Is this anti-semitism?

Most of my Spurs friends who chant "Yid Army" are decidedly not Jewish.

i think gentile identification w/ jews through sports fandom is a really interesting concept

Liverpool mocked for being poor, unemployed, eternal victims

"You'll never walk alone" has been adopted by Liverpool fans so their competition sings it as "You'll never work again".

Yeah xp, I doubt there can be any stats on ethnicity of support but Spurs having a larger Jewish following can't translate into anything more than still a very small percentage of total support.

I think this is kind of dumb on the part of the FA. Anybody who's genuinely anti-semitic enough to call Spurs fans 'yids' in earnest is already pretty visibly malevolent (not to mention highly visibly stupid) and anybody trying to wind up Spurs fans by calling them Yids has already been answered by the majority of Spurs fans, Jewish or not.

Another Liverpool dig is for the opposing fans' supporters to sing 'sign on, sign on' over the appropriate bit of You'll Never Walk Alone.

Tottenham/Stamford Hill is a traditionally Orthodox Jewish area (although latterly Tottenham itself is known as the place black people riot against the police), with lots of Jewish people in North London generally, as Ismael says. Outer East London is also a Jewish area and a friend from there who went to a kibbutz for six months told me half-jokingly that it was East London Jews on one side of the pool, North Londoners on the other - and never the twain shall meet.

Apparently some opposing teams' supporters make a hissing noise at Spurs fans, which is supposed to be an allusion to gas chambers. Many Spurs fans are *incensed* that nothing gets said or done about the hissing.

The other complicating thing is that the abuse is mostly pantomime, but not always; and unless you know what's happening it might be hard to tell the difference, and impossible to legislate with that degree of nuance. With Liverpool 'sign on, sign on' gets trotted out in the first five minutes of any game and that's expected, but there's other abuse that might provoke actual violence.

With Spurs there was a highly-publicised instance of mass hissing last season which did aiui provoke outrage because it's become taboo. Ten years ago it wouldn't've.

I was among the Arsenal fans on Saturday and there was a chant I don't know (I'm not Arsenal myself) but which obviously used to have a yid + hissing coda because every time it stopped there was a very quiet continuation along those lines. I dunno what could or should be done about that tbh, because it's still an example of self-policing and even in the midst of it it's impossible to tell who's doing it or how prevalent it is.

Also I doubt that Arsenal have significantly fewer Jewish fans than Tottenham do (they're both North London clubs) so we're not really in the realms of hardcore racial theory here.

http://fanchants.co.uk/football-songs/tottenham_hotspur-chants/yids-clap-spurs/

btw, googled yids just now, first result was the tottenham score -- anyone else get same?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVwGKo2pOmc

Ajax Amsterdam have the same sort of issue - fans who aren't Jewish identifying with those who are via shared abuse, not always in an uncontroversial way. The wider problem is that people who aren't intentionally anti-semitic, often kids, will mirror the anti-semitic language out of antagonism to Spurs / Ajax without even knowing about the Jewish connection. The more the fans adopt an identity notionally linked to Jewish culture, the more that culture becomes a point of attack.

The hissing was mostly from Chelsea who have longstanding links to the far-right but it has diminished significantly since the club was bought by a Jewish owner.

Ajax indeed have the same problem. For decades now a majority of the fans (Jewish or not) chant 'Joden!' or 'Superjoden!' (Joden being the Dutch word for 'Jews'). It's probably the number one chant when they are winning, just scored a goal or have just won a game.
In the 90s there's been a terrible 'retaliation' by rivals Feyenoord, whose fans would hiss or sing things like 'Hamas, Hamas, Jews on the gas'. It lead to a ban on Feyenoord fans when they played Ajax in Amsterdam for some years.

More and more though, Ajax VIPs are expressing their concern and disagreement of using 'Joden' as a pejorative term used with pride by the people called that way. But the hardcore fans (them being Jewish or not doesn't seem to make a difference) will not have this 'taken away from them'.

