Maccabi Tel Aviv Hooligans Terrorize Amsterdam and are Painted as Victims
Photograph Source: Michael Leonardi
The ridiculous and twisted western government and media propaganda that is painting the zionist, ethnonationalist, racist and terroristic (many IDF soldiers and reservists and even mossad agents) Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans as somehow victims of antisemitic attacks is beyond the pale of hasbara manipulations of an ever increasingly ignorant and reactionary populace in both the United States and western Europe. This comes with a backdrop of growing repression throughout Europe fueled by the US government’s full and unyielding support for the genocide of Palestinians and its cooperation with the state of Israel in spreading flat out lies to the international community in unison with many of its western European allies.
These so-called “fans” rampaged through the streets of Amsterdam shouting and singing racist slogans and violently attacking local citizens. Eyewitness and video accounts demonstrate that they destroyed property across the historic center, as a violent mob indicative of the vile, genocidal and terroristic country that they represent. They ripped Palestinian flags from buildings and chanted and sang “Death to all Arabs”, “Fuck Palestine”, and “There are no schools in Gaza because all the kids are dead”, as they terrorised the central canal district of this historic port city.
The reaction of western governments and their western media counterparts to the intentionally created mayhem by the Tel Aviv hooligans depicts the very stark reality that any of us hoping for justice for Palestinians or freedom to dissent are up against. Just last week the German Bundestag reaffirmed its recognition of the The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s contorted zionist interpretation of “anti-semitism” as a tool for weaponizing the ongoing crackdown and repression of any voices speaking out against the incredibly well documented genocide that has been unleashed by Israel over the course of the last year.
In a visit to Amsterdam at the beginning of 2024 we witnessed Palestinian solidarity in levels unrivaled by most of the rest of Europe. There were Palestinian flags, literally, everywhere we looked and we witnessed and took part in demonstrations every day starting on New Year’s eve at the city’s official ringing in of 2024. Amsterdam has a diverse population despite it’s right wing and reactionary leadership and many from the Palestiian diaspora that reside here have helped create a culture of solidarity that is unique and strong.
Holland’s political leadership is guided by a band of extreme right wing islamaphobic fascists led by Geert Wilders, one of Europe’s equivalents to the exceptionalist racism embued by the US empire and zionist Israel. As if reading from the script provided them by the criminal Netanyahu government, the condemnation of the residents of Amsterdam for what were painted as “anti-semetic” attacks agaisnt these rampaging zionist ultras rang out like a chorus from across the western world starting with the Dutch king and prime minister. Netanyahu decried the attacks on the “fans” as reminiscent of the pograms of 1938 and warned that it was time to crack down on the “antisemitism” sweeping Eurpoe and his words were echoed incessantly from the whitehouse on down.
President Biden:
“The Antisemitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam are despicable and echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted. We’ve been in touch with Israeli and Dutch officials and appreciate Dutch authorities’ commitment to holding the perpetrators accountable. We must relentlessly fight Antisemitism, wherever it emerges.”
Antony Blinken:
“There is no place is our world for antisemitic attacks like those against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam yesterday. The United States stands with tye Dutch and Israeli governments …”
But this nonsensical propaganda doesn’t stop with the US state department, Netanyahu’s war cabinet and the Knesset, it permeates all western media where an alliance of zionist spokespeople are well positioned and at the beck and call of the genocidal elite to spread disinformation with false cries of antisemitism and the victimhood of the oppressors in a macbre circus of deceit. While Russia has been banned from International sporting events for its invasion of Ukraine, the western world leaders and International sporting bodies have turned a hypocritcal and blind eye to Israel’s genocide, despite growing calls from BDS and others to ban Israel from all international sporting events. https://bdsmovement.net/ban-apartheid-israel-from-sports
In Italy these parasitic excuses for journalists have names, like Enrico Mentana director of national TV station LA 7; Maurizio Molinari former director of La Repubblica who is now a tv pundit constantly on the Italian airwaves and who compared the defense by Amsterdam residents of their city from this zionist mob as the equivalent of “October 7th attacks coming to Europe” as he went so far as to spread lies on national TV about Israeli hostages in the canal district; Davide Parenzo, talk show host and proud member of the Jewish Brigades of Roma which has evolved from its anti-fascist past into a zionist hate group now aligned with neo fascists; and Paolo Mieli former director of Corriere Della Sera who spouts that Gaza was an independent country and independent of Israeli occupation, and a list of others. These ridiculous pillars of the fourth estate in Italy control the reigns of a mass media that is forever retelling the Israeli narrative however Netenyahu wants them to, while glossing over and distracting the masses from the well documented genocide that continues to intensify every single day.
