When Sports Gets Ugly: German Soccer Fans, Poland And Anti-Semitic Slogans

Once again soccer seems to have brought out the worst in people. If they keep this up, they’ll start looking like California drivers. John Rosenthal writing in Pajamas Media:

The motto of the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany was “The world is our guest, you’re staying with friends” [Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden] — or, in the simplified official translation, “A time to make friends.” Two years later, however, the prospects of a good showing by the German national team in the European soccer championships, currently being co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland, appear to be inspiring anything but friendly sentiments among some German soccer fans.

As first reported by the Austrian news agency APA [link in German], around 140 “mostly German” fans were arrested Sunday night in Klagenfurt in the run-up to the German team’s opening match against Poland. The rowdy German fans were chanting what the APA describes as “obviously racist and anti-Semitic slogans” that “recall the Nazi period.” More precisely and more bizarrely, they were in fact adapting anti-Semitic motifs from the Third Reich in order to insult their Polish rivals: chanting “All Poles have to wear yellow stars” and “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Poles!” The latter is a variation on the slogan with which the Nazis unrolled their infamous boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in 1933: “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!”

The distinctive mixture of aggressiveness and Nazi nostalgia appears, moreover, not to have been limited to just those German fans that made the trip to Austria.

Read it in its entirety.

Soccer hooliganism, also called football hooliganism, is NOT limited to some fans from Germany. It’s a huge problem worldwide and has led to deaths. Go here, here, and here. In Italy soccer hooligans even killed a policeman.

Teams of opposing Hooligans have even confronted each other in pre-game rumbles — ending some young lives. Watch this:

What makes the Austrian incident different is the chanting of Nazi slogans — where passions over the game caused some young people to culturally regress.

What is it about soccer? Americans reserve this kind of violence and verbal abuse for driving and attending their kids’ Little League games.