The Y Word
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Gary Lineker is knowlegable about so many things. Where does he get the time to read all those books?
[quote author=Peatcheo link=topic=44960.msg1315715#msg1315715 date=1302805149]
Spurs fans call themselves it which I imagine is a large reason why football fans are desensitised to it.
[/quote]
I wonder how many of those Spurs fans that use that word are even Jewish ?
I have a feeling it's not that many.
Spurs fans call themselves it which I imagine is a large reason why football fans are desensitised to it.
[/quote]
I wonder how many of those Spurs fans that use that word are even Jewish ?
I have a feeling it's not that many.
I'll raise my hand up and say, I don't find it offensive on a personal level - unless it's sung in songs like the one in the video. Maybe I'm a bit de-sensitized to it (I call some of my English mates the word), but I've not heard of it used bar with Tottenham fans (for example, were Cohen, Rosenthal or Yossi ever called that? I've never heard of either of them complain). Nazi solutes or 'hissing noises' to me are far worse - and most of the people doing them probably know very well what they're getting at.
Oh well, I'm rambling.
Oh well, I'm rambling.
[quote author=Hardcastle link=topic=44960.msg1315790#msg1315790 date=1302815504]
I know two jews.
Neither are spurs fans but neither are bothered when they get called it.
That's my excuse for using the word in the Madrid-spurs thread anyway.
[/quote]
And hearing that more than a couple of Jewish people are offended by that word does nothing to alter your feelings on the matter ?
I know two jews.
Neither are spurs fans but neither are bothered when they get called it.
That's my excuse for using the word in the Madrid-spurs thread anyway.
[/quote]
And hearing that more than a couple of Jewish people are offended by that word does nothing to alter your feelings on the matter ?
[quote author=themn link=topic=44960.msg1315794#msg1315794 date=1302815880]
[quote author=Hardcastle link=topic=44960.msg1315790#msg1315790 date=1302815504]
I know two jews.
Neither are spurs fans but neither are bothered when they get called it.
That's my excuse for using the word in the Madrid-spurs thread anyway.
[/quote]
And hearing that more than a couple of Jewish people are offended by that word does nothing to alter your feelings on the matter ?
[/quote]
I'd like to think I only used the word in the presence of people who I genuinely feel won't be offended by it.
So yes, I won't go around using the term in public (Not that I ever have) and yes, I'll probably revise my use of the word in the Arena of private.
[quote author=Hardcastle link=topic=44960.msg1315790#msg1315790 date=1302815504]
I know two jews.
Neither are spurs fans but neither are bothered when they get called it.
That's my excuse for using the word in the Madrid-spurs thread anyway.
[/quote]
And hearing that more than a couple of Jewish people are offended by that word does nothing to alter your feelings on the matter ?
[/quote]
I'd like to think I only used the word in the presence of people who I genuinely feel won't be offended by it.
So yes, I won't go around using the term in public (Not that I ever have) and yes, I'll probably revise my use of the word in the Arena of private.
[quote author=themn link=topic=44960.msg1315784#msg1315784 date=1302815048]
LTW, Obviously the Nazi/gas chamber shit is *more* repugnant than the ill-advised use of a "word" but, surely it's all part of the same thing ?
[/quote]
I guess one thing leads to the next ... I don't really know where I stand on this - most of my English Jewish mates feel the same way.
LTW, Obviously the Nazi/gas chamber shit is *more* repugnant than the ill-advised use of a "word" but, surely it's all part of the same thing ?
[/quote]
I guess one thing leads to the next ... I don't really know where I stand on this - most of my English Jewish mates feel the same way.
I’d met her in 2003 when I’d gone to Amsterdam with my DJ mate, he was playing at some club night, a gabba rave called Hellraiser where the predominantly male crowd went off their heads to 200 bpm techno, a very different vibe to the loved up UK rave scene. Crowds of skinhead kids bouncing around with little of the rhythm associated with house music, more speed, less E, less women. We’d got there a couple of days earlier to have a few days in Amsterdam with my friend, Jim, and to check out an Ajax match - they were playing Galatasary of Istanbul in the Champions League.
He’d only booked a fucking hotel in the middle of the gay bit hadn’t he, Jim? Over the road was some club called the Back Door Cafe, but next door to it was a little kebab house, and as we checked in on the morning of the match I noticed the red, yellow and black colours of the Turks, of Galatasaray, hanging up in the window of that place, The Funny Duck.
