Bullying of Jewish children is wakeup call for football
Let’s kick racism out for good, whatever form it takes
In the Seventies and Eighties, racism was rife on football terraces. These days, with the success of schemes like Kick It Out, the situation is much better, with instances of abuse – while sometimes serious – thankfully increasingly unusual. Not so, it appears, with antisemitism. With Tottenham Hotspur taking the step of asking fans to stop using the Y-word in February, many Jews felt that their concerns were finally being taken seriously. But shocking new revelations this week, which emerged during a parliamentary debate about hostility towards Jews in football, showed that anti-Jewish bigotry remains a problem in the sport. And not just in the Premier League. Worryingly, MPs heard how the worst kind of Holocaustinspired abuse was rife in football’s grassroots, with children as young as seven years old being targeted by hissing noises intended to evoke the sound of Zyklon B emerging into the Nazi-era gas chambers in the mass-murder of Jews.
It is difficult to understand the motivation of people who can behave towards Jewish children playing for Maccabi in this way. At worst, they are both malicious and deeply racist; at best, they are thoughtlessly adopting the sort of behaviour sometimes seen at Tottenham games, displaying shocking levels of ignorance and callousness towards the worst genocide of the 20th century. Either way, the fact that in our enlightened times, when society encourages us to be hyper-sensitive to even the smallest “micro-aggression”, people can behave in this way is sobering. The dramatic conviction this week of a 101-yearold Nazi war criminal underlines both how proximate the Shoah remains, and how the eyewitness generation is slipping through our fingers. At this vital juncture in history, rigorous steps must be taken to educate people about the nature of antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust. Robust penalties must also be applied to stamp out the kind of grotesque antisemitic bulling that was cited in parliament this week. Let’s kick racism – in whatever form it takes – out for good.