May 9, 2003
THE RIGHT WAY TO COMBAT RACISM
'Maybe the revolution will start in the sports stadium' (Ha'aretz, 5/5/2003)Walid Badir, number 5 in green, stood on the sidelines at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem with an expressionless face as the loudspeakers announced he was taking the field. In the 58th minute, when the yellows in the eastern bleachers of the stadium were still exuberant because of Betar Jerusalem's temporary advantage over Maccabi Haifa, it was difficult to hope for any restraint from the "handful," as Betar's management calls them. They are the fans who have become both a fable and its moral for their chants of "death to the Arabs" - expressed as always at Betar games during the playing of Hatikva before the game. These were simply the dessert for chants like "Walid the shahid," "terrorist," and "Haifa Hamas." It was also routine, every time the ball reached Chukody Anwago or Ofer Talker, two dark-skinned Betar players, for the "handful" in Maccabi's bleachers to scream "Kushi" (Negro) and do their chimpanzees impressions....
R. a 29-year-old student from Jerusalem, was at Teddy last weekend among hundreds of Haifa fans. He wore a green T-shirt, he jumped up every time the ball hit the Betar net, but what really interested him was what was going on in the stadium bleachers, not on the field. Like 20 other observers in the stadium, he was taking note of expressions of racism against Arabs, Jews, blacks, Ashkenazis and Sephardim.
Thirty-five observers, all football fans, were recently drafted by the New Israel Fund, a joint enterprise by Israelis and Diaspora Jewry to promote and consolidate pluralism and democracy in Israel. The idea is pretty simple. Reports will be prepared to summarize every game in the national and super leagues according to the "crimes" - songs, chants, slogans, signs, jeers, physical and verbal clashes between fans and players. All will be totaled at the end of every round of league play into a "weekly incitement and racism index" at the stadiums, ranking the teams according to the behavior of their fans, players and team executives and officials....
About 100 volunteers showed up in response to the ads that ran in local papers calling for fans to submit applications as "volunteer monitors to report on incidents of racist incitement in the stadiums."... Most are Jewish but some are Arab, and there are men, women and youngsters.
"Most of those who came to us were die-hard fans and they are angry, pained, and can't stand the situation at the games," said Shanon. "Some wrote to us that they had stopped going to games with their children because of the racism."...
"There were a lot of offenses," he says, as he checks off the boxes on the form and wrote down the slurs he heard hurled at Badir and the others. He quoted from some of the songs sung in the stands, including those aimed at players who weren't even on the field that day, like "I hate you Salim Tuame, like I hate all Arabs," and he made note of one Haifa sign held up by someone who drew a Betar fan looking like a monkey.
Shanon knows the project depends on its continuity and weekly consistency, and the interest the public shows in the racism index.... But he is optimistic. One TV channel has already promised to include the racism index in its sports coverage....
"No advertiser is going to want to market his product through a team that is consistently considered racist," he believes.
Hopefully the racism index will spur the teams to eject racist fans. This is a brilliant - and profoundly conservative - approach.
In America, we have taken just the opposite approach to racism. We have forsaken moral pressure and resorted to governmental coercion. This has been true throughout our history: first slavery; then, following the evisceration of the 14th Amendment in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, the Jim Crow era; finally, in the 1960s, we passed immediately from forced segregation to forced integration, as the judiciary began to review the associational decisions of businesses. Moral pressure by a free people has been the one remedy that has never been tried.
The Michigan affirmative action case before the Supreme Court illustrates the trouble with the coercive approach. Why shouldn't school officials be free to determine the character of their school, and to use affirmative action if they so choose? But then we must either sacrifice the equal protection of the laws, or grant liberty to all -- even racists.
I have previously argued that freedom of association and freedom of contract will emerge as the most important liberties of the 21st century. It is past time for conservatives to recover their allegiance to liberty, on the one hand, and to moral suasion, on the other, by encouraging change in our racial laws.