“Die, you anchovies (Editor’s note: pejorative term used for Olympiacos Piraeus in Greece),” reads the wall we encounter daily as we arrive at the Phileleftheros offices.
It is only one of hundreds of football hooligan slogans that Nicosia Municipality has not bothered to remove, despite it being there for at least a year between two secondary schools in the capital. Perhaps because it too forms part of our “culture” – the mentality according to which it is considered “normal” to raise children in a place where citizens wish through a wall that some mother should get cancer because she supports the rival team. A phenomenon so common that it forms an integral part of life in a Cypriot city.
In this country of selective sensitivities, a directive was sent. It was received by the municipalities and communities of the island and was titled: “Strengthening actions to combat antisemitism and incitement to hatred in Cyprus.” The directive was transmitted, as stated, by Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs to the Ministers of Interior and Justice and Public Order, through the President of the Republic’s Diplomatic Office, and concerned the immediate cleaning of slogans found on walls.
A minister of a foreign (and not even European) state gives directives to the President’s Diplomatic Office, and the Interior Ministry considers it an immediate priority to transmit them so that municipalities and communities give priority to his request: to remove from walls slogans that this foreign country judges as “antisemitic” and as “inciting hatred.” As indeed revealed by a document bearing the “State of Israel” seal that circulated on social networks, five works were targeted. Among them, a piece of graffiti with the Palestinian flag on heart-shaped balloons that activists raised into the Limassol sky on the day of the match between Pafos and Maccabi Tel Aviv at the Alphamega Stadium.
Heart-shaped balloons are incitement to hatred, it seems, but the death wishes to mothers of Omonoia supporters are normal. The infant on its knees is incitement to hatred, but the threats against APOEL supports are normal. The word “Genocide” painted on a tin can with blood is incitement to hatred, but swastikas and chants supporting EOKA B are normal.
And life in our (otherwise independent) state continues.