The receptionist and hotelier was a middle aged fat guy with a beard that ran right around his head who wore glasses that made him look like Mr Twit. As we checked in he asked us jovially
‘You here for the fucking or the fighting?’
We just stood there giggling at this cartoon character – we’d had some weed, some blow your head off white widow sputnik spliff shit we’d picked up ready-rolled from a coffee shop on the way from the station and it was becoming clear how strong this native gear was, but he continued while we wobbled
‘You English, you only here for one or other, the fucking or the fighting’ before he seemed to check himself, staring into space thoughtfully, before saying ‘but hey... no English play today, so you’re here for the fucking’ winking at us, the leery gelmety twat.
He’d figured out for himself that we's arrived on a fetish tourism errand. Of course we hadn’t, but I was far too amateur at smoking that stuff to be able to put him right and instead started to drift off into a panic ridden daydream in which he broke into our room, tied us up and bummed us to death, before Jim brought me round by tolling me to pick up my bag as he’d sorted all of the checking in stuff out.
It was one of these narrow tall buildings with no lift that overlooks one of the canals, and we were on the top floor. We struggled up the spiral stairs with a heavy record box and all the other DJ shit he had until eventually, a few minutes later, I was drinking a cold beer on the end of my bed waiting for my palpitations to slow down, able to giggle again. It was only one o’clock but we decided the best plan would be to smoke more draw, get out of the hotel and wander around town and see what unfolded. We didn’t get far. The munchies kicked in sharply, and after staggering out the hotel we parked ourselves in The Funny Duck and let the plump happy owner feed us one-Euro kebabs and one-Euro beers while telling us how the match was going to go (a sure win for the Turks) and how much he loved Liverpool. I was well pleased we’d found this place, just a shop front with a couple of tables hosted by a sympathetic chilled out kebab tsar, playing old 90s house mix CDs. I’d have happily stayed there all day, it seemed to have everything I needed within arm’s reach.
I was already twisted up and good for nothing but fun – I’d never been much of a pot smoker so I was fucking bombed - and was now what must have been the most inconvenient thing for a native Mokummer, a smoking tourist out of his depth. It always fascinated me how they managed to get to work with everything going on around them anyway. Not just the day to day (I mean the Back Door Cafe would be emptying as people were on their way to work – a surreal blend of sober Hugo Boss adverts walking through a gaggle of two meter tall cut-out butt-cheek-lederhosen wearing handlebar moustache men, making the whole scene look like the imagined future of Hitler during a cheese dream), but how did you grow up through adolescence with all that whoring and partying going on without turning into Oscar Wilde? I guess it was all so passé.
We finished our kebabs and headed into the red light. Jim was better at this sort of thing, a time served stoner who was not prepared to spend all day listening to C&C music factory and talking about football, but as I was wasted he steered me on the inside of his gait as gangs of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink lookalikes gestured ‘Coom wit me, I have goot prices’ or ‘i haff whatchu want, I can zee it in your eyes’ until we bumped into a gang of Geordies on a 40th birthday party singing a football chant to one of their number that had been turned down by a whore for being too ugly.
I felt bad for him, a craggy faced dude who’s textures required some study. I mean at what point did all those lines start appearing? And I wondered had there been any way to stop their progress. Whatever the reason for his Grand Canyon grid I think we all realised that the ‘couldn’t score in a brothel’ rhyme that his mates were all singing for him would stick for a lifetime. He’d been turned down by some high class brass who apparently had standards as well as a price.
We tagged along with them, entering their group as if by osmosis, like you tend to be able to when you’re at you’re most relaxed – and they seemed pleased to have people to tell their stories to, as each seemed to have made a stupid dick of himself in one way or other over the past few hours. One had gone down on a twenty euro whore and his mates were reminding him how many diseased cocks that woman might have seen this week, so there were more songs for his impending facial herpes, which would of course be the end of the world, and he nipped backwards and forwards to the bog to wash his mouth out. We sat with them all in a coffee shop, exchanging numbers as they promised to come to the rave on Friday and they took it in turns to slope off to jackhammer augmented mannequins bussed in from the Pacific Rim and Chechnya and come back with more tales of retail mechanical friction.
At five o’clock I’d had enough and wanted to get up near the ground. I was a sucker for the atmosphere on a big match night - but we also needed tickets, and although I was good at hunting them down I needed time and some measure of negotiating ability intact. Jim agreed so we chopped out of the centre and dealt our way through the packed Metro on the A line to the ground.
