Speaker
Description
The paper examines online antisemitic discourse in Dutch football and by doing so addresses an omission in the current body of work on online football-related hate. While online racism and combating online racism in the context of football is increasingly researched (Cleland, 2014; Kilvington & Price, 2019; Farrington et al., 2019), online football-related antisemitism remains largely overlooked. In this paper expressions of rivalry and hate speech in relation to antisemitic discourse(s) in Dutch football are analysed. Expressing hate and (online) hate speech is often part of acting rites and rituals between rivalling football fan groups (Khosla et all., 2019). When playing the Amsterdam based alleged ‘Jewish club’ Ajax, some fans of opposing teams make hissing noises, and chant songs such as ‘Hamas! Hamas! All Jews to the gas!’(Gans, 2013). This kind of football-related antisemitic behaviour is reproduced in stadiums, bars, cafe’s but also online. This study examines online football-related antisemitic discourse by analysing Tweets between 2010 and 2021. Tweets were scraped using the Twitter API and a selection of the Tweets was analysed more in depth using narrative digital discourse analysis. The research shows that antisemitic chants and slurs find their way towards the online domain, sometimes explicit and other times implicit. It is argued that these Tweets, while seemingly targeted towards the football other contribute to an exclusionary discourse in which being a ‘Jew’ is not wanted and contribute to the normalisation of reproduction of antisemitism in the Netherlands.
