A sports broadcast that criticized Black basketball players on the Rochester University team who last week boycotted a game with Israel’s National Basketball Team and contended that the Black players had bowed to Arab pressure was scrapped just hours before it was to have been aired by radio station WBAI-FM, a New York radio station sustained by listener subscriptions. This same station was the center of a controversy several years ago when it broadcast a poem by a 15-year-old Black student which was condemned by Jewish organizations for being anti-Semitic.
The sports broadcast was taped last Friday morning for WBAI-FM by Peter Heller, a “volunteer”–unpaid–sportscaster for the radio station who is the sports producer for ABC-TV (Channel 7), for airing that evening from 7:15 to 7:30. The criticism of the Black players was a segment of the 15-minute program that included comments and views of other sports events of the week. Several hours after taping. Heller was notified that the entire broadcast was cancelled and that he was fired from his position on the radio station.
Heller, whose book about former boxing champions, “In This Corner,” has just been published by Simon and Schuster, Inc., told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had anticipated trouble with the radio station over this broadcast “in view of WBAI’s traditional liberal views” which had earlier prompted it to kill another one of his broadcasts which contained an interview with Bobby Riggs. That broadcast, he said, was killed because Riggs had expressed “anti-women” views which in the opinion of WBAI was not sufficiently balanced with pro-women views.
Last Friday, Heller said, he was told that the latest broadcast had injected politics. “But,” he told the JTA, “I didn’t introduce the politics. It had been introduced when the Black players decided to boycott the game. All I did was to report it.”
Larry Cox, news director for WBAI-FM, told the JTA that last Friday’s broadcast was cancelled because Heller introduced the segment as “a personal commentary, and we are not allowed under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules to present personal commentaries” under the radio station’s current operating guidelines. Asked by JTA if the decision to dismiss Heller, who had been hired several weeks ago and had broadcast several programs, came before or after last Friday’s taping. Cox hesitated for a few moments then replied: “We didn’t like his work, generally.” Heller, however, noted that he had been hired “to present an over-all commentary rather than a rehash or spot reporting about the week’s sports events, and that’s what I tried to do.”
MORAL SPINES OF JELLYFISH
In the cancelled broadcast, a transcript of which was obtained by the JTA, Heller noted that the decision of one Black player to boycott the entire game and the decision of two other Black players to boycott the second half was “a serious misguided action…bowing to anti-Semitic Arab propaganda out of apparent ignorance of the facts on their part.”
He noted that the Black players bowed to Arab propaganda “because it’s the ‘in’ thing among some Blacks to align themselves with Arab guerrilla groups, and against Israel. In doing so, they conveniently closed their minds to some very cogent facts, like, for instance, the decimation of the Israeli Olympic team by Arab terrorists in Munich.” Heller stated that the Israeli basketball team’s U.S. tour was part due to an effort to raise funds that “will be used to help rebuild a viable Israeli Olympic team for Montreal in two years.”
Continuing, Heller observed that the Black players also “chose to ignore the incalculable financial help and technological assistance and training Israel has provided to many of the merging Black African nations, and they apparently forgot that it’s the Arabs who were the slave traders who sold Blacks into slavery in the past and who still carry on a slave trade in some parts of the Arab world.” He furthermore stated that “it’s apparently the radical-chic, leftist-chic, revolutionary-chic among a lot of misguided people who think they’re being liberal to support Arab terrorists instead of the progressive, democratic government of Israel. I think it’s a bunch of hogwash. These people have the moral spines of jellyfish.”
In Dec. 1968, during the struggle for community control of schools in New York between the Black community and the United Federation of Teachers, WBAI-FM became the center of a controversy when it broadcast a poem titled “Anti-Semitism.” The poem was written by a 15-year-old Black student and dedicated to Albert Shanker, UFT president. Leslie Campbell, the student’s teacher in Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district which was the focal point in the community control controversy, read the poem on Julius Lester’s WBAI-FM program.
The poem began: “Hey, Jew boy with that yarmulka on your head/ You pale face Jew boy, I wish you were dead.” The last two lines of the poem were: “I hated you Jew boy because your hang up was the Torah/ And my only hang up was my color.” The tumultuous aftermath of the reading was the filing of a complaint to the FCC by the UFT and demands by numerous Jewish organizations that the station’s license be revoked or suspended.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