As we stumbled out of the train and down the platform I did wonder for a minute what all the pro PLO graffiti was about but it was just a passing thought – I figured there must be a large pissed off local middle eastern population – and let’s face it if there’s anywhere that militant Islam is going to lock horns with the west on the streets it’s probably where you can buy a blue mushroom and a teen arsehole for less than a ton. But that wasn’t why it was there – and still is I guess. Ajax have a new build stadium just out of town – built with the idea of calming down the hooligan issues that led to street riots between Ajax of Amsterdam and Feyenoord or Rotterdam, or between the Dutch national side and the Germans. They even swapped all the season tickets around when fans tried to sit next to each other as they had in the last gaff. This place was so large that they gave pairs of seats out and left gaps four long and two deep, making the first few matches of the next season look like an odd game of human backgammon from a distance. People gradually became drawn together, but to this day there is still no genuine ‘end’ where the loonies congregate. The ‘ultras’ can’t settle on where it should be, and even if they do gain consensus from time to time the ticketing system spots the plans and starts pushing people apart again. I knew this because I met Corina and she told me. Corina had been one of the main ‘heads’ in the Ajax firm, the changes coming just in time for her metamorphosis into a life not so reliant on the buzz of throwing bottles at people because they lived in a different town.
There wasn’t much going on at the stadium yet as it was still quite early. Champions League games all start at 7.45 in the UK and 8.45 in mainland Europe – as dictated by the main sponsors, Amstel, Mastercard, Adidas. They even all have the same anthem, a burst of adapted Handel prior to each kick off– as if that measure of corporate branding means anything to anyone outside UEFA headquarters in Geneva. At 5.30 there wasn’t much activity, just a few shirt sellers and burger vans preparing for action. The stadium looked glorious as night began to fall (the only times I ever regretted packing in playing were when I saw a stadium at night before a Champions League game) and we walked towards it and past bars that stated clearly that they were for home supporters only. There was a kiosk on the far side of the ground selling enormo pints of either of the main sponsor’s beer – Amstel or Heineken (the Dutch have cornered the global market on lager with superior product and branding, this could have been a game in Glasgow or Tel Aviv, it would still have been Dutch beer) and so we settled there and smoked more of this silly weed ‘white widow’ as it was known, and kept a steady seal of strong ale from which more psychedelic dreams could not escape. We were becoming increasingly unlikely to be able to watch any football as active spectators but were beyond the point of no return as finally the place started to fill up with supporters.
As we were stood there, just people-watching, about twenty or thirty Galatasaray fans walked through the space where we’d planted ourselves, singing a song and looking joyous with anticipation. Some of them were wearing red and yellow and black jester hats with similar face paint. They looked funny, so we laughed. We pointed and laughed – with them, not at them – but just as they’d passed I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was an odd sensation, I knew from that first touch that this was someone smaller and yet stronger than me. I turned around to be greeted by a wide smiling face hiding behind sunglasses that reflected the spot lights and police cars around us and a typical Dutch yankee twang that said ‘You want to fuck the Turks, no?’ I looked around her, there was a presence of well built, rough looking dudes, all looking over at me and Jim nodding and smiling. ‘You lead - we follow’ she said, and I looked at Jim and wondered what we’d done to end up here. ‘Listen man, you get your guys, I get mine. I get two hundred guys here in five minutes, just say it. We fucking love you English’.
I was looking down at a girl, no more than five feet tall, dark thick hair in dreads, tied above her head revealing a tight firm pair of shoulders, the full inverted A shaped body, she was wearing a black tank top which had ‘I am the Fuck of God’ written on it revealing six pack abs. She had the glistening of sweat under her arms - which she’d now joined behind her head as she smiled. A lower front tooth missing, a scar from her ear ran down her neck, she was a Mad Max biker, and as she lowered her arms again and her chest relaxed I couldn’t help myself looking at her tits, no bra, that seemed to be holding her tight top to her. She laughed and reached up to my soldiers, grabbing them and pushing me backwards. ‘Well, you fucking English dogs?’ she laughed.
She had of course thought, like the hotelier, that as we were English we were here for one reason and when we had laughed at the Turks, it was everything they’d suspected coming true. Down the years English fans had had some bother in Istanbul. Nothing to write home about until a Leeds fan was killed there, but they clearly suspected we were here for retribution. Finally I spoke ‘Well, ff, we’re just.. . So you hate them, the Turks?’
