Graeme Smith warns Panesar of racist abuse

[Slow Love™]

IMO, this 'racial abuse' scenario is very easy to deal with if there is any real desire to deal with it : Regardless of rank, social status or connections, issue a lifetime ban from all international grounds ( atleast, in the nation where the abuse is taking place) for the said offender(s). I dont care how many beers or joints are inside the dude/chick- if they resort to racial abuse, they deserve to get banned for life.
Problem solved.

It's probably hard to ban people for life. But throwing them out, same as you treat being drunk and abusive, or violent, will probably do the job anyway.

 

[Matt79]

It sounds like they have a much more robust plan of action and responses lined up to target these tools anyway, should any of the primordial sewer scum raise their diseased heads at the matches this year.

It's going to include extense use of CCTV surveillance, with squads of security specifically on stand by to go in and bust up any hoon-ish behaviour, and most importantly, they've imported the idea of having an SMS alert system where members of the crowd can send an SMS to a number to report objectionable behaviour, in particular racist behaviour. they've stated that on receipt of any SMS's, they'll immediately focus in with the cameras, and send in security guys. And they're promising life bans for racist abusers I believe. So hopefully any incidents will be solved quickly.

Otherwise, they can set me up in the light towers with a sniper's rifle, and I'll hand out instaneous "life-bans".

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

Err it is very easy to do- most bookings these days are electronically done(even the ticket issued is electronic in many grounds) - just have a file with blacklisted names on it that automatically overrides a ticket reservation under the same name.

I don't know what cricket tickets are like in other places, but I've never had my name on a ticket I've bought in my life. In fact, I have tickets for an ODI between Australia and New Zealand sitting next to me, and it doesn't identify me at all. You could perhaps prevent particular people from purchasing tickets with a credit card or something, but it'd be very difficult to stop someone coming to the games at all. At the very worst they could just have a friend pay for the tickets for them.

Why not ? the statute of limitation isnt such short term for even petty theft.

It's got nothing to do with the statute of limitations, it's about identification. Makhaya Ntini says "I was racially abused while fielding on Saturday at the WACA". How do you identify who did it? Unless Ntini happens to know or it's caught on camera or something it's simply impossible to prosecute the person in question. Obviously sometimes the person will be caught in the act, but in that sort of situation there's nothing that can be done.

 

[Slow Love™]

It sounds like they have a much more robust plan of action and responses lined up to target these tools anyway, should any of the primordial sewer scum raise their diseased heads at the matches this year.

It's going to include extense use of CCTV surveillance, with squads of security specifically on stand by to go in and bust up any hoon-ish behaviour, and most importantly, they've imported the idea of having an SMS alert system where members of the crowd can send an SMS to a number to report objectionable behaviour, in particular racist behaviour. they've stated that on receipt of any SMS's, they'll immediately focus in with the cameras, and send in security guys. And they're promising life bans for racist abusers I believe. So hopefully any incidents will be solved quickly.

Otherwise, they can set me up in the light towers with a sniper's rifle, and I'll hand out instaneous "life-bans".

LOL. Mind you, the SMS thing could be a bit prone to mischievousness...

 

[Matt79]

LOL. Mind you, the SMS thing could be a bit prone to mischievousness...

Hmmm... "that guy said that he thinks Pakistan did tamper with the ball at the Oval - LIFE BAN!!!"

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

Your urdu example doesn't even line up - for some (extremely strange, I might add) reason you and others continually ignore a very basic explanation for the use of the word that takes it entirely out of the same context. And no matter how many times I repeat it (and other Australians agree), there still seem to be plenty that completely ignore it. Maybe it suits people's purposes to do so, for the sake of their argument.

But even in the urdu example, you are reducing this to a matter of ethnic background. What happens in our country is our problem, and if we were to find that behaviour of this nature is occurring more in our country than others with expat populations, we would have to face up to what might be a problem for us specifically. We have had a bad few years in this regard, period, and I don't see the value in hiding from it. What if the guys calling urdu were born and raised here? What then? "Our" crowd behaviour should in no way be judged? What about when people hypothesise as to, of all the countries to travel to when the crap hit the fan back home, so many South Africans decided to resettle in Perth? IMO you are going to a very silly place just in order to avoid flak for some specific comments that somebody who may well have been garden-variety Australian (whatever that means) said.

Like I said, if what we are saying is that Aussie crowds shouldn't be generalised as a result of a select few morons, I am in agreement whether they were expats or not. I just don't see the need for this defensiveness.

