ANTISEMITISM IN FOOTBALL: EDUCATION IS KEY
But this was not a one off. To fans of the Amsterdam-based club and other sides (such as Tottenham Hotspur of London) that are perceived as Jewish due to their history or fan-base encountering antisemitism in or around football stadiums has become a depressingly familiar event in recent times. Just this October, a group holding up Israeli flags at the UEFA Conference League game between Union Berlin and Maccabi Haifa in the German capital were subjected to antisemitic abuse and doused with beer by Union supporters.
German club Borussia Dortmund are one of the few top level clubs who have consistently confronted this problem over the last few years. In 2019, they and co-founders Anne Frank House Amsterdam, fare network (Football against Racism in Europe) and Dutch side Feyenoord set up the “Changing the Chants” (CtC) project, an European Union-supported initiative geared towards educating supporters and the setting up of guidelines for the fight against antisemitism. The two-year multi-faceted project culminated in a two-day conference at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim on August 31st - September 1st 2021.
About 50 guests from eleven different countries travelled to the hybrid offline/online event, while more than 500 participants followed the many interesting lectures, debates and panel discussions remotely. For those present, the conference included guided visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, as well as a guided walk through the town of Oświęcim and its Jewish Museum.
Andrzej Kacorzyk, Director of the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, welcomed participants in the auditorium. In his opening note, Kacorzyk reminded the audience that unopposed hate and discrimination had laid the foundations for the horrors of the Second World War: “Antisemitism, propaganda, building national pride on the basis of racism led the Germans to the crime of the holocaust, to thousands of war crimes committed in Poland and so many other European countries. That’s why our meeting, our work, our activity, is so important for the world today.”
In a panel on “Remembrance and Education - the potential impact on society through football and new target groups”, Nataliia Tkachenko, a State Museum staff member working on educational projects, said that in the recent years the historical research has aimed at deepening and finding new perspective to different aspects of the history of the camp while in the educational work more and more focus is made to present this history through the prism of individual and personal experiences. Willem Wagenaar, a researcher working with Anne Frank House, recalled the positive impact of Feyenoord supporters meeting an older Jewish woman who was herself a fan of the Rotterdam-based club. They realised that their chants were hurting real people living in their own city. "All of a sudden, it's no longer 'the Jews.' They see a face," Steven Berger, a fan liaison officer for the club added. He called it an "eye-opener" for many participants.
Many clubs were reluctant to tackle antisemitism for fear of upsetting sections of their fanbase, said Pavel Klymenko, Head of Policy at the fare network: “Football’s reckoning with antisemitism has come late. Clubs find it very difficult to confront their own supporters.” Those that do, however, have found that pointing out the role of Jewish players and supporters in the club’s history has often seen a change of attitude.
All speakers agreed that education, not punishment was key. “Education must be included in the regulatory sanctions framework,” said Chris Gibbons, the London-based director of Inside Inclusion, a consultancy working with clubs, players and federations on equality, diversity and anti-discrimination. “Participants should be encouraged to become agents of change themselves,” he added.
In his speech outlining CtC’s guidelines for the fight against antisemitism, Wagenaar emphasised that supporters’ involvement was crucial. “Fans cause the problem but they are not the problem they are part of the solution,” he said. “Education is not telling supporters what they cannot do, but speaking to them about topics that are of interest to the fan base, that relate to their pride in the club and in their city.”
Daniel Lörcher, the head of Borussia Dortmund’s Corporate Responsibility department, sees football clubs as “social actors”, that can be utilised to bring about change. He expressed the hope that the concluding stage of the CtC project at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was only the beginning in that respect.
In April of this year, a section of FC Vitesse supporters chanted “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” at a rally before the Dutch first division match against Ajax. The story made some headlines but then quickly disappeared again, as the authorities promised to investigate and the sports news agenda moved on, to the next round of matches.
Raphael Honigstein