The Only People “Claiming” Celtic Fans Drove Out Abada Were The Club’s Bitter Enemies.

The least shocking story of the weekend came late last night when the head of Liel Abada’s new club told the media that the Celtic fans loved him and supported him, knocking out the idea that it was our supporters who were responsible for “driving him” out of the club.

The hacks who are covering this sound almost surprised.

It shows how poisoned this narrative is, and it’s obvious to those of us who followed this story all the way in who poisoned it as well. The media themselves are partly responsible for this.

They were the ones who kept on pushing this entirely false version of events, with their constant references to the Palestinian flags and other things.

Palestinian flags are not new in the Celtic support. As one site pointed out, we’ve had them in the stands for decades and for 15 straight years we had an Israeli in the team without it causing the least bit of hassle, except that some people back there made it clear that they didn’t like it.

The difference here is that Abada was easy prey for them. Bitton had served in the military; there was no way they could level allegations of being unpatriotic at him.

This nasty little idea started on the Israeli right and amidst those over there who have mistaken support for Palestine for antisemitism, or don’t care to make the distinction.

They hate our club, and they used a young guy miles from home to hit us with a hammer. It’s disgusting. Imagine putting pressure like that on somebody. They must be so proud.

But sections of the media over here, knowing full well that this was the situation, were happy to spread that lie and ramp the pressure up on him. And every time they filed a story about Celtic fans and Palestinian flags, they gave that hard-core section of the Israeli machine justification to keep the pressure on and push Abada further into the corner.

That some of these same hacks are apparently surprised to learn that none of it was true just goes to show how thoroughly they believed their own nonsense.

They told themselves this story so often, and with nothing to back it up, that I think some of them just swallowed it and subsumed it into their thinking about this situation.

All of those people owe our fans an apology, but of course we won’t get it and shouldn’t hope for it.

This is the closing of a difficult chapter in our recent history; it is somehow satisfying now, at the end of it, to know that the record has been set straight and in a way where even the hacks had to write about it, and reflect the facts.