
Is it racism or boorishness?
I very much enjoyed Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam last year. Here’s a review I wrote at the time.
One haunting scene in the book involves soccer fans from Rotterdam chanting anti-Jewish slogans against Ajax of Amsterdam (a team associated with Jews, albeit with no Jews on the roster):
"F__ing Jews!" [Feyenoord fans] went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. "Cancer Jew!" they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul.
And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister hissing sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beer-flecked mouths. I didn't know what it meant, until [Buruma's friend] Hans explained it. The sound got louder: the sound of escaping gas.
In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeted by rival supporters shouting: "The trains to Auschwitz are ready!" In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans were a touch more inventive.
After a year of thinking about that story, I found the real thing on Youtube. Here it is, below:
Hamas, Hamas, the Jews into the Gas
It's around 0:25 of this clip. the Dutch is "hamas, hamas, joden aan het gas":
Comments below the clip (in Dutch) argue the finer point that they hate Ajax Jews (the largely gentile fans), not Jews in general.
I'm trying to decide if this is stupid to the level of childish, or a scary warning. Or both?
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