Financial Times (London, England)
November 6, 2004 Saturday
Injury time Anti-Semitic taunts from Dutch football crowds highlight
a classic dilemma of democracy. We might not like what someone says,
or who is saying it – but are we prepared to force them to give up
the right to say it?
By IAN BURUMA
The Dutch nurture their reputation for tolerance and moderation with
loving care. Perhaps that is why some Dutch people, in a rebellious
mood, like to put such a dent in it. And also why, when they do so,
there is such huge dismay. The latest outrage to set the Dutch press
on fire concerns the behaviour of football hooligans in The Hague.
ADO, of The Hague, were playing Ajax, from Amsterdam. Ajax, like
Tottenham Hotspur in London, have the reputation of being “the Jews’
club”. This is not based on anything very real. Jewish football
players are a rarity, at Ajax or anywhere else. But Amsterdam had a
sizeable Jewish population before the war, and many of them supported
Ajax. Hence the reputation. And since hooligans from Rotterdam, The
Hague and Utrecht began taunting the Ajax team a few decades ago with
such slogans as “filthy rotten Jewboys”, or “We’re going Jew
hunting!”, Ajax supporters responded by waving Israeli flags. This,
in turn, prompted the appearance of Palestinian flags in the
anti-Ajax ranks.
The ADO thugs actually did much worse than that. In fact, they did
just about the worst thing possible: they made hissing noises,
mimicking escaping gas, and chanted “Hamas, Hamas, send the Jews to
the gas!” The Hamas slogan, heard on other football terraces as well,
is relatively new, but the hissing is not. About 10 years ago, I had
the misfortune to be in the Feyenoord block when the Rotterdam club
played Ajax. It was like being surrounded by a crowd of foaming
neo-Nazis. The odd thing was, however, that “Jews” had very little to
do with actual Jews. Every time an Ajax player, including blacks from
Surinam, touched the ball, he would be called a “filthy Jew”.
It is probably the same with the flags, or the references to Hamas.
These bear little or no relation to actual countries or their
politics, of which most hooligans will have only the sketchiest
knowledge. I say most, because there are well-organised extremists
who use the stadiums as recruiting grounds. But the thugs know very
well that their chants are bound to cause maximum offence, especially
in Holland, where anything to do with the Holocaust, or Jews, has
been treated over the years with a mixture of sentimental piety and
residual guilt. They have crossed a well-established line: they are
saying the unsayable.
What to do about it? Ajax tried to ban Israeli and Palestinian flags
in the stadium, as though they were the problem. Referees were urged
to stop the games at the first sign of trouble. The football
association held the clubs responsible and threatened to ban the
public from attending games altogether if this behaviour went on – a
curious notion: football games in empty stadiums. A special
government committee, convened to look into the matter, concluded,
rather weirdly, that “racism” and “causing offence” were separate
issues. The first was a matter for the police, the second for the
clubs. One can try to arrest some of the perpetrators, which has been
done with notable success in Britain. Police monitoring and higher
ticket prices also seem to have cleansed the air. But even if you can
drive violent language out of stadiums, it is likely to re-emerge in
other ways, at heavy metal concerts, for example, or on the internet.
The young like to shock. The Dutch prime minister’s talk about
strengthening “norms and values” is hardly going to stop them.
The problem goes beyond the comfort of football spectators. We know
from the past how pushing the extremes of racial prejudice can
undermine the most civilised societies. Calling for the murder of
others, even in jest, or as a provocation, should not be permissible.
But democracy can suffer from too much protection against verbal
offence. Banning the expression of certain views does not get rid of
them. It is an illusion, common to totalitarian states, that thought
can be controlled by policing language.
Where there is freedom of speech, people will be offended. It has
become common in Europe to deal with the problem through legislation
against language or opinions deemed to be inappropriate, or to ban
people who express them from public life. The British home secretary,
David Blunkett, suggested that members of the far-right British
National Party should be excluded from the civil service. An Italian
candidate for the European Commission, Rocco Buttiglione, has been
rejected by members of the European parliament because of his view
that homosexuality is a sin. I have no sympathy for the BNP, and
disagree with Buttiglione, but as long as such people do not call for
violence to impose their views, I see no reason for their exclusion,
even though a man with Buttiglione’s opinions may not be best placed
to deal with justice and freedom.
Some commentators on the Salman Rushdie affair concluded that
toughening blasphemy laws was more important than protecting the
right to free speech. They believed that Muslims had a perfect right
to demand protection from offence, and demanded the same for
Christians and other religious believers. Both France and Germany
have laws against Holocaust denial, which cover more than the
genocide of the Jews. The distinguished Middle Eastern scholar
Bernard Lewis was tried at a French court for claiming that the
Turkish massacres of Armenians after 1915 were not planned by the
Turkish government, and thus could not be called genocide. This
considered opinion was offensive to many Armenians. Lewis lost.
Americans are more protective of the right to free speech than
Europeans. When Frenchman Robert Faurisson got into trouble for
claiming the Holocaust was Jewish propaganda, Noam Chomsky came to
his defence by writing an introduction to his book. He didn’t agree
with Faurisson’s views, but he believed in his right to express them.
In another case, Arieh Neier, acting for the American Civil Liberties
Union, defended the right of American neo-Nazis to march through
Skokie, Illinois, home to many Jews including Holocaust survivors.
