Jewish regalia without Jews, and unintended consequences

The unofficial team logo of the Amsterdam soccer club Ajax is the Israeli flag. In fact, Ajax's fans, in jest, call themselves Jews and go to games in hats and shirts embroidered with Hebrew writing.

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."

And the unintended consequence? Opposing fans are acting in bad taste and even the Ajax fans are disprespectful.

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.
...
"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.

What an odd, yet intriguing, phenomenon. Link