20,000 Anti-Semitic Tweets Greet Israeli Hoops Win
Image by getty images
Nearly 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets in Spanish followed Maccabi Tel Aviv’s victory over Real Madrid in the Euroleague basketball championships, Catalonian Jewish organizations said.
The groups claim to have found 17,500 anti-Semitic tweets, many with the derogatory hashtag #putosjudios, and said they plan to jointly file a complaint alleging hate crimes and discrimination to State Attorney Miguel Angel Aguilar.
Some of the Twitter messages suggested sending Jews to gas chambers or ovens. The complaint to the state’s attorney will include five tweets from users the Jewish organizations have been able to identify.
“I am a firm defender of freedom of expression, but there must be a limit,” Jai Anguita, president of Bet Shalom, one of the Jewish organizations, told El Pais. “We could say that these comments came from high spirits following a defeat, that they are almost jokes. But history has shown us where these jokes can lead.”
On Sunday, Maccabi Tel Aviv defeated Real Madrid, 98-86, in overtime to win the Euroleague championship. It was Maccabi’s sixth Euroleague title.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