The march was offensive, but Neier, Jewish himself, born in Hitler’s
Berlin, believed that the First Amendment, protecting freedom of
expression, was one thing that distinguished his adopted from his
native country.
I recently came across an interview with the former Belgian foreign
minister, and current European commissioner, Louis Michel. He was
questioned about his most cherished values. Was there anything he was
prepared to die for? Yes, he replied, freedom of speech. Later, he
lashed out at journalists who spoke to politicians of the rightwing
nationalist Vlaams Blok, “as though it were a normal party”. What
about free speech, asked the interviewer. “Yes,” said Michel, “but no
freedom for the enemies of freedom. Racists have no right to that
valuable freedom of speech.”
Michel’s commitment to the freedom of expression clearly does not
come up to the standards of the US constitution. If Belgian
journalists behaved according to his wishes and refused to take the
views of a major political party (33 per cent of the votes in
Antwerp) seriously, it would be difficult to have any debate on such
contentious issues as political asylum or immigration.
A history of persecution often helps to clarify people’s minds. Milos
Forman, the Czech movie director who moved to the US after Soviet
tanks smashed any chance of free expression behind the iron curtain,
made a brilliant film in 1997 about the case of Larry Flynt: The
People vs. Larry Flynt. Flynt is the owner of Hustler magazine, and
not known for his taste. He published a pornographic caricature of
the televangelist Jerry Falwell having sex with his mother. Falwell
took offence and sued. He won in the district court but the US
Supreme Court overturned the verdict on appeal. A pornographer’s
right to free speech was given priority over a public figure’s
emotional distress. Forman said he made his film as “a love letter to
the First Amendment”.
The defence of free expression in the US has not always been so
robust. Think of the trouble Nabokov had in publishing his
masterpiece, Lolita. The traditional enemies of freedom in the US are
usually to be found on the right. But when it comes to gender or
race, liberal-leftists can be just as censorious. Maybe speech bans
are necessary to maintain a civilised society. But where do we draw
the line, and who is to decide?
A good example of the perils of language policing is the case of the
burakumin, or outcasts, in Japan. Officially, the caste system was
abolished in the late 19th century. Unofficially, the descendants of
those whose occupations were considered ritually unclean, such as
butchering, tanning, or executing criminals, are still subject to
discrimination. There are several organisations that wish to protect
their rights. One way is by acting as watchdogs on offensive
language. Derogatory words for the outcasts, such as eta or yotsu,
are as far beyond the pale now as “niggers” in the English-speaking
world. But even the more correct burakumin causes problems. If used
in any way thought to be inappropriate, the mere mention of burakumin
can be criticised. As a result, the Japanese media have stopped
mentioning them at all. When Rising Sun, Michael Crichton’s
inflammatory and offensive novel about Japanese businessmen taking
over America came out in Japan, the only thing the publishers removed
was an inoffensive reference to the outcast problem. When a Japanese
newscaster, in a story about drug-related violence in America, warned
that the streets of New York could turn into a “slaughterhouse”, he
was fiercely attacked for a whole year. The mention of the word
slaughterhouse could conceivably have been construed as a slur on a
traditional outcast occupation. And so a social problem that urgently
needs to be discussed in public is silenced.
“Word hunting” is not limited to the outcast community. Japanese
television producers, newspaper editors and publishers work with long
lists of words to be avoided at all costs. Terms for blind people, or
left-handed people, or deaf people, or any other vulnerable group,
are all scrutinised, a task made more difficult by the fact that
standards of acceptability change. The results can be absurd. A
famous author, named Tsutsui Yasutaka, wrote a science fiction story
about a man arrested by robots because of “irregular brain waves”.
This caused an outcry from the Japanese Epilepsy Association, because
the story could offend people with odd brain wave patterns, including
epileptics.
Japan might be an extreme case. Arthur Koestler once described the
Japanese people as suffering from “social haemophilia”, terrified
that the smallest prick will cause interminable bleeding. But fear of
giving offence does not necessarily translate into greater compassion
for the vulnerable. A physically disabled person, or indeed a black
person, would still be better off living in the ruder, cruder
societies of Britain or the Netherlands than in the linguistically
fastidious Japan. And yet Japan’s social haemophilia should be a
warning to us. To have the freedom to speak freely, we must be
prepared to take the rough with the smooth. Just as crass tabloids
have a legitimate place in a free press, offensive language is
something we must be prepared to live with in a free and open
society. There are limits, of course. Even the First Amendment draws
the line when words are designed to incite violence and disturb the
peace.
Abusive chants in a football stadium might indeed disturb the peace
of other spectators. But then a football stadium is an odd place to
go looking for peace. If the slogans were not only designed to shock
or offend, but to incite violence, the perpetrators should be
arrested. But apart from that there is a case to be made that
football stadiums are a contained venue for ritualised bad behaviour,
which would be more dangerous if it were unchained in daily life.
If you cannot suppress prejudice or the desire to shock, then you
have to find ways in which these urges can be expressed without
people getting hurt. Prejudices can fade away. Now that every
football team in Britain has black players, there are fewer monkey
noises. American baseball teams are a complete mix, which may be one
reason why ethnic taunts are largely absent from US stadiums
I believe all the above to be true, and yet I would never again want
to find myself in the midst of fully grown idiots who find amusement
in mimicking the sounds of mass murder. Anything short of that, I
would put up with as a price for my freedom.
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights, democracy and journalism at
Bard College, New York.