‘Fucking A man, we fucking hate them, we are the Yids’ and Corina, as yet unintroduced, grabbed her lower lip, dragged it down and showed me a painful looking tattoo that said YIDS - where years before in London someone would have had SKINS torn in with a Stanley knife and a bottle of Quink.
I asked ‘Yids?’ and she said ‘Fucking A man’ as she rolled her tight black T shirt up a welterweight bicep to show a Star of David ‘We are the fucking Yids and we hate the fucking Muslim cunts’.
Here was a feral animal staring me down, putting me on the spot. Yeah, Islamaphobia was as ubiquitous as McDonalds by then, but I was a passive observer, stoned, out of my depth, I didn’t know how to react. She scared me but I could feel my cock twitch too, which was odd, coz I normally go for models, or girls who could. She just kept looking into my eyes inquisitively while I tried to my best to unravel some of her angry complexity. It was impossible.
I was smashed, so I figured that giggling was the key to this, to diffuse my need to make sense, so I just spoke to the group ‘I would never have guessed guys... well you don’t look Jewish’ – and they all burst into laughter. ‘We’re not Jewish you mad fucker, we are the yids.. the yids..Ajax man.’ And I could feel the tension roll off me and down my back as she leant against a pillar and began, with the help of her friends (all ripped steroid abusing goons wearing D&G or Diesel Ts with Doctor Martins), to explain the connection between the diamond and gold dealers of the early 20th century and the setting up of Ajax.
How they hate Arsenal but love Spurs because of the religions of the teams and the rivalries they share – and why they hate the Turks. How Feyenoord are the Muslim side. How they killed one of each other’s firm the year earlier. How, after they’d friendly-but-not finally established I had no Muslim in me (I’m black, well I’m a quarter Jamaican anyways) they were expecting us to lead them into some form of Judeo Christian Anglo Saxon Crusade against a few score migrant workers in silly hats. About how they stole their hooligan culture from...us. Who’s us? I felt like asking her. I’m not us. I didn’t do that. I’d had a few moments and seen these kind of things go off but I was a spectator even then. Whatever was happening, through this mental half wreck of a conversation in which it did become clear that we were just here for the footy and the party, very soon we had more drinks in front of us and we were stuck into that cool kind of cultural exchange that only happens when you lower your guard. We’d met a small army that for reasons of geography seemed to put us on a pedestal.
We were taken to one of the home supporter only bars and match tickets appeared out of nowhere, no money asked for, we were their guests now. This bar, an annex of the stadium, had a DJ playing a crazed techno version of Hava Nagila while hundreds of skinheads drank shots and snorted coke off the tables. ‘See?’ said Corina ‘Just like in England, no?’ I tried to explain to her that if this sort of thing happened in England people would have a word. The police would get involved in this kind of thing in the UK, all the rioting, if there is any, is miles away from the ground along with the police and the horses, CCTV, drones and helicopters – and what was happening at Ajax looked a lot to me a lot like some sort of state sponsored terrorism, an effort to get the already mental kids off their fucking heads.
She said it was just how they liked it. She told me how the fan groups had met with the club following the disastrous stadium move in an effort to keep an identity – one grounded in hate. There had been a crowd strike, so a happy medium had to be found – and while the stadium experience remained much less mental than it had before the move, now they had this – the surrounding area’s bars controlled by the fan groups. It turned out that Corina was a big player in the fan groups and committees, and in the rave scene, in the drug scene, in the world of import and export - and she was very interested in how my mate had come to be DJing at one of her parties (her party in the same way his as Ajax was her club). Eventually, the music came to an abrupt halt and the bar closed. Corina looked at me and Jim and said it was time to watch the match. ‘What...’ I thought ‘...could possibly go wrong now?’
As we walked toward the ground Jim turned to me in a mess and said he was getting a cab back to the hotel – even trying to watch would be pointless. He was right. The game, watched behind clouded Perspex, a hooligan deterrent, and through cocaine peepholes, is not memorable to me– nor is the rest of the night, but when I surfaced the next day I had a couple of missed calls from Corina. I guess she’d sent me packing in a cab. No sign of Jim, I called him to find he’d ended up back with the Geordies, leathered on pills and unlikely to talk any sense until much later in the day, or week. I rang Corina – who sounded like an enthusiastic schoolgirl playing up to my deranged pot tourist, and something in her voice and about her manner made me want to care more and care less. She wondered what we were up to so I explained I was a bit hazy and that we were a man down, but as I had no plans until the following evening we arranged to meet up in a few hours that evening and get some food.
