Anybody Coming After Celtic Had Better Make Sure Their Hands Are Clean.

Celtic is not one thing. That’s the beauty of Celtic.

That’s why the last few days have been so frustrating, because some people are determined to hammer us into that mould with their simple-minded ideology and determination to provoke a fight with the club. Celtic is a lot of things, and most of those things are good. Most of those things are creditable.

I have no problem with freedom of speech.

I have no problem with people exercising their right to hold different opinions than me. But if I’m in someone’s house and they tell me “no politics, no football, no religion” I’ll adhere to that. I respect the House of Celtic as much as any other, and the thing is, almost everyone at Celtic Park does.

Celtic is not one thing. Celtic is a broad church.

Not an all-encompassing one; I covered this yesterday in exhaustive detail and I won’t be going over it again. But it’s a much larger institution than just a handful of fans. There are 60,000 of us at Parkhead every week and you would find a wide range of opinions and views there, as you would anywhere else.

Which is why I think Dolev Haziza – and yeah, I had to look him up as well – should keep his damned mouth shut about Celtic instead of trying to drive a further wedge between the club and Liel Abada.

Celtic is not one thing.

But I’ll tell you one thing Celtic is; a vastly bigger club than Haziza has ever played for or ever will. (He was linked with a move to Ibrox some years back; they didn’t follow through on their interest. Say no more, right?)

So if I were in Abada’s shoes I might listen to Brendan Rodgers and the people at our club rather this guy whose “talents” have never taken him outside of Israeli football.

I’ve done all the criticising a group of our supporters than I’m going to do this week. 10,000 words on it already, and if there’s anything left to say someone else can do it.

My issue right now is with the people – many of them completely ignorant as to what our club is, like this football nobody – who would seek to paint Celtic in a bad light because they disagree with some of our fans.

We know that some of them have agendas.

We know that some of them will use anything against us that they can.

Others are just simply talking guff.

If you’re coming after Celtic, our broad church, know that Celtic is not one thing. And know something else too; your hands better be clean.

Dolev Haziza is, according to our appalling media, “one of the most outspoken sportsmen in Israel.” I can’t find any reference to his political views except that he’s had a rant against Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan for condemning the Israeli government’s savage response to the weekend’s massacre, a response which threatens the wellbeing of over 2 million civilians, many of whom will certainly die as a result of Netanyahu’s government and especially what it is about to do.

Other than that, and some stories linking him to Ibrox, I’ve only found one story about Haziza’s past comments, and that’s when he and another star-struck team-mate sent the equivalent of an Instagram begging letter to Neymar and other PSG players asking for their strips prior – prior – to a game between the Parisian club and his Israeli team.

So he has priorities right there, eah?

Maybe one rant about a world leader whose wholly legitimate, and accurate, opinions you don’t like – and I can’t stand Erdogan by the way, he’s another leech, another wannabe tyrant – qualifies you as outspoken, but I just wonder if there’s more, a lot more, out there and our media simply won’t print it because it might present him in a somewhat different light than they’re trying to do here.

Every single article carries the same wording, identical wording about his being outspoken without actually giving us more than just that one example, which makes me wonder who disseminated this stuff to all of them at the same … because somebody did.

How embarrassing it would be if his “outspoken” political commentary up until now wasn’t exactly egalitarian and principled.

Tell you what, I’ll leave that to the vast army of internet researchers amongst our support who will almost certainly run that down if it happens to be the case …. and then we can see about giving that a wider audience and putting his comments in some context.

But from what I can see from his comments at the moment … highly unimpressed.

He’s never going to play in Turkey he says.

Really? Well, I guess that’s Turkish football’s loss, yeah?

The thing is, if his national team goes there and he doesn’t, that would suggest a greater commitment to his own ideas than he has for his country.

And whilst you ponder that one, I have a sneaking suspicion that as the number of dead in Gaza mounts in the next few weeks that Erdogan isn’t going to be the only world leader talking about human rights violations.

What Israel is doing in the siege of Gaza is a crime under international law; the right to self-defence does not translate into a right to hold hostage an entire people, or a right to bomb residential areas, or a right to cut off humanitarian aid.

And the International Criminal Court wouldn’t have to work terribly hard to prove these things, as the defence minister and others in the Israeli government openly boast about them. When that grossly unpleasant fact can no longer be denied by the world there will be much more criticism along those lines.

Anthony Bilken, the US Secretary of State, has already started with the coded warnings to Israel about what it’s planning to do; “How Israel defends itself matters,” he said today, which is as close as a US official has come so far to saying “Just don’t.”

