Section 14

Many British football clubs have their origins in communities that were for years divided by religion. In Glasgow, Celtic is the Catholic team and Rangers is the protestant team. In London, Tottenham Hotspur has traditional links to the Jewish community and for decades the fans have referred to themselves as the “Yid Army”.

Last week, eight schoolboys were arrested and questioned for ten hours by Hertfordshire police after singing a football chant at a Jewish teacher’s leaving do. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is already in consultation with an array of busybodies over concerns that fans might be being racist towards themselves.

Fans and club historians point out that the use of the words “Yiddo” and “Yid Army” by the fans to refer to themselves has developed over decades and stopped some of the real racial abuse that used to occur at football matches.

Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill has coined the phrase “mate speech” to describe this new assault on free speech.

if recent cases in Britain are anything to go by, the language police are turning their attentions to what we might call ‘Mate Speech’. They’re cracking down on banter between buddies, throwaway chants at football matches, and words uttered in informal, behind-the-scenes settings, on the basis that someone somewhere, if they ever caught drift of these words, might possibly be offended by them.

Welcome to the humourless society, where no off-the-cuff remark, gag or utterance is beyond the sanction of the sanctimonious word-watchers.

UPDATE: More from Spiked on the ‘Yid Army’, including this sporting-rivalry gem:

Chants at sports stadiums should not be interpreted literally. An obvious case in point are the basketball games between Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel, where a common chant from the Jerusalem supporters is ‘Ya Saddam ya habib udrub udrub Tel Aviv’. Hapoel fans adopted it after news programmes showed Palestinians chanting it on rooftops during the Gulf War. It means ‘Saddam, darling, bomb Tel Aviv’ in Arabic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Hate Speech, Sport, Britain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.