Keith Jackson couldn’t help himself.
His “review of the season” includes digs at Hamza Yousef and a description of “shameful scenes at Celtic Park.”
He has placed the incident there in the comparative with the scenes involving the Ibrox fans.
I’m not going to defend the scenes at Celtic Park; frankly I don’t have to.
Out of a support of more than 60,000 season ticket holders a handful of people turned up to protest a couple of times as the season went from bad to worse.
There was no comparison between those scenes and what we saw in George Square, and it serves only one club’s interests to create that false equivalence.
Jackson has a long and sordid history of this sort of appeasement and pandering to Ibrox by shining the light elsewhere.
Celtic fans did their thing, made their point, and then backed off. Ibrox fans twice deliberately set out to take over the city centre and terrorise the populace. They sang sectarian songs all day. They fought with each other. They destroyed property and then they turned on the police.
I can understand why people like Jackson want to deflect from that.
His comments about Hamza Yousef are absolutely extraordinary.
I think they deserve a piece on their own because they are part of a continuum of criticism that this guy is getting, and some of it is perfectly understandable as it comes from unscrupulous political foes but is somewhat more disturbing when it comes from journalists who are meant to deal in facts.
Jackson, of course, isn’t big on facts. He is the latest journalist to mention the events at Celtic Park, in an act of Whatabouttery which does nothing whatsoever to excuse the behaviour of the tens of thousands in George Square.
Frankly, he knows he can’t wish those scenes away or excuse them … this is just blowing smoke, and it’s all that paper ever does.