The Herald Has Smeared Celtic Fans In An Article Urging Change At Ibrox.

Andy McIver of The Herald thinks he’s doing his club – the one at Ibrox – a service today by writing a piece which demands that they remove the bad element from their support.

Yet in doing so he has written a number of highly suspect things which will do nothing more than encourage the lunatic fringe to believe in many of the outrageous myths which propel their hate.

No more so than when he launches two quite preposterous attacks on the Celtic fans.

Writing of his own club, he says this; “(They) treat last week’s rioters as the target audience. This needs to be turned on its head. They are not the target audience. They are the enemy within, and they need to be purged not by words, but by deeds.”

The sentiment is right on, but every single word of it is undercut by the first half of the article which makes a number of highly dubious claims before dipping right into Whataboutery.

I treated the article yesterday in The Scotsman to the full-scale paragraph by paragraph treatment; I feel that I need to do the same here. Because it virtually demands it.

I think the article said things that needed to be said.

I also understand that McIvor is playing to the gallery himself a bit, and probably thinks he needs to “talk the talk” but none of what he said in the second half of the piece will even register with the Peepul he was writing for in the first half of it.

It was a big mistake to pander to that part of the audience, because our side will deplore the smears on our support whilst that’s the only part of the piece that the Peepul will even remember.

There’s weak thinking behind it.

It was just plain stupid.

The article doesn’t start particularly well either …

The Song Lyrics He Won’t Even Mention …

“We are Rangers, Super Rangers, no one likes us, we don’t care”. I won’t type the next line for reasons those familiar with the song will understand, but the opening line refused to leave my mind last weekend as 15,000 of my fellow Rangers fans decided to break the Scottish Government’s lockdown rules by descending on George Square to celebrate the ‘Invincibles’ on trophy day.”

Right there, he’s off to the worst possible start.

What a pathetic opener, to quote the first lines of the song but to refrain from quoting the rest.

If he had quoted the rest the whole tenor of the piece would have been very different.

It would have hit hard.

The refrain that “we hate Celtic fenian bastards” is what this entire debate should be about.

He has chosen to just skip over the whole point, which for me renders the entire article worthless before he’s even got past the first couple of lines.

Because if they aren’t the focus of the piece, what exactly is the point of it?

This is a song sung not by hundreds of their fans and not by thousands of their fans but by tens of thousands of their fans and he cannot seriously do a piece urging them to get their house in order and calling those who frequently disgrace the club “enemies within” without tackling the ugly truth; that removing this from the support is going to be beyond difficult because it’s ingrained in it.

McIver doesn’t actually think that those words are the ones we should be focussed on.

He thinks that there’s a more important line in the song, which says it all.

The First Sign Of Paranoia …

“No one likes us. Never a truer word spoken. When Rangers clinched their first league title in a decade, a couple of months ago, I wrote in this newspaper’s daily sister title about the shame I felt as a fan; how disappointed I was that the club had failed to do what it could to prevent fans gathering outside Ibrox to mark the triumph.”

Imagine believing that “no-one likes us” is the most important line in that song.

What can you say, except that the mind-set of the journalist has to be seriously questioned?

The rest of his point is quite correct; the club did nowhere near enough that day and they should have suffered universal condemnation for it, but the commentariat was too busy eulogising them for it.

In fact, it took the publication of the police’s own internal thinking on it for the spotlight to be shone there, where it belonged the whole time.

McIvor did express his dismay, and for that he gets partial credit … but most journalists chose to utterly ignore it and that was part of the problem here.

The Agenda Is Clear From The Start … 

“Many Old Firm fans wrote to me to inform me that I was correct in my assessment of the other side, but wide of the mark in my assessment of theirs. So far, so predictable.”

The one thing here that is entirely predictable is that this guy, who uses the Old Firm term and who thinks the line about fenian bastards is a less important one to the debate than the old “no-one likes us” nonsense, would believe in the “two heads of the same coin” garbage and all the false equivalence which goes with it.

