I see that a number of Sevco’s online Twitterati – with the emphasis on Twit – are up in arms about George Galloway this week; they object to the following Tweet, and are insisting that their supporters email and phone and generally bother the police over it.
As if the police don’t have a thousand better things to do with their time right now.
I also got a number of deranged emails and messages from various cretins in their support over the publication of Joe O’Rourke’s open letter to Stewart Regan, because of a tweet he sent way back in the sands of time, over which the media has already raked, over which Joe has spoken in the past, over which he has already apologised.
This mob really are rich. Their sudden concern over sectarianism – or what they deem sectarianism to be – is rich. It is also hypocritical.
As far as I’m concerned they can give out lectures only when they get their own house in order and not before.
And they still have a serious, serious problem with this stuff, and one that’s not getting any better as time goes on.
In fact, it’s getting worse.
Let me say, first, on Joe O’Rourke and the tweet a lot of them decided to dredge up the other day.
What he did when he sent that out – a joke about the Titanic and Protestants drowning on it – was absolutely, utterly, indefensible. But see, that’s the thing. Nobody tried to defend it. Nobody tried to deflect from it. Nobody made the slightest attempt to make excuses or indulge in whatabouttery over that. Joe held up his hands at once. He faced the issue head-on. He spoke to the media. He offered an apology that was sincere.
As far as I’m concerned, that shuts the book on it. Anyone who’s met Joe O’Rourke knows he’s about as far from being a bigot as you can get.
Anyone who’s spent time with the guy knows that he abhors sectarianism, which is exactly why he has no love for the clubs which have played football out of Glasgow’s cathedral of hate at Ibrox.
As grimly pathetic as it is for their fans to try to make hay out of a years old controversy, which was taken care of at the time, I find the phony anger over Galloway’s tweet to be far worse, and even more hysterical. Talk about manufactured outrage. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel, hoping to find something to moan about.
Some in the Scottish media – who have ignored events on their own doorstep, for years almost beyond count, and who still do, who ignored entreaties from myself and others to get the SFA to say something, anything at all, about events at Ibrox – suddenly believe they are in a position to lecture a guy who has 100 IQ points on any of them and a history of fighting bigotry and sectarianism in Scotland and beyond, and who even wrote a book on the treatment Neil Lennon got, at a time when their own profession was telling our former manager he deserved it. These people ought to save it; they embarrass themselves and draw attention to their own complete hypocrisy when they do stuff like this.
They too can save the lectures until they have the balls to confront the wider issue.
Galloway uses the H word in a very specific way. My own feelings on that word precisely mirror his own. It has damn all to do with religion, as those currently wailing know fine well. They are, for the most part, ignorant scum, but they are not stupid, ignorant scum. They understand the connotations of the word alright, but it suits their agenda to blow smoke and try and distract from the problems they have in their own support.
That word refers to behaviour.
To a state of mind.
To a way of looking at the world.
If you want me to get deep into etymology, it refers to “a member of a warlike Asiatic nomadic people who invaded and ravaged Europe in the 4th–5th centuries.” And those peoples were notorious for the viciousness of their actions; they were the original barbarians.
Nowadays it refers to those who behave in a destructive manner, who hold ignorant, even dangerous, opinions, who are members of sectarian societies. Celtic Wiki has a wonderful description of those who could be described with the word; those “whose general political slant is strongly right-wing, parochial, conservative and highly xenophobic towards any form of outside influence.” That just about sums it up.
The phrase has been used to describe followers of Hearts, Kilmarnock, Motherwell and other clubs who’ve sung sectarian songs at Celtic fans or who’ve engaged in destructive behaviour.
And it most definitely applies to the Democratic Unionist Party and its foaming leader Arlene Foster, who’s frequently poked her nose into issues here in Scotland which have damn all to do with her remit as the head of a North of Ireland political organisation with ties to sectarian death squads and which holds any number of repellent, backward, social views. Honestly, for anyone to object – on their behalf – with allegations of sectarianism … too funny.
For all the Sevconuts attempts to brand the use of the word a “hate crime” – and how hysterical is that? – the word has not been labelled sectarian. When the SFA tried to charge Guidetti with using it they had to settle for disciplining him with “offensive language” – basically, they did him for laughing at the Ibrox club.
Which, let’s face it, we’ve all spent the better part of five years doing.
And all this comes as a Mexican football website publishes an article highlighting the disgusting songs sung by the Ibrox supporters, and informing those players departing that league to ply their trade at the Vomitorium about the sectarian nature of the club.
This is what’s really got them fizzing, the further international embarrassment which attaches to their rotten institution, and they deserve it because a section of their support – a big, vocal, loud section – still cannot leave this stuff behind.
The day they do, that’s the day they can lecture the rest of us.
That’s the day they can claim to be whiter than white.
Until then, I don’t even want to hear it.