Evra accuses Suarez of racism

[Vermilion]

Worth reading though....albeit I'm now enraged again at how Suarez was stitched up. I'd just about got it out of my system

[Shaggy]

Complex racial overtones

Neil Berry

20 January 2012
Notorious for self-serving evasiveness, the English Football Association has few friends among the British media’s swollen ranks of opinion-mongers. So it was an extraordinary development when, after the ‘FA’ punished Liverpool’s Uruguayan striker, Luis Suarez, with an eight game ban and a fine of £40,000 for ‘racially abusing’ Manchester United’s French black defender Patrice Evra. London’s ‘commentariat’ lavished praise on English football’s governing body for proclaiming its implacable opposition to racism.

That the FA should have taken an unequivocal anti-racist stand was bound to appear especially fitting at a moment when the case of the black British teenage Stephen Lawrence, who was stabbed to death by white racist thugs in south London in 1993, has been much in the news on account of the belated gaoling of two of his killers. What the Lawrence case all too graphically illustrated is that racism rooted in prejudice about skin colour is not merely monstrous in itself but belongs to a pathology that can result in a black person being treated as if he does not deserve to live.

Yet if Suarez had to be at the very least censured, the FA’s verdict was hardly beyond reproach.

Not least does it deserve scrutiny because of the impression it has conveyed that verbal abuse of a dark-skinned person is so foul a thing as to make other forms of contempt pale into total insignificance. For so far as can be determined – and the problem is that Evra made allegations against Suarez that could not be corroborated – the Spanish-speaking Suarez called Evra ‘negrito’, ‘little black fellow’, only after Evra taunted him with disgusting innuendos regarding his sister. To a product like Suarez of a Latin American Catholic culture jealously protective of family and female honour, the inflammatory nature of such an insult needs no underlining. It is true that the FA sought to pre-empt accusations of being heedless of Suarez’s background, hiring Latin American specialists to consider whether the language employed by the player might be less racially charged in his native culture. Bizarrely, Evra has not received so much as a reprimand.

Nowhere is the confusion in question more egregiously displayed than in the pages of the Daily Mail, which was quick to castigate Suarez for his abuse of Evra and Liverpool football club for standing by him. Priding itself on being the voice of British common sense and decency, the newspaper spearheaded the campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice, yet even as it did so it indulged its inveterate habit of pandering to white British xenophobia, often publishing stories about British Asians that seem calculated to demean and discredit Britain’s Hindu and Muslim communities.

The truth is that while the Daily Mail has done much to establish in the public mind the absolute unacceptability of expressing racism against black people, it has done little to encourage understanding that prejudice may take many forms and be bound up with religion and culture and gender as well as skin colour. If anything, it has worked to entrench popular bigotry about Muslims, the perception that they are the ‘enemy within’ bent on undermining the British way of life. It is perhaps worth adding that there is cause to wonder if the Daily Mail would ever have embraced the campaign to achieve justice for Stephen Lawrence at all if it had not been for the stray connection between the editor of the paper, Paul Dacre, and the murdered black youth’s father Neville, who once undertook decorating work in Dacre’s home and who telephoned him to express indignation after the Mail ran a story denigrating a protest on behalf of his son that became unruly. Luis Suarez is a sportsman new to a country long given to fits of furious moral righteousness. Like many before him, he is discovering what a curiously arbitrary and selective thing British righteousness is apt to be.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/displayarticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2012/

[BigChief]

Worth reading though....albeit I'm now enraged again at how Suarez was stitched up. I'd just about got it out of my system

As more people discuss it the truth is beginning to shine through the sh*t. Long may it continue and shame the sh*t throwers. Any benefit of the doubt I may have afforded Evra or the FA is now officially over.

[BootRoom]

The British media won’t be spending any time on this sort of analysis; if they did it would be an admission that the journalists were too stupid to spot the glaring weaknesses in the report themselves.

We are lumbered with the result of the commission and its fallout, and I don’t see how that is going to change in any meaningful way.

[Frenchie]

LFC and Luis will have their say in Parliament..Cannot wait for this and the shame the FA will feel when it is exposed as a sham.

[rudedog]

I really doubt that the blog was written by a Manchester United supporter.

[Shaggy]

I really doubt that the blog was written by a Manchester United supporter.

Spoke to the lad who runs the blog and he swears he's a United fan.

[destinydude]

I clicked on the twitter link above the article and it shows that he's a Liverpool Fan??

[Mark79]

I clicked on the twitter link above the article and it shows that he's a Liverpool Fan??

josiewalesLFC didnt write it, he set up the blog asking for people to contribute their opinions. That piece was sent in by Jim, a Man Utd fan.

[TheElephantMan]

I didn't realise how much people hated us before the Evra/Suarez farce. Apart from the obvious rivalry with certain clubs I can't believe how much vitriol we've had to endure from the media and every bugger else. Anyone with an open mind would see the glaringly obvious flaws in the FA's case. It was clearly a stitch-up from the start.

[JHP]

JohnSinnott
DCMS-"charging & decision-making process handled outside of FA, by accountable independent & separate organisation" http://t.co/YBvVXDNC

[Shaggy]

josiewalesLFC didnt write it, he set up the blog asking for people to contribute their opinions. That piece was sent in by Jim, a Man Utd fan.

[Vermilion]

JohnSinnott
DCMS-"charging & decision-making process handled outside of FA, by accountable independent & separate organisation" http://t.co/YBvVXDNC

FA not considered fit for purpose then, more or less. haha.

[JHP]

FA not considered fit for purpose then, more or less. haha.

And when Barrister's disciplinary process found as such they were deemed to have breached human rights. http://m.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/mar/...k&type=article

[Shaggy]

Alex_Kay_DM ALEX KAY
Disgusting racist comments and chants from Chelsea fans about Anton Ferdinand on train back from Norwich. Pathetic and ignorant.