Oh the irony – football hooligans celebrate genocide and get a beating
JVL Introduction
Gideon Levy pulls no punches in his reaction to the violence in Amsterdam last week.
Far right racist football hooligans from Israeli team Maccabee Tel Aviv, in the Netherlands for a “friendly” match against hosts Ajax, spend two days making mayhem in the city centre, celebrating the slaughter in Gaza and attacking pro-Palestinian locals, especially those of North African origin (like my Moroccan in-laws – Ed). There is a reaction from Amsterdammers who don’t take kindly to thugs inciting genocide on their streets. A few people get hurt.
The Zionist propaganda machine goes into overdrive and lo! The world is told that Muslims are hunting down Jews in a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust. Anti-Jewish “pogroms” are going on right here and now in a European capital city!
Meanwhile, no one is sending military planes to rescue the Palestinian victims of daily pogroms on the West Bank, let alone of the murderous 401 days pulverisation of Gaza.
Levy concludes by noting the consequences for Jews of Israel’s war. “Every Israeli abroad will be a target for hatred and violence from now on. That’s what happens when you kill almost 20,000 children, carry out ethnic cleansing and destroy the Gaza Strip. It’s a little quirk of the world; it doesn’t like those who commit these sorts of crimes.”
NWI/LL
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Sun 10 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
The Amsterdam Attack Shows Israelis' Denial of the Reality They Created
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The British Foreign Secrterary, David Lammy rushed to.express his support for the Israeli ‘victims’ in Amsterdam. He said:
‘I was pleased to have the opportunity to express my horror at the abhorrent acts of violence against the notorious racist hooligan supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv.
I was so perturbed by it that I took time off my continuing acts of support for Israel’s unspeakable war crimes against the Palestinians and my denial of their genocide in order to express my solidarity with Israeli citizens.
We know Israeli citizens have been steadfast over more that 60 years in their treatment of Palestinians as sub-humans, their illegal settlements in occupied territories, their systems of apartheid, their bombings of civilians, their use of starvation as an act of war, their invasion of foreign territories, and now their blatant ethic cleansing and land grabs. We should admire their dedication while continuing to express our horror at any abhorrent violence against them.
And of course, oppostion to Israel is EXACTLY the same as antisemitism. I used to be deluded and think it was wilfully dangerous to confuse hatred for what people do with hatred for what they are. I know differently now since I’ve become Foreign Secretary.
(When Israel announced it was about to ban UNRWA from.the occupied territories, Lammy – and Starmer- could only express ‘concern’. Now he’s suddenly able to ‘utterly condemn’.)
If an Israeli football team plays in every capital city with this result the Israeli state could succeed in destabilising the rest of the world? First they came for …. Then they came for us.
IN CASE
YOU MISSED IT
The BBC ran a headline
About Israeli football fans
Being attacked in Amsterdam
Which was shown to be a nonsense
So the BBC switched their headline
To a report repeating unverified
Accusations from others
About Israeli football fans
Being attacked in Amsterdam
In fairness, to the BBC
All Western media ran
The (same) story of the story
Which was the opposite of reality
Israelis need to realise that they are universally reviled for war crimes so can not strut around with racial arrogance when abroad. Note that no Dutch have been arrested
I really don’t understand why Naomi is so impressed with Gideon Levy’s article. It is one of his worst efforts. It begins:
‘An ugly, criminal pogrom against Israeli soccer fans took place in Amsterdam on Thursday.’ No it didn’t. What set in was a reaction to 2 days of racist rioting in which Arabs were physically attacked and vile racist chants like ‘Death to the Arabs’ were chanted.
Instead of whatabboutery Levy could have laid into the disgusting comparisons with Kristallnacht, as if Germany’s Jews had been chanting ‘death to the Germans’ when the mobs retaliated.
Pogroms are where a particular racial/ethnic group are attack because of their ethnicity. Israel’s fans were attacked because of what they’d done and because they were a bloc quite understandably they were hunted down.