This is where any of our supporters who were still reading would have started to zone out, and unfortunately he’s not even scratching the bottom of this rancid old barrel yet; the worst is yet to come on that score.

One of the reasons why our club isn’t plagued with any of this garbage in the way they are across the city is that we have been an open and multicultural club since our founding.

We may have been founded by Irish immigrants but we never closed our doors to anyone or defined ourselves merely by that. We are a Scottish club first and foremost and that, right there, is an important distinction.

We neither pigeonholed ourselves or let others do so.

This is why I find it sometimes difficult to understand why those on the other side of the city cling so tightly to this Old Firm pish … our side let go of it years ago, before the death of Rangers, and feel no attachment to it at all.

The reason so many of our fans refuse to acknowledge that we have “issues” in our support has nothing to do with snow blindness, and it’s not even a flat out denial that there are things we can do better, or stop doing at all.

It’s because some of the charges against us are ridiculous.

There are a handful of them in his article.

A Moot Point? Really? 

“Last weekend was somewhat different. The club, legitimately, did much more to try to prevent the scenes which unfolded. In advance, they wrote to the Scottish Government to suggest a socially distanced, four-day event allowing a total of 40,000 spectators to enjoy the celebration with the players inside Ibrox. Whether it would have prevented the march to George Square; whether the clientele inside Ibrox would have been the same as the individuals mobilised by the Union Bears supporters group to gather in Govan, is moot. But at least the club tried.”

There is more nonsense in this single paragraph than you’d find in most articles, even in a down market tabloid like The Record or The Sun.

For openers, the club did not “legitimately” do all that much to prevent the scenes which unfolded.

They made one vague statement asking fans not to gather.

It was nowhere near enough, and Police Scotland and others have said so, quite loudly.

Everyone is aware that the club had asked for 15,000 fans to be allowed into the ground … but now we discover that they made a moon-howling proposal for a four day event involving 40,000 people during a global pandemic … and he thinks this was a good idea?

That reeks of Ibrox exceptionalism, and not just exceptional in regards the rest of football in Scotland; that would have been an event unique in the whole of the UK.

Who are they to make a request like that and believe that it would be granted? It’s barmy.

He is also being disingenuous when he claims we don’t know if the march would have gone ahead, followed by the part in the square. We know that’s exactly what would have happened, as the online chatter was quite clear that the city centre was to be “taken over.”

That is not “moot” as he suggests, and nor was is it “moot” to wonder if the same people who were in George Square would have been at Ibrox instead; indeed it’s supposed to be the whole point of the article, that these are the “enemies within.”

So how can it be “moot” if they’d been in Ibrox instead of knocking the shit out of each other in the city centre?

Did this eejit use brain cells in the writing of this article or what?

Stupidity, Bigotry And Outright Lies

“Let me also give some credence to some of the other mitigations I commonly hear from my fellow Rangers fans. When crowds gather to protest against the UK immigration policy, the Scottish Government portrays them as saintly. The same goes for people on anti-Israel marches. And remember the Celtic fans, who broke lockdown rules when the pandemic was at a significantly more dangerous stage, to call for Neil Lennon to be sacked. The same Celtic fans who regularly glorify IRA murder and hang effigies from their stands to mock the suicide of Kris Boyd’s brother.”

And this is where it gets murky as you can see.

Let’s start from the beginning, and work our way forward.

What’s he saying is that he’s about to lend credibility to lies and paranoia.

There’s no other way to put it, he is about to legitimise the hatreds of these people based on a bunch of fabrications.

I am not even going to sugar coat this; the writer is passing off fiction as fact. If he’s doing so knowingly then I have no problem calling him a liar because that’s what he is.

If he’s not a liar I suggest he educate himself.

But whether or not he’s lying or just an idiot, the entire paragraph stinks out the article.

It is where even the most determined Celtic fan – determined to give him the benefit of the doubt – would zone out and deplore the whole piece.

