Mick Hartley

Danny Cohen in the Telegraph – ‘Jew hunts’ are returning to the streets of Europe:

We now know more details of what took place in Holland and the planning that went into it. The messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp were used by pro-Palestinian men to organise a “Jew hunt” or “Jodenjacht” in the city.

The attacks were well-organised, with taxi drivers responding to calls to mobilise and help identify the whereabouts of Jews.

One message in a WhatsApp group called “Community Centre” thanked a member of the chat in Arabic for providing information about the movements of Jews, commenting further in Dutch “bro your tip was worth gold”. Ugly, racist violence followed. Jews were beaten, kicked and humiliated on the streets of a major European city.

It would be some solace to believe that these horrific events in Amsterdam were an isolated incident, but this is not the case. Accounts of violent racism against Jews have appeared across Europe over the past few days.

In Germany, a group of Jewish schoolchildren were attacked by a pro-Palestinian mob armed with knives and sticks. The teenagers from Makkabi Berlin’s youth football team said they were “hunted down” by a gang of Arab youths after a match. The attackers shouted “Free Palestine” and “F— Jews” before threatening them with weapons.

It is a painful irony that the club these children play for was set up in the 1970s by Holocaust survivors as the capital’s first Jewish sports’ club since the end of the Third Reich.

In Belgium, police arrested five men as part of a pro-active effort to stop a suspected “Jew hunt”. Snapchat accounts were used by local men seeking to organise attacks on Jews. Their plan was to target Antwerp’s Jewish quarter. We must be grateful to police in the city for their timely intervention which disrupted another outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.

The use of the phrase “Jew hunt” to target Jews is particularly disturbing, with its echoes of the most traumatic and deadly period in Jewish history.

It has been used by historians to describe Nazi attempts to search out and kill Jews during the Holocaust. “Jew hunts” were especially prevalent after the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Poland, with the Nazis seeking out any remaining Jews, of any age, who had escaped their genocidal plans.

We haven't, as yet, had the same level of pre-planned "Jew hunts" here – just the occasional sporadic outbursts of violence, plus of course the steady drumbeat of the endless "from the river to the sea" pro-Palestinian marches, with their clear antisemitic undertones. No reason to pretend it couldn't happen in the UK.