There was no Green Brigade in attendance at Celtic Park on Sunday afternoon as Brendan Rodgers’ side dismissed Aberdeen but there remains an element of questionable behaviour from sections of the Celtic support.
Aside from the running onto the pitch at various points of the afternoon, the most notable moment of consternation came with the singing from a section of supporters that disrupted the minute’s silence for Remembrance Sunday.
Sky Sports were forced into an apology while Rodgers himself looked uncomfortable on the touchline as the camera panned around.
The players of both teams appeared awkward and bemused by the noise around them that played through the minute’s silence. The vast majority of Celtic of supporters who respected the silence looked equally mortified.
Whatever the understandable criticisms around the increased jingoistic nature of how the poppy is represented, the moment’s silence is designed to pay respect to all of those who have lost their lives in conflict, something that has been overlooked amidst some of the rhetoric that revolves around this time of year.
But there is an irony to the disruption of the silence when pitched against the background of recent weeks.
The Palestinian flags that flew around Celtic Park were designed to raise awareness of the plight of those stranded in Gaza and who have endured hell over the last month as killing has taken place on a mass scale.
Images that have been come through on social media and television channels have been harrowing with children featuring in deplorable numbers among those affected.
The minute’s silence is an opportunity to reflect on all of those. That would also include those who have lost their lives in any kind of conflict – and would include those killed unlawfully in civil war.
It is also worth reiterating, as this column has done before, that Celtic lost players during both the First and Second World War.
This is not an argument to say that people do not have the right to chose not to wear a poppy. Abstaining from wearing a red poppy or, indeed opting to wear a white peace poppy, is not an insult to those who went to war and, is surely, representative of many of the freedoms for which they fought; the right to disagree, the right to dissent, the right to question.
But finding it is impossible to stay quiet for a minute while there is a pause for reflection for those killed, maimed, traumatised and changed forever because of global conflict, inflicts a similarly authoritarian view on others.
There is no need to join in with a minute’s silence if political views take a different stance but stay on the concourse and allow others their own moment for the many reasons that may be.
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