Dutch soccer club to identify, punish fans who sang about burning Jews

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A Dutch soccer club whose fans were filmed recently singing about burning Jews said it would attempt to track down the culprits and punish them.

In the video, which was posted online Tuesday, several dozen fans of the PSV Eindhoven soccer team are filmed at a McDonald’s eatery singing a song that last year brought another Dutch soccer team, FC Utrecht, into disrepute.

“My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews ’cause Jews burn the best,” the PSV Eindhoven fans allegedly sang.

PSV Eindhoven’s spokesman, Thijs Slegers, told the Eindhovens Dagblad daily that the club will study the footage to see if those filmed belong to the team.

“If that’s not the case, there’s nothing we can do,” he said.

Slegers also said there is no proof the video was recorded Monday. He said the chant featured “a horrible text” but also his club needs “to study what went on” during the scene filmed.

But a spokesman for the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, which is a major Dutch watchdog on anti-Semitism, told the RTL broadcaster on Wednesday that “the images don’t lie.” CIDI filed a complaint with police for incitement against the people filmed singing.

Last year, the Dutch soccer association slapped FC Utrecht with a $12,000 fine on fans who sang the same song and another chant about Hamas and “sending Jews to the gas” during a match against Ajax.

Ajax and its supporters are often dubbed “Jews” because of the historical Jewish presence in Amsterdam, which is sometimes colloquially called “Mokum” after the Yiddish word for “place.” Some Ajax fans embrace the label, and some have brought Israeli flags to matches before it was banned on the grounds that it invites anti-Semitic abuse.

On Monday, Eindhoven fans brought traffic in the center of their eastern city to a standstill to celebrate the team’s defense of a Dutch title when Ajax lost that day.