Arsenal rape suspect behind bars

opposing those are idiots and hooligans read this article and you will know all about it.

quote SOCCER IN MOKUM This is not really a new story, but during my trip I picked up a copy of Joods Journaal (Jewish Journal) a glossy Dutch magazine focusing on Jewish culture and current affairs in The Netherlands. In it I found a story about Ajax Amsterdam, the Dutch capital's leading soccer team, its Jewish heritage and the way in which that heritage is increasingly abused and used by both the soccer club's opponents and supporters.

For my North American audience, soccer is the number one sport in Europe (for Americans: compare it to baseball and for Canadians: think hockey) and Ajax is one of Europe's and probably one of the world's most renowned and successful soccer teams. The kind of soccer team that has transcended everything earthly and become a myth, like Manchester United, AC Milan or Real Madrid. It has also produced some of the world's best soccer players (even non-soccer fans would now about Johan Cruyff), is known for its creative way of playing the game and its phenomenal history and tradition. As anywhere else in Europe, soccer in The Netherlands has been marred by violence and disturbances perpetrated by hardcore hooligans. Most Dutch clubs have in addition to their regular supporters their own group of hardcore fans, most of who are not exactly known for being well behaved or well mannered. Whenever a match takes place a huge police turnout is required to separate the supporters of the opposing sides, a battle between violent supporters of Ajax and Feyenoord (another major Dutch side), left one fan dead and many wounded only a few years ago. Hate has become a part of the clash of supporters and while a lot of it has a mildly condescending undertone (teams from the eastern part of the country are always qualified as "farmers"); Ajax and its supporters are the subject of anti-Semite rants, slogans and banners. I will spare you the details but the chants vented against the players and supporters from Amsterdam center around the Second World War, genocide and the current state of affairs in Israel.

You probably wonder why. The background to Ajax' Jewishness is probably rooted in the fact that the club is from Amsterdam - called Mokum in Yiddish, meaning "city" or "place" - the home of the majority of Dutch Jews and the center of Jewish culture in The Netherlands. The club has had two high profile Jewish chairmen, Jaap van Praag who led the club to stardom in the 1960s and 1970s and his son Michael van Praag who performed a similar feat in the 1990s by returning the club to its past glory following a period of mediocre results during the 1980s. The name "van Praag" you probably noticed, translates into "From Prague" underlining the fact that Amsterdam was throughout the centuries a sanctuary for persecuted Jews from all over Europe. Anyway, in the days before TV-rights, IPOs and worldwide merchandising revenue, professional soccer clubs were to a large extent reliant on wealthy individuals and Ajax was often helped by Jewish businessmen such as Maup Caransa and Jaap Kroonenberg. And of course, some of its legendary stars were Jewish: Sjaak Swart and Bennie Muller who where part of the famous team in the 1960s and early 1970s to name a few. The perception therefore existed that Ajax was a Jewish club and although the club is not based on race or religion or anything like it, it so happened to be branded as a Jewish entity.

Many attempts have been made over the past few years to deal with the unpleasant phenomenon of anti-Semite expressions during soccer matches, notably by Michael van Praag as well as Dutch public prosecutors using anti-discrimination and anti-hate laws. It is however next to impossible to bring to justice a few thousand supporters in a stadium filled with fifty thousand people over a song about gas and Hamas. To the Van Praags it has always been devastating to enter their team's stadium in Amsterdam (a city from which over 100,000 Jews were deported never to return home) and hear this vile and mean spirited rhetoric as they lost a significant number of family members during the Second World War. Jaap van Praag, who died in 1987, had to hideout for a number of years and barely survived this dark chapter in the world's history. What was equally disturbing to them is the response of the hardcore Ajax supporters as they have taken on the Jewishness of the club as their very identity by calling themselves Jews, carrying Israeli flags and, to the ultimate horror of holocaust survivors, tattooing the Magen David on their arms or other body parts. The guys that do this are a small but very fanatical group, yet, they are an integral part of the Ajax culture so it has always been very hard for the club's management to turn its back on these faithful supporters by excluding them from the club, its matches or other activities.