Mate, I'm not being defensive at all. I have no problem at all with acknowledging that Australian crowds are occasionally badly behaved in various ways, and occasionally that includes racial abuse. Leaving the South African example aside, there are other instances which demonstrate this perfectly well.

What I'm saying is that ex-pat cricket fans carry with them their own baggage and issues and may do things that one wouldn't normally expect from native Australians. That's it. There's a difference in terms of the significance it has in judgements about Australian cricket fans between South African ex-pats abusing South African players and native Australians doing it. It's not because the ex-pats aren't Australian in some sort of ultimate sense, it's because a bunch of ex-pats being racist jerks towards people from their native nation doesn't implicate your average cricket-going hoon as a potential racist, whereas guys wearing blackface and absuing Murali at the SCG probably does, or at least it would if thise sort of thing happened all the time.

As I said pretty clearly in my last post, it doesn't and shouldn't make any difference to how authorities deal with the issue or even talk about it. It does however make a difference when one is discussing the issue or whether or not Australian cricket fans are racist. That is the issue here with Smith's comments. The relevance of the ex-pat issue or the urdu example or whatever is that those things wouldn't give anyone any particular reason to believe that Monty is going to suffer racial abuse here. If South African ex-pat racists get off on yelling "kaffir" to black South African players, they obviously aren't as likely to behave that way to a Sikh who plays for England. And, as an extension of that, if it wasn't native Australians who decided to use a South African term to abuse black South African players, then there's no particular reason to believe that those same people are going to have a problem with Monty.

That's the entirity of my point.

 

[jot1]

The onle thing he has to worry about is if there are any South Africans in the crowd.

That is an appalling thing to say! You have effectively accused me of planning to racially abuse Monty when I go watch the match! I take STRONG exception to that!

 

[pasag]

That is an appalling thing to say! You have effectively accused me of planning to racially abuse Monty when I go watch the match! I take STRONG exception to that!

Just joking tbh, thus the smiley.

 

[Slow Love™]

Mate, I'm not being defensive at all. I have no problem at all with acknowledging that Australian crowds are occasionally badly behaved in various ways, and occasionally that includes racial abuse. Leaving the South African example aside, there are other instances which demonstrate this perfectly well.

What I'm saying is that ex-pat cricket fans carry with them their own baggage and issues and may do things that one wouldn't normally expect from native Australians. That's it. There's a difference in terms of the significance it has in judgements about Australian cricket fans between South African ex-pats abusing South African players and native Australians doing it. It's not because the ex-pats aren't Australian in some sort of ultimate sense, it's because a bunch of ex-pats being racist jerks towards people from their native nation doesn't implicate your average cricket-going hoon as a potential racist, whereas guys wearing blackface and absuing Murali at the SCG probably does, or at least it would if thise sort of thing happened all the time.

As I said pretty clearly in my last post, it doesn't and shouldn't make any difference to how authorities deal with the issue or even talk about it. It does however make a difference when one is discussing the issue or whether or not Australian cricket fans are racist. That is the issue here with Smith's comments. The relevance of the ex-pat issue or the urdu example or whatever is that those things wouldn't give anyone any particular reason to believe that Monty is going to suffer racial abuse here. If South African ex-pat racists get off on yelling "kaffir" to black South African players, they obviously aren't as likely to behave that way to a Sikh who plays for England. And, as an extension of that, if it wasn't native Australians who decided to use a South African term to abuse black South African players, then there's no particular reason to believe that those same people are going to have a problem with Monty.

That's the entirity of my point.

The problem I have with what you are saying is twofold:

1) Given what you've written, you are giving the term "native Australians" a very awkward meaning. Because, as I illustrated, you could certainly get somebody born and bred in Australia abusing Pakistanis in another language, and I certainly think that if that were so, it would be our problem, and people would judge what goes on in our crowds accordingly (though I still maintain of course that isolated incidents should not tar a nation's spectators with the same brush, of course). Unless you would be willing to write these people off as not Australian - which I don't think you would.

2) I don't think that the entirety of your point is how you judge what expats do, as you appear to be claiming in this post. You have also said that you consider it less likely that a non-expat or native Australian would use these terms (and clearly this is a distinction a number of Australian posters cling to, though certainly not all). But while nobody can claim it couldn't have happened (it being a recent expat), the reasoning is similar to my saying "I believe that the majority of Australians at the cricket are not racist (which I genuinely believe, BTW), therefore it's unlikely that an Australian racially abused this person". More than enough Aussies would know these terms to constitute a minority of idiots at a cricket match.

