All the more reason, then, for us to condemn the confusion aimed at disparaging Islam in its essence and nature and labelling it an obscurantist enemy of progress and the West.

Casual racism disparaging remarks made about other ethnic and national groups around the workplace, or over the bar or the family dinner table (as I can well remember growing up in the 1950 s) had become much less prevalent in Australian private life, and certainly wholly absent from public life, by the 1990 s. But sport was somehow different.