Celtic Has Said All They Need To On Abada Now And So Has The Player Himself.

Thank you to Liel Abada for leaving Celtic fans such warm words. I have been hard on that boy, but I am always hard on players who no longer want to play for Celtic. He’s leaving our club because the people around him have gotten in his ear and because the hatemongers of the Israeli right are happy bombing Palestinians but don’t want to be criticised for it.

If you’ve seen some of the stuff on social media from Israel, which has been directed at the player, it’s beyond disgusting. Abada hasn’t uttered one word on the conflict itself. Not one.

He’s branded a traitor and a charlatan and worse because of the club he plays for. There is no doubt any longer that a section of the Israeli lobby hates Celtic, and in some ways, Abada has been used as a stick to beat us with. But mostly, they just beat him which is bizarre.

These people have slandered their own countryman. They have made him leave a place where he was happy, and settled, and they’ve done it for their own selfish, sectarian ends.

I think they’ve served him abysmally and I reckon his representatives have as well to an extent. Abada doesn’t want these people dictating the career choices he makes, and that he’s bowed to them genuinely makes me feel sad because I thought he was stronger than that.

My concerns over him were that he so obviously had decided he no longer wanted to play for this club, that he allowed whatever pressure they were putting him under to effectively go on strike and I am glad that he’s no longer at the club, because he’s no use to us in the stand and that sort of thing can become a disruptive presence.

I don’t intend to write a lot on this subject; I feel like I’ve exhausted the language on this in recent weeks, but although Abada has been discreet it’s worth pointing out that there is a small section of our support whose behaviour is beyond the pale and who are racist and bigoted and antisemite and who need to be tweezered out of the fan-base, and I have little doubt that they have been a contributing factor in what has come to pass here.

But although our enemies were hoping for some lurid stories on this front, and quite possibly for Abada to slander the whole support and the club with it, he hasn’t and in fact has been very gracious and very decent about it and for that I commend him.

I think we’ve been under paid. I think the fee is lousy compared to what we might have got in the summer, and if we were selling him to Europe, we would have stood a better chance of getting a huge fee somewhere along the line, but if we really did get an eight-figure sum that’s a lot more than our enemies were hoping for.

I don’t think this is a particularly good day for Celtic. But it’s a much better day than some of those who hate us were hoping it would be. I think they expected Abada, or his representatives, to scorch the earth. They haven’t gotten their way, and that’s a victory of sorts.

Our reputation hasn’t’ been badly damaged by this, except when it comes to signing Israeli players and I reckon it’ll be a long time before we see another one of them in a Celtic strip, but I look at their national team right now and don’t really feel we’re losing much in that regard, although Paul Brennan at CQN said an odd thing in his piece today which is that our club has had an Israeli player on its books for every one of the last 15 years.

To be honest, we can do without the soap opera. We can do without the nonsense that has floated around this issue since that shocking day in October and the disgusting response to it in that banner from The Green Brigade, which remains an inexcusable disgrace and always will, especially in that they have never apologised for it even if they didn’t intend to cause offence.

But that small handful of fans aside, our club has been supportive and our fans have been supportive and we did nothing to deserve the appalling misinformation and lies which we’ve been subjected to in the last six months, and that’s how long it’s been folks, six months of this constant garbage in the media and elsewhere, very little of it grounded in reality.

Liel Abada is no longer a Celtic player.

That’s his decision, and all of us accept it and the vast majority of us will wish him well. Yet there will be a lasting legacy here, and the club has to be alert that it does not accept any narrative which attempts to blame us for this.

The blame lies with extremists wrapped in the Star of David who are comfortable with their country starving millions and killing children but who don’t want to have to hear about it on the news.

Aside from that we’re correct not to say another word about this. Put this dire chapter behind us, move on and win this title. That’s what we need to be focussed on.