Comic subjected to violent antisemitic abuse

...and when Katie Price complained, SHE was the one thrown out of pub

Comedian Katie Price has spoken of how she was violently threatened during an antisemitic attack in a London pub yesterday.

And she revealed that after the terrifying incident, venue staff ejected her, and not the group of racists who turned on her.

The attack happened as she and a group of friends were watching the North London derby between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. It was triggered after she challenged a fan for using the slur 'yiddo', an offensive reference to Spurs' large Jewish fanbase.

Price was watching the match at The Cally in Islington, which was full of Arsenal supporters like her, and joined in the cries of 'we hate Tottenham’ as the game reached its conclusion

However, the chanting then began to include the insulting term. Price, who was wearing an Arsenal shirt, lodged her objection with the man who started that chant before rejoining the friends she had been out with, which included fellow comic Jamie D’Souza.

When the instigator then came over to her, asking her why she had objected, she told him that she was Jewish and that it was an offensive racial slur. Another man then came over.

Price, 26, told Chortle: 'I saw the whites of his eyes and then he shouted at me with such anger: "You dirty fucking yid!" Five men were coming at me, they had to be restrained away from me.’ They also told D'Souza he should ‘take his girl out of his pub’.

The comic and her friends moved to another part of the venue where, she says The Cally's manager came over and asked them to leave. As they did so, chants began of 'Off you go’ and ‘Yiddo go home’.

The comedian recalls being 'shocked, really, really shocked’. ’I just kept saying to him [the manager], "did you hear what they said to me? They called me a 'dirty fucking yid!",’ she recalls. ‘And he stumbled over his words and then just said "get out, get out!"

'I knew what was going to happen as soon as we left. The embarrassment, that they immediately started chanting, "go home"

'To them, it looked like they'd won. And I felt so vulnerable. That there was no security, I thought was mad. But throwing out the people that were attacked? We were running a gauntlet through these absolute dickheads.'

Price, who says she's experienced her 'fair share of antisemitism in my life', was stunned by the ferocity of the abuse, 'a group of five men, probably in their 40s, attacking me physically and nobody else in that pub did anything about it.

‘I’ve never seen so many people get onboard with antisemitism. That was really, really frightening. Thinking I can't rely on anyone here.'

Arsenal won the game 2-0. But it was marred by confrontations between the players and a Spurs fan kicking Arsenal goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale as he celebrated at the final whistle.

The abuse won't put teetotaller Price off watching future North London derbies, but says: ‘What was also striking was they kept saying "get out of my pub", like it was their territory. Even though we're on the same team and we were 2-0 up, it made no difference to them.

'So I will watch the derby again and I will wear my shirt. But I won't go anywhere where there's no security and that's a shame. As a Jew in 2023 London, I could not hear the word "Yiddo" be chanted so loudly. I know there are quite a few Arsenal pubs where that is quite a common chant, where it isn't called out, and I can't get that out of my head.'

She does not blame Arsenal FC for the incident. 'But I really want to see what they do with this now,’ she says. 'The ball is in their court and they need to clamp down on this.

‘I go to a lot of Arsenal games at the Emirates [Stadium] and they've very good at clamping down on it there. But that's say, 60,000 fans, how many more thousands are watching outside with no regulation on them?’

D’Souza, who was celebrating his birthday yesterday, added on social media: ‘Anti semitism is still so rife in football, especially in the NLD [North London derby]. Call it out if you hear it!We need to stamp out "Y*ddo" from the chant.’

Antisemism has reached a record high in the UK, with 2,255 anti-Jewish hate incidents reported in 2021, up 34 per cent on the previous year.

The bigotry is also being called out more often. David Baddiel highlighted the shocking issue in his hard-hitting 2021 book Jews Don’t Count, and subsequent Channel 4 documentary.

But football has had a longstanding antisemitism problem. As long ago as 2012, Baddiel and his brother Ivor, a comedy writer, made a short film about the topic.

The Y-Word, made with the game’s anti-racism project Kick It Out, featured footballers and ex-pros including Gary Lineker and Frank Lampard appealing to fans to stop using the offensive chant:

Speaking to the Evening Standard today, visiting American Jewish comedian Alex Edelman said that he'd noticed a recent rise in antisemitism online. And he recalled dating a woman who felt comfortable describing herself as "broadly not being into Jews’.

In November, comic Joe Jacobs posted footage of hecklers shouting ‘Yid army’ and making a Nazi salute as he was on stage at Up The Creek comedy club in South London: