Young Soccer Fans Attack Italian Sportscaster with Anti-Semitic Chants

ROME (JTA) – A group of youths accosted an Italian Jewish sportscaster after their team lost a key match in London.

In a blog post, David Gaeta, known as the radio “voice” of the Florence soccer team Fiorentina, reported that about 20 youths had accosted him Thursday night as he waited for an underground train after Fiorentina lost to the English team Tottenham Hotspur.

The loss ousted Fiorentina from the European League championships.

“They recognized me and started to chant ‘David Guetta, a train for Mauthausen awaits you,’” he wrote. The chant rhymes in Italian.

The shameful thing is, he wrote, that the youths who accosted him “almost certainly do not really know what happened at Mauthausen. Or at Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka.” He added that he would have liked to have had the encounter in Florence, “in front of the memorial plaque that recalls the Florentines who left with these trains that today they want for me, and who never returned.”

Racism and anti-Semitism by militant soccer fans has been an issue in Italy for years.

Thursday’s incident was not the first time that Guetta, who has provided the radio play by play for Fiorentina for more than 30 years, had been subjected to anti-Semitic slurs. In an interview for an Italian Jewish newspaper in 2010 he reported that he had been called “s—tty Jew” on a number of occasions, had had swastikas scrawled on his motorcycle and had received threatening letters.

“My response to these totally imbecile manifestations was to re-join the Florence Jewish community, after 14 years,” he said, even though, he said, he was not observant.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO