“I knew by speaking out that I would get a backlash,” Joe Jacobson says. The Wycombe Wanderers defender, who is one of a handful of Jewish footballers playing in England, is speaking with depressing honesty. Jacobson, who hopes to lead Wycombe out at Wembley when they face fellow League One side Peterborough in the EFL Trophy final on Sunday afternoon, was targeted after posting on social media about Hamas attacking Israel on 7 October.
There was nothing particularly controversial about the 37-year-old Welshman’s comments. Jacobson simply questioned images of people in London and Sydney appearing to celebrate the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. “We got a few comments back,” he says. “And then about a month later I started getting a lot of messages. There had been a march in High Wycombe. I think it may have been a Free Palestine march, but it was peaceful. But people associated my earlier tweet with that march, even though you can see the timeframe is six weeks earlier.