These journalists have names all over the western world and can be found in every NATO and European country, with seemingly more allegiance to upholding the myths and lies of the zionist project and its “final solution” than the interests of their own countries, and just stating this fact is a direct violation of the The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s absurd guidelines on antisemitism. CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, the NYTimes, and the Washington Post all repeated the Netanyahu and US government’s lies on this latest orchestrated distraction to the real story that they refuse to address – over a year of the most brutal genocide of the 21st century paid for and weaponised by the United States and with the full cooperation and help from western countries like Germany, Britain, and Italy, and in the face of the complete impotence of the United Nations and International institutions to do a damn thing to stop it.
Source: Wikimedia - Maccabi Fans Derbi 2
There has never been a harder time to do political and media analysis than right now. Each day, the western establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is ridicule.
The latest example was the reaction late last week to violent clashes in Amsterdam before and after a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local team Ajax.
The ridiculous framing from western politicians, assisted by mainstream media outlets, was that the visiting Israelis were “hunted down” in what supposedly amounted to a “pogrom” by Dutch street gangs, comprising mainly youths of Arab and Muslim heritage.
According to this official narrative, the violence on Amsterdam’s streets was further proof of a rising tide of antisemitism sweeping Europe and imported from the Middle East. More, the attacks were presented as having disturbing echoes of Europe’s Nazi past.
Outgoing US President Joe Biden claimed the Israeli fans faced “despicable” attacks that “echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted”.
Israel, of course, helpfully stoked this idea by promising “emergency flights” to “rescue” its football fans – seeking to evoke memories of its airlifts in the 1980s of Ethiopian Jews to escape famine and reports of persecution, or possibly of the 1975 airlift of US embassy staff from Saigon.
Nazi comparisons
Dutch politicians with their own ugly, racist agendas, as well as the country’s king, rushed to join Israel in fuelling the hysteria. Geert Wilders, the racist, far-right leader of the largest party in the Dutch parliament, said “multicultural scum” had carried out a “Jew hunt”.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, gave her country’s official stamp of approval to portray events in Amsterdam as a potential “second Holocaust”, calling the scenes “horrific and deeply shameful”.
She added: “The outbreak of such violence against Jews crosses all boundaries. There is no justification whatsoever for such violence. Jews must be safe in Europe.”
This is the same Germany where videosdaily show Arab and Muslim demonstrators – in fact, anyone waving a Palestinian flag – being brutally assaulted by German police officers for protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Baerbock seems just fine with crossing those kinds of boundaries – whether it be eradicating the right to protest or fostering a political climate that authorises Islamophobic violence, not from random football hooligans but from functionaries of the German state.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exploited the opening offered by Baerbock to compare the violence in Amsterdam to the Nazi pogroms against Jews in 1938 known as Kristallnacht.
And, of course, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy took his cue from Washington, declaring he was “horrified”. He wrote on X: “I utterly condemn these abhorrent acts of violence and stand with Israeli and Jewish people across the world.”
Celebrating genocide
It is not support for violence, let alone for antisemitism, to point out that this portrayal of events was utterly divorced from reality.
Videos on social media showed the visiting Israeli fans wilfully provoking confrontation as soon as they arrived in Amsterdam.
In the days leading up to the match, they had torn down and burned Palestinian flags in the city centre. They had hunted down Dutch taxi drivers and passers-by suspected of being Arab or Muslim. They had chanted genocidal death threats against Arabs.
At the game itself, they raucously disturbed a minute’s silence in the stadium for the victims of Spain’s floods by singing, “There are no more schools in Gaza because we killed all the kids.”
Spain is apparently reviled by Israeli fans because, in line with international law but against Israel’s wishes, it has recognised Palestine as a state.
Video of the Israeli fans arriving home at Tel Aviv airport showed them unbowed. They chanted the same genocidal songs: “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs. Ole ole, ole ole ole. Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”
Like Wilders, the Israeli fans had used their time in Amsterdam to vent their bigotry at “multicultural scum”.
