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I think anybody using the word yid should be banned. Tottenham supporters calling themselves Yid army is a disgrace.
If I were a Jew and heard anybody using this term I think I would be doubly insulted. Firstly because of the obvious offensiveness of the term Yid, and secondly because it would imply that I was a Spurs fan which is even more insulting.
If I were a Jew and heard anybody using this term I think I would be doubly insulted. Firstly because of the obvious offensiveness of the term Yid, and secondly because it would imply that I was a Spurs fan which is even more insulting.
Oooooh, we've caught a Spammer!!
Do we feed him or kill him? I presume he's already been neutered to help save the future of mankind. Probably not house trained though.
We in the majority as West Ham fans deplore that sort of stuff and it will have no place in modern football as now these morons will be getting bans. What about spurs fans calling West Ham fans pikies (yes I know it is a case of pot calling the kettle black). Pikies is a term of abuse for gypsies and they also are a minority group subject to racial discrimination and were gassed at Auschwitz. Not very nice is it.
I only know one West Ham fan. He's called Andy. He actually lives in a caravan. Ergo, he's a pikey.
So you all are.
Hope you understand all that. I kept the big words down to minimum. Now give us our three points and fuck off back to selling pegs or running the waltzers.
Can I rep this more than once? :dawson:
I didn't think this thread could get worse, and now a West Ham troll has shown up.
It could be that I am romanticising our anti-fascist stance. I'd say that yid means different things to different people (although it obviously means Spurs to all of us at WHL), for me- and I assume some others- it is meant as an anti-fascist slogan as well as a rallying cry for the team/fans.
But what is certain is that the Spurs fans of days gone by would have never appropriated the term if they weren't at the very least OK with us having Jewish fans. Although it's difficult to imagine this hypothetical situation, I very much doubt Chelsea or West Ham fans would have appropriated the term if the shoe was on the other foot. So if not a symbol of proactive anti-fascism for everyone, it was evidence that Spurs fans weren't racist. That is good enough for me.
Africa woo, a long post, but you're missing the point . WE'RE NOT a Jewish club, we're predominantly an English/British club, that is our primary cultural heritage.
Yid Army is sung in the main by beered up bellicose Englishmen, who have no strong affinity with Jewish culture, and many indeed know little about it, or even in some/many cases actually sympathise with it.
It's pantomime lunacy in the extreme. Defending something that doesn't exist by people who in the main haven't a clue about what some people think they're defending, when they're not even defending that, they're just shouting out something 'to have a go back'. Monty Python you are alive and well and shouting 'Yids' in Lyon.
As I've said before, they might as well be shouting out 'pink tomatoes' for all the deep philosophical thought that goes into most of the shouting that's going on.
But 'yid army' is not meant and never has been meant to be about a strong affinity with Jewish culture. It was originally an appropriation of a racist insult used against us, nowadays it largely just means the collective of Spurs fans...it also has a semiotic of anti-fascism for some of us. I think part of its appeal is because it's a controversial word, but seeing as it certainly not meant offensively I don't see this as a problem- behaviour that is considered controversial or distasteful in polite society has always been popular at football. OK, it may not have deep philosophical thought behind it for everyone, but it tells a story about Tottenham (the area), Spurs fans and their rivalries with other clubs, so it's not an illogical or nonsensical thing to sing like you suggest.
Interestingly, in the Football Factory (a book about Chelsea hoolies) one of the main characters (who is extremely right-wing) gets incensed by Spurs' appropriation of yids, the Star of David etc. He is so racist that it actually really winds him up that we do/did that. Winding up rival fans, and showing that they weren't able to wind us up, was obviously part of why the term was taken on in the first place.
In my experience there are Jewish Spurs fans amongst all sections of our support. A few of the older (ex) hooligan lot, for instance, are Jewish.
......??......
Fair point. Through interracial relationships I suppose it's not possible to delineate the way I did. Think my point was really just that "white" can't be used as an ethnic description that is mutually exclusive with "Jewish".
Fair comments PG
Fair comments again PG
Yep, I agree that Jewish and white aren't exclusive. I guess also that for example a lot of Russian and Polish Jews don't/didn't have a Middle East genealogy, but rather somehow became part of the Jewish culture.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
I have always been of a mind to speak out against the right wing bigots and claim the Yid label with pride. Safety in numbers, if we all stand up against it, then they won't win. Ye come on then, bring it on. If you are going to abuse my Jewish Spurs supporting friend here (yes I do have one) then call it to me too. Don't for one second think you make me angry that you are calling me a Yid even though I am not Jewish, or that I am insulted that you call me a Jew. I claim the label as mine and wear it with pride and you calling me that to try to upset me is laughable. We are the Yid Army! You are racist scum.
But Saga is right about the Pikey label for West Ham fans too, joking aside. It is just as offensive to Romany gypsies as yid is to a Jew. Should the West Ham fans take the label and wear it proudly just as we have? Should they make up songs about players being pikeys? "Ricardo Vaz Te - he's a pikey". Somehow, I don't think in the modern day that this is an appropriate solution. These days, authorities are willing (to a degree) to tackle discrimination head on (eg with Terry, Suarez, the fan who abused Cantona), back 30 or 40 years ago there was more lethargy and tacit acceptance of institutionalised and not even very mild racism. Taking the Y word back then worked better as a way of neutralising openly racist abuse of Spurs fans.
Maybe it is time to stop using it, but certainly not as a knee-jerk to what happened in Lyon. I agree with everyone here who has said treat the cause of the problem (the racist scumbags doing this to innocent fans) not the effect. It's not the Spurs fans singing songs with the Y word, its our historical association with a section of society that those bigots hate, and that won't ever go away.
