After recent North London Derbies, footage has emerged allegedly showing Arsenal fans singing a song which has become all too common at games involving their neighbours Tottenham.
Those joining in sang ‘I’ve got a foreskin, haven’t you’ (fuck the Jews)”.
We’ve heard about this happening countless times over the last few years. It’s condemned at the time, action is rarely (if ever) taken, and it’s by no means exclusive to the North London Derby.
On Saturday, West Ham will take a few thousand fans with them to White Hart Lane but, as a Jewish West Ham fan, I wouldn’t dream of going.
Clive Rose/Getty Images
West Ham fans, along with those of Arsenal and Chelsea, have always seemed the most virulent when it comes to antisemitism from sections of their support. In a sense this seems inevitable – all three have stronger rivalries with Tottenham than a club from outside London might do, and these games get a lot more heated, often with standoffs (or in some cases, violence) between fans outside the ground before games. Furthermore, the late kickoff time on Saturday feels like poor planning when it comes to the next meeting between Spurs and West Ham.
‘Tribal rivalries’ will be used by some to explain the chorus of hissing that alludes to the gas chambers used during the holocaust, and to justify singing ‘Viva Lazio’ in reference to the stabbing of Tottenham supporters in Rome in an act of far-right extremist violence. However, while that contextualises the hate, it doesn’t excuse it. Nothing excuses it.
In fact, during last year’s meeting at White Hart Lane, I saw a red-in-the-face West Ham fan hurling abuse at the nearest Tottenham supporter for failing to respect the fact that a visiting fan had been stabbed in the street before the game (something which many in the ground didn’t learn until after half-time at the earliest) before resuming singing “Getting stabbed on sight on a Thursday night, Viva Lazio”.
Giuseppe Bellini/Getty Images
Why have Tottenham been the targets for this kind of abuse? It’s a club from a traditionally Jewish area (though many fans now live elsewhere in North London), a large proportion of the fanbase is Jewish (there have been similar reports from the Netherlands, where Ajax have the strongest Jewish ties), and some Tottenham fans – for the reasons above – refer to themselves as the ‘Yid Army’.
Jewish writer and broadcaster David Baddiel, who supports Chelsea, went as far as blaming this reclamation of the word for the abuse suffered by Spurs fans at the hands of their rivals, writing in the Guardian:
‘The fact is that whatever its origins, their continuing use of the Y-word legitimises and sustains the racist abuse aimed at Spurs by other fans.’
While it may be true, as Baddiel notes, that rival fans feel justified in hurling antisemitic abuse because Tottenham self-identify as ‘Yids’, the response should be to address the former rather than the latter.
Clive Rose/Getty Images
There’s an argument that – even if we never heard the word ‘Yid’ at a football ground again – this abuse would not disappear.
Clamping down on the use of the word won’t eliminate Tottenham’s Jewish traditions; enough Jewish and minority history gets erased within sport and culture already without us doing it ourselves.
And besides, the antisemitic element’s response to such a scenario would surely just be a replacement of the dog-whistle ‘Yid’ with a removal of any such couching, as some no doubt do already. And to expect people to stop associating Tottenham with Judaism because people stop singing ‘Yid Army’? Yeah, good luck with that.
We already see the club’s Jewish chairman Daniel Levy met with that old antisemitic trope of Jews being ‘money-grabbing’ or ‘snakes’ during any transfer window, and – guess what – he won’t stop being Jewish, and he won’t stop receiving antisemitic abuse, if the fans behave differently.
Indeed it seems from recent transfer windows that even a huge monetary outlay on players like Moussa Sissoko won’t stop some treating him like a caricature.
That particular image of Jews and Jewishness is so deeply ingrained that it’s become day-to-day jargon in video gaming circles, even among those who likely don’t even know a single Jewish person.
Countless people who concede a goal on FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer when an opponent draws the goalkeeper and squares to a teammate for a tap-in have responded by cursing the concession of a ‘Jew goal’. Why is it given that description? It’s a cheap way to score, and you know who else is cheap…
It extends further, to people being ‘Jewed out of’ a situation when they feel they’ve been harshly denied something they feel entitled to. It has even spread to poker, with tournament players who fold their way into the money being congratulated for ‘Jewing’ their way there.
Take a second and type the phrase "Jew goal" into Twitter. Then scroll through the tweets and tell me it's just 'banter'.
— James Masters (@Masters_JamesD) April 27, 2014
It’s difficult to work out why antisemitism seems to remain more oblique than other forms of racism in football, but it may come down to the fact that – now, at least – European Jews tend to be racialised as white.
We benefit from the privilege of not being visibly ‘othered’, yet are also victims of abuse which is both insidious (see the language around ‘metropolitan elites’ and ‘North London geeks’ when Ed Miliband was running to become the UK’s first Jewish prime minister – or second, depending on how you read Benjamin Disraeli’s background) and explicit (fans singing ‘fucking Jews’, often unchallenged).
https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/595712828306280448
Other forms of racism in sport are far more ingrained – see, for example, the manner in which the media rushed to scapegoat Raheem Sterling after England’s Euro 2016 exit, or the jokes about how black female athletes such as Serena Williams either look masculine, are all raw power, or a combination of the two.
When it comes to football, the racism du jour generally expresses itself in an inability to compare an up-and-coming black player to anyone besides another black player (Yaya Toure, at his peak, was much closer to Zidane than to Vieira), or to think you’re being complimentary when calling a black player a ‘beast’ (no, doing the same for Alvaro Negredo as well doesn’t make it okay), or to infantilise or implicitly question the intelligence or decision-making of the likes of Sterling while not bringing it into the conversation when it comes to similarly wasteful white players.
Meanwhile, despite a number of Jewish players having played at the top level – Yossi Benayoun, Juan Pablo Sorin and Kyle Beckerman, to name but three – Jews are traditionally characterised as the money-men behind the scenes (we’ve seen a similar theme of Jews as those pulling the strings and holding the real power in the recent US presidential election).
It’s often a case of semantic hoop-jumping which fools no one. But good news, racists. You don’t even have to pretend when it comes to the traditionally underrepresented group of Jews in football.
You’re just attacking rival fans, and it’s all part of tribalism. You don’t mean it, and you don’t really hate Jews. It’s just banter, right?
Colombia coach José Pékerman is one of the highest-profile Jewish managers in the modern game (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
If you’re going to White Hart Lane on Saturday and you hear anything untoward from rival fans, or from your own fans, speak up. Call them out directly and get them to consider what they’re doing – or, if you don’t feel like you’re in a position to do that, try to speak to a steward.
It’s difficult to speak out against them when you’re an isolated voice, but you don’t tackle this by telling Jewish supporters to erase their identity. You do it by calling out abuse.
