Here's another one - like the face veil - that's had an earlier outing or three on this blog, with a moderate case for Tottenham fans to dump the Yid chants being both stated and opposed (by a normblog reader). But much of what goes around comes back around, and so this has, with the FA now warning 'that the use of such words [as 'Yid'] could result in a banning order or criminal charges', and David Cameron saying that without mens rea - in this case being 'motivated by hate' - terms of hate are (or so I presume) innocent. Here's David Baddiel denying they are that: 'Yid', he says, 'is a race-hate word.' And here he is in discussion with David Aaronovitch, a Tottenham supporter who disagrees with him.
I, for my part, don't think use of Yid-slogans by Spurs fans should be subject to any penalty. The campaign against them should be an effort in persuasion. But I would offer these three further observations.
First, the use of hate speech and its constituent terms does not depend on malicious intent to be offensive. This is because language doesn't fully belong to any individual user or even small group of users. Words acquire meanings and associations as part of a whole structure of usage, and you can't simply legislate away hateful connotations by declarations of intent. The anti-Semitic lineage of 'Yid' is of long standing.
Second, it is unlikely that a tiny group of people (relative, that is, to the great wide world) will be able to reclaim the term by some attempted contra-usage at football matches. This is an empirical matter, but the weight of such football-specific effort by comparison with the frequency with which the term is used for overtly anti-Semitic purposes will probably fail to swing things.
Third, football supporters are notoriously adversarial, contrary and counter-suggestible. I won't quickly forget the occasion at Old Trafford some years ago when Manchester United were playing Liverpool, and the two clubs had taken an initiative to improve relations between the two sets of fans. Before the game, a United supporter and a Liverpool supporter were brought out on to the pitch, named on the public address system and said to be good mates, kicked a ball around some (I think), and finally shook hands. This was greeted all over the ground, including in the away supporters section, by vehement booing and jeering. Getting the Yid-chants dropped at White Hart Lane might yet take a while.