Like the late Christopher Hitchens who only discovered his Jewish roots once he had moved to New York in the early Eighties, Donald Sterling has also had a revelation and is advertising the fact that he’s Jewish. For any of you who might not be aware who Sterling is, he was born Tokowitz 80 years ago but changed his name to Sterling to sound ritzier. He is a slum landlord who evicts poor women, began his career selling second-hand furniture to blacks and Hispanics, is as disgusting a man as you hope never to meet, and is, since a week ago, the most reviled man in America. His crime: telling a black girlfriend, who insists the relationship is platonic — one who has been arrested four times, however, and the recipient of at least 1.8 million big ones from Sterling — not to bring black people to LA Clippers basketball games, a team he owns, or rather owned. She taped him and is being investigated for selling the goods after he refused to meet her price.

Since the storm broke, Sterling has revealed his Jewish roots, hoping that Hollywood will come to his aid. No dice. When it comes to race, the Hollywood sharks may lack talent but they make up for it in PC. They know that the crap they put out about zombies and science fiction and child-abusing priests and Nazi southern folk is watched by 25-year-old-and-under black men, so the last thing they wish to do is alienate this group. What is shocking is that not a single voice has dared point out that Donald Sterling has not had his day in court and has been railroaded by the media, in cahoots with race hustlers and other busybodies. By forcing him to sell the team he owns and imposing a $2.5 million fine, the NBA has not only acted illegally, it has also acted unconstitutionally.

The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech. Sterling may be a rich slob but he didn’t use the N-word, and went as far as to encourage the black female hustler to ‘admire him, bring him here, feed him, fuck him…but don’t put him [Magic Johnson, an ex-NBA superstar] on an Instagram for the world to have to see…And don’t bring him to my games.’ Pretty tame stuff, I’d say, especially when compared with the hate that rappers spew out. My God, I’ve said so much worse in the privacy of my house, but under the new rules of PC I’d get life without parole on Devil’s Island. What in hell is going on here? How dare anyone call America and Europe free countries when one can lose one’s business over something said to some woman in private.

Sterling’s case is straight out of Orwell. Owners of franchises are required to sign a series of moral and ethics contracts that bar them from expressing views that are considered detrimental to the league. A past female owner of a baseball team, now deceased, was suspended from running her team for a year after she said in a press conference (among other things) that Hitler was a good job creator. (The trouble is that Hitler did create jobs, and lots of them.) She then repeated her remarks and was suspended for a longer period and eventually she sold her controlling stake of her own free will.

But Sterling did not make his remarks in public, and he is totally within his rights to say that he doesn’t like a female friend bringing blacks to his owner’s box. The real reason the commissioner of the NBA has come down on him with a death sentence is money. Blacks are disproportionally represented in audiences of pro-basketball games and, of course, on the playing field. Throw the bum to the wolves and keep the punters coming, is the commishe’s train of thought.

What has shocked me, being a very sensitive soul in the prime of youth, is that not a single columnist or pundit has come out and said that Sterling, for all his vulgarity, is within his rights to say what he wants if America is as free a country as it claims to be. It’s knee-jerk hysteria and PC gone crazy. Here you have a professional basketball league that has been tainted by the criminal behaviour of its professional players, but the book is thrown at a very rich and rather unpleasant slob for remarks made in private. In Los Angeles, the very city in which Donald Sterling committed the crime of the century, three quarters of adults arrested are black or Hispanic. Some 45 per cent of black teenage girls become pregnant; and only half of all black Americans finish high school. One in three black men end up in prison. I list these horror statistics to show that, although the Civil Rights act was passed 50 years ago, the politicians and the media have chosen to look the other way and not read the riot act to black leaders. The contemptible sycophants that call themselves pundits in Washington and New York fell over themselves with verbal inflation to crucify Donald Sterling, in case some race hustler targeted them for having remained silent. Few of them point to the awful problems indicated by the crime and pregnancy figures. Courage is an alien word in politics and the media, especially when it comes to race.