Is Racism in Europe Worse than in America?

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.”

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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.

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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.

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