Israel basketball winners condemn racist twitter abuse

Members of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s winning Eurobasket team has condemned anti-Semitic abuse which was posted on Twitter their win over Real Madrid.

Twitter users in Spain posted 17,500 racist messages on the social networking site, which included making reference to the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust.

The team released a statement, quoting manager Danny Federman, which said: “Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball wishes to express its shock and disappointment at the hurtful discriminatory comments made on social media networks.

“It is very disappointing to see the rush of anti-Semitism following a well fought competition.”

Club president Shimon Mizrahi said: “The hateful remarks we have seen this week, and the subsequent global condemnation of them, serve both as a reminder of how far we have come in the fight against ignorance and racism, and how far we still must go.”

Jewish groups in Catalonia launched a legal complaint over the messages, with Ruben Noboa of the Jewish group Israel, saying: “When we saw reactions to Maccabi’s victory such as ‘Jews to the oven’ or ‘Jews to the showers’, we decided to lodge this judicial complaint.”