Anne Frank director: Stop anti-semitic football chants with voice recognition

The government must require football stadiums to install voice recognition equipment in order to single out those who start Antisemitic or other insulting chants. This is according to Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank Foundation, in an opinion piece in Trouw, Parool reports. Leopold wants the government to help pay for the equipment. "The responsibility of dealing with chants should no longer only lie with the football clubs", he writes. According to him, the government should provide clubs and other stakeholders more legal and financial capability to deal with insulting chants. He wants the government and Dutch football association KNVB to give clubs less space to downplay these chants. "The past few months show that the Antisemitic chants in football are a comprehensive and international problem", Leopold writes. According to him, the word Jew has become a popular swearword in Dutch regions where there is antipathy against Ajax and the current Dutch approach, with the primary responsibility with the clubs themselves, leads to insufficient results. "Only when all parties work together, there is a chance that the poison of Antisemitism will no longer overshadow national sport."