Making up a pogrom will not protect Jews – or even Israel
JVL Introduction
This is a deeply disturbing story about a serious antisemitic attack in Stockholm that went viral on social media and in the Israeli mainstream just a few days after the events involving Israel football fans in Amsterdam. Except there was no such attack in Stockholm. It was all a fabrication, apparently sparked by one far-right activist on a bicycle.
As David Stavrou writes in the Ha’aretz article we reproduce below:
A ceremony that never took place was invented, groups of Jews who were attacked were created ex nihilo, one flag became many flags, and on some accounts, it was no longer flags that were thrown into the freezing water of the Baltic Sea, but Jews. Anger boiled over, and there were thousands of shares and comments in groups with hundreds of thousands of members.
Israeli media willingly disseminated and embellished the falsehoods.
Stavrou tells the tale with some incredulity, apparently surprised that there are right-wing antisemites like the activist at the centre of the story waging war on Israel’s behalf. Surely he is aware of countless examples of such people, pleased to advocate for a Jewish state where Jews can go, rather than living in countries like Sweden (or the UK, France, US etc)!?
He also gives far too much credence to the Israeli version of the Amsterdam events, mistakenly accepting that clashes between pro-Palestinian locals and racist Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans were akin to anti-Jewish pogroms. Nonetheless, the story he tells is well worth reading.
LL
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Thu 12 Dec 2024. Read the original here.
The Far-right Activist Who Sparked an Imaginary Pogrom in Stockholm
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There is no shame any more, if there ever was. Any lie, however exteme and however inciteful, may be told in the single cause of complete victory. Pity, empathy, simple compassion, have been washed away in a tide of malice and hatred, and that savage tide is ruining lives for no reason that makes any sense to anybody who knows how to reason. The spitefulness, selfishness, and deviousness of the whole Zionist enterprise is shown up in stories like this. The tragedy is that the story this story is about is the only one which the world will hear.
To complete the picture….last Wednesday’s Guardian, in a report of the Amsterdam public prosecutor’s call for a two year sentence to be passed on one of seven men charged with public violence, summed up the events the Netanyahu government called an antisemitic “pogrom” in this way: “The attacks came after two days of skirmishes in which Maccabi fans chanted anti-Arab songs, vandalised a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag.”
Gone are the references to antisemitism, gone are the references to the Maccabi thugs as victims. Indeed, even the prosecutor is reported as saying, ““In this case, there was no evidence of … a terrorist intent and the violence was not motivated by antisemitic sentiment. The violence was influenced by the situation in Gaza, not by antisemitism.”
While this ‘correction’ is to be welcomed after the Guardian’s initially misleading report, the same issue of the Guardian, on its sports page, reported that an investigation into a member of Arsenal’s staff, kitman Mark Bonnick, involved what the paper referred to as antisemitic remarks. One of these remarks was to the effect that Israel suffers from a “persecution complex”. Hardly an antisemitic statement – just a bit naive: Bonnick should have said that the Israeli authorities encourage a “persecution complex” – it’s an essential part of their armory.