Swans fan in peace. With the current feeling towards certain words being used (at all) on the terraces, I wondered if you all see it as offensive or do you feel like you've almost repurposed the 'Y' word to represent something other than the older meaning. I only asked because one of your mods was on our board and he was called Yid Vicious.
Whenever David Baddiel spouts off about it (again), I always think of this...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UMedd03JCA&t=4m08s
I always think of him blacking up to take the piss out of Jason Lee. That and his stereotyping Spurs fans on Fantasy Football. We've discussed this quite extensively on here, Shaper. Views are mixed, but the idea of arresting our fans for what's clearly not intended as an offensive gesture is ludicrous. The amount of open anti-Semitic abuse that's aimed at us without any action from the police only makes it a bigger insult.
Wasn't there a History Today sketch where the other professor goes to Baddiel : See that M Khan ?? That's you that is.
I hope:- (a) the courts laugh the CPS and the police out of court when dismissing the charges that have been brought; (b) Spurs fans keep chanting "Yid Army!" in continued support of our Jewish supporters, as they have done for many decades (c) the police put its paid-for-by-the-tax-payer time to better use in arresting real criminals, such as greedy fraudster bankers, including Baddiel who has been masquerading as a comedian, one of the biggest frauds in showbiz.
You should regard Ivan and David Baddiel as a latter day version of Mike and Bernie Winters. But less funny.
Schnorbits was funnier than Bernie Winters, and that dog was one of the dullest creatures on the planet.
Cheers Shaper: Before anyone used it as an epithet, the word in Yiddish simply meant Jew, and has a positive connotation, as it is used as part of a form of address. (See my avatar.) It continues to. The fact that some have chosen to use it, or try to use it, as an epithet, does not make it an offensive word. To maintain otherwise is an affront to common sense, and would represent a victory for both bigotry and self-righteous ignorance. Sometimes you actually need to know something before you act, this was one of those times, and those who acted in criminalizing the use of the word were sadly lacking in knowledge. To continue in this vein, "American" can and is used as an epithet by some. Following along with this logic, it ought to be made illegal for me to use it (rather ineptly, but that's another story) to describe my nationality. If you say I can't have it both ways, and can't object to the word's use as an epithet, you're right, I believe, and I don't. I have never believed in the criminalization of speech in any case, as it is a very slippery slope. Throwing fans out who use certain racially offensive, or for that matter simply inflaming words at sports events is an entirely different matter, as the proprietors of a grounds have a right and duty to keep the peace, and have always thrown out troublemakers to do so.
It would be interesting to get a black guy to go into a ground and shout the n word,would the police arrest him?
This whole criminalization of speech thing is for the birds. While it's always painful to hear, and can and arguably should lead to violence, letting people provide a negative advertisement for stupidity and prejudice insofar as possible tends to help the cause of tolerance in the long run, IMO.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/24240085. ..any Jewish person with any relative that experienced the Holocaust would not easily walk around anywhere shouting "Yid"” Dr Helen Beer University College London The term in itself does not have anti-Semitic connotations explains Helen Beer, a lecturer in Yiddish at University College London and a native Yiddish speaker. "It's a very straightforwardly Yiddish word," Dr Beer says. "So you would say 'Der Yid' which among Yiddish speakers simply means 'the Jew'. "You also have expressions where men might greet each other informally and say 'Gut morgn Reb Yid' which simply means 'Good morning, mister'." However, Dr Beer warns the word only retains this neutral meaning when it is used by speakers of Yiddish and, in contemporary Britain, only a low percentage of secular Jews can speak the language. "From my point of view, as a native Yiddish speaker, I find it very odd that somebody that's Jewish suddenly would speak about Yids, rather than Jews, and for a non-Jew that's pretty weird too," she says. ….......... anyone here Jewish? Probably not(as be interesting to hear their take on the term) but the general opinion (among football fans) is that the word in question has always been used to represent a Spurs fan. I didn't see any issues in the 90's. Why now?
No, they'd shoot him in cold blood yet those responsible would get away with it. Wouldn't be the first time that happened in Tottenham...
Boss, I am Jewish and am thoroughly ticked off that the Met and others seems to have an agenda regarding the word "Yid" and I think that its because we we live in the world of "PC" speech and litigation is now used widely to inflate that nonsense. Not being able to visit the Lane in recent times I can only comment on what I hear and read about it, but there are far worse insults used at football grounds than that. I can recall when using the "F" word was deemed an offence and now it has become part of our everyday speech. Would like to know why the club will not release the findings of the survey as it would give us a snapshot of feelings within the Spurs community.
