The Hypocrites Of The Scottish Media Are Calling For Celtic To Be Disciplined By UEFA Again.

There was a certain kind of inevitability about the Scottish press looking for something negative about our excellent performance and fantastic win last night, and it cropped up on cue with the suggestion that The Green Brigade has put us in peril of more UEFA sanctions.

Our media has absolutely no shame about this stuff at all, and will use the flimsiest pretext to attack us.

The publisher of the lead-off piece on this shouldn’t come as any surprise – it’s The Scotsman and one of their resident snipers, Kathleen Oates.

The piece is deplorably bad, as you might expect, and has only the most fleeting understanding of the subject it flits around the edges of. She helpfully reproduces the section of UEFA’s regulations with deals with banners, as if the governing body needed this pointing out to them.

She mentions the clear anti-fascist banner depicting a hanging Mussolini and the words “Follow Your Leader”, and that’s fair enough because that one’s clear-cut although quite what it has to do with UEFA I do not know.

But the implication that the Brigate Verde banner somehow implicitly supports the Red Brigade – Brigate Rossa – is one she’s going to struggle with.

Actually the banner is a highly sophisticated in-joke.

Because yes, the logo the Green Brigade uses in it is one that is very similar to the Red Brigade’s one but what Oakes appears not to have realised is that the words Brigate Verde aren’t a nod to the Italian terrorist organisation as much as they are a reference to the Brigate Fiamme Verdi – the Green Flame Brigade – who fought Mussolini’s fascist scum during the Second World War.

I’d suggest that the next time she wants to wade into politics she at least educate herself and know what she’s talking about beforehand.

Now regular readers know I think some of the Green Brigade’s actions to be grossly irresponsible at times – the use of flares and smoke bombs – but this isn’t one of them.

Those banners were a superb riposte to the ugliness of the Lazio support, a support that is notorious throughout Europe for their vile slogans and evil embrace of fascist ideology.

Oakes may well get her apparent wish, and our media might well get to celebrate Celtic being hit by yet more UEFA fines, but I refuse to condemn our supporters for sending a clear message that fascism is not welcome in our stands.

I think UEFA’s own policies – which themselves promote anti-fascism and inclusivity – would flatly contradict them if they attempted to discipline our supporters for this.

How can they preach an anti-fascism and anti-racism message and then dare to pull our club up for the fans explicitly endorsing the same sentiments?

So I say bring this one on.

If some in our media want to shit-stir over this that reveals them to be bitter and jealous over our success, and nothing more.

It is hard to know who will be bigger hypocrites if Celtic get done here.

UEFA for their idiotic and contradictory stance or the Scottish media for continually trying to get Celtic into trouble when they ignored years of bigotry at Ibrox?

I mean, if they want to start banging on about banners how come none of them condemned the shocking one that greeted our fans when we visited Ibrox earlier in the campaign? I seem to remember a lot of press coverage about how well behaved their fans were.

That’s the subject of the poll below … so please make sure you vote in it.

Congratulations to the Green Brigade on their excellent displays last night.

The world was watching and through you our support sent a message that was very clear.

Far right ideology is the detritus floating in the sewer of history.

Good God, has there ever been a more important time in the course of most of our lives to actually say that out loud?

Please share these articles widely, and join our Facebook Group for discussions about the pieces and other issues.

If you have trouble finding the articles you can subscribe, follow us on Twitter and get every piece on Celtic News Now. And you can, of course, bookmark the site itself and check it for updates throughout the day.