5 Feet of Fury

‘Standing side by side with the Yid Army’

No, it’s about something else:

That is, it doesn’t matter how Spurs fans use and understand their own use of the Yiddo nomenclature; it doesn’t matter how the words have acquired their own particular significance in the context of football culture; what matters is that a select group of legal experts and commentators have decreed, in the name of the offended, that the word is racist. (…)

When a Chelsea fan says ‘Fuck the Yids, fuck the Jews’, as Baddiel hears one do as a Spurs score is read out at half time, he is not driven by a National Socialist commitment to the systematic extermination of Jewry. He is driven by his desire to see Spurs do badly.