Cheers for that Perry. I posted that link as found it explained the term and how it was used outside of football and probably due to my ignorance had never looked that deeply into the wording. But considering we have adopted the term since the 80's and in the 90's these same chants where widely used, why is it only now our fans have been targeted as in the 80's, 90's and onwards police would have been present when the term was used. Yet was anything said then? I can understand the word being offensive if used in a hated meaning but considering the same term is used in a pleasant meaning then us calling ourselves ' Y Army' is a term of positivity and said proudly so it does seem bizarre our fans have been targeted for using the term in a positive way.
In response to that Swansea fan....we have always had a very strong Jewish fan base.Whether more or less than other clubs I can't honestly tell you.But south of Tottenham,an area between South Tottenham and Stoke Newington (and possibly beyond) is a very large Jewish community. Which reminds me of that twit Oswald Moseley and his gang turning up at Dalston to stir the crap against the Jewish people. Anyway,we mean no insult to them.In fact I salute them,as do the Spurs fans. We are very proud to be called Yids!
The key thing is that we're not reappropriating the word on behalf of the Jews. This is one thing that's often misunderstood, probably deliberately because it provides the easy counter argument that our fans using the term can't all be Jews. We know we're not Jews but because of the Jewish heritage of our club and traditionally having a Jewish fan base we were targeted by anti-semitic rival fans as the "yids". What we've done is reappropriate the word for our fans because our Jewish fans we didn't want them to have to sit through hostile, anti-semitic chanting every week at the hands of block headed opposition fans. This was not great attempt to change the meaning of the word Worldwide or make ourselves some beacon for anti-semitism. We didn't like our Jewish fans being abused so, rather than all sit on our hands in silence whilst the idiots chant away and the targeted Jews sit there accepting the abuse or stop going to games, we all became Yiddos. A "Yiddo" to a Spurs fan is another Spurs fan, the "Yid Army" is every Spurs fan. Words are reappropriated in context all the time, "Yid" wasn't a term anti-semites made up so it's not an anti-semitic term unless used in that context. In a football context "the Yids" are Spurs like Swansea are "the Jacks". It's really not difficult to seperate the context between anti-semititic, football and a Jewish person using the term talking in Yiddish. It's worth remembering that we didn't start using the word last week, it's been going on for decades and no ones had a problem identifying the difference between our use of the term and a racist's use of the term. What really pisses me off about the whole thing though, is the way our fans are being punished as racists. It probably is possible to get the majority of Spurs fans to stop using the term but there are somethings the FA/police need to address first. Look at West Ham's away fans last season, hundreds, maybe thousands of them singing "Adolf Hitler their coming for you" and what happened? 2 fans got arrested for Nazi saultes(caught on TV) only one of them got banned from West Ham and the rest of the fans and West Ham as a club got away without so much as a warning. Had that been in a UEFA controlled game they'd have been fined and if it continued they'd get a stadium ban. If the FA and police did their jobs to start with we'd have had no reason to identify with the word and use it to start with, is it really that much to ask that they target the actual anti-semitism before our fans are asked to stop? West Ham fans sang "we won't say his name, he's coming for you" this year and had their usual police escort to the stadium which they sang blatantly anti-semitic songs. It's a ****ing disgrace that none of them are arrested yet 3 of our own fans have been this season for using well known Tottenham songs which are inoffensive in a football context.
I had a friendly pop at Yid Vicious before because his username indicated he was happy to be associated with that word. I was rewarded with a two week ban!
We never "reappropriated" anything. They used the word in a nasty attempt to offend Spurs and its alleged Jewish support (a fallacy in itself) . We nullified that attempt emphatically. And as I will continually say : NONE of these Spurs haters have the integrity to even ACKNOWLEDGE the fact, or COMMEND us for having done it all those years ago. And as for Baddiel, I have no time for a **** , who as a Jew, cannot deal with the fact that the club he SUPPORTS has a significant vile element who require only the singing of ONE WORD by Spurs supporters to trigger their bile.
I'm not Jewish, but half my family is. I can also claim to be illiterate in Yiddish; that is, I've found I can understand it adequately but can't read it. I wouldn't really say I can speak it, but have been able to make myself understood. (I know German, learned mostly Bavarian German, and Yiddish is a dialect of High German; and have picked up various bits of Yiddish over the years from older relatives and neighbors, as I also mostly grew up in a mostly Jewish neighborhood.) Dr. Beer has an interesting POV, and sounds like a good, interesting person, but it is still an opinion. Most people across the ocean (hell, most people this side of the ocean as well, now) seem to have found ways to justify repression of free speech. It's a slippery slope, I tell ya! Pretty soon we'll all have to sign for permission to our minders to be allowed to speak, briefly and from a short list of selections. The virulent outbreak of attacks on free speech is the cause of the sudden concern over word choice. I may despise what someone says, but I would defend to the death his right to say it.