Even after the match, when they felt the backlash from incensed local residents, it was clear that Israeli fans were initiating the violent clashes as much as getting caught up in them.
A video shot by a young Dutch Ajax fan following the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans as they rampaged through Amsterdam after the match went viral on social media. It shows a large gang of Israelis prowling through Amsterdam armed with batons, throwing stones and aggressively confronting local police.
Astonishingly, Dutch police are shown either absent or keeping their distance for much of the time as the Israelis look for trouble. Notably, not one Israeli fan has been arrested.
Islamophobic bile
The western media’s coverage of these events was as strangely deferential to these genocide-inciting thugs as the Dutch police’s handling of their violence.
Had visiting British fans behaved this way in Amsterdam, the police would have made mass arrests immediately.
Similarly, had British hooligans found themselves on the receiving end of violence in such circumstances, the British media would have shown little sympathy.
The clashes would rightly have been understood as ugly tribalism, a not-unfamiliar sight at football matches.
The difference here was that the clashes unleashed by the Israeli fans’ provocations had a much larger context than simple antipathy between rival teams. It was fuelled by tensions surrounding horrifying events taking place on the international stage.
There is nothing shocking or especially sinister about Dutch fans, especially those with Arab or Muslim heritage, responding with their own violence to Israeli youths – some of them presumably fresh from military service in Gaza – trying to export their own genocidal anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incitement to Amsterdam.
All the more so when the Israeli fans were amplifying the bigoted, Islamophobic bile of leading Dutch politicians.
It should have been even less surprising given the wider context: that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were celebrating in someone else’s city the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza, among Dutch citizens who don’t view Arab life as worthless or Muslims as “human animals”.
Sadly, that is exactly how the western establishment has viewed Palestinians over the past 13 months, as Israel has slaughtered them in the ever-shrinking concentration camp that is Gaza.
Paradoxically, it was left to an Israeli politician, Ofer Cassif, who belongs to the tiny Hadash party, the only joint Jewish-Arab party in the Israeli parliament, to bring some perspective.
He wrote on X: “[Israeli] fans go on a violent rampage, carry out beatings, tear up Palestinian flags in the streets as if they were an occupying force, and shout Nazi slogans in favour of the extermination of a nation [Palestinians], and then whine when the situation degenerates into complete chaos and violence returns to them like a boomerang.”
‘Victims of pogroms’
As ever, the establishment media dutifully regurgitated the official presentation of events in Amsterdam. Its reporting is best characterised as industrial-scale trolling.
Headlines like this one from the New York Times took it as read that the Israeli fans were victims of antisemitism who needed saving: “Antisemitic attacks prompt emergency flights for Israeli soccer fans.”
Other outlets uncritically reported unhinged statements from Dutch officials: “We failed Jewish community during football fan attacks as we did under the Nazis, says Dutch king.”
Or, as with this Reuters headline, the media used quotation marks to justify peddling disinformation: “Amsterdam bans protests after ‘antisemitic squads’ attack Israeli soccer fans.”
The BBC, which trumpets its dedication to accurate reporting with its Verify service, didn’t bother to verify images from Amsterdam it used to supposedly illustrate attacks on Israeli fans.
In fact, as the Dutch photographer who shot an image used by the BBC pointed out, it showed the exact opposite: Israeli youths beating up a local Dutch resident.
The misuse of these images – disinformation – was repeated by CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and other major outlets, as all raced to bolster the fake news narrative being imposed by the western political class.
The photographer has since demanded apologies and corrections from media organisations that used her footage incorrectly and without authorisation. By Saturday, she had received only one – from the German news programme Tagesschau.
Wellspring of thuggery
The degree to which the establishment media intentionally sought to deceive audiences to promote a distorted official narrative was illustrated by Sky News’ coverage.
Initially, before the politicians had had a chance to frame events more conveniently for their agenda, Sky’s journalist in Amsterdam reported the violence as being initiated by the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans – a club already notorious for the aggressive anti-Arab racism of its supporters.
Her report was soon pulled, however, as Israel, Wilders, Baerbock, Biden and Lammy reformulated the narrative in terms of antisemitism and pogroms. A note from the channel’s editors claimed the video “didn’t meet Sky News’ standards for balance and impartiality”.
