Rangers’ fans were on spectacularly impotent form on Wednesday night. I was in the Broomloan End with two Partick Thistle-supporting friends, who, along with another 3,000 or so of their ilk, were delighting in raising an index finger to their mouths and shushing ten times as many home fans. Rangers fans just don’t seem to know what to sing these days, now that ditties about being “up to their knees in Fenian blood” have been banned.
Until very recently, there used to be an attitude among police and the footballing and that as long as it’s confined to the stadium, this sort of ugly triumphalism doesn’t do too much harm. That was misguided at best, dangerously negligent at worst.
In David Winner’s book about Dutch football, Brilliant Orange, one chapter deals with the Jewish identity of the country’s most famous club, Ajax. He reports how supporters of their biggest rivals, Feyenoord, have a particularly charming line in anti-Semitic insults: they hiss in unison and shout “Trains for Auschwitz leave in five minutes”.
“The abuse is widely viewed as a symptom of childish football tribalism than anti-Semitism, and has become so commonplace that police hardly ever bother to prosecute,” writes Winner.
“Hadassa Hirschfield, deputy director of the Centre for Information and Documentation about Israel in The Hague, considers the trend ‘dangerous’ because it lessens the taboo against anti-Semitism.”
The taboo against sectarianism in Ibrox, similarly, seemed almost non-existent until UEFA started threatening Rangers with elimination from European competition if their supporters didn’t clean up their act. But at long last, they’re being forced to rack their brains and come up with alternatives to the bigotry that’s been coursing through Ibrox for decades.