Looking out of the window down to the streets and the bridges crossing the canal, I saw Efe, our host at the Funny Duck the previous afternoon, removing shards of glass from the wooden frame that had been shattered at some point in the night, presumably by some Ajax ‘jews’.
He’d only booked a fucking hotel in the middle of the gay bit hadn’t he, Jim? Over the road was some club called the Back Door Cafe, but next door to it was a little kebab house, and as we checked in on the morning of the match I noticed the red, yellow and black colours of the Turks, of Galatasaray, hanging up in the window of that place, The Funny Duck.
The receptionist and hotelier was a middle aged fat guy with a beard that ran right around his head who wore glasses that made him look like Mr Twit. As we checked in he asked us jovially
‘You here for the fucking or the fighting?’
We just stood there giggling at this cartoon character – we’d had some weed, some blow your head off white widow sputnik spliff shit we’d picked up ready-rolled from a coffee shop on the way from the station and it was becoming clear how strong this native gear was, but he continued while we wobbled
‘You English, you only here for one or other, the fucking or the fighting’ before he seemed to check himself, staring into space thoughtfully, before saying ‘but hey... no English play today, so you’re here for the fucking’ winking at us, the leery gelmety twat.
He’d figured out for himself that we's arrived on a fetish tourism errand. Of course we hadn’t, but I was far too amateur at smoking that stuff to be able to put him right and instead started to drift off into a panic ridden daydream in which he broke into our room, tied us up and bummed us to death, before Jim brought me round by tolling me to pick up my bag as he’d sorted all of the checking in stuff out.
It was one of these narrow tall buildings with no lift that overlooks one of the canals, and we were on the top floor. We struggled up the spiral stairs with a heavy record box and all the other DJ shit he had until eventually, a few minutes later, I was drinking a cold beer on the end of my bed waiting for my palpitations to slow down, able to giggle again. It was only one o’clock but we decided the best plan would be to smoke more draw, get out of the hotel and wander around town and see what unfolded. We didn’t get far. The munchies kicked in sharply, and after staggering out the hotel we parked ourselves in The Funny Duck and let the plump happy owner feed us one-Euro kebabs and one-Euro beers while telling us how the match was going to go (a sure win for the Turks) and how much he loved Liverpool. I was well pleased we’d found this place, just a shop front with a couple of tables hosted by a sympathetic chilled out kebab tsar, playing old 90s house mix CDs. I’d have happily stayed there all day, it seemed to have everything I needed within arm’s reach.
I was already twisted up and good for nothing but fun – I’d never been much of a pot smoker so I was fucking bombed - and was now what must have been the most inconvenient thing for a native Mokummer, a smoking tourist out of his depth. It always fascinated me how they managed to get to work with everything going on around them anyway. Not just the day to day (I mean the Back Door Cafe would be emptying as people were on their way to work – a surreal blend of sober Hugo Boss adverts walking through a gaggle of two meter tall cut-out butt-cheek-lederhosen wearing handlebar moustache men, making the whole scene look like the imagined future of Hitler during a cheese dream), but how did you grow up through adolescence with all that whoring and partying going on without turning into Oscar Wilde? I guess it was all so passé.
We finished our kebabs and headed into the red light. Jim was better at this sort of thing, a time served stoner who was not prepared to spend all day listening to C&C music factory and talking about football, but as I was wasted he steered me on the inside of his gait as gangs of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink lookalikes gestured ‘Coom wit me, I have goot prices’ or ‘i haff whatchu want, I can zee it in your eyes’ until we bumped into a gang of Geordies on a 40th birthday party singing a football chant to one of their number that had been turned down by a whore for being too ugly.
I felt bad for him, a craggy faced dude who’s textures required some study. I mean at what point did all those lines start appearing? And I wondered had there been any way to stop their progress. Whatever the reason for his Grand Canyon grid I think we all realised that the ‘couldn’t score in a brothel’ rhyme that his mates were all singing for him would stick for a lifetime. He’d been turned down by some high class brass who apparently had standards as well as a price.