A new, heavily re-edited video was posted that played down the Israeli fans’ violence and foregrounded Dutch politicians claiming the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were victims of unprovoked, antisemitic attacks. A Maccabi fan was even given space to suggest the clashes recalled Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
In fact, there was a parallel with 7 October but not in the sense suggested by the Israeli fan or western politicians.
Media coverage of Hamas’ attack 13 months ago has consistently scrubbed out any of the preceding context: decades of illegal, violent Israeli military occupation of Gaza; a 17-year Israeli siege that denied the Palestinian population there the essentials of life; and many months of Israeli snipers executing and crippling Palestinians who tried to protest against their imprisonment.
The Amsterdam violence was similarly decontextualised.
The media’s uncritical acceptance of this new, overtly politicised narrative paved the way for Amsterdam’s mayor to then impose a martial law-style crackdown on protest.
Predictably, the city’s police then used the ban as a pretext to arrest anti-genocide protesters en masse in Amsterdam on Sunday when residents came out to denounce the provocations and genocidal incitement by Israeli fans over the preceding days.
Conveniently for western politicians and their accomplices in the establishment media, they have provided themselves with yet another opportunity to present protests in the West against Israel’s genocide as inherently dangerous to the safety of Jews.
European antisemitism can be snuffed out, so their logic goes, only by stamping out the right to protest against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children.
There is a double deception being perpetrated here. That Jews were attacked in Amsterdam for being Jews rather than for being Israeli football thugs all too visibly trying to provoke confrontation.
And that the only proper response is to further accommodate not just Israeli football fans’ thuggery but the wellspring of that thuggery: Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.
Israelis, not Jews
Western politicians and the establishment media, meanwhile, have made it all too evident that they share the racist sentiments of Israel and its proudly racist, thuggish football emissaries.
Contrary to what western politicians and the media would have us believe, “taking offence” isn’t something reserved only for Israelis and for Zionist Jews. Other groups have sensitivities, too, even if western politicians and media systematically denigrate those sensitivities.
Lost once again in the political and media frenzy is the fact that people can feel angry towards Israel and its citizens, especially when they glorify the mass slaughter of Palestinian children, without hating Jews.
Israel, after all, has been carrying out a live-streamed genocide for 13 months, backed by almost its entire population. Anyone opposed to genocide – sadly, not enough of us, it seems – probably isn’t feeling too warmly towards Israel right now. That is a moral position. Confusing it with antisemitism is pure sophistry.
The sophistry is dangerous, to boot. It creates the very reality it claims to be trying to stop. It suggests there is some connection between being Jewish and supporting genocide. That truly is antisemitism.
In echoing Israel’s own mischievous conflations of Israeliness and Jewishness, western politicians and the establishment media have helped to intensify tribalisms that can only lead to damaging polarisation, violence and repression.
Some Europeans fete Israel, and are willing to indulge its genocide, because they wrongly imagine that this is the best way to protect Jews. Other Europeans, though small in number, end up blaming Jews for Israel’s genocidal actions.
Both of those sides are living in an entirely false and anti-democratic reality, one created for them by the deceptions of western politicians and the establishment media.
Those who reject either position – a sane, embattled majority – suffer constant gaslighting and find themselves lumped in with the genuine antisemites.
The BBC’s reporter in Amsterdam replicated precisely this type of confused narrative on Friday night, arguing that Israeli fans had been attacked for their “nationality”, while also echoing her colleagues in arguing that this amounted to antisemitism.
But “Jewish” is very obviously not a nationality (whatever Israel may claim), and loudly cheering on Israel’s Zionist ideology of Jewish supremacism over Middle Eastern, Arab populations is a political act – and at the moment, complicity in a monstrous genocide. It is not victimhood or “innocence”.
Burying the story
There are two, related reasons why the media have been so ready to whip up yet another antisemitism furore out of thin air.
The media have blown up this football hooliganism story into a major international scandal, with front pages concerned for the welfare of violent Israeli football fans, at the same time as they ignore the latest chapter in Israel’s horrifying, 13-month genocide in Gaza.
Israel is currently carrying out the so-called “Generals’ Plan“: bombing and starving Palestinian men, women and children in northern Gaza to force out the 400,000 of them who have been living amid its ruins.
Israel has said this population will never be allowed to return home. In other words, it is formally announcing that these Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed.
Any Palestinian who refuses to move into the concentration camp Israel has made of southern Gaza – one constantly bombed too – faces being executed as a “terrorist”.
