AMSTERDAM (JTA) – A Jewish man was assaulted on the Netherlands’ national holiday of liberation from the Nazis by revelers who sang about gassing Jews.
The man, identified in the Dutch media only as Joram, complained to police that he was pushed around, kicked and verbally assaulted with anti-Semitic hate speech by a group of about 50 men in the Hague on May 5, a national holiday known as Liberation Day.
Joram, 35, asked men celebrating in a park near the Dutch parliament building to stop singing the offensive song, whose lyrics include: “My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews ’cause Jews burn the best.”
The chanters then began pushing Joram around as police stood idly by, he told the AD news site and the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI.
The men were wearing soccer shirts of the Feyenoord club of Rotterdam. The club’s rival is Amsterdam’s Ajax team, which is widely associated with Jews.
The chant, whose use was first reported by the media in 2015, has proliferated in the Netherlands and Belgium in recent years. In some cases, fans chant it to taunt counterparts from rival teams.
Hidde van Koningsveld, the head of the pro-Israel CiJo group, last week told the Dutch media he experiences an anti-Semitic incident at least once a week in the Hague, where he works, because he wears a kippah.
