DAILY RECORD COMPLICIT IN CELTIC FANS "ZIONIST ABUSE" SLANDER
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
I knew it was going to happen, but when it did, I hoped that the Scottish press would do the right thing and not play along with the lie.
As soon as it became clear that Celtic’s former target Jocelin Ta Bi had decided to move to Sunderland instead of Glasgow, I knew his Israeli club and agent would try to play the “antisemitism” card.
I wanted to believe our media weren’t gullible or vindictive enough to fall for it, and yet, that’s exactly what’s happened.
Agent Tries to Blame Celtic Fans' "Zionist Abuse" for Player’s Aborted Transfer
According to Ta Bi’s agent, Stav Hakmon, speaking to The Daily Record today, Celtic fans’ alleged treatment of the player led to Celtic pulling the plug on the deal.
The fact that Celtic’s interest in the player cooled immediately after his medical in London raised fitness concerns, was acknowledged, yet quickly glossed over in today’s report in the Record. Instead, they chose to focus on the following, unsubstantiated allegations from Hakmon.
The Agent said: “Jocelin received messages from Celtic fans saying that he was a Zionist and they didn’t want him there, and that the owner of Netanya invests in all kinds of security companies.”
Of course, none of these alleged messages have been made available for public scrutiny.
Yet the Daily Record had no qualms about running a headline alleging "Celtic Fans Zionist Abuse" towards Jocelin Ta Bi.
It is however true that Netanya's owners have invested upwards of $50 million in Israeli's largest manufacturer of military drones. The same ones used in the ongoing slaughter in Palestine. I guess maybe what constitutes "security companies" has a different interpretation in Tel Aviv?
I wrote an article a couple of weeks back, while the deal for Ta Bi, an Ivorian international who had no prior links to Israel before choosing to play football there, still looked likely to go ahead.
I predicted at the time, that despite plenty of anger towards Celtic’s board, and indeed towards Ta Bi’s parent club’s owners for their financial complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza, I saw no evidence of direct animosity towards the player.
I still haven't. I've seen plenty of anger directed at the Celtic Board for pursuing this deal, and I've seen plenty of commenters calling out the criminal actions of Maccabi Netanya's owners, but not a word of personal abuse directed at the player.
Like we see so often in politics these days, this once again seems like a case of an Israeli source claiming, yet offering no evidence of, racism, as an excuse for their own failings and the anger the actions of their government bring upon them internationally.
So, I’m going to go ahead and call “b*llshit” on these messages. Show us them, or they didn’t happen!
Celtic had second thoughts about the player and wanted more time to consider. We can have a separate debate about the Celtic board’s dithering in the transfer market. However, the reality is the agent in question chose to speak to Sunderland instead. He goes on to admit in the same interview that “Celtic called us numerous times, but until it was completely signed with Sunderland, we didn’t get back to them.”
So, in other words, he chose to ignore Celtic’s concerns about the player’s fitness and, instead of trying to salvage the transfer through further discussion, chose to go for a quick and easy deal with Sunderland.
That’s what agents are paid to do. I don’t doubt that Hakmon probably got a far better pay deal for himself and the player from Sunderland than anything Celtic would have been willing to offer.
Football transfers are a cutthroat business. As the old saying goes: “If you’re not fast, you’re last”. I don’t blame the agent in question for going for a better deal with a club in a wealthier league. But at least, he should have the intellectual honesty to admit that.
His lies and slander of the Celtic support highlight exactly why so many of us had reservations about doing business with a club such as Maccabi Netanya, and the warmongers who own them, in the first place.
It’s also disgusting that once again, someone is allowed to slur the good name of Celtic fans, without a shred of evidence, and without the club lifting a finger to refute these claims.
Not only that, but the paper that ran these unproven allegations will once again be welcomed with open arms at the next Celtic press conference, while fan media, the only voices defending fans against these falsehoods, remain banned.
