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Evil People Do Evil Things. Those Who Blame The Rest Of Us Are Just As Sick In The Head.

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In the aftermath of Sunday’s game, the predictable horror stories.

A Celtic fan stabbed in the face in Paisley by a guy in a Sevco top. A young kid walking down the street with his dad and his auntie, hit in the back of the head with a bottle by Celtic supporters leaving a bar. Those are the headline stories, those which make the papers.

There are others, no doubt.

I’ve written before on this site that there are people out there who need no excuse to engage in this kind of behaviour. They are psychopaths. They would find a reason if none existed, but football gives them a convenient one. The scarves or jerseys they wear are a convenience that allows them to blend into a crowd. The atmosphere of such a big game – especially these games – is all the additional adrenaline they require, that a drop of the Dutch Courage.

Not unexpectedly, entire Sevco forums have been dedicated to the incident with the kid. This would be perfectly valid and fine if those who posted on there were raising money for him or expressing their sympathy; alas, most of them are pouring out their hatred of all things Celtic. To them, this is just another excuse to let that out. Some of them wait for incidents like this; their match experience would be lacking without it.

This, to them, is another brick in the wall, another shining piece of Evidence in their life long public examination of our club, and its supporters. I don’t have to go into the litany, to list every vile thing they associate with Celtic … you know all that already.

So a kid gets bottled by some drunken yob who belongs in a psycho ward instead of walking the streets. They could say that, but of course they won’t. Instead he’s a “typical Celtic fan” in their eyes, and on their forums the crime becomes one that all of us had a hand in. It becomes something that we’re all guilty of by association.

I’ve also written on this site about the way in which the songs in the stands at Ibrox morphed over time, and of how appalled I am that the direction of travel tends to be downward. From the Billy Boys to the Famine Song, to chants about our greatest ever manager. One replaced the other, in the repertoire of hate.

In recent years, the first has made a comeback. The song-sheets for the second have been dusted off and brought out again and you see banners still informing a world that thinks these people are sick in the head of the third.

Now they’ve added a new and awful chant of hatred; I’m not even going to go into it.

You know which one I refer to, one that trawls the sewer, that appropriates a word that has no business in a football stadium, levelled not at the perpetrator of some long ago crime but directed at the entire institution of Celtic this weekend, every single one of us. And it’s disgusting and shocking and disturbing that this mind-set has taken such root, as if the prospect of living with mediocrity in the shadow of our great club has turned the hate dial up to full.

And of course it has because that chant dredges the swamp in a manner only a few heard in football grounds ever has. This is their Ibrox disaster song. This is their version of the not-so-witty ditties which you can hear from the scummier element in English grounds who mock Munich or Hillsborough. This thing their support has with child abuse has become a kind of sick obsession, one that has started to cast a dark shadow over Ibrox.

Because other fans at other clubs do not do this. (Save a small cohort at Aberdeen, the only other fans in Scotland who routinely sing about the horrible disasters at Ibrox.) No-one else’s fans taunt us with such vile chants. No-one else’s fans spend time making banners which radiate such naked, open hatred. They scream of cover-ups, but if you believe them our club’s entire history has been categorised by the same. The same people think we got State Aid. That we used religious and political influence to build a massive international web of power, with a reach the masonic lodges could only fantasise about. And what do we do with it? We used it to … emmmm … buy land.

Not to bully our way to the EPL or elbow our way to the top of the European Club Association so that the big boys there would invite us to the much heralded European Super League. Hell, with those kind of connections why would we stop at mere football supremacy anyway? After all, the Vice President of the United States’ secret service code-name is Celtic. Having got our claws in the White House, surely carpet bombing Ibrox itself isn’t too large an ambition?

These people believe we’re at the centre of a global conspiracy designed to deprive them of everything they hold dear. But none of what happened to them is our fault. I understand their need to apportion blame, but they are looking in the wrong place.

Evil people do evil things, and major organisations make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are horrendous, costly, even ruinous. What I do know is that there are no banners at Celtic Park blaming Rangers itself for the Ibrox Disasters. There are no songs about cover-ups there. Nobody ever says that after one catastrophe at the ground there ought never to have been a second although we know these things to be literally true.

But to use those facts as a stick to beat those who attend that stadium today?

Even if the club itself were still going, the connection still literal and real, why would we? What possible reason could there be for wanting to dive straight into that cesspit? Celtic players, fans and club officials mourned the dead. Jock Stein, the man this section of their support so defames, helped the injured. Something like that brings people together, it doesn’t tear the city apart. To use that would be sick point scoring, standing on the graves of the dead.

And rational, normal, decent people don’t do that.

No such inhibitions affect those who this week will be unleashing their bile from behind a wounded kid or victims of an age old scandal. It won’t stop some on our own side from using the stabbing of the guy in Paisley as an excuse to ramp up the hatred of all Sevco fans, as if every single one of them played a part in picking up the knife and sticking it in.

Every event like it is an outrage and an offense against our humanity. I’ve long argued that those responsible don’t represent football fans at all; they simply wear our colours, in an effort to look as if they belong somewhere, when the whole of civilisation would close the door in their faces. They are ticking bombs on any given day of the week.

I won’t hold their behaviour against an entire support.

But there were many thousands, tens of thousands, in the stands at Hampden who did reveal an inhuman, sick side at the weekend, directing a shameful chant at the fans of our club, and that’s something that does deserve highlighting.

That is something I hold against them as a collective, and something they ought to deal with amongst themselves.

Because it heaps shame on all of them. Not on us, not on the intended targets. It makes their club looked mired in hatred. It makes it look as if bile is their common tongue. That has an impact far beyond the football stadium.

Evil people do evil things. Those who would blame the rest of us for them, well I’m afraid they are just as sick in the head as those who commit the dreadful acts themselves, and I would argue that they are just as great a danger to society.

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