One might imagine these horrors upon horrors would be a major news story. Not so. Nowadays, there is always some other story, however unimportant, to take precedence.
On Friday night the BBC dedicated not one second to the genocide in Gaza because the corporation, like the rest of the media, was too busy focusing on the suffering in Amsterdam of Israeli football hooligans. Those fans, remember, had threatened to murder Arabs and Muslims in Europe, to replicate what has been happening in Gaza.
The media’s priorities here are beyond obscene.
Stoking hatred
What the coverage is seeking to do is not just bury the Gaza genocide and turn Israel and Israelis into the victims even as they commit genocide.
It is also intended to stoke Islamophobic hatred towards Arabs and Muslims for being present in Europe, and for insisting that we not forget about Gaza. It is to import into the West the same racist assumptions and discourse that led to Israel’s genocide.
Western establishments have willed this outcome. They are enabling it through their rhetoric and actions.
What possible justification can there be for banning Russian teams and sportspeople from international competitions the moment Moscow invaded Ukraine, when Israeli teams like Tel Aviv Maccabi are still being welcomed in Europe after 13 months of genocide?
How is it possible that fans of Israeli teams not only find themselves embraced by western leaders but treated as victims when they parade their anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigotry – and their glorification of genocide – in European cities?
The Israeli national team is due to play France in a Uefa Nations League match in Paris on 14 November. Clashes are all too predictable. They could be easily averted by imposing a ban – similar to the Russian one – on Israeli involvement in international competitions.
What the coverage demonstrates so clearly is that the aim of leading western politicians, aided by the establishment media, is to recast Europe’s Arab and Muslim populations as a threat, as barbaric, as antisemitic, as impossible to integrate into a supposed western “civilisation”.
In other words, the transparent goal is to turn Europe’s Arab and Muslim communities into Europe’s Jews of the 1930s – reviled, distrusted and seen as a menace.
By supporting every monstrous Israeli crime, by pandering to Israel’s genocide-inciting football hooligans, western politicians and the media know they are bound to inflame tensions, especially with domestic populations of Arab and Muslim heritage. That is what they wish to do.
The aim is to promote the demonisation of Europe’s Arab and Muslim minorities.
Worthless lives
We know where European bigotry towards Jews led. To the gas chambers.
And increasingly we can see precisely where western politicians and the establishment media want to take their publics in endlessly promoting Israeli-style bigotry towards Arabs and Muslims.
Already western establishments have rationalised their active complicity in the genocidal murder of Palestinians in Gaza, and the destruction of south Lebanon, by supplying weapons and diplomatic immunity.
Already they have cast Israel’s blockade of aid and the mass starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza as “self-defence”, and as a “legitimate war” to eliminate Hamas.
Already they have insisted that the lives of Palestinians are so worthless, so insignificant, that they can be butchered in their tens of thousands – or, more likely, hundreds of thousands – in revenge for the deaths of just over 1,000 Israelis on 7 October 2023.
Already they have inverted reality to depict genocidal Israel as the innocent victim and the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed and maimed in its slaughterous rampage as the guilty party.
None of this has happened by accident. A mood is being cynically cultivated in the West, just as it was in parts of Europe in the 1930s, to suggest that some groups are sub-human, that some minorities must be expelled, or rounded up and disappeared.
That is the proper context for understanding what really happened in Amsterdam last week, as the police treated violent Israeli hooligans with kid gloves and the politicians and media recast the villains as victims.
If our politicians and media are really worried about Europe’s not-too-distant Nazi past, they would be far better advised to stop stoking an all-too-real new antisemitism: incitement against Arab and Muslim minorities.
The darkest days in Europe’s history are indeed back with us. But not because a bunch of Israeli football hooligans ended up receiving as much violence as they tried to dish out.
It is back because the West is all too ready to embrace Israel’s anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigotry. Day by day we inch ever closer to renewed pogroms.
Not against Jews or Israelis, who enjoy the support and protection of western politicians, media and police. Rather those in most danger are the “new Jews”, the Middle Eastern populations those same politicians, media and police constantly vilify, insult, incite against and assault.
Western racism never went away. Europe’s ruling class just found a new target, and a new scapegoat.
The dark clouds from Amsterdam are gathering across Europe. Authoritarianism and fascism are once again in the ascendant. It is those trying to keep us tethered to reality who will be first in the firing line.
Jonathan Cook
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).
