Not to sprinkle even more salt in Eindhoven football wounds after the failure against Rangers, but what a refreshing gesture it was from Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam to ban PSV supporters from the Johan Cruijff Arena for the time being.
From the period, about fifteen years ago, when I often went to see the Arena myself, I still remember the anti-Semitic slogans you could already hear back then. The PSV supporters gave extra gas during the last match for the Johan Cruijff Scale against Ajax, I now read everywhere. They have not only shouted the traditional “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas”, but also “All Jews must die”, “Together they burn Jews, because Jews burn best” and “Kick, kick, kick them down, kick those Jews down.”
What worries me even more than those verbal slurs is the fact that they were barely mentioned during and after the ESPN TV broadcast of that match. I cannot recall such chants being strongly signaled or commented upon. The talk of the army of experts at such competitions is endless, but a journalist who calmly and coolly reads the debited slogans from a piece of paper can’t stop. That could scare the viewers, and even worse, the advertisers.
The newspapers also failed miserably, with – as far as I can ascertain – the exception of The Telegraph who neatly reported on the following Monday that the safety coordinator of Ajax had considered asking the referee to stop the match. This is because of the abuse that Ajax player Steven Bergwijn had to endure: “Steven Bergwijn dirty dirty cancer Jew just die.”
At ESPN they called it “the best match for the Johan Cruijff Scale ever”. It was also a fun game for those who didn’t know what was being scolded, but most reporters and officials who did pretended they hadn’t heard anything. The fact that the young Ajax keeper Jay Gorter blundered several times was much more important. The more than 1 million viewers at home had to make do with that.
The reactions from the PSV side were, as usual, weak as the young lettuce from Rutger Kopland’s poem in September. “It is a pity that the good suffer among the bad,” said the PSV spokesperson. He could better explain why the good rebel so little against the evil. No time? No sense? No daring? Or all three?
The chairman of the PSV supporters reacted as chairman of the supporters always react: Ajax guys do the same when they visit Eindhoven. Not that this finding is necessarily wrong, but what good does it do you? So just continue sanctioning anti-Semitic chants because everyone suffers from nasty tendencies?
You could, however, ask Ajax to take a stricter approach against the use by Ajax supporters of ‘Jews’ or ‘Super Jews’ as a nickname. That may not be anti-Semitic, but it does provoke anti-Semitism. “The measure is now full,” Mayor Halsema wrote to PSV. Perhaps it should be added with some regret that the anti-Semitic measure has never been completely empty.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 26, 2022