awful past experiences, Europe still has a deep and wide race problem, and an acute anti-Semitism problem.
This fact is worth remembering any time any liberal holds Europe up as a model for what America should do.
Yep. Imagine if fans tossed bananas or made monkey noises at Ray Lewis next week. Happens in Europe to black players all the time. Huge sections of supporters chant racist/anti-Semitic abuse at players at every game, in every EPL stadium. Hotspurs fans chant about “our Kike” vs. Arsenal’s “Kike” whenever each team has a Jew on the field.
For all the talk of blatant racism in the US, the Euros need to look long and hard at the hatred they’re formenting, on and off the pitch.
Henry may be a great athlete but he is wussy soccer player. Of course they insult him. There is nothing to fear. On the other hand, who in his right mind would insult Ray Lewis for any reason. He will rip your head off!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l6qjiKlQ7w
But the New York Times thought The Blind Side was Lion King in shoulder pads, so there are no heroes in this story…
In the early ’30s, if the present PC group of Leftists were around, I’d have been told by them that I suffered from Naziphobia.
As for racism in Europe, if you tell a man he’s a racist long enough when he’s not, he might just say, “Okay, I am.” If the Left goes on and on about Carmel, Calif. being too white, and plays a Twitter game of “negrospotting” at the RNC, expect pushback.
Telling a society it’s racist that has allowed in tons of non-white immigrants as an explanation as too why those Third World immigrants don’t do well is in retrospect, foolhardy. Reap what you sow, and don’t be surprised that if you treat a man like a dog long enough he starts barking. So what came first, the chicken or the egg?
I’ve been told I’m a racist and suffer from white privilege so many times by people who’ve never met me that I have not the slightest sympathy for those who voted for Obama to the tune of 95% who do not call out the opposite of banana and monkey calls. Isn’t that what the Dem Party does to the Right non-stop?
To the Left, aren’t I Col. Sanders wishing for mint juleps on some imagined plantation where women are in the kitchen and gays in the closet? Those stereotypes work both ways, except it’s not some soccer fans talking this nonsense, it’s the President of the United States at a 2007 Hampton U speech and the head of the DOJ, Eric Holder. Yup, reap, sow.
People have warned the Left to knock it off and now look what’s happened as a result. You can’t tell the difference between honest people tired of being called racists and racists.
The truth can be shown in this manner: who has ethnic caucuses and who doesn’t. Who has groups like 100 black men of America and who doesn’t. They can spare me their “see I told you so.” I have nothing but contempt for race pimps who start at shadows and when they see one they themselves created say its monstrous shadow was there all along. These morons are on their own. I fought the good fight and got slapped for it. Don’t let a good deed go unpunished says the black political Left.
Fine says I. Until you call out your own racist congressional caucus, until you call out Rev. Wright and Eric Holder and Louis Farrakhan instead of giving them medals, screw you.
You must be the angriest non racist I have ever seen.
Fail Burton, AMEN.
Is this a joke? Europe is ten times as racist, and a hundred times as antisemitic as America, unless you include American blacks, which or course have to be excluded because it’s not possible to call them racist. If they are included, then racism is about equal in Europe and the US, but the antisemitism factor increases by at least another order of magnitude.
The only part of America that are even close to Europe in racism and antisemitism are the big cities where the liberals and marxists (to be redundant)live and the worst black racists like the Reverends live. They like to exploit in quantity, and the urban environment is the perfect landscape for it.