We tagged along with them, entering their group as if by osmosis, like you tend to be able to when you’re at you’re most relaxed – and they seemed pleased to have people to tell their stories to, as each seemed to have made a stupid dick of himself in one way or other over the past few hours. One had gone down on a twenty euro whore and his mates were reminding him how many diseased cocks that woman might have seen this week, so there were more songs for his impending facial herpes, which would of course be the end of the world, and he nipped backwards and forwards to the bog to wash his mouth out. We sat with them all in a coffee shop, exchanging numbers as they promised to come to the rave on Friday and they took it in turns to slope off to jackhammer augmented mannequins bussed in from the Pacific Rim and Chechnya and come back with more tales of retail mechanical friction.
At five o’clock I’d had enough and wanted to get up near the ground. I was a sucker for the atmosphere on a big match night - but we also needed tickets, and although I was good at hunting them down I needed time and some measure of negotiating ability intact. Jim agreed so we chopped out of the centre and dealt our way through the packed Metro on the A line to the ground.
As we stumbled out of the train and down the platform I did wonder for a minute what all the pro PLO graffiti was about but it was just a passing thought – I figured there must be a large pissed off local middle eastern population – and let’s face it if there’s anywhere that militant Islam is going to lock horns with the west on the streets it’s probably where you can buy a blue mushroom and a teen arsehole for less than a ton. But that wasn’t why it was there – and still is I guess. Ajax have a new build stadium just out of town – built with the idea of calming down the hooligan issues that led to street riots between Ajax of Amsterdam and Feyenoord or Rotterdam, or between the Dutch national side and the Germans. They even swapped all the season tickets around when fans tried to sit next to each other as they had in the last gaff. This place was so large that they gave pairs of seats out and left gaps four long and two deep, making the first few matches of the next season look like an odd game of human backgammon from a distance. People gradually became drawn together, but to this day there is still no genuine ‘end’ where the loonies congregate. The ‘ultras’ can’t settle on where it should be, and even if they do gain consensus from time to time the ticketing system spots the plans and starts pushing people apart again. I knew this because I met Corina and she told me. Corina had been one of the main ‘heads’ in the Ajax firm, the changes coming just in time for her metamorphosis into a life not so reliant on the buzz of throwing bottles at people because they lived in a different town.
There wasn’t much going on at the stadium yet as it was still quite early. Champions League games all start at 7.45 in the UK and 8.45 in mainland Europe – as dictated by the main sponsors, Amstel, Mastercard, Adidas. They even all have the same anthem, a burst of adapted Handel prior to each kick off– as if that measure of corporate branding means anything to anyone outside UEFA headquarters in Geneva. At 5.30 there wasn’t much activity, just a few shirt sellers and burger vans preparing for action. The stadium looked glorious as night began to fall (the only times I ever regretted packing in playing were when I saw a stadium at night before a Champions League game) and we walked towards it and past bars that stated clearly that they were for home supporters only. There was a kiosk on the far side of the ground selling enormo pints of either of the main sponsor’s beer – Amstel or Heineken (the Dutch have cornered the global market on lager with superior product and branding, this could have been a game in Glasgow or Tel Aviv, it would still have been Dutch beer) and so we settled there and smoked more of this silly weed ‘white widow’ as it was known, and kept a steady seal of strong ale from which more psychedelic dreams could not escape. We were becoming increasingly unlikely to be able to watch any football as active spectators but were beyond the point of no return as finally the place started to fill up with supporters.
As we were stood there, just people-watching, about twenty or thirty Galatasaray fans walked through the space where we’d planted ourselves, singing a song and looking joyous with anticipation. Some of them were wearing red and yellow and black jester hats with similar face paint. They looked funny, so we laughed. We pointed and laughed – with them, not at them – but just as they’d passed I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was an odd sensation, I knew from that first touch that this was someone smaller and yet stronger than me. I turned around to be greeted by a wide smiling face hiding behind sunglasses that reflected the spot lights and police cars around us and a typical Dutch yankee twang that said ‘You want to fuck the Turks, no?’ I looked around her, there was a presence of well built, rough looking dudes, all looking over at me and Jim nodding and smiling. ‘You lead - we follow’ she said, and I looked at Jim and wondered what we’d done to end up here. ‘Listen man, you get your guys, I get mine. I get two hundred guys here in five minutes, just say it. We fucking love you English’.