I also think his use of the word “mitigation” is both stupid and dangerous.

There are mitigating factors for rioting and racist and sectarian chanting?

There are things which explain those things away or justify them, are there?

Is this joker for real?

If he needs anyone to spell out the difference between rallies and demos supporting human rights and “celebrations” of supremacy which end in violence and which were punctuated all day by sectarian and racist chanting then he is thicker than a concrete milkshake.

Now let’s get to the nitty gritty; the claim against Celtic fans breaching lockdown at a more precarious point in the crisis is manifestly untrue. It happened in November when the country looked as if it was moving forward.

It was before the Kent variant became known.

It was way before the other variants of concern including the one from India.

I am not justifying those scenes, but they involved a small number of fans and whilst regrettable they lasted a brief time and didn’t devolve into a riot.

The claim about Celtic fans glorifying IRA murders is reeking, stinking, rancid bullshit.

The writer either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or he is wilfully misrepresenting.

I don’t actually care, it’s a disgraceful allegation and one that no journalist should be making.

How many times must I do this?

In the last week I’ve laid the challenge twice; if someone can name me just one Republican song sung by our fans which “glorifies” in murder then I will stop writing this blog on the same day.

Ten years that challenge has been “live” and not a living soul has met it yet and nobody ever will because the allegation is fictitious.

The effigies mocking Kris Boyd?

Absolutely deplorable allegation, swept from the gutters of Follow Follow and without the least foundation.

I wrote at the time about those effigies; seeing them at Celtic Park was an outrage, a disgraceful act.

The Green Brigade defended it on the grounds that it was a reference to the death of the OldCo, and I didn’t think that was an appropriate way to make that point then or now. I found the sight of them to be sickening.

But to suggest that it was a reference to the suicide of Boyd’s brother is a lie so grotesque the writer should be sanctioned for repeating it.

As far as I’m concerned, this is what took the article from being something with a serious point to make to the point where it was one unfit even to wipe your arse with.

The Victim Lies 

“All of these protestations have a decent helping of truth attached to them. I fully understand why Rangers, as a fan base and as a club, feel persecuted. I feel it myself, regularly. I, too, harbour a deep suspicion about which way the Scottish football authorities lean. I, too, wince at the joy I hear when a radio commentator calls a Celtic goal. I, too, roll my eyes at the moral superiority which many self-described impartials heap onto Celtic. I, too, feel less attached to a Scotland team which doesn’t field a Rangers player.”

No, most of those “protestations” don’t have anything in them which you can call truth and keep a straight face, and so this paragraph is already as bad as the one before it.

The writer is stoking hatred and giving credence to outright falsehoods and he should be ashamed.

Far from feeling that way, he then goes on to justify the rampant victimhood which fuels both their sense of entitlement and their sense of hate.

Neither their club or their fan base is “persecuted”, it’s a laughable suggestion.

He freely admits furthermore to his own idiotic paranoia; he thinks the SFA – the organisation that tried to railroad the NewCo into the league, which fixed the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry in Ibrox’s favour and other sins too tedious to count – leans towards Celtic?

Really?

I’d love him to name me the pro-Celtic commentator.

Good God.

Was this written on Ibrox Noise?

The writer sounds absolutely bat-shit by this point.

Dog Whistling To The Peepul …

“However, and here is the key point for Rangers, none of that matters. Pointing at someone else and saying “look over there” will not fix their problems. And, let me be absolutely clear, the root cause of the problem is the club itself. Rangers Football Club is guilty of a dog-whistle enabling of this sort of behaviour by a very significant proportion of its supporters.”

None of this matters? What an absurd argument.

Much of the trouble flows from a support which believes every single fiction out there if it can paint our supporters and our club in a negative light, or which feeds into their sense of victimhood, or promotes this pish about them being persecuted, and he has just attempted to legitimise some of those points.

No wonder he wants to move swiftly on.