The wider problem is that people who aren't intentionally anti-semitic, often kids, will mirror the anti-semitic language out of antagonism to Spurs / Ajax without even knowing about the Jewish connection

this, and where it becomes a problem, why it becomes a problem, the backwash of the football-aimed abuse that filters back to the jewish community and the connections between the aim/target/recipient and how, if it does at all, this changes the dynamics, etc, is all very interesting and worthy of much conversation and debate on any website but this one imo

i'd like to hear your thoughts darragh. i promise not to 'privilege' you.

iirc Rangers fans briefly adopted the star, not for any connection to Jewry (other than both being the chosen people) but because Celtic fans had taken on the Palestinian flag i.e. as a symbol to goad them a la Feyenoord

there's a whole mess of Israel/Palestine metaphors deployed within the context of Northern Irish sectarianism

other than both being the chosen people

LOL

Chosen to be models in the Simpsons' Big Book of British Smiles?

I'm not even Catholic, Scottish or into football but CHRIST do I hate Rangers.

Another Liverpool dig is for the opposing fans' supporters to sing 'sign on, sign on' over the appropriate bit of You'll Never Walk Alone.

huh?

Signing on for unemployment benefit

Oh, hold on though, I see what you mean, what is the appropriate bit?

sign on, sign on
with hope in your heart
but you'll never ... get ... a job

no, no. I didn't understand the sign on part. you explained it well. thanks.;

sounded like an AOL thing to me.

it is an aol thing

it'd be ridiculous to prosecute Spurs fans for using a word in a positive context, otoh it'd be really awkward if a club's fans all decided to call themselves the N-word

my dad insists that in ye olden days it was Arsenal that was noted for its Jewish support but i dunno if this is right or not

Is there any cultural context to rival Soccer in scope and reach that is so commonly linked with knuckle dragging abuse, racist and otherwise?

there are few cultural contexts to rival soccer in scope and reach so no prob not

xp - the internet

I've been meaning to read this for a while:

Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?

I bought that a couple of weeks back, it's in a very long queue though

interesting! tell me how it is?

iirc there's a chapter in the foer soccer book about exclusively jewish clubs (like Hakoah in Vienna) in the 1920s

some info here: http://www.jstandard.com/index.php/content/item/17856/

Looks interesting. I've been meaning to find out more about the old rivalry between Jutrzenka Krakow and Makkabi Krakow too.

This kind of thing is what really cause my ulcer to flare. Isn't anti-semitism complicated enough? You can't reclaim something on someone else's behalf right? I mean:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

And now I can't even tell the evil people from the people ironically reclaiming evil by using hate speech to self refer which only please the evil people because it makes it harder to legislate what they...say...and prevent...Nope, I'm out.

https://audioboo.fm/boos/1606789-how-offensive-is-the-word-yid

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/david-cameron-yid-really-is-race-hate-word

good article tbh

It is, though i think it misrepresents what Cameron said. He didn't defend the right to chant or say that it wasn't offensive, as i understand it, he said that it shouldn't be criminally prosecuted as hate speech if it's not intended as hate speech.

to point out that the p or n words wouldn't ever have passed his lips even in making such a point is cogent, tho i wonder if there isn't a gradient of offensiveness in these words?

not in the unhelpful sense of 'play em off against each other' or anything

there's a gradient, like David Baddiel pointed out in his radio bit, but why there's a gradient or whether there ought to be is a different question?

i think the "please don't use this word even if you're trying to be positive" argument is pretty fair at this point

made me wonder about what percentage of a group has to take serious offence at a word before the law decides to step in tho - not that i'm denying that this is an offensive word that people should take offence at

Any combination of words intended to harass or intimidate on the basis of race would be covered, even if those words weren't inherently offensive outside of that context.

idk why or whether there ought to be, and everything depends on context, but i mean i couldnt argue that 'paddy' was in any way as unacceptable as the obvious ones. i wouldn't consider that yid is either, though it's hardly for me to define that one way or the other, and this is probably why this is a greyer area.

PFA boss Gordon Taylor has told him to toughen up. Taylor said: "It belittles racism to compare the two issues. It is just an opportunity for someone to have a go in same way as if you are bald or fat.

"Dave should be proud of his hair. It makes him stand out if he is having a good game and he could always dye it if he wants."

Simon Cheetham, who chairs Red and Proud, said: "I have no sympathy for Dave Kitson. I think he should get a grip on himself and stop whingeing. I have to say he comes across as slightly pathetic, a ginger whinger.

"Come on, everyone with red hair gets some stick. Okay, so I have never had 20,000 people shout at me, but we just get on with it.

"He should be proud of having a red head and moaning about abuse is not doing us redheads any favours."

just cos it was bumped today