Mick Hartley

The Birmingham Maccabi Tel Aviv saga gets worse:

A senior police officer has apologised to representatives of the Jewish community after wrongly telling parliament they had agreed with the controversial decision to ban Israeli football fans from a game in Birmingham.

Mike O’Hara, the West Midlands assistant chief constable, claimed officers had consulted with Jewish representatives before concluding it was too “high risk” for Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters to attend a fixture against Aston Villa last month.

He repeatedly told the home affairs select committee on Monday that Birmingham Jews said they did not want Maccabi fans coming to the city. He said this was communicated directly to police and included in its risk analysis.

But he was lying.

The claims were untrue. O’Hara has now written to representatives of the community in Birmingham saying he “apologises”, that it was “not my intention” to mislead and that he accepted that no community members had told police they supported the ban. He said he would update MPs as soon as possible.

One source who saw the letter alleged that it was a particularly “twisted” distortion of the facts because consultation with Birmingham Jews had been so minimal. The source said the force appeared to be using the community as a shield to avoid scrutiny.

There’s more – apart, that is, from the stuff we already know, about the Dutch police saying that the force justified the ban using false “intelligence” about the disorder in Amsterdam.

The force also referred to a fictitious match between West Ham and Maccabi, a claim so inaccurate that MPs queried whether it had been generated as a result of an artificial intelligence hallucination.

What? Police intelligence said the game took place on November 9, 2023, and led to a 1–0 scoreline. In fact, the sides had never played. They’d been trawling social media and got confused. “Police intelligence” would appear to be an oxymoron.

The apology would deepen concerns over a decision which, No 10 said, excluded Israeli fans “simply because of who they are”.

Other critics have accused the force of compromising its neutrality and pandering to the loudest voices including the local pro-Gaza independent MP Ayoub Khan. Lord Cryer, a Labour peer, described the ban in parliament as “an evil plot” by “a bunch of bigots and racists” to turn Birmingham “into a no-go area for Jewish people”.

Seems about right.