I was looking down at a girl, no more than five feet tall, dark thick hair in dreads, tied above her head revealing a tight firm pair of shoulders, the full inverted A shaped body, she was wearing a black tank top which had ‘I am the Fuck of God’ written on it revealing six pack abs. She had the glistening of sweat under her arms - which she’d now joined behind her head as she smiled. A lower front tooth missing, a scar from her ear ran down her neck, she was a Mad Max biker, and as she lowered her arms again and her chest relaxed I couldn’t help myself looking at her tits, no bra, that seemed to be holding her tight top to her. She laughed and reached up to my soldiers, grabbing them and pushing me backwards. ‘Well, you fucking English dogs?’ she laughed.
She had of course thought, like the hotelier, that as we were English we were here for one reason and when we had laughed at the Turks, it was everything they’d suspected coming true. Down the years English fans had had some bother in Istanbul. Nothing to write home about until a Leeds fan was killed there, but they clearly suspected we were here for retribution. Finally I spoke ‘Well, ff, we’re just.. . So you hate them, the Turks?’
‘Fucking A man, we fucking hate them, we are the Yids’ and Corina, as yet unintroduced, grabbed her lower lip, dragged it down and showed me a painful looking tattoo that said YIDS - where years before in London someone would have had SKINS torn in with a Stanley knife and a bottle of Quink.
I asked ‘Yids?’ and she said ‘Fucking A man’ as she rolled her tight black T shirt up a welterweight bicep to show a Star of David ‘We are the fucking Yids and we hate the fucking Muslim cunts’.
Here was a feral animal staring me down, putting me on the spot. Yeah, Islamaphobia was as ubiquitous as McDonalds by then, but I was a passive observer, stoned, out of my depth, I didn’t know how to react. She scared me but I could feel my cock twitch too, which was odd, coz I normally go for models, or girls who could. She just kept looking into my eyes inquisitively while I tried to my best to unravel some of her angry complexity. It was impossible.
I was smashed, so I figured that giggling was the key to this, to diffuse my need to make sense, so I just spoke to the group ‘I would never have guessed guys... well you don’t look Jewish’ – and they all burst into laughter. ‘We’re not Jewish you mad fucker, we are the yids.. the yids..Ajax man.’ And I could feel the tension roll off me and down my back as she leant against a pillar and began, with the help of her friends (all ripped steroid abusing goons wearing D&G or Diesel Ts with Doctor Martins), to explain the connection between the diamond and gold dealers of the early 20th century and the setting up of Ajax.
How they hate Arsenal but love Spurs because of the religions of the teams and the rivalries they share – and why they hate the Turks. How Feyenoord are the Muslim side. How they killed one of each other’s firm the year earlier. How, after they’d friendly-but-not finally established I had no Muslim in me (I’m black, well I’m a quarter Jamaican anyways) they were expecting us to lead them into some form of Judeo Christian Anglo Saxon Crusade against a few score migrant workers in silly hats. About how they stole their hooligan culture from...us. Who’s us? I felt like asking her. I’m not us. I didn’t do that. I’d had a few moments and seen these kind of things go off but I was a spectator even then. Whatever was happening, through this mental half wreck of a conversation in which it did become clear that we were just here for the footy and the party, very soon we had more drinks in front of us and we were stuck into that cool kind of cultural exchange that only happens when you lower your guard. We’d met a small army that for reasons of geography seemed to put us on a pedestal.
We were taken to one of the home supporter only bars and match tickets appeared out of nowhere, no money asked for, we were their guests now. This bar, an annex of the stadium, had a DJ playing a crazed techno version of Hava Nagila while hundreds of skinheads drank shots and snorted coke off the tables. ‘See?’ said Corina ‘Just like in England, no?’ I tried to explain to her that if this sort of thing happened in England people would have a word. The police would get involved in this kind of thing in the UK, all the rioting, if there is any, is miles away from the ground along with the police and the horses, CCTV, drones and helicopters – and what was happening at Ajax looked a lot to me a lot like some sort of state sponsored terrorism, an effort to get the already mental kids off their fucking heads.
She said it was just how they liked it. She told me how the fan groups had met with the club following the disastrous stadium move in an effort to keep an identity – one grounded in hate. There had been a crowd strike, so a happy medium had to be found – and while the stadium experience remained much less mental than it had before the move, now they had this – the surrounding area’s bars controlled by the fan groups. It turned out that Corina was a big player in the fan groups and committees, and in the rave scene, in the drug scene, in the world of import and export - and she was very interested in how my mate had come to be DJing at one of her parties (her party in the same way his as Ajax was her club). Eventually, the music came to an abrupt halt and the bar closed. Corina looked at me and Jim and said it was time to watch the match. ‘What...’ I thought ‘...could possibly go wrong now?’
