I been screwed by another time-traveller!

Oh boy am I steamed!

Got this pal, he and I met the other day to eat some fattening delicious pastry and overpriced Italian coffee in downtown Qualityoflifeville. We had a great time, we talked about ships and stars and sealing wax and cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.

He was born and grew up in the Netherlands and visits du temps en temps to see family. So I told him about my Vleeptron post about Amsterdam's Ajax soccer team, and how I had this perfect lovely Sunday in Amsterdam during which I failed to notice that the Mayor had declared martial law and suspended all civil liberties.

I'd sorta thought this minor insurrection was very obscure and unknown here in the USA, which wouldn't know The Offsides Rule if it bit the USA in the ass, doesn't get the Dutch papers, and even if it did, nobody can read Dutch ...

But my friend scroonched up his face like he'd just knocked back a big glass of vinegar and said he'd heard about this toxic nasty mega-unpleasant Ajax mess, which you expect to happen in every other country in Europe, but never never ever in the Netherlands. He said he'd just read a story about it in The New York Times like two days after my Vleeptron post.

Oh boy was I mad. Obviously some creep at The Times had stumbled on my Vleeptron post and re-wrote it and didn't credit it to Vleeptron.

I went surfing. My pal got the date wrong. The Times story, by Craig S. Smith, ran on 28 March, and my Vleeptron post was 17 April.

Now I'm even more mad. Obviously here is what happened. This Craig Smith guy got his hands on another old Heathkit TM-212 Time Machine just like mine, and travelled into the Future to 17 April, stole my Vleeptron post, went back to 28 March, did a quick sleazy re-write on my post, and then ran it in The Times.

This is another of those unethical sleazy journalism things that have been happening lately in The Times.

Well ... here's the Times story. You decide. I'm just proud that I'm another blogger keeping a close eye on unethical mainstream big-media monopolistic behavior. I'm breaking this scandal right here, you read it on Vleeptron first.

And I know damn well this ganef didn't build his own TM-212 from a kit like I did! He bought it at a tag sale for $5, off the ignorant children of a dead Heathkit guy who built it back in 1973 like I built mine from a kit!

***********************

The New York Times
Monday 28 March 2005

A Dutch Soccer Riddle:
Jewish Regalia Without Jews

By Craig S. Smith

AMSTERDAM -- Just minutes before a high-stakes soccer game not long ago between this city's home team, Ajax, and their rivals from the southern city of Eindhoven, a chant built to a roar in the hall packed with supporters where they were serving plastic pint cups of Dutch beer.

"Jews, Jews, Jews!" thousands of voices cried.

Outside, souvenir stalls sold Israeli flags or flags with the Ajax logo, the head of the fabled Greek warrior, emblazoned inside the star of David. Fans arrived with hats, jackets and scarves embroidered with Hebrew writing. Until recently, the team's official Web site even featured the ringing tones of Hava Nagila and other Jewish songs that could be downloaded into fans' mobile phones.

Few, if any, of these people are Jewish.

"About thirty years ago, the other teams' supporters started calling us Jews because there was a history of Jews in Ajax," explained Fred Harris, a stocky man with brush-cut hair and a thick gold chain around his neck, "so we took it up as a point of pride and now it has become our identity."

For years, the team's management supported that unique identity. But over time what seemed to many people like a harmless - if peculiar - custom has taken on a more sinister tone. Fans of Ajax's biggest rivals began giving the Nazis' signature straight-arm salute or chanting "Hamas, Hamas!" to provoke Ajax supporters. Ajax games have been marred by shouts of "Jews to the gas!" or simply hissing to simulate the sound of gas escaping.

The most disturbing displays have come during games against teams from The Hague or Amsterdam's greatest rival, Rotterdam. But even Eindhoven fans get into the act: not long after the game started, a chant arose from the corner section of the city's stadium reserved for fans of the opposing team. "Everyone who's not jumping is a Jew!" the crowd cried over and over again as thousands of people in the section jumped up and down.

Ajax games have become so charged with such anti-Semitic displays that many of the team's Jewish fans now avoid the games altogether. The offensive behavior is not one-sided: during a game against a German team late last year, a group of Ajax supporters displayed a banner that read "Jews take revenge for '40-'45," a reference to the Holocaust.

"We were probably too tolerant," said Uri Coronel, a Jew who was a member of Ajax's board in the 1990's, speaking about the management's past attitude. Since then, the atmosphere at the games has become "unbearable," he said, adding that the fans' adoption of a Jewish identity is widely misunderstood as something positive. "A lot of Jews all over the world believe that Ajax fans are proud to call themselves Jews, but it's a kind of hooliganism," he said.

There is no clear reason why Ajax, founded in 1900, became known as a Jewish club. Amsterdam has always had the largest Jewish population in the Netherlands and the club had two Jewish presidents in the 1960's and 1970's. It has had Jewish players at various times. The club, which owns 73 percent of the listed company that owns the team, also has some Jews among its 400 members, but no greater a percentage than their representation in the city's general population. There are no Jews on the club's current board.

"The club has no real Jewish origins," said John C. Jaakke, the club's dapper president, speaking before the Eindhoven game.
Nonetheless, the club became identified in the public mind with Jews in the 1950's, and by the 1970's, opposing fans began to call Ajax supporters Jews. The supporters adopted the identity in a spirit of defiance.

Mr. Jaakke said the trend had bothered the club's management for the past 10 years, and many Jewish supporters have complained that it makes them uncomfortable. Finally, last year, during a period of national debate about the language being used in soccer stadiums, the board decided to take the opportunity to address the issue. One of the main catalysts for that debate was not anti-Semitic chants, but chants calling the well-known girlfriend of an Ajax player a prostitute.

Mr. Jaakke called a meeting with representatives of the club's two main supporters' associations last year to communicate the management's concerns. Mr. Coronel, the son of Holocaust survivors, spoke to them about how hurtful the language was to Jews. Finally, in his New Year's speech, Mr. Jaakke expressed the management's desire that fans drop their pretended Jewish identity.

"Not only Jews are bothered by this," said Mr. Jaakke, "I'm not Jewish and I hate it, too."

The club has asked an independent committee, headed by the Dutch foreign minister, to discuss the issue and try to come up with a strategy for ending the practice. Mr. Jaakke said there had been some suggestion that fans substitute the word "Goden," or gods, for "Joden," or Jews, and call themselves "sons of gods," on the logic that Ajax was a sort of god.

Mr. Jaakke conceded that forcing the fans to change their behavior was a daunting task. "It's difficult for the supporters because it has become part of their identity," he said. "Many people are walking around with Jewish stars tattooed on their bodies and they're not Jewish at all."

Standing in a section behind the goal reserved for hard-core Ajax fans, the leader of the more fanatical of the teams' two supporter associations said he understood that it hurt Jews who lost family members during the war, but complained that it was the fault of other teams' fans.

"We don't say anything that hurts anyone," said the tall, sharp-featured man who would give only his first name, Henk. "Even if we stopped, they'd still call us Jews."

A cheer of "Let's go, Jews, let's go!" started up among the fans around him.

"It'll never change," he said. "It's been our identity for almost 30 years - you can't erase it." He tugged down the neck of his shirt to reveal a large light-blue star of David tattooed on his chest with the word AJAX emblazoned above it in black gothic letters.

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