But I’m not going to let him move swiftly on and nobody else should either.

He accuses the club of dog-whistles, and he is entirely correct to, but it’s people in the media, like him, who lend those dog whistles a megaphone and whilst I agree that the club is the root cause of the problem in trying to push to that point he has uncovered another issue.

The media’s culpability in breeding the hateful mind-set of the support.

It is high time that the press here took some stock of its own behaviour and did a little self-analysis, and in pushing some of the transparent falsehoods that he has here and in legitimising the paranoia the supporters surround themselves in he is making matters worse not better.

He too has enabled their behaviour.

That’s the truth of it.

At least part of this is down to him and other journalists who refuse to treat this as a problem affecting Ibrox alone, who can’t break free from the idea that this country is full of people who hate them for what they are rather than how they behave … until that sinks in, until the difference sinks in, until they let go of all this hatred – and the writer himself sounds profoundly lost in it whether he sees that or not – this will go on and on and on.

The Right Message … But Wasted.

“It’s this dog whistle which says: we don’t like the Scottish Government, or the SNP, or independence. It’s this dog-whistle that says Northern Ireland and Scotland are British. It’s the dog whistle that promotes orange-coloured kits amongst its merchandise despite literally any other colour being at its disposal. It’s this dog whistle that offers Ibrox as a vaccination centre to ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ rather than to the ‘UK Government’. It’s this dog-whistle that increasingly says we shouldn’t support causes associated with the left. It’s this dog-whistle that leads to Israeli flags being occasionally seen amongst the Union flags, flown by people who couldn’t point to Israel on a map.”

All true, and all commendable, and all long overdue from someone who self-defines as an Ibrox fan. This is exactly the kind of scrutiny that has to be given to the club, and it’s even better if it comes from someone in the mainstream press.

But every single word of it has been rendered facile and redundant by the stoking of hate, paranoia, conspiracy theories and rampant Whatabouttery which came before it in the article.

The entirety of the first part of the piece negates any benefit which could conceivably come from the second. It should not surprise me but it does.

It should anger me, and it does, but it dismays me more.

This article could have been a breakthrough moment; instead if indulges in all the rabid nonsense which lies at the heart of this thing, and the cowardly opening paragraph where he skipped over the song lyrics, should have warned me that this was to be its tone.

“Not By Words, But By Deeds …”

“Rangers treat last week’s rioters as the target audience. This needs to be turned on its head. They are not the target audience. They are the enemy within, and they need to be purged not by words, but by deeds.”

They do treat last week rioters as the target audience.

So too has the writer, and if this is ever going to be turned on its head it needs people like him to first pull their own heads out of their arses and start facing this thing in a way that doesn’t attempt to “mitigate” or justify or explain … straightforward condemnation would have done just fine.

And the Whatabouttery has to stop with it … and the false equivalence and all the other disreputable stuff he’s repeated in this piece.

The Global Brand Myth

“In this global game, Rangers could be a global brand, attracting investment, support and indeed love from all over the world, exploiting the romance and tragedy of the club, using Steven Gerrard’s status as a global footballing icon. We know that Scottish brands can achieve this; Rangers is no different.”

None of that will ever happen.

Because this is the club.

This is what Ibrox itself is built on, and the one chance that all involved had at the sort of clean break he’s talking about could only have been achieved in 2012 had they openly admitted what we all know to be true; that Rangers had gone and they were starting again.

It would have been a story and a half alright, how a new club climbed from the bottom tier of the game to win a title … but they opted instead to embrace a blatant fiction which was never going to lead to anything good and birthed another obscene lie.

Rangers itself had enough baggage, and porting it over was dangerous.

But on top of that baggage their apologists and enablers in the media and in the governing bodies then piled on top of it even more with the bastard children of the Survival and Victim lies.

And out of the first came the second and the second reinforces the first; our club was targeted for destruction by its enemies, but we beat them and now we’re on top we’re going to make them pay for it.