They got a taste of their medicine and of course Starmer etc. wept tears over their plight whilst ignoring what caused it
Levy might “pull no punches” but he also accepts as fact that It was a pogrom.
As our headline is meant to imply Sid, neither we nor Levy “accept as fact that it was a pogrom”. His opening paragraph is meant to be darkly ironic.
This constant bias can only increase popular antisemitism in western countries, if the deluded supporters of Israel could only see it. However I’m opposed to the undercurrent on our side of collapsing ‘provocation’ into ‘violence’ which then justifies ‘getting a beating’ from people we agree with. This is (among other things) classic masculinist thinking which I’m surprised to see from sisters NWI and LL! Especially as I remember arguing the opposite alongside one of them when taking part in a counter-demo against Zionists some years ago. The situation has of course totally changed since then as genocide is openly taking place in front of our eyes…
But this recent report sent by Graeme A from Martin J, a militant antifa in Amsterdam, seems to me to have the ring of truth to it:
‘What happened in Amsterdam Thursday night?
It was an alarming escalation of violence that erupted out of tensions/anger/pain about the situation in Palestine, which is increasing and intensifying since months here in Amsterdam.
What happened Thursday night was not football hooliganism as reaction to the disgusting provocations of Maccabi supporters, but organised mob attacks that followed public calls (on social media) for a violent riot against Israeli supporters. Youth groups, taxi drivers, hospitality workers, activists etc. made a coordinated effort to chase and attack Israeli supporters throughout the city …with surreal scenes of people being stopped on the street and asked for their passports while nearby others were chased through the streets, beaten up, thrown in the canal and only let out of the water after being forced to shout “Free Palestine”.
The disgusting actions of Maccabi fans have influenced and escalated the violence, but this is no justification for what happened.
And any comparison with the “Kristallnacht” is ridiculous, unhelpful and equally nauseating as comparing the atrocities in Gaza to the Holocaust …
[cut to our limit of 300 words – admin]
As the stories are disentangled I hope that paper copies are being kept to show history that there wasn’t only one ‘truth’. The ease with which Netanyahu’s machine manipulates news stories to show only one victim is terrifying.
It is a small sign of hope that articles like this can still be published in an Israeli newspaper. After Trump’s election has given strength to the far right everywhere, I wonder how long it will be before Netanyahu decides that voices such as those of Ha’aretz, B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence should no longer be tolerated.
Oh the irony. Oh the hypocrsy. Establishment politicians and establishent media have been repeating the regular big lie that Israelis are unpopular wherever they go because of ‘antisemitism’ and not because of the fact of the Israeli genocide of the indigenous people whose land they have taken.
What is it with David Lammy? His immediate knee-jerk reaction to interpret the troubles as antisemitism displays a disturbing ingrained prejudice and political bias. What happened to the sensible approach of reviewing the facts before making public judgements? I am lost for words at the demise of the Labour Party and the quality of MPs and Ministers.
Terry Rees
@Amanda Sebestyen 11th November 2024 at 07:58
A Pogrom on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans by “criminal Jewhunting anti-semites” : really?
How dare you – four days after the horrible events – in all honesty, try to frame a one-sided violent tsunami of a Maccabi Tel Aviv originated Jew-supremacists, forming a mob of racist and fascist thugs, taken to the streets of Amsterdam after leaving the Stadion and expressing once again, in high volume community-choirs yells, of their unconditional joy and unabated satisfaction of the IDF having massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians during the past year alone..
Racist chants from the totally unleashed mob, that loudly and proudly yelled, that “Gaza does not need no schools anymore, for all the children are dead now, oleh-oleh-oleh”.
The very same mob, that – having molested a Moroccan taxi-driver – subsequently did weaponize themselves with iron poles, stones and wooden sticks from a building site, which projectiles had been whirled to the police and innocent bystanders.
The very same mob, tearing Palestinian flags from buildings and burning them, and trying to enter some of these building by force.
