Argentinian Soccer Fans Brandish Swastika Flags
FOX Sports reports,
Jewish leaders urged Argentine soccer authorities on Friday to investigate an incident involving a group of fans who waved flags emblazoned with a swastika at a second-division match.
Television images showed fans of the second-division club Talleres waving the flags ahead of the team’s match on Thursday night against rival Gimnasia de Jujuy in the central city of Cordoba.
The match was played as scheduled and police reportedly entered the section to arrest the flag-waving fans. However, the offenders melted away into the crowd as the officers approached. No arrests were made, police said.
The flag waving “was a clear provocation and racist,” said Jorge Kirszenbaum, the president of DAIA, a leading Jewish organization.
He said several prominent Jewish groups were appealing to the the Argentine Football Association to sanction the club.
What ever happened to freedom of speech? Does Argentina not have it? And why should a football team be punished because it has racist fans?
I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it, etc.
Isn’t free speech in our own country limited in the same way? Incitement to hate is illegal, I thought. I don’t see any problem with that. Unless of course they were trying to symbolize the heart and mind of the Buddha (which is the original usage of the swastika). Too bad they couldn’t be detained to determine their true intentions…
I agree the team itself is not culpable for the actions of its fans, however.
we read this article about young conservatives political types in Argentina like ten years ago: it said nothing about the inevitable you-know-what with Argentina and political conservatism, but one detail stuck out. The Argentine they interviewed bleached his hair blond and greased it straight and romantic like all the Fascists in the pictures.
we don’t know that you can or should be imprisoned for being a hateful asshole at a sporting event (what about that guy who did that thing with the black baseball player that one year; it was glossed over in Summer of Sam?). That would be a lot of arrests, and it is hard to imagine such a law being so stupidly easy to enforce all the time. Besides, as the Germans proved, it is asinine to think you exterminate Nazis by banning the swastika: it meant nothing to them and they’ll steal some other symbol just like they stole that one. (The buddha’s anything could hardly have been the “original meaning” of a universal symbol that predates Gautama by centuries, but it doesn’t matter.)
Well, as shameful an event as this is, fee-speech is free-speech, try to limit things like this, and you plsy right into the hands of the flag-wavers (the Jews are the enemies of truth and free-speech and all that). All in all, not suprised though. Isn’t this tha same country that hid Eichmann, Mengele (for a time), and Stangl? Is this not also the country where, after the abduction of Eichmann, a pogrom raged until his hanging and the daughter of the Jew who owned the safe-houses where Eichmann was held was beaten, raped, and had a Swastika burnt into her breast with cigarette butts? As horrible as this is, it just goes to show that nothing changes.
The message is:
Leave the galut. Move to Israel.
Move to Israel.
And get confronted by swastikas and in particular Nazi epithets splattered abot by nutty settlers, as everyone just saw on Herzl’s grave.
Is there something that can be done (including restrictions on freedom of speech) that will guarantee that nobody ever has to come across something so ugly? No, there isn’t. These marginal cowards do this because it is so simple, so what is interesting about the story is not that hate symbols showed up but how they were received and dealt with. And Argentina is a hell of a choice to represent the galut (christ on a stick, modern Germany is probably better).