VIDEO: Hungarian football fans sang about “Jewish crime” in stadium
Some radical football fans sang about so-called “Jewish crime” in Szeged stadium. The Southern Hungarian city’s club played with MTK Budapest. MTK is traditionally regarded in the Hungarian football world as “the Jewish team”. Read about what happened below.
The Jewish football club of Hungary?
1888 is the foundation date of the MTK, Wikipedia writes. The reason was that some young athletes of Jewish origins could not compete in the aristocratic and Christian Magyar Athletikai Club then. Therefore, they founded the “Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre” (MTK).
Interestingly, every word was Hungarian in the name of their club, which was rare those days. That is because they wanted to emphasize their distance from the Jewish community of Budapest. A further example of that pursuit was when the club transformed into Hungária FC in 1926. Wikipédia says that the MTK has been open to everybody and widely regarded as a democratic and cosmopolitan club.
A scandal broke out after MTK’s match with the Szeged-Csanád Grosics Akadémia on Monday evening. Some radical and antisemitic football fans started chants about so-called “Jewish crime” after the final whistle, telex.hu reported. MTK reported the sorrowful events to the police.
12-year-old girl recorded everything
Rabbi Zoltán Radnóti wrote about what happened on his Facebook page first. He said that his 12-year-old daughter recorded the chanting with her phone while leaving the stadium. She did not dare to take a video of the fans, but she did record their voice.
The football team of the MTK regards as unacceptable all antisemitic or racist acts, fearmongering or hate speech against any minorities, they said in a statement. “We protest against the antisemitic behaviour of the Szeged fans concerned, who chanted some unacceptable rhymes even during the match”, they added. “We stand for our fans offended and threatened during the match. We ask all our benevolent compatriots for solidarity in the name of the MTK family”, they concluded.
The club asked Szeged to challenge their fans to avoid such scandals happen in the future.
Here is the video recorded by the 12-year-old MTK fan about what happened:
Featured image: illustration
Source: Wikipédia, telex.hu