Time for the Spurs army to march to a different tune

When is a yid not a yid? This is a question the Football Association may need to answer in the coming weeks, not to mention Chelsea, and Tottenham.

In just about every walk of life, ‘yid’ is a derogatory term for a Jew. Although the word Yiddish also applies to Jewish dialect and culture, ‘yid’ in the mouth of a gentile is invariably intended to insult and demean. With antiSemitism again rising, to allow its use to grow unchecked would be wildly irresponsible.

In english football, however, there is a complication. A yid can also be a supporter of Tottenham. Their fans identify as the ‘ Yid Army’ to such an extent that in June 2014, the Metropolitan Police announced that use of the word ‘yid’ in chants at White hart Lane would no longer be considered an offence worthy of arrest. One presumes the same now applies during Tottenham games at Wembley.

And now it gets interesting, for at Chelsea, the fans have a new song in honour of their striker Alvaro Morata. ‘ he came from Real Madrid,’ they sing, ‘he hates the f****** yids . . . ’

Unsurprisingly, not everybody is comfortable with this, not least Chelsea and Morata. The club are threatening to use CCTV evidence to impose bans on those chanting the offensive song, and say they will show zero tolerance to offenders and support criminal prosecutions. Morata has issued a statement calling on Chelsea’s fans to ‘respect everyone’. The FA has confirmed it will open an investigation.

Yet into what, exactly? Chelsea are admirably insistent there is no grey area here, but that isn’t quite true. Football has allowed the word ‘yid’ to develop duality. It could be argued that the Chelsea fans’ song is not anti-Semitic, but merely against a rival club. Chelsea’s fans could claim that they are not singing Morata hates Jews, but that he hates Tottenham — the way Willian does, in another Stamford Bridge favourite.

now we all know that a supporter prepared to sing the line ‘he hates the f****** yids’ is going to have a hard time convincing any court, or reasonable person, that the words are not racially motivated. Yet there is a shade of grey, in football at least.

A section of Tottenham’s support have been allowed to get away with the notion that they are reclaiming a word; a word that wasn’t really theirs to reclaim.

Put it like this. Say there was a football club that was strongly identified with and part of the black community: Brixton United, for want of better. As time passed, the many black fans of this club had sought to reclaim the words they were called by rival supporters, making them their own.

Yet, as happens in football, the cultural and ethnic make-up of the fans group had also changed, become diluted, less identifiably black. And now you’ve got a load of white guys, at a football match, chanting: ‘n***er Army!’

That’s pretty much where Tottenham are now. The majority of supporters piously protecting their right to use the word ‘yid’ are not actually Jewish. Might they wish to consider the 0.4 per cent of the country that is, before affecting ownership?

The counter-argument is that Tottenham’s ‘ Yid Army’ are showing solidarity with previous generations of the club’s supporters, who suffered anti- Semitic abuse.

Tottenham have long been identified as the Jewish club, even though it was Arsenal who were the first to wish supporters well over the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Tottenham did not follow suit until 1973, a decade later. Arsenal’s Jewish support, however, was relatively new.

IT WAS Tottenham who first attracted the working-class Jewish community that grew up around the industrialised Tottenham hale area at the beginning of the 20th century. It is this Jewish ancestry that modern Tottenham supporters can claim to be defending. The ‘ Yid Army’ chant is never intended in a pejorative sense, and comes from a position of affinity for crowds it was once estimated would contain as many as 10,000 Jews. To then blame Tottenham’s fans for their rivals’ racial slurs, it is argued, is like blaming the

victims of sexual assault for being drunk or dressing provocatively. And these are valid points — except it is indisputable that the only environment in which the use of ‘yid’ is tolerated is the football ground. And something has caused that.

Not every black man wishes to reclaim the N-word, as comedians like Chris Rock and Reginald D Hunter have done.

In the aftermath of Hunter’s after-dinner turn at the Professional Footballers’ Association dinner in 2013, opinion was divided. Many black players in the room were quite comfortable with the comedy of race, the frequent N-bombs, some less so. ‘If my dad heard me say it, he would turn in his grave,’ said PFA deputy chief executive Bobby Barnes, of the word that came to define Hunter’s act.

One imagines there are Jewish Tottenham fans who feel the same about ‘ yid’, or Jewish supporters at other clubs who greatly resent that their own fans feel safe singing racist songs because they can hide behind the lie of equivalency. Football has placed a minefield around racist language.

In 2013, when West Ham visited Tottenham shortly after the FA had intervened on the subject of anti-Semitism and cries of ‘Yid Army’ were temporarily outlawed, an appalling masterclass in provocation was delivered. The visiting fans pushed it as far as they could, without quite crossing the line.

‘Without the Y-word, you’ve got f*** all,’ they taunted. Another reference to Adolf Hitler was even less subtle. ‘He’s coming for you, he’s coming for you,’ they sneered. ‘We won’t say his name, but he’s coming for you.’ As a final act of triumph, the only person arrested for saying the word ‘yid’ at White Hart Lane that day was a Tottenham fan. It was horrid.

AND little has changed since then. Blurred lines, pushed buttons, claim and re- claim and counter-claim. Maybe it is time that Tottenham as a club considered a better way forward, maybe as a way of marking their return to a new stadium next season. Would so much be lost if the new White Hart Lane was to become a yid-free zone? Spurs is also a one-syllable word, too. It scans perfectly in all the same songs.

When the FA previously intervened in this debate four years ago, it provoked a strong response. ‘If Spurs fans genuinely are going to stop using this word then it should be our decision,’ said Darren Alexander, chairman of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust. And that is the problem. A section of Tottenham’s support will always see the ‘ Yid Army’ as part of their identity and feel protective of it.

To challenge this, it needs the club to take a stand — but what club wishes to get on the wrong side of its most vocal, and probably loyal, supporters? Throughout the years of debate, the strongest measure of disapproval from Tottenham came in a statement asking fans to be ‘mindful’ of their language, after a series of arrests. Interestingly, though, the club referred throughout to ‘ the Y- word’, suggesting it was not quite as inoffensive as some believe.

With the advent of the Morata chant, maybe it is time to take mindfulness to the next level. To think about when a word is not so much being reclaimed as handed over to the last group who should be allowed to use it: to racists, to anti-Semites and to bullies, to play with, spit and spew as they wish. Maybe the time has come for the ‘Yid Army’ to modernise, and march to a different tune.