It’s not that it took great intelligence to see where one road led to the other … but people like the writer have been feeding this mind-set for a decade and it’s no surprise at all that it turned out this way, and all they can think of to do is keep on stoking the fire.

Added to that, of course, is this new myth; that the club are, again, the victims here when the idea of that doesn’t stand up to the slightest examination.

So there is no chance that the club is ever going to grow to become a global institution; Hugh Adam, the former director at Rangers, knew this about his own club and every attempt to sell it to outsiders failed because of some of the belief systems built around it and having rejected the opportunity which 2012 presented to build something new they are stuck with them.

The King Of Wishful Thinking

“But far from growing its global base, if Rangers fails to change its outlook in the most fundamental way, it will go in the opposite direction. It’s support will shrink. Decent fans will stop taking their children. They will stop going themselves. It will be left to the sort of people who destroyed George Square a week ago.”

More and more I’ve come to believe that the George Square neds are the true representatives of the Ibrox support.

What a lot of people don’t want to accept is that the war for the club’s soul has probably been lost already and in particular because it would have to have started at the top, and the one thing the writer has gotten right is that the top is where the problems start.

I know some of the old school fans at Ibrox, those who don’t involve themselves in the madness and are simply following their club.

There are more of them than you might think.

There was a time when the true lunatics were a smaller group.

But the next generation of their fans is a lost cause and you cannot read their forums and doubt it.

One piece, right out of the madhouse sewer depicted Scotland in the present day as like Rwanda before the genocide; this is the kind of lunacy that some of them are immersed in and if you think you can get through to someone who believes things like that you are welcome to waste your time in the effort, but the rest of us will get on with something more fruitful.

The Burning Question … 

“How sad, that would be.”

I could have folded the last line into the paragraph above it, but it brings me to the last point. He says it would be sad if the club calling itself Rangers died … but can we be honest here for a minute and ask if that’s true? Because it’s surely not an unreasonable question.

The writer accepts that the club has acted as a totem pole for bigots and racists and sectarians. If the club is incapable of changing, or if those who follow it won’t let it, then why is it sad if that club goes out of business? Should such an institution exist in modern Scotland?

Should it even be permitted to exist?

There are some who will say that I am simply playing into their hands by asking the question; I will be accused of being a “hater” who wants to see them go out of business.

I am accused of that every morning when I get up anyway, I am not going to change anyone’s mind.

I am asking if an organisation which encourages and feeds hatred and division is something this country needs or should seek to rescue?

Back in 2012 there was a feeling in some circles that Scotland and Scottish football would be better off if some version of them existed; I wonder how many of those who believed it then still believe it today?

Why does Scotland need Sevco? To boost our game?

They operate on the margins of the rules, they pick fights with everyone who they dislike even for the most ridiculous reasons, their fans are a scourge on the sport … but they bring money and viewers so we’ll overlook their myriad sins? Is that really the basis on which we want to build our game?

Imagine there had been no social restrictions due to the virus; can you even imagine the carnage and mayhem which would have blanketed not only Glasgow but large parts of the country?

For ten years they have wallowed in victimhood and their outrage has grown exponentially. Alongside their supremacist mind-set it was a disaster in the making.

How much longer will Scotland tolerate that, especially as the problem has only multiplied in the last week as idiots like the writer have attempted to justify the behaviour? How much more will happen before we say “enough is enough”?

At that point, what is Scotland prepared to do?

I am more and more coming to the view that the only proper way of dealing with this is to keep the pressure on, to keep telling the truth about the club and its fans, and to give all those decent followers a decision to make, and then stand back to let them make it.

Let the Ibrox club become less and less every year.

Let the stands fill with the goons and the yahoos for a while … and then over time become emptier and emptier and emptier.

No intervention is going to succeed at this point and we shouldn’t even attempt it.

If that club dies then so be it, and we should not waste any time feeling sorry for it or those who got it there.

If that club dies we should not mourn it.