Recently, an Israeli football team (soccer to you colonials), Hapoel Be’er Sheva, flew to Scotland to play Glasgow Celtic. The famous Scottish greeting “ceud mile failte” – a hundred thousand welcomes – was conspicuously absent. Instead, as the team ran onto the field it was greeted by hundreds of Celtic fans waving Palestinian flags.
The two major football clubs in Glasgow are Rangers and Celtic. Both are products of the religious divide within the city between “indigenous” Scots who were Protestant and the Irish immigrants who came looking for work throughout the nineteenth century and were mostly Catholic.
The 20th century civil war in Northern Ireland was – and to certain degree still is – echoed in the culture of my hometown of Glasgow.
Throughout the bloody years of bombings and shootings, the Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland, and to some extent Glasgow, supported or were often sympathetic to the IRA, a Marxist terrorist group. They sought to have the territory of the North of Ireland, Ulster, join the independent Republic of Ireland. The majority of Northern Ireland’s six counties had voted to remain part of the UK after Ireland gained its independence from British rule in 1922.
The Protestants of Northern Ireland and Glasgow likewise wanted the territory to remain in the UK and were usually sympathetic to the British army that fought the IRA and occasionally sympathetic to or supportive of their own terrorist groups.
The IRA trained with the PLO and other Palestinian terrorists in bases in Libya. Unsurprisingly, given their shared political worldview, the IRA supported the Palestinians. The Protestants of Northern Ireland and Glasgow were far more likely to sympathize with Israel and its struggle. Glasgow Rangers supporters have in the past waved the Israeli flag as a counter to Celtic fans’ anti-Israel chants.
Scotland’s pronounced left-leaning political landscape is fertile breeding ground for anti-Israel recruitment as well as classic anti-Semitism. Left-wing activists see Celtic fans as wide open to recruitment and exploitation vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just as far-right groups tried to manipulate Rangers supporters in the 1970s.
It was truly pathetic to see how many U.S. Jews, abysmally ignorant of British-Irish history and politics, were sympathetic to the mythology of the IRA. They swallowed without chewing an anti-British propaganda concoction that portrayed the terrorists as “freedom fighters” rather than what they were – ruthless Marxist butchers (the Protestant terrorists were often ruthless Fascist butchers).
We’ve just experienced the 2016 Olympic games in Brazil. Once more, Israel’s athletes had to endure much abuse and insult both on and off the field despite being part of the “Olympic family.”
The images of Israeli judoka Or Sasson offering to shake hands with Egypt’s Islam El Shehaby only to be rebuffed, resulted in El Shehaby’s being sent home from the games. Sasson went on to win the Bronze. El Shehaby reportedly had been pressured by fans on social media not to show up for the match with his Israeli opponent because it would “shame Islam.”
Several other Muslims at the games seemed to agree and disqualified themselves from other competitions rather than face an Israeli.
Joud Fahmy of Saudi Arabia forfeited a first-round judo match in what the Israeli press described as a tactic to avoid facing Israeli Gili Cohen in the second round.
In June, Syrian boxer Ala Ghasoun refused to participate in an Olympic-qualifying match against an Israeli, saying that to do so “would mean that I, as an athlete, and Syria, as a state, recognize the state of Israel.”
The International Olympic Committee issued a reprimand to the Lebanese delegation for its treatment of Israeli athletes who were attempting to board a bus in the Olympic Village bound for the opening ceremonies. A Lebanese coach blocked the entrance to the bus, forcing the Israeli athletes to ride in a “special vehicle.”
At the same time, though, something remarkable occurred at the Olympic games this year, and it signaled that a small spark of hope may exist for Jews passionate about sport and sportsmanship.
Ankie Spitzer had been married for a year and a half to Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer when her husband was killed with ten other Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. He left Ankie with a two-month-old baby girl.
Ankie has been conducting a campaign for 44 years to have the Olympic Committee mark the massacre with a moment of silence at the start of the Games. Her campaign was not successful. The IOC mustered an impressive list of the weakest justifications for refusing her, including a statement in a letter sent in 2004 explaining that it is not “in the protocol of the opening ceremony” to have a moment of silence. Ankie wrote back with the arch observation that “The murder of our loved ones was never in the protocol either.”
This year, IOC head Thomas Bach, himself a former fencing star, held a ceremony in the Olympic Village to commemorate the massacre of the Israelis. It was not exactly what Ankie Spitzer wanted, but it was enough to give her closure and allow the IOC to at last redeem itself from its previous indifference.
The opportunity to hijack and use the extensive media coverage accorded to the Olympics is simply too obvious an opportunity for our enemies to ignore. In 1972, the siege of the Israeli athletes’ living quarters and the ongoing negotiations with the terrorists played out to a worldwide audience for hours on live television.
Margaret Thatcher, at the height of her battle with the IRA, forbade the British media from broadcasting interviews with IRA spokesmen. Instead, their statements were read by broadcasters. Thatcher famously said she was “Denying the terrorists the ‘oxygen’ of publicity.”
An old friend of mine in Glasgow is a passionate fan of Glasgow Celtic. Prior to the aforementioned match between Hapoel Be’er Sheva and Celtic, he told me that only a handful of troublemakers would try to exploit the game for political ends.
He further assured me that the Scottish Police had threatened to arrest anyone who waved Palestinian flags during the match. In the end there were not a few flags – there were hundreds. And the police did nothing.
I asked him if this would make him, as a Jew, re-think his allegiance to Celtic. He assured me it would not, repeating it was only a “small minority” of troublemakers.
Well, the pictures from the match show that the adjective “small” cannot be used to describe what happened.
Besides, Jews have long known that when a small number attack us and the majority looks away, the poison and evil of anti-Semitism spreads.
The treatment of Jews in sport is a microcosm of the treatment of Jews throughout the world. Some, like the IOC’s Thomas Bach, will take a stand and reject it. Others will pretend it’s not a problem.
I hugely admire stalwart Jews like Ankie Spitzer, who forced the world to acknowledge evil, and I shake my head in sadness at an old friend who, despite being a Jew, turns his face and looks away.