The UK is now willing to undermine British institutions to protect Israel
JVL Introduction
The hypocrisy surrounding the political and media faux frenzy over Birmingham Police Chief’s decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the game against Aston Villa last October is nauseating.
Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Majar pulls no punches in his short article.
He insists correctly that “was not a scandal involving corruption, brutality or police cover-ups but a risk assessment”.
Errors were made in the assessment but there is no evidence of bad faith, conspiracy or prejudice let alone antisemitism.
Football fans have frequently been banned in preventive measures because of their reputation for violence. This has long been accepted as normal public-order policing.
“No ministers have cried discrimination. No police chiefs have been hounded. No national crisis has been declared.”
But because an Israeli club was involved, the UK establishment rose in a fury to protect it, even if it meant challenging its own institutions.
Hypocrisy and double standards…
RK
This article was originally published by Al Jazeera on Mon 19 Jan 2026. Read the original here.
The UK is now willing to undermine British institutions to protect Israel
British football fans are regularly banned without scandal. Why is it that Israeli fans cannot be?
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Excellent analysis and damning, as well as disturbing, conclusion. To what lengths will the British Establishment go to defend Israeli genocide?
I welcome this article. The opinions expressed in it are factually based.
The efforts of our government, official opposition and mainstream media have been biased, actually unbalanced, hypocritical and vindictive.
Overweaning efforts are put in to supporting the truly terrorist State of Israel in its continuing genocide of indigenous people, whilst British state nastiness is deployed against protest about the genocide, in the process doing down our own people and our normal public institutions.
I keep expecting Shabana Mahmood to be the next defector to Reform UK. She is truly dreadful. Seizing the power to sack a chief constable puts that decision, in effect, into the hands of the Prime Minister.
I quote from this article: “Anti-Semitism is real, dangerous and rising globally, and it must be confronted seriously.” Is this really so? Please can it provide evidence for this as compared to say, racism towards, black people, or Arabic people?
If a defined group of people – Israelis who are virtually all Jewish – publicly and aggressively, express hostility towards a group defined by their ethnicity, skin colour or culture, i.e. the Palestinians – is not that racist?
It seems to me, that Israel has very cleverly created a hierarchy of racism, with Jewish people as the greatest victims of racism and who are protected against all criticism, or serious political analysis of their actions. Israel is not only at war to protect its land from encroachment; Israel has been allowing violence and blatant theft of Palestinian farmland by Settlers for decades and with no consequences. If, as it appears to be, that the current prolonged Israeli/Settler violence is a convenience to further a plan to colonise the entire area for Jewish-only people – that is racist!
And, in response to the quotation above, it seems to me that the reported vicious and sadistic cruelties being inflicted by Israelis on Palestinians unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner, suggests not simply a colonial war, but a modern racist holocaust – albeit, on a smaller scale than that of the Nazis in the 1940s – and should be called out, as such.
The report by Sir Andy Cooke HM, Chief Inspector of Constabulary, is a pretty strange document. He criticises the West Midlands Police primarily for a ‘lack of balance’ by which he means holding the Maccabi fans mainly responsible for the violence at Amsterdam. It remains disputed whether this was correct, but in any event it seems completely irrelevant. Given that it is undisputed that there was violence on all sides one would think that the main responsibility of the police was not to allocate blame but to stop the same thing happening again in Birmingham.
Following the logic of Sir Andy’s report it would seem that if the only danger had been that Maccabi fans would attack local people he would have agreed to ban them. If however there had been a further danger that these people might retaliate with equal or greater violence he would see that as a reason to relax the ban and allow the Maccabi fans to come anyway. One doubts whether local people would have agreed with this position. They might have preferred a quiet life.
This might not have bothered Sir Andy much anyway. The list of those whose views were sought in preparing the report does not includer any local people at all, apart from one group claiming to represent the Jewish community.