Fool’s Monkey Business Ends With Jail

Mensah und OL have pressed charges against the man; he will face criminal charges. The French Soccer Association has also joined in this court action with the public prosecution.

[Global News Commentary: Racism And Sports]

The problem of verbal racist attacks –mimicking the sound of apes and monkeys—against athletes reared its ugly head again in Europe.

This time, the attacker intent on sowing the wind, reaped the whirlwind. The 21-year old young man is presently languishing in custody in France for his racist taunts against soccer star John Mensah, a defender of the French soccer team Olympique Lyonnais – OL, and other soccer players of color of Olympique Lyonnais last Sunday 15, at the Gerland Stadium of Lyon, France.

The man taunted the players as they warmed up to play against “Le Havre” in Lyon.

OL’s Mensah, who is from Ghana, went ballistic when the taunter kept at it. Eventually, Mensah was sent off before the end of the game because he couldn’t check himself, unlike his team mates of color Keita and Benzema.

Jean-Michel Aulas, the president of Olympique Lyonnais explained later that the stadium announcer and marshals clearly warned that they “would not tolerate any racist behavior.” Nevertheless, this didn’t seem to deter the 21-year-old buffoon from mimicking chimps and apes, denoting that people of color are chimps and or apes.

He was then nabbed by the marshals of the Gerland Stadium of Lyon and the police took him into custody. Mensah und OL have pressed charges against the man; he will face criminal charges. The French Soccer Association has also joined in this court action with the public prosecution.

The man’s objective was to upset the Black players’ psyche, affect their play, and pave the way for the team that he’s a fan of—Le Havre. Unfortunately, his obtuseness didn’t prevent OL from trouncing Le Havre 3-1.

This attitude, which oftentimes takes place in soccer and tennis, is due to the foggy knowledge many folks have of the evolution surmise by Spencer and Darwin. Darwin surmised that primates and humans share common forbears. This is to imply that even Mensah’s Jester shares, according to Darwin, common forbears with primates.

It’s therefore nonsensical on the part of the booby of Lyon to purport that only humans of color do share common ancestors with primates. Moreover, it’s the taunter who is closer to chimps than the player of color, as witnessed by his chimp-like actions.

According to Darwin’s surmise – in fact, for any thinking person who is eager to be accurate, propositions about evolution still make up at most a hypothesis because they are fraught with holes: “Humankind is supposed to have wandered over the surface of the earth in primitive, savage hordes, ignorant of marriage and family, and little by little attaining higher views of self and society.” (Silvano Borruso 2007)

If we apply the hatata method — which the East African philosopher of the 17th century Zar ´a Ja´aqob propounded, we will find out that the evolution surmise rests upon sandy foundation. The hatata method consists in breaking down a discourse into many portions or bits so as to submit each portion or bit to thorough questioning and analysis.

One of the shortcomings of Darwin’s surmise is that this man didn´t live in ancient times in order to reliably tell us that the first humans were not different from chimps, and that they were wild. Only gullible nincompoops, who deliberately refuse to use their nous, would lap up Darwin’s figments of imagination. Borruso is right to remark: “As an exercise in pure imagination, evolution has been very successful” ( Borruso 2007). Anybody who puts on his or her thinking cap would first of all impugn these claims, submit them to the hatata method and accept only cogent, obvious, plain and proven assertions. Did proponents and supporters of Darwin ever inquire into the high degree of sophistication reached in ancient times, for instance in the building of the pyramids of ancient Egypt, in philosophy and literature?

The incident that occurred last Sunday in Lyon, France, often happens in soccer and tennis stadia in Europe. The tennis players Venus and Serena Williams have already suffered such racist foolery.

The Cameroonian soccer striker Samuel Eto´o, who is on FC Barcelona’s payroll, complained many a time about being taunted as a chimp or ape. Ghanaian-born Gerald Asamoah who sometimes plays for the German soccer national team has already gotten the raw deal of racist buffoonery and profanities in German stadiums. But soccer buffs and spectators alone are not to blame.

Indeed, as I recall, in the early 1990s, when the former famous Cameroonian goal keeper Joseph Antoine Bell was playing for Toulon in France, some French soccer teams’ presidents didn’t recoil from plainly letting on that they were racist – even though they were employing players of color.

The mature response to racist folly on the part of players and sportswomen is to keep focused and to strive to put on a good performance on the pitch or on the ground; that is the guidance Frank Edmundo Rijkaard, the former Dutch trainer and coach of FC Barcelona, primed Eto´o with some years back.

Therefore, the best reaction is what we may learn from the view expressed by one character in the novel The African by William Conton—adapted and applied to racism in stadia, that the best way to deal with such dull-witted racists in stadiums is to produce deeds on the pitch that bring their gimmicks to naught.

 

Black Star News Columnist Mathias Victorien Ntep is a PhD candidate at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and at the Leiden University (in the Netherlands). He played soccer in the late 1990s for “Sportfreunde Schwanheim”, a soccer team in the Soccer

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