’You should have been gassed,’ tennis player tells his Jewish contender during tournament in Antwerp, Belgium
‘’You should have been gassed,’’ a tennis player told his Jewish contender during a tournament in the Belgian city of Antwerp.
The Jewish player, identified only as Serge N., told the media that the incident took place after a dispute over the validity of a point.
The match was then suspended by the club management and the offending player, Alain Verlaak, removed from the tournament.
Serge N. said that he believed the club acted correctly, but added his opponent should be banned from playing in association matches. He filed a criminal complaint against him with police.
According to the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism (LBCA), this incident didn’t come as a surprise. "Over the past ten years we have registered nearly a thousand complaints of ant-Semitic slurs of this kind," said its president Joel Rubinfeld.
Belgian law not only prohibits any public expression of racism, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, but also the denial, trivialization, justification or approval of the Holocaust.
by Yossi Lempkowicz