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Battling bigotry

Thursday, December 14, 2006

In the western media there’s a tendency to be sniffy about sectarian conflict – as if it’s something alien to sophisticated civilizations like our own. This weekend comes a sharp reminder that division on the basis of religious affiliation is never far away, even in a 21st century secular society.

Sunday sees another high-profile soccer match between the two rival home teams in Glasgow – a modern industrial (or rather, since the decline of British shipbuilding, a post-industrial) city that’s more accurately regarded these days as a tourism, culture and banking center. The ritual encounter, known locally as an “Old Firm” game, has this stark sectarian resonance: the Rangers team are the Protestants and Celtic the Roman Catholics. And these divided loyalties are deep and abiding.

At Ibrox Park, the Rangers’ home ground, Glasgow police will be out in force to prevent outbreaks of fighting (which have sometimes been horrific and bloody) and, in a historically unheard-of measure, Scotland’s two top religious leaders, the Catholics’ Cardinal Keith O’Brien and the Moderator of the (protestant) Church of Scotland's General Assembly, Right Reverend Alan McDonald have announced plans to sit together in a spectators’ box.

 

It’s meant of course to be a photo-opportunity trumpeting communal harmony.  But, strikingly, it won’t actually take place this Sunday. 

 

Efforts to make this joint gesture at previous matches were vetoed by the police – on the grounds that it could provoke more, not less, violence among the so-called fans. The big news this week is that it’s been agreed that such a clerical combination can now happen – but just not yet. The police and grounds security units need time to prepare.

 

It calls to mind a remarkable film report made for me when (for my sins, so to speak) I ran a weekly series on religious and ethical issues for Britain’s commercial TV network, ITV. An enterprising journalist, Alex Graham (who nowadays is executive producer of those tellingly observational PBS shows Frontier House, Colonial House, and others) found evidence of how deeply, and institutionally, sectarianism afflicted Scottish soccer. It was a well-appreciated fact of life in west-central Scotland – but hard to prove journalistically, until Graham nailed the story of how Rangers dropped - like a hot brick - one of their star players when they discovered he had a Catholic girlfriend. The team unsurprisingly refused to cooperate with our investigation, and to get footage of them at play, we rented a tall crane to shoot down on the stadium.

 

This week, acting on their hard-hitting expert report titled "Calling Time On Sectarianism" the two churches joined forces with the Scottish Football Association (“association” being the very origin of the name “soccer”, as I like to remind American sports-followers) to launch a public relations drive under the banner “Football For All”, to promote inclusiveness above prejudice, as well as a new set of rules that will punish football clubs who allow or encourage sectarianism.

A NOTE ON ABIDING PREJUDICE – in America rather than Scotland. The Al Jazeera International TV news channel, which I noted here went on air in English last month, has been accepted by how many American cable TV services, do you think?

 

Precisely none.

 

Discussions with cable operators Time Warner and Cox Communications have gone nowhere, and though a deal was on the table with Comcast, who significantly supply 24 million households in the greater Detroit area that includes a substantial Middle Eastern population, the operator “ran a mile, on almost the eve of launch, for purely political reasons”, one Al Jazeera staffer told me.

 

As for satellite carriage, DirecTV and Echostar have both demurred. So if a US-resident TV viewer wants to see Al Jazeera in English, there’s a really only the French-based international satellite service Globecast, and then - in the words of my understandably anonymous source - only “if you have a huge dish”.
 
 
 

IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WHO in the English-speaking world will be watching France’s own entry (in both French and English) into the international video news market. It's France 24 – long pushed by President Jacques Chirac, and now at last launched, with a lavish soiree in … where else but … Les Tuileries in Paris.
 
The channel’s CEO, Alain de Pouzilhac toasted its mission "to cover worldwide news with French eyes". The slogan finally adopted by the service will be "Beyond the News". Originally, though, it was to have been a rather Gallic tilt against Anglo-dominated global news: "Everything you are not supposed to know".

The change was made because, according to spokesman Damien Amadou, the original "sounded a little conspiratorial”.