Lex Immers is a footballer playing for ADO Den Haag who, unlike most modern footballers, is a diehard born and bred fan of his club as well. And like almost every other club in the Netherlands, ADO Den Haag has a fierce rivalry with Ajax (though the same is not necessarily true the other way around). An ADO victory over Ajax is rare, which obviously feeds the rivalry, but even rarer is ADO winning both the away and the home match, as they managed last Sunday. Which is why Immers ended up in the supporters home celebrating. Where he did something stupid.
Because Ajax is the club of Amsterdam. And Amsterdam was traditionally a Jewish city, proud of its Jewish history. So in recent decades Ajax supporters have started to call themselves “superjoden”, Superjews. Which in turn led to quite a lot of antisemitic unpleasantness from the supporters of other clubs (including, I’m sad to say, my own, Feijenoord), something that has been not be good for the reputation of football of course and something what the Dutch football association has punished clubs harshly for when caught at it.
Which is why it has been incredibly fscking stupid of Immers to lead the crowd in a rendition of “we’re going on a Jewhunt”….
Sure, you can argue that “everybody” in football knows you mean Ajax with it, that there’s no harm meant with it and that Immers of course is not antisemitic. But while the intention might not be there, it still is an antisemitic text and when you see supporters surrounding him are doing something that looks a lot like a Hitler salute… There are still Jewish people alive in the Netherlands who lived through the war and for whom this sort of text evokes nasty memories, to say the least.
How thick do you have to be to not know that singing “we’re going on a Jewhunt” might not be the best thing to do as a professional footballer of a club whose supporters already had a reputation for their unenlightened views about race?