As we walked toward the ground Jim turned to me in a mess and said he was getting a cab back to the hotel – even trying to watch would be pointless. He was right. The game, watched behind clouded Perspex, a hooligan deterrent, and through cocaine peepholes, is not memorable to me– nor is the rest of the night, but when I surfaced the next day I had a couple of missed calls from Corina. I guess she’d sent me packing in a cab. No sign of Jim, I called him to find he’d ended up back with the Geordies, leathered on pills and unlikely to talk any sense until much later in the day, or week. I rang Corina – who sounded like an enthusiastic schoolgirl playing up to my deranged pot tourist, and something in her voice and about her manner made me want to care more and care less. She wondered what we were up to so I explained I was a bit hazy and that we were a man down, but as I had no plans until the following evening we arranged to meet up in a few hours that evening and get some food.
Looking out of the window down to the streets and the bridges crossing the canal, I saw Efe, our host at the Funny Duck the previous afternoon, removing shards of glass from the wooden frame that had been shattered at some point in the night, presumably by some Ajax ‘jews’.
Heh, Onky's got competition
Is this from your memoirs Krump? Nice.
I'm sick of these stupid arguments that basically assert that because a word can be used in a very offensive way, there's no possible way it could be used in a way that isn't offensive.
I don't think the way that Spurs supporters use the word is offensive, by and large, and almost every one of them would find that other part of the video repulsive. It's a bit of a strawman.
I'm interested to see what the response will be after they show the video. Football supporters love being moralized to.
I don't think the way that Spurs supporters use the word is offensive, by and large, and almost every one of them would find that other part of the video repulsive. It's a bit of a strawman.
I'm interested to see what the response will be after they show the video. Football supporters love being moralized to.
[quote author=keniget link=topic=44960.msg1315872#msg1315872 date=1302844348]
I've never thought of it as being a particularly offensive word.
But I suppose if some guy snarled at me and said "fucking yid", he'd do a good job of making it offensive.
[/quote]
It's true of many mono-syllabic words though. Most words sound threatening when said in a threatening way. Obviously it's a term of anti-semitism in this case, but "meh". I'd much rather focus on the hissing myself
I've never thought of it as being a particularly offensive word.
But I suppose if some guy snarled at me and said "fucking yid", he'd do a good job of making it offensive.
[/quote]
It's true of many mono-syllabic words though. Most words sound threatening when said in a threatening way. Obviously it's a term of anti-semitism in this case, but "meh". I'd much rather focus on the hissing myself
I didn't even know what yid meant until a few years back TBH.
There's very little active anti-semitism in Liverpool as far as I'm aware, but pretty much everyone uses the term jew to mean someone tight without meaning it to be offensive.
Oh, & if they've got those funny curly hair thingies the extremist Jews (right term?) wear some people point & laugh, but I figure that happens pretty much anywhere & you only see that once in a blue moon.
There's very little active anti-semitism in Liverpool as far as I'm aware, but pretty much everyone uses the term jew to mean someone tight without meaning it to be offensive.
Oh, & if they've got those funny curly hair thingies the extremist Jews (right term?) wear some people point & laugh, but I figure that happens pretty much anywhere & you only see that once in a blue moon.
Yid means Jew. Eastern European Jews used to speak in their own language called "Yiddish" (Jewish) and they called themselves Yids. So Yid is not necessarily an offensive word, but I guess it depends on the way and context it is used as well as who uses it and what intentions he has.
You guys know better than me what those football fans mean when they use the word Yid. They may simply be referring to the Spurs fans (or Ajax fans in Holland) but when chanting about Yids being gased again by Hitler, it can't be anything but offensive (and maybe even threatening).
BTW, I remember seeing in London various Hitler T-Shirts, and with the BNP probably having some "sympathy" towards Hitler and the Nazis, it's clear that there is some issue there.
You guys know better than me what those football fans mean when they use the word Yid. They may simply be referring to the Spurs fans (or Ajax fans in Holland) but when chanting about Yids being gased again by Hitler, it can't be anything but offensive (and maybe even threatening).
BTW, I remember seeing in London various Hitler T-Shirts, and with the BNP probably having some "sympathy" towards Hitler and the Nazis, it's clear that there is some issue there.
Kaka uses the Y word all the time.
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