The naming game of racism: Farveez, Jehan and Izeth

I am not conversant with court procedure and I don’t know if there’s any truth in some of the techniques lawyers are supposed to employ as described by novelists. What I find ‘plausible’ might be pure fiction. For example, Earl Stanley Gardner has Perry Mason asking witnesses questions that he is clearly aware are out of order.

The counsel for the defendant knows very well that the prosecuting attorney will object and that the judge will ask the jury to assume the question was not asked and whatever reactions elicited from the witness to be struck off memory.

The law can’t erase impression and these can feed determination, though.

I was reminded of this ‘technique’ reading Izeth Hussein’s garbled piece on devolution (Cricket and SL Muslims) where he tries to buttress his argument by alleging racism for the exclusion of certain Muslims from national teams. His position on ‘devolution’ is erroneous, stinks of intellectual sloth and is nothing more than a pandering to Tamil racist/chauvinistic claims, but that’s another essay altogether. I am more concerned about his rant about racism.

Yes, he rants for quite a while about Muslims not being selected to national teams around the case of Farveez Maharoof, clearly wanting us to believe that there is systemic discrimination in selection procedures of some sporting bodies and then interjects at the very end a save-my-ass caveat.

‘I must make an important clarification before concluding this article. What looks like racist discrimination could well be susceptible to valid explanation on other grounds. We must remember that every society under the sun has injustices in it to varying degrees and some fields of activity have more injustices than others. For some reason that I cannot fathom Sri Lanka cricket is a field in which some of our greatest virtuosos in injustice have flourished.

Some of the victims were driven into premature retirement, causing incalculable loss to our cricket. I mention the following names more or less at random:- Anura Ranasinghe, Brendon Kuruppu (now and in the past), Roy Dias, Sidath Wettimuny, Asanka Gurusinghe, Attapattu, Chamara Silva, Graeme Labrooy and so on.

But at this point I must caution against excluding racism as a possible explanation for injustice in addition to everything else. Too often Sri Lankans who are not racist at all are prone to make that exclusion.’

To be continued