Taking the knee is a bit like Covid. Everyone’s bored with it but its still very valid and exceptionally serious. But there are many people opposed to it. NOT racists. Some are black people, who just feel it is inappropriate or a wasted symbolic gesture or many other reasons that they are allowed to hold dear. Some even boo the gesture. Which, personally speaking, is a bit strong, mainly because however decent, valid and ‘woke’ your reasons for booing are, you will just be seen as a racist for doing so. A football fan with really genuine, decent reasons was banned at Crystal Palace for such booing. And then later un-banned when they realised that, like taking the knee, booing is merely freedom of speech. Albeit not a very eloquent speech.

And so, back to Crystal Palace, that hot-bed of political anarchy and rebellious insurgency, yesterday. Where those sorry Eagles played Newcastle, the team so recently bolstered by massive Saudi investment, to the combined shocked morality (about 3%) and excessive jealousy (97%) of the other 19 clubs in the division. And some Palace fans flew a banner. It was ‘proper’, not just scribbled on toilet roll. It was clever and it was funny. And it was about Saudi Arabia, the state generally, and Mohammed Bin Salman specifically.

It was not in any way ‘racist’. It said nothing about Saudi people. It made no stereotype tropes, it didn’t call anyone a ‘towel head’. Mainly because the Geordie fans have taken to wearing tea-towels on their heads in a show of (bit misplaced) solidarity and support for their new board members. Which is a bit like Spurs fans calling themselves ‘the Yids’ and causes many blood-vessels to burst because you can’t really be called a ‘racist’ if you’re showing love and support for any group and so people just don’t know what to do about it.

So the poster went up, it shows MBS with a bloody scimitar. It attacks the Saudi nation for its human rights atrocities and brutality. Things which, I’m sure, were completely off most Palace fans’ radars until 10 days ago when Saudi Arabia entered the collective consciousness of all football fans. But if so, even if this is just a ‘let’s find a way to wind up a few Geordies’ kind of deal, they’re allowed. Yet for this, the police are investigating? Like, really? The Saudi police maybe, they don’t need any kind of ‘legal framework’ behind their actions, as they constantly prove. But OUR police? Those defending free speech of online numpty trollers, and other hard lefties? And this is racism?

Happy Sunday

A xxxx