If I were Haziza, I wouldn’t bother renewing the passport for a while because he’s going to be crossing a lot of countries off his list of places to go.

England is off the list for starters.

Their FA has just announced that there will be a minute’s silence before tonight’s game with Australia to “remember the innocent victims of the devastating events in Israel and Palestine.” So not much doubt what they think of this.

I would wager that most of Europe will end up on his little list, although as long as Suella Braverman is home secretary here and wanting to criminalise the Palestinian flag, and there’s a place called Ibrox looking for players, that he can still dare to dream of these shores, even if the EPL is out, although he won’t be much good to our neighbours in the Europa Conference League.

(There is another possibility of course, and I hestitate to bring it up; maybe he just doesn’t want to play in a Muslim country that has criticised Israel. I wonder if we’d find something to back that up in his “outspoken” statements, you know all those ones that the media didn’t enlighten us about.)

And that brings me, with much regret, to Nir Bitton because whilst I sympathise with his frustration and with his anger to a certain extent, his own comments seem to tar the whole Celtic support with the same brush and he too needs to know that Celtic is not one thing.

But he should know that, because he was at the club for years.

Oh man, how majestic was his fury as it swept over our fans.

I just wonder when, or if, he intends to say something about fans a little closer to home, and what their attitudes are. Because I would suggest that a large segment of his current club’s supporters have a lot more to be ashamed of than the fans of this one do.

Let me elaborate.

In 2020, a series of articles ran in various journals, during the time when Israeli citizens were protesting against Netanyahu during his trials for corruption, which said that along with the demonstrations against him there were far right demonstrations in his favour … and some of them were augmented by the heavy presence of football fans from two clubs.

Beitar Jerusalem was one of them, and in particular their fan organisation La Familia, which is on the far right even by Israeli standards.

They proudly refer to their club as “Israel’s most racist team” and during those demos their fans chanted, amongst other things, “death to the media” and “we hate all the Arabs.” Nobody who knows anything about them can be in the least bit surprised by that or the level of their vitriol; they are quite open about it all.

The club itself is the only one in the Israeli league never to have signed an Arab player; does that sound familiar? Do they sound like a club we know? Believe me, their fans are ten times worse than the ones from Ibrox. Ten times worse.

Netanyahu himself is a Beitar fan.

The other fans who were involved in the protests, and the violence that arose from them, were the “Maccabi Fanatics”, whose club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, is where you can now find Nir Bitton. And oddly enough, there’s another ex-Celt there too; Robbie Keane, their manager.

The “Maccabi Fanatics” are an ultras group, like The Green Brigade.

Except that they’re really nothing like The Green Brigade.

In 2014, their fan group racially abused an Arab-Israeli playing for their own club.

He got death threats from them.

Graffiti was scrawled around the city saying “We don’t want Arabs at Maccabi.”

In 2019, the player himself, Mahran Radi, spoke about how attempts to reach out to them so they would accept him, which involved drafting in a club legend, utterly failed when the guy, Sheran Yeini, came back and told him, “There’s nothing we can do, they just hate Arabs.”

According to my research, no Arab player has signed for the club since.

That may or may not be the case, but it was true as of 2020, and prominent Israeli sports journalists have confirmed that the ideology of the Maccabi Fanatics is virtually indistinguishable from that of La Familia.

They simply would not tolerate the presence of one in their team.

But you know what else?

Those same journalists go out of their way to say that The Fanatics are not representative of the whole Maccabi support. Indeed, they appear to be an outlier. The club itself might not be on the left, as such, but it’s not on the far right in the way Beitar is. It seems that Maccabi Tel Aviv, as a club, is more than one thing.

But the Maccabi Fanatics are pro-Netanyahu and avowedly racist.

That’s pretty much a settled fact, and we should have an eye on how they respond to the events over there right now, whether they stop at simply commemorating Israeli dead or take a more hardline view on Gaza.

But regardless, I will take Bitton a little bit more seriously when he complains about terracing culture if he ever points that finger at the fans of his own club and says enough is enough.

Because if you’re going to be selective – and his comments on the atrocity at the weekend are already selective, with no thought given to the Palestinians at all except to accuse those who sympathise with their plight of being “brainwashed” – then maybe you should just shut up altogether.

It’s been open season on Celtic this week, Celtic as a club, Celtic as a whole, for the stupidity of a small group of people who might be guilty of no more than crass insensitivity and sheer pig-headedness.

Celtic is not one thing. But Celtic is strong.

Some of you have had your fun, but hunting season on us is over.