Farrakhan Not An NBA Player Who Can Be Suspended, Rendering US Powerless To Address Antisemitism

“We’re stymied,” admitted former President Barack Obama, whose own past includes posing for pictures with Farrakhan.

New York, November 16 – The removal of a basketball star from a Brooklyn franchise for several games over the player’s sharing of content online that incited hatred for Jews has highlighted for experts the shortage of remedies available to curtail the spread of such materials when the person spreading them is not a professional basketball player, and is, for example, a preacher touting Black-Islamic supremacism who for some reason enjoys popularity among prominent members of the Democratic Party who insist they abhor bigotry.

Anti-racism experts and activists described the quandary facing them in stark terms. “It’s not just [Nation of Islam founder and President Louis] Farrakhan,” explained Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). “There are a handful of actual Congresswomen in the House who make frequent trips to the antisemitic trope shop – and I don’t just mean Republicans! Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar  – they traffic in such rhetoric all the time. But the thing is, we’re not the National Basketball Association, and we can’t suspend them for a bunch of games and demand a non-apology-apology. We did once try to denounce antisemitism and ended up watering down the resolution into meaningless generalities. That’s it. That’s all, as mere national leaders, we have the capacity to attempt.”

“We’re stymied,” admitted former President Barack Obama, whose own past includes posing for pictures with Farrakhan. “I can offer the expected platitudes, of course, but that’s not what Jewish-Americans are looking for. I suppose what we need for the purpose is someone of stature, someone who held national office and is held in broad esteem, to denounce such figures as Farrakhan, [Rashid] Khalidi, and the broader ideologies of Black Hebrews and the Nation of Islam. It would help if that figure were also a person of color, for added credibility on the subject. But where are we to find such a person?”

Some analysts suggested creating a different organization with the initials “NBA” and automatically including figures such as Farrakhan on the roster, and then making a public demonstration of suspending, or even expelling, those problematic figures from the organization. Others, however, observed problems with such an approach, among them that mentioning the anti-Jewish animus of a prominent member of another ethnic minority automatically constitutes racism and will only stoke further tension.

“It’s a frustrating situation,” acknowledged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose operations profit from the sale and distribution of the materials the basketball player shared, and others like them. “If there were some effective action to take, we would surely examine doing so.”

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