Many of those thugs might have been themselves perpetrators of the war-crimes that they were celebrating in Amsterdam, because many of them had the right age, to have even recently been serving within the very IDF ranks, performing the onslaught on innocent Palestinians, that are being killed by the tens-of-thousands and rounded up in a nazi style exercise of Umvolkung : Replacing the original population of autochthonous Palestinians with allochthonous Jews to install a mono-ethnic Jewish state.
And no, the concept for the tactics of settler colonialisation does not originate from around 1948, but had been encompassed from the times that Herzl wrote in his diary, that the Palestinians should be spirited over the border.
People in Holland are very straight forward and to the point. I like that, But others do not seem able to accept that. Which is their problem. It is frustrating to witness politicians to do their thing, take actions that are worlds apart from what we the peaceloving people want. We need more than just a vote every 5 years or so. Going forwards, we need a veto, so we can prevent things like war-mongering, the violence, the killing. We need to strip the US, UK or that there terror state of their veto. The latter has been getting off scotfree for too long. I am very very upset and angry.
The incident on Thursday is very worrying. It is obvious now that any Israeli group be it sporting or otherwise is a useful tool in any country to provoke a response by Palestinian and Lebanese sympathisers with the result that governments and police cracks down on any support for Palestine. What a clever move orchestrated I believe by the ‘Israeli ministry of Truth ‘ (1984)
The subtext that the Jewish people “had it coming” and caused the violence is what terrifies Jewish people around the world. Chants and pulling down a flag are bad behaviours. They are NOT on the same level as organized violent hate crimes to “hunt” and “beat” people because of their religion.
Come on now, in a court of law “he taunted me” is not a defence for premeditated beatings. To present the chants as “incendiary” makes it sound like Jews are responsible for this.
Yes, the chants are wrong and gross. But no excuse for violent premeditated hate crimes, period. I can’t imagine another minority being subtly blamed like this (women, people of color), but for Jews this is a trope as old as time.
Further, according to the Wall Street Journal, these attacks were indeed premeditated
The Grayzone posted the following article yesterday:
Viral video reveals Israeli hooligans attacked Dutch police while instigating Amsterdam unrest
A November 8 video report by a 16-year-old who publishes YouTube reports under the moniker “Bender” provided extensive on-the-ground footage of a mob of armed Tel Aviv Maccabi ultras hunting victims, throwing metal poles at police vehicles, threatening journalists, and even being detained after attacking undercover police officers.
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/11/10/video-israeli-hooligans-attacked-police-amsterdam/
And I have no doubt whatsoever that they provoked it deliberately.
And Jonathan Cook posted an excellent and insightful piece earlier today:
The West buries a genocide – by making victims of Israel’s football thugs
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-11-11/genocide-victims-israel-football-thugs/
And as with A/S black op smear campaign against Jeremy and the Left, and the demonisation of the anti-genocide marchers and the student protests, the message to Jews around the world is that no-where is safe – “Just look what happened in Amsterdam!” – so come live in Israel, the promised land.
The zionists have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about creating worry and concern and fear in Jewish people with their lies and falsehoods.
However vile these hooligans were, the main steam media “journalists” are much worse. They do not have the excuse of historical trauma or systematic brainwashing from birth. They are just greedy shameless, erm, – no – I won’t insult the oldest profession. Sociopaths. And talentless. They just read the script written for them.
It is utterly bizarre that racist, Far Right football hooligans, notorious in their own country, by all accounts, can be portrayed as innocent victims.
I’m sure Italy’s Ultras, Celtic’s ICF and Millwall fans have never been portrayed as the victims in their violent histories.
To portray Maccabee Tel Aviv thugs as innocent victims must be some sort of pinnacle of achievement for Israeli propagandists.
Well, the lesson that every football hooligan around the world can learn from this incident is that if he wishes to get away with his violence, all he needs to do is to wrap himself in an Israeli flag, and if a person he hits whacks him back, just cry out ‘anti-Semitism!’, and he’ll receive the wholehearted sympathy of every major Western politician and media outlet.
So it’s bad of Israeli football fans to sing patriotic songs, but it’s ok for pro Palestinians to go round tearing down hostage posters and intimidating Jews.