Suspending Kyrie Irving is only a step toward acknowledging the damage done

National Basketball Association

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Yaron Weitzman

NBA Writer

Kyrie Irving was given yet another opportunity Thursday to denounce the antisemitic tropes featured in a film he promoted last week on his heavily followed social media accounts. Once again, he declined.

Not only that, he doubled down. When a reporter asked the Brooklyn Nets guard whether he “has any antisemitic beliefs,” Irving replied, “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from.” He then repeated the line a second time.

This finally pushed the Nets to action after a week of in-between statements and delays, waiting for Irving to own his mistake. Thursday evening, hours after he spoke to reporters, the team announced it has suspended Irving for “a period of at least five games.”

“Such failure to disavow antisemitism when given a clear opportunity to do so is deeply disturbing, is against the values of our organization and constitutes conduct detrimental to the team,” the Nets’ statement read.

Irving’s choice of words — “I know where I come from” — matters here because those words underline exactly why his comments are dangerous. This was not Irving doing his usual galaxy-brain opining. This was him parroting the very ideology of the antisemitic movie that he used his Instagram and Twitter platforms — where he has a combined 22.1 million followers — to promote.

The film (it does not deserve to be referred to as a “documentary”), “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” purports to “uncover the true identity of the Children of Israel.” It is basically an advocacy of the beliefs of the radical sects of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement (a specific movement; not a reference to Jews of color), a broad organization that contains some extremists on the fringe that the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as hate groups. “Radical Hebrew Israelites appropriate biblical Jewish heritage to claim an exclusive identity as the true chosen people of God,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says on its website, “and decry Jews as the impostors and thieves.”

Which brings us back to Irving. When he says, “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from,” he’s not being evasive but rather further endorsing the film he originally promoted.

Think about how backward this is: Irving is using news conferences that are being called so that he can denounce the film to instead promote its thesis.

Irving’s defiance has been so jarring that the Anti-Defamation League, which just one day earlier signed onto a statement in which it was announced that Irving and the Nets would each be donating $500,000 to the organization, has already backed away from its association with the superstar and said it will no longer be accepting his money.

Irving has made his thoughts, feelings and beliefs clear. Debating whether he’s worthy of the label of an antisemite is a waste of time; labels are overly simplistic and easily argued. But after acknowledging that some things in the documentary were “questionable” and “untrue,” Irving was asked Thursday if he could specifically list examples. “I think some of the criticism of the Jewish faith and the community for sure,” he replied.

“When I repeat myself that I’m not going to stand down, it has nothing to do with dismissing any other race or group of people,” he continued. “I’m just proud of my heritage and what we’ve been through and the fact that this has pinned me against the Jewish community, and I’m here answering questions of whether or not I’m sorry on something I didn’t create, something I shared, and I’m telling everyone I’m taking responsibility, then that’s where I sit.”

And then:

“So take my full responsibility again, I’ll repeat it, for posting something on my Instagram or Twitter that may have had some unfortunate falsehoods in it. But I also am a human being that’s 30 years old and I’ve been growing up in a country that’s told me that I wasn’t worth anything and I came from a slave class and I come from a people that are meant to be treated the way we get treated every day. So I’m not here to compare anyone’s atrocities or tragic events that their families have dealt with. Generations of time. I’m just here to continue to expose things that our world continues to put in darkness. I’m a light. I’m a beacon of light.”

Irving is correct about the way the Black people have been — and currently are — treated in this country and others. The problem is that he seems to believe that this history makes it OK to promote and defend a film that says “Jews will blackmail America” and “extort America” and have a plan for “world domination” and that denies the Holocaust. (I’ll be sure to tell that to my wife’s grandmother, who saw both her parents and four of her six siblings murdered by Nazis.)

Again, this isn’t just about Irving’s words being hurtful. This is one of the most recognizable, influential people in sports using his platform to shed light to the very types of evil conspiracy theories that, throughout history, have served as the basis for the murder of millions of Jews, from the Middle Ages to Nazi Germany. And it’s worth mentioning that Irving happens to be doing all this at a time when, according to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic attacks in the United States are at an all-time high. On Thursday afternoon, the FBI released the following alert:

It’s impossible to calculate the damage done by Irving over the past week. How many people around the world were exposed to the themes of “Hebrews to Negroes” for the first time and found them palatable? How many are watching Irving on the defensive and viewing him as a victim, one under attack by the Jews? This, of course, is the catch-22 of antisemitism. Ignoring it only allows it to spread. Fighting it only feeds into the very tropes of Jews controlling the world.

It’s time to stop treating Irving like a serious person capable of owning or recognizing what he has done. It’s time to stop protecting him, or waiting for him to change, or trying to break through his defense system.

For the Nets, that means franchise owner Joseph Tsai showing that his statement last week was not just empty PR-speak, that when he said “this is bigger than basketball,” he actually meant it. That means NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who announced on Thursday that he was going to meet with Irving next week, canceling that meeting and focusing his energy on actions that have a chance of making a difference, on people who might actually care what Silver has to say and are open to hearing why these tropes are dangerous and false. Also, while he’s at it, how about fining Irving, just as he has dozens of other players in the past for various non-basketball-related transgressions (such as Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, who was fined $40,000 this summer after making homphobic comments on a social media post)?

That means Nike, where Kyrie’s signature shoes are a top-seller, showing that it, too, meant it when the company said this week, “We believe there is no place for hate speech and antisemitism.”

That means one player, any player, coming out and denouncing what Irving is pushing, or at the very least displaying any indication that they take the dangers of antisemitism seriously, if for no other reason than out of kindness and empathy, and not discussing it as something that “only impacted you guys and everybody outside the locker room,” as Irving’s teammate, Kevin Durant, said last week, or something that, as Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker said Thursday, “I haven’t paid much attention to.”

That means the Nets backing up the words they put in their statement announcing Irving’s suspension, how “failure to disavow antisemitism when given a clear opportunity to do so … is against the values of our organization.”

This kind of dangerous rhetoric Irving has endorsed can lead to devastating real-world consequences. Just about three years ago, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, only about six miles from the Nets’ arena, Barclays Center, a man and a woman walked into a kosher grocery store in a Hasidic neighborhood wielding automatic guns and opened fire. The man, David Anderson, and his girlfriend, Francine Graham, murdered three Jews that day (as well as a police detective about an hour earlier), and officers later found a pipe bomb in their van, which they believed suggested assumed was going to be used to attack the Jewish day school in the same building.

Anderson and Graham were killed, but it was discovered that Anderson had a history of posting antisemitic content, that the victims of this attack were not random but specifically chosen, and that he considered himself a follower of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, the very sort of thinking that Irving is now aligning himself with and promoting.

Throughout history, conspiracy theories about Jews have almost always led to dead Jews. Irving has made clear through his words and actions that he does not care. It’s time for Adam Silver, the Nets, Nike and the rest of the NBA world to truly show that they do.

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. He is the author of “Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports.” Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.