EDIT: and 3) Are Smith's aspersions (that Aussie crowds are inherently racist) really what we are debating? That seems a shifting of the goalposts considering I've already dismissed his motives as stirring the pot, and I don't buy what he's selling. My argument in this debate is to do with the kneejrk assumption that the abuse of the South Africans is not an issue pertaining to "our" crowds because the offenders were "South African expats".

 

[archie mac]

I agree. It's based on a foolish assumption that Australians don't know terms like "Kaffir", but as I've said before, anybody who's seen Lethal Weapon 2 would be familiar with these terms of abuse. Fundamentally though, I don't know why we keep practicing this denial - it's a small minority of utter tools, and I think we're better off condemning them and acknowledging that something's been done about it, rather than continually writing it off as "expats" (which doesn't even really mean non-Australian anyway, unless you think many immigrants aren't Australian, and do we actually want to go there?). It seems kinda desperate and pig-headed, to me.

I have said it before and I will say it again, I had never heard the word Kaffir until last season, in regards to the SA series.

 

[howardj]

....I doubt many other Aussies had either.

 

[Matt79]

I'd heard it in The Power of One, but forgotten it til last season.

 

[Slow Love™]

Everybody I know has. And anybody that's seen either movie (or read the book in "Power of One"'s case), which are quite popular and not obscure in the slightest. Could it not be a little case of national pride perhaps getting in the way?

I fail to see how these anecdotal "I never heard it" comments have anything to do with anything. Likely I couldn't name a current day EMO artist, but I daresay plenty could. Up to a few days ago, I thought Jack Palance was already dead.

 

[archie mac]

Anyways, fingers crossed that the crowds will be well behaved this year. The whole world will be watching us and I'm quite nervous that something may go wrong.

Tbh I could not care less what the rest of the world think. If they think the whole country is racist because of a silly few, well the problem is theirs and not mine.

I bring my kids up not to be racist and if anyone says anything of a racist nature to Monty during the series with in ear shot of myself, then they will cop a mouthfull.

Besides it may give the press something else to focus on instead of the flogging the English are going to cop.

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

I'd never heard it either.

I agree though that it doesn't necessarily matter. I do think the origin of the phrase makes it more likely that it was people of South African backgrund saying it, but it's plausible that it wasn't. Certainly some people who aren't South African would be familiar with the term.

 

[C_C]

Regarding this 'Kaffir' term - i dont know if it has any different connotation in South Africa(it probably does, given the direction of the talk here but i am unaware what it exactly means in Afrikaans) but in the middle east, the term is technically not derogatory but is used in a derogatory manner.
In Arabic, Kaffir means 'unbeliever' - which by definition, isnt derogatory. However, it is used by most muslims i've met in a derogatory sense ( similar to the 'pagans' connotation christians use)

 

[archie mac]

Everybody I know has. And anybody that's seen either movie (or read the book in "Power of One"'s case), which are quite popular and not obscure in the slightest. Could it not be a little case of national pride perhaps getting in the way?

I fail to see how these anecdotal "I never heard it" comments have anything to do with anything. Likely I couldn't name a current day EMO artist, but I daresay plenty could. Up to a few days ago, I thought Jack Palance was already dead.

To be fair I had the impression you were suggesting that we (all Aussies) new what the term meant, and I was just pointing out that at the age of 40 I have never heard it.

 

[Slow Love™]

Regarding this 'Kaffir' term - i dont know if it has any different connotation in South Africa(it probably does, given the direction of the talk here but i am unaware what it exactly means in Afrikaans) but in the middle east, the term is technically not derogatory but is used in a derogatory manner.
In Arabic, Kaffir means 'unbeliever' - which by definition, isnt derogatory. However, it is used by most muslims i've met in a derogatory sense ( similar to the 'pagans' connotation christians use)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_(ethnic_slur)

 

[Slow Love™]

To be fair I had the impression you were suggesting that we (all Aussies) new what the term meant, and I was just pointing out that at the age of 40 I have never heard it.

To be fair, I never said all Aussies knew what the term meant. I simply suggested that enough know the term to constitute a minority of idiots at a cricket match.

 

[jot1]

Just joking tbh, thus the smiley.

As far as I know a joke is something everyone finds funny. But I'll forgive you unconditionally in this instance as I have always enjoyed your posts and IMO one of the best posters on this forum, even if I don't always agree with you.