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
I have always been of a mind to speak out against the right wing bigots and claim the Yid label with pride. Safety in numbers, if we all stand up against it, then they won't win. Ye come on then, bring it on. If you are going to abuse my Jewish Spurs supporting friend here (yes I do have one) then call it to me too. Don't for one second think you make me angry that you are calling me a Yid even though I am not Jewish, or that I am insulted that you call me a Jew. I claim the label as mine and wear it with pride and you calling me that to try to upset me is laughable. We are the Yid Army! You are racist scum.
But Saga is right about the Pikey label for West Ham fans too, joking aside. It is just as offensive to Romany gypsies as yid is to a Jew. Should the West Ham fans take the label and wear it proudly just as we have? Should they make up songs about players being pikeys? "Ricardo Vaz Te - he's a pikey". Somehow, I don't think in the modern day that this is an appropriate solution. These days, authorities are willing (to a degree) to tackle discrimination head on (eg with Terry, Suarez, the fan who abused Cantona), back 30 or 40 years ago there was more lethargy and tacit acceptance of institutionalised and not even very mild racism. Taking the Y word back then worked better as a way of neutralising openly racist abuse of Spurs fans.
Maybe it is time to stop using it, but certainly not as a knee-jerk to what happened in Lyon. I agree with everyone here who has said treat the cause of the problem (the racist scumbags doing this to innocent fans) not the effect. It's not the Spurs fans singing songs with the Y word, its our historical association with a section of society that those bigots hate, and that won't ever go away.
Bloody hell. I'm late to the game here, but...are the people who were saying "We'll sing what we want" a couple months ago when the use of the word Yid was threatened now the same ones saying, "Let's not have any connection between Jews and Spurs"? 
As one of your resident Spurz Jooz, I don't expect any other fan to take a punch for me/my people. Supporting Spurs never had anything to do with my ethnicity. It's a happy coincidence. If the tables were turned and Woolwich were the "Jewish" club, I would happily defend their fans against anti-Semitism. (Handy fact: Israeli citizens are banned from entering the UAE, so I doubt there will ever be much of a Woolwich/Jewish association. When the ONLY country whose citizens you ban happens to be the only Jewish state on the face of the planet, I don't fancy contributing to your economy...I'll go on holiday to Southern California if I feel like sweating in Disneyland, don't need Dubai.)
As for Jewish people being white - well, it looks like that most of the time in Europe and America where the Jewish population is mostly Ashkenazi (descended from Eastern and Central European Jews), but in Israel, over half the Jewish population is Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning they're descended from Jews in North Africa / Iberia / the Middle East / Asia. Yossi Benayoun is Sephardic - his parents are from Morocco. Charles Saatchi of horrible artwork fame is Mizrahi, he's from Baghdad. There were roughly 120,000 Jews in Iran alone up until 1948. There are indigenous Jews in India who look, well, Indian. Ethiopian Jews who are Black. They're not converts - they've been Jews for as long back as anybody knows. Chinese Jews who are the descendants of Persian traders but look Chinese. The typical "Jewish" appearance just happens to be European because that's who most people see.
There have been some fascinating mitochondrial DNA studies that have found that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews all have common ancestors in the Middle East and North Africa. A White English Jewish person is genetically more similar to a Greek or Southern Italian person, or to a Kurdish or Iraqi Jew, than to a non-Jewish White English person. So it's not at all surprising that the Polish Jews in my family are darker than the Polish Catholics - and they didn't intermarry until my parent's generation even though they lived in the same region. Of course all this will be less relevant in the future because except for the ultra-orthodox we're marrying and having children outside our own ethnic group more often.
tl;dr version: I don't get sunburnt, it's fantastic.
As one of your resident Spurz Jooz, I don't expect any other fan to take a punch for me/my people. Supporting Spurs never had anything to do with my ethnicity. It's a happy coincidence. If the tables were turned and Woolwich were the "Jewish" club, I would happily defend their fans against anti-Semitism. (Handy fact: Israeli citizens are banned from entering the UAE, so I doubt there will ever be much of a Woolwich/Jewish association. When the ONLY country whose citizens you ban happens to be the only Jewish state on the face of the planet, I don't fancy contributing to your economy...I'll go on holiday to Southern California if I feel like sweating in Disneyland, don't need Dubai.)
As for Jewish people being white - well, it looks like that most of the time in Europe and America where the Jewish population is mostly Ashkenazi (descended from Eastern and Central European Jews), but in Israel, over half the Jewish population is Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning they're descended from Jews in North Africa / Iberia / the Middle East / Asia. Yossi Benayoun is Sephardic - his parents are from Morocco. Charles Saatchi of horrible artwork fame is Mizrahi, he's from Baghdad. There were roughly 120,000 Jews in Iran alone up until 1948. There are indigenous Jews in India who look, well, Indian. Ethiopian Jews who are Black. They're not converts - they've been Jews for as long back as anybody knows. Chinese Jews who are the descendants of Persian traders but look Chinese. The typical "Jewish" appearance just happens to be European because that's who most people see.
There have been some fascinating mitochondrial DNA studies that have found that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews all have common ancestors in the Middle East and North Africa. A White English Jewish person is genetically more similar to a Greek or Southern Italian person, or to a Kurdish or Iraqi Jew, than to a non-Jewish White English person. So it's not at all surprising that the Polish Jews in my family are darker than the Polish Catholics - and they didn't intermarry until my parent's generation even though they lived in the same region. Of course all this will be less relevant in the future because except for the ultra-orthodox we're marrying and having children outside our own ethnic group more often.
tl;dr version: I don't get sunburnt, it's fantastic.