ESPN, the U.S. sports network, has removed several leagues with anti-Semitic names from its online Fantasy Football websites. The network undertook the move after complaints by the Simon Wiesenthal Center that some of the leagues on the site had names like “Jews are Immoral” and “Jews Are Terrible,” with one site including banners reading "Burn Jews Wherever Possible" and, “Jews love pennies.”
"They may have been Fantasy Leagues, but the hate is all too real," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "This is another example of bigots leveraging Internet portals to demean their 'enemies' and recruit for their causes. Unfortunately, the targeted enemy in this case was a Jewish father who was about to sign up his son to ESPN Fantasy Football.”
ESPN apologized for the incident, but said that it could not control everything users did on its site. "Offensive hate speech like the examples discussed here have no place on our site,” an ESPN spokesperson said. “While we have systems in place to protect against inappropriate team and league names, clearly with millions of users and deceptive ways around the safeguards, we can never completely eliminate it."
Fantasy football, where users create “dream teams” of NFL players and record their team's progress based on players' activity, is far from the only online game that has been accused of anti-Semitism. Several years ago, the Anti-Defamation League complained that a Japanese version of Pokemon trading cards, derived from the popular video game series, contained swastikas. Although the card was not meant for American audiences and was not distributed by Nintendo, the company still pulled it off the shelves worldwide.
In a statement, ADL Director Abraham H. Foxman said that “in today’s shrinking world due to globalization, what is deemed appropriate or acceptable by one culture may have a significantly different meaning in another. While Nintendo says this is considered an ancient religious symbol of hope in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the image of a swastika in any form has clearly negative and hateful connotations in the Western world."