Anti-Semitic Dutch Fans Facing Punishment
The director of a soccer team from the Dutch city of Utrecht has vowed to punish fans who sang anti-Semitic chants during a recent match.
“Racism will not be tolerated in the stadium,” Wilco van Schaik, general director of FC Utrecht, told the Dutch news agency ANP. The report did not specify what steps would be taken against the fans.
The chants were sung in a sing-along led by Danny Temming, a Dutch folk singer, who has distanced himself from the anti-Jewish slogans during the match in Utrecht on Oct. 26.
Temming told the daily AD that he “only began to sing the first lines” during the match, “and then the fans [of Utrecht’s soccer team] started to sing their own texts.”
Teun den Hartog, chairman of FC Utrecht’s fan club, said a flyer instructing fans how to behave was passed out before the match, in an effort to educate fans on refraining from “racist slogans.”
The leading soccer club ADO Den Haag banned eight fans in April from entering the city’s soccer stadium for five to 10 years, following protests by the Hague-based watchdog group CIDI and court instructions. The fans were filmed shouting “Hamas, Jews to the gas” during a match with the Amsterdam soccer club Ajax.
Dutch soccer fans often refer to players and supporters of Ajax as “Jews” at Ajax matches, where some Ajax supporters can be seen waving Israeli flags.
The match last Friday, however, was between FC Utrecht and FC Groningen.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
