Thomas Williamson
At last weekend’s FA Cup game I was extremely disturbed to hear two fans sing a song that included the line “gas them all”. In the noise of the crowd I was unable to hear the rest but I imagine it was along the same lines.
It is even more disturbing that this was not the first time I have heard similar chants while watching Arsenal. In my view this is a problem away from home. On a train home once from Blackburn I heard a large group of fans sing “Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz”. I heard the same chant at a train station in Wigan and a bar in Munich (this may have been a violation of German law - but I don’t know enough about this to be sure). In Munich, it was one supporter, but the key point is that is one too many. Away at Manchester City I also heard a song with the chorus “f***ing Jews” in reference to Spurs.
Obviously there are also many chants at Arsenal that include the word “Y***o”. You may think this is a light hearted word but to those Jews who know that it was used by Oswald Mosley’s black shirts in the 1930s it is deeply wounding. The use of the P or N words would be entirely unfathomable these days, and Y** should be so as well. It is a similar situation to Ron Atkinson’s use of lazy “n****r” to describe Marcel Desailly. He didn’t understand how using such words together was incredibly painful for many black people in the context of slavery and segregation in the southern US.
There are several points to remember about these incidents, and the four others I have cited. The first is that the people involved in them probably, in fact almost certainly, would have had at least one relative who served in the war against Nazi Germany. For all I know they could have had relatives as prisoners of war, severely injured or even killed. So how can they now turn around and turn the Holocaust into a cheap line to taunt Spurs with? These people are too young to remember the emotional impact of the Holocaust, so this means they don’t realise what they are doing.
The second point is that Arsenal in fact has a large, possibly even larger than Spurs, following among London’s Jewish population. My own experience suggests a large proportion of Tottenham’s fans live in London’s commuter towns in Essex and Hertfordshire, places not known for their Jewish links. So the idea of Spurs as a “Jewish” club is in my view a bit of an urban myth these days. Arsenal also has large amounts of support among London’s non-white population. So it is utterly unacceptable that such supporters should be made to feel uncomfortable while following their side.
So what can be done? I twice e-mailed Arsenal in the week after the game only to twice get a reply about how “we don’t condone racism”. Well Duh! I never said that the club itself condoned this, but my point was they have a bit of an undiagnosed problem of anti-Semitic chanting at the club. My communication with the club suggests they are not especially interested in addressing this issue head-on, and that their apparent action on this matter, joint declarations with Spurs before matches, is not nearly enough.
If they were serious they would have investigated the issue and issued life bans to the two supporters. They would then have publicised this to illustrate how there will be hell to pay if supporters sing such songs.
The club’s apparent indifference means that we as supporters must try to stamp it out ourselves. Whenever a supporter sings such a song, they need to be turned on by other supporters and made to feel uncomfortable. This in my view would stamp out such chanting. We really are better than the likes of Millwall, Chelsea and West Ham where many supporters are happy to sing about Hitler, make Nazi salutes etc. There is in my view a slippery slope between such songs and attacks on Jewish schools, graveyards and synagogues. They are part of the same problem.
