Mick Hartley

Some of those involved in last November's "Jew-hunt" in Amsterdam, when fans of visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv were targeted by a violent mob, are currently on trial in Holland. You won't read about it here, but still…it matters, as an insight into the vicious antisemitism now commonplace in many European cities. Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

They called their rampage a ‘Jew hunt’. They incited each other to violence, saying ‘[we] may never get this chance [again] to beat up some fucking Jews’. They called for a city-wide ‘rage’ against ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’. They damned the Jews as a ‘cowardly’ people. They shared information about the arrival of a ‘train full of Jews’ and said everyone should be there to greet it, because ‘we have to make those cancer Jews feel what they did to our brothers’. The train could be late, one of them joked, because it might be a ‘special train’ laid on by Hitler, ‘with gas for [the Jews]’.

Where were these racist obscenities uttered? Where was this violent hunt for Jews carried out? Germany in 1938, perhaps? No, it was in Amsterdam, last year. This was the jodenjacht of November 2024 when visiting Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv were ‘hunted’ by mobs of mostly Arab men in the streets of Amsterdam. More details about this pogrom emerged during the latest court cases last week, and they heap yet further shame on the pogrom deniers of the Western left who insisted these were just street clashes, not a Jew hunt.

Much of the reporting here blamed the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, of course. Football fans and Jews: the perfect villains.

Western leftists devoted the same amount of moral energy to denying the truth of the Amsterdam pogrom as they normally devote to uncovering racism absolutely everywhere. The same people who for years decried everything from white women wearing their hair in cornrows to the scuffing of a page in the Koran as ‘racism’ were now shrugging their shoulders over a literal Jew hunt. ‘Maybe the Maccabi fans brought it on themselves’, they essentially said.

To the rational observer, it was clear from the start that what happened in Amsterdam was a pogrom. The first ‘trial of the Jew hunters’ took place in December. Five men were convicted of violence. One had boasted in the WhatsApp group about joining the ‘Jew hunt’ – his words. He later kicked Maccabi fans and grabbed one by the throat. Another described his victims as ‘cowardly [Jews]’. The men, along with around 900 others, were part of the virtual chat which, the court heard, had shared information for the purposes of ‘violence against people of Jewish descent and / or supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv’. Four of the five men were jailed, one was given a community order….

And yet still leftists said it wasn’t a pogrom. Still we saw headlines like ‘The pogrom in Amsterdam that wasn’t’. Still we were told that the Maccabi fans had it coming because they yelled offensive slogans and tore down a Palestine flag. These fans brought the ‘spirit of Israeli fascism’ to the Netherlands, one observer said, and folk in Amsterdam just fought back. It was victim-blaming on steroids, as grotesque as when anti-Semites said the Jews of Germany brought Kristallnacht on themselves by being such economic disruptors. Nothing better sums up the turbo-smug racial paternalism of the modern left than the fact that gangs of men said ‘We carried out a Jew hunt!’ and these people essentially replied: ‘No you didn’t. You were just protesting. Bless.’ They don’t only know better than Jews, you see – they know better than Arabs, too.