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Jewish Soccer Star in England Warns of Rising Antisemitism Among Fans Since Hamas Atrocities
Wycombe Wanderers’ Jewish captain Joe Jacobson in action. Photo: Reuters/Dennis Goodwin
One of the United Kingdom’s few professional Jewish soccer players has spoken out on the antisemitic abuse he has faced from fans as a result of a social media post he shared following the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel.
“For me, I feel a responsibility as one of the few Jewish footballers in the UK to speak out,” Joe Jacobson told the BBC in an extensive interview on Tuesday.
The 37-year-old veteran is the captain of Wycombe Wanderers, who compete in League One — the third tier of English professional soccer. During a 20-year career in the game, Jacobson said he had never seriously been confronted with antisemitism until the Hamas atrocities.
Anger turned on Jacobson in the wake of the massacre in Israel, when he referred in a post on X/Twitter to the scenes of jubilation in Gaza following the bloodshed. “Imagine taking to the streets and celebrating mass murder,” Jacobson wrote.
Jacobson was promptly inundated with antisemitic abuse. “It is hate messages,” he said. “It’s not anything to do with what I’m posting, it’s just comments that people want to throw at you really.”
He emphasized that in the past, whenever he had “spoken about antisemitism there wasn’t much for me to talk about from my own personal experience. However, since what happened in October, it seems to be more and more things going on.”
Threatening messages were also sent to Jacobson’s club, forcing them to provide him with extra security.
“One of them wasn’t necessarily a threat, but more a demand that I apologize and demanded that the club took me away from being the captain,” said Jacobson. “They said if they didn’t, then they might barricade the gates at Adams Park [Wycombe’s home ground]. Then going to a match, there was all these weird things happening, with people wanting to come with me on the journey, and there were phone calls to friends on the journey saying where were we.”
Jacobson said that when he “got out of the car in the car park there were people surrounding me, Wycombe staff saying ‘come on Joe, let’s go into the stadium.’ And that is really different and abnormal to what it usually is. Later on I found out that they had plain clothes security there just in case people were looking to do something … It was something I didn’t realize would have to happen going to a football match.”
Jacobson encouraged fans who witness antisemitic incidents to report them to soccer’s governing authorities in order for the scale of the problem to be properly understood. According to Kick It Out, an anti-discrimination charity focused on soccer, there was an increase of more than 400 percent in antisemitic acts during the first half of the present soccer season, with reported instances over that period rising from 11 in the 2022-23 season to 57 in the current campaign.
The post Jewish Soccer Star in England Warns of Rising Antisemitism Among Fans Since Hamas Atrocities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd
Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang
i24 News – A suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.
Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.
The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister
A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.
Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.
Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.
Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.
Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.
Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”
Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.
Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.
Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.
Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.
The post Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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