Significance of Nicolas Anelka's punishment will come out in the telling

Described by some as an inverted Nazi salute, originated by the comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, who has been convicted in France of inciting racial hatred for antisemitic jokes in his stage act, this quenelle is ugly and somehow more sinister for being coded and cryptic. It clearly has no place, not outside sites of Jewish interest or identity, where people have been pictured doing it with a grin, and certainly not on a football pitch by a player with the world's cameras on him – broadcasting, Anelka knew, to France.

It is accepted that few at West Ham United's ground in the East End of London understood what Anelka was doing on 28 December when he used the quenelle to celebrate his goal for West Bromwich Albion. Yet in France they knew and there was an outcry. The more that it and M'bala M'bala, with his penchant for antisemitism and references to gas chambers, came to be understood, the more disturbing and unacceptable it appeared.

So for many people the five matches, £80,000 fine and compulsory education course required of Anelka is inadequate and does not send out a strong enough zero-tolerance message. It seems mild when compared to the eight-game ban handed down to Luis Suárez for racially abusing Patrice Evra, if not the mere four games John Terry had to sit out for calling Anton Ferdinand "a fucking black cunt".

It is difficult to pick a satisfactory way through this ruling without the full written reasons of the three-man commission, chaired by a QC, Christopher Quinlan. Frustratingly, the FA releases a brief summary first, apparently worried that in the time it takes for a commission's QC to write the judgment up, the decision itself could be leaked.

So the rationale for finding Anelka guilty but applying the minimum sentence has been explained, for now, only in its barest form. The commission did accept the FA's charge – it is, importantly, the FA itself that brings such charges, and it took expert advice on the quenelle – that the gesture was "abusive and/or indecent and/or insulting and/or improper". Furthermore, it was an "aggravated breach" because "it included a reference to ethnic origin and/or race and/or religion or belief".

Anelka had protested throughout that he is not antisemitic, did not mean the gesture to be antisemitic, that he did not believe the gesture is antisemitic. He said he was "supporting" M'bala M'bala, his friend, whose shows in France have been banned due to his mocking of the Holocaust and stereotyping of Jewish people. Anelka at first latched on to the remarks of Roger Cukierman, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, who said Anelka's charge by the FA was harsh, but Cukierman later clarified that he was disappointed and did believe the quenelle "glorifies" Nazi crimes against humanity… Read more.