The net of this is that whenever Ajax plays you will see large Israeli flags and other Jewish symbols making the team incredibly popular in Israel where many appear to believe that the supporters of Ajax are well informed about the state of Israel, Zionism and the history of the Jews. Nothing could be further from the truth; very few of these soccer fans realize what they are doing or indeed have any knowledge about Israel and its history. As Michael van Praag would say, they are as Jewish as I am Chinese. So, a very distasteful part of what is otherwise a great Dutch soccer culture has become an integral part of Ajax' existence as a soccer club and its image is now intertwined with Israel and Jewish traditions in an unintended way. To Israelis this may be a great thing but to Dutch Jews it is anything but. Here's what former Ajax player Bennie Muller had to say about it:

"Sometimes when I'm sitting in the stadium and I hear those crazy people shouting 'We are super-Jews' and 'Jews are champions,' it's so bad that I just walk off and go home," he says. About 200 members of Muller's extended family died in the Holocaust and he vividly remembers the day his mother was taken away. "I had two brothers and two sisters. All of us children were crying. The German said, 'Oh, let's leave them,' but the Dutch Nazis said no. My mother had 11 brothers and sisters." His mother survived, but her relatives were end. "Older people know what happened in the war. But these fans, they don't know. I wish they would stop, but they won't. I talk a lot with Israelis here. They all seem to like it. They laugh about it. But for the Jewish people in Amsterdam it's so disgusting, it's unbelievable," says Muller.

Muller's sentiments are echoed here, no doubt about it. But in the days of Hamas, al-Qaeda, arm-twisting Sharon into a roadmap and, yes, Gretta Duisenberg I can imagine that many Israelis consider it to be encouraging to see a mbuttive outpour of support for Israel in a Western European city even though it has been taken out of its context by those who express it. As discussed earlier here, the history of the relationship between Jews, Israel and The Netherlands is an interesting one with many great moments, but it is also one filled with instances of shame, sadness and deep regret. The way some Dutch treat the soccer team that hails from Mokum and the way in which some Mokummers respond is now a bizarre concoction of pro-Israel sentiments and anti-Semitism that is of benefit to no one.

SOCCER IN MOKUM, CONTINUED Thanks to Chrenkoff and Myrtus I was alerted to this piece in the New York Times which discusses the continuing issues soccer club Ajax Amsterdam has with its supporters who have branded themselves as Jews, in turn generating anti-Semitic rhetoric wherever the team goes. It's an old issue and by way of background I suggest you check out my original piece on the topic that I wrote almost two years ago.

But the atmosphere in Holland has changed so much since then that people with a even a small measure of authority are now willing to take on excesses that for years had been tolerated, a term of which I remain deeply skeptical. Here's why:

"We were probably too tolerant," said Uri Coronel, a Jew who was a member of Ajax's board in the 1990's, speaking about the management's past attitude. Since then, the atmosphere at the games has become "unbearable," he said, adding that the fans' adoption of a Jewish identity is widely misunderstood as something positive. "A lot of Jews all over the world believe that Ajax fans are proud to call themselves Jews, but it's a kind of hooliganism," he said.

Coronel is a little disingenuous here. The club did not "tolerate" the Ajax fans carrying Israeli flags and chanting pro-Jewish slogans, but were in fact very reluctant to take on their core group of supporters. It was a pragmatic approach bordering on indifference: why alienate your most loyal fans?

But by taking on their own supporters and trying to stamp out a thirty-year old tradition the club is doing something it should have done ages ago when it would have been both easier and attracted a lot less (international) attention. And that's just one aspect of this issue as the club and the authorities are now entering the slippery slope of curbing free speech by specifically targeting certain expressions, however intolerable they may be. As the NYT article correctly notes a referee recently suspended a Dutch premier league soccer game when fans of one side suggested that the spouse of one of the other teams' star players was a prostitute. If you can't call someone's wife a whore any longer, a quaint piece of Dutch humor, then you have to wonder what's next on the list of things that you shouldn't be saying or doing. And that's not just a Dutch phenomenon, consider this bizarre tale from Britain.

In a desperate effort to create harmony European societies are now increasingly prepared to use the strong arm of the law to regulate free expression and monitor debate. Be prepared to see a lot more of it going forward.

unquote. glad to have been of serice to you and i thank you from the deepest of my heart that arsenal bought that moron, we are so glad to got rid of that idiot.