So The Daily Record managed its anti-Celtic story for the weekend after all.
Impressive.
Two guys giving Russell Martin abuse in a supermarket.
Incredible find, if the yahoos responsible hadn’t put it on social media to advertise their own stupidity and ignorance to the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome the story; find these people and punish them accordingly. Weed them out. They are a social sickness that has to be wiped away.
No, my problem with The Record is that they’ve done what they always do; they’ve taken their shot at an easy and obvious target. Going after goons like these isn’t a moral act, it’s an opportunistic one. This doesn’t help society, it confirms that there are people living amongst us who are too stupid for words. Guess what? We knew that already.
But we also know that there are problems out there bigger than two guys wandering around with a mobile phone.
This weekend, on the streets of Glasgow, there was a fascist march. Black outfits. Ski masks. Hateful banners. Nazi salutes. It happened. It was filmed. It was well publicised. I’ve written two articles about it myself, and there have been dozens of others.
After the fact, numerous high profile public figures – including Green MSP Patrick Harvie – tweeted their disgust.
The prominent website Wings Over Scotland did a piece on it. I might not have agreed with everything in that piece, but that site has a huge audience and it has spread word of this shameful spectacle – in modern Scotland for God’s sake – far beyond our shores.
And sometimes that’s what’s needed.
Confront a country with its own shame on a grand scale.
The spectacle is vile, and our media, as a whole completely ignored it.
The Record thinks two guys in a supermarket is a bigger, more important, story.
Or rather, they know what the bigger story is but took an editorial decision not to bother with it. And we suspect we know why. The links to the club are too clear and on no account should the shame of the club itself be confronted here.
That’s Scotland real shame.
That we let this stuff go on in the first place, that we refuse to confront it openly, that we won’t even tell the truth about where it comes from.
This march might as well have come with official sanction from The Blue Room, and that is the truth that dare not speak its name.
Not one media outlet – not one – has linked the Union Bears to the club that has indulged them and could put a stop to this overnight. The march itself was illegal. Like the racists in the BA lounge, also linked, we believe to the Ibrox club, and who targeted Scott Sinclair, no arrests were made.
These people crawled out from under a rock. The Daily Record pretends they don’t exist and so it doesn’t have to confront the ways in which they could be shut down, and that sells all of us short to keep them in good with the Ibrox hierarchy.
It is beyond shameful.
Those two guys in Asda have given them a story to placate their target audience, who needed it after a shocker of a weekend.
The rest of us … well, this is why the newspaper is so despised.
When black shirted thugs doing the old stiff arm salute can march through Scottish streets without attracting the slightest media scrutiny and without our political class as a whole going off its nut … it makes you wonder what the press here is actually for.
Join the best Celtic Facebook Group there is right here.
Like our Facebook page and comment on and share the articles by clicking here.
You can also follow us on Twitter at @The_Celtic_Blog