Football fans are known to get a little rowdy after a game, but the horror that broke out after the Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax game on Thursday night was an entirely different matter. As Jonathan Sacerdoti wrote for the Spectator today, hundreds of Jews were hunted and beaten by mobs after the game while videos of the violence quickly spread across social media, leaving users horrified at the Amsterdam attacks. Yet for some rather peculiar reason, mainstream broadcasters were not quite as fast to report on the matter as one might have expected – with the Beeb in particular notably slow to the news, with readers taking to Twitter to blast both the delay to the public service broadcaster’s reporting and the language used to describe the attacks. Good heavens…
Last night, social media users slammed the Beeb for what seemed like ‘complete radio silence’ on the matter, while the broadcaster was criticised over its reporting of ‘rude, anti-Palestinian slogans’ in Amsterdam. When the news outlet finally decided to report on the attacks taking place on Jewish people, Twitter users raged at its description of ‘clashes in Amsterdam’. One person tweeted that the BBC ‘couldn’t refer to what had happened as “antisemitic riots” without the disclaimer that this was Israel’s description of events’.
Then this morning, a blog post appeared on the broadcaster’s website which looked to some Twitter users as though the Beeb was trying to lay some of the blame for the attacks on Israeli football fans. In the post entitled ‘Some Maccabi fans “looking for a fight”, witness tells BBC’, the author writes, on interviewing one individual, that:
I’ve spoken to a fan who went to the match last night, who reports seeing Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters on the Amsterdam metro ‘going up and down the carriages three or four times looking for a fight’. Conor Dalton tells me: ‘I felt worried. Everyone was going into the city so everyone knew what was going to happen.’ He adds that he is ‘shocked by the portrayal’ of the incident in the media, adding that the attacks were ‘completely provoked’ and Palestinian flags were ‘torn down the night before’.
‘Nothing to see here,’ one Twitter poster fumed. ‘Just BBC News trying to victim blame the Israeli fans who were attacked last night in Amsterdam.’ Another raged: ‘Jews are attacked on the streets of Amsterdam. So who does the BBC blame? Jews!’ One writer took to the social media app to lament:
I very rarely pick up on BBC News criticism but I do not understand why it was necessary to append the words ‘officials say’ to the headline about the Amsterdam football attacks. Why suggest doubt about the attacks? This is beneath you, BBC.
The BBC’s live blog has received criticism for noting: ‘Before the match, there was trouble between Maccabi fans and pro-Palestinian protestors.’ It also highlighted as a main bullet point that: ‘Maccabi supporters attacked a taxi and set a Palestinian flag on fire. There are also reports of supporters chanting racist slogans about Arabs.’ However none of the other main bullets actively condemned the attacks on Israeli fans. How very curious…
For its part, a BBC spokesperson told Mr S:
A single short post on a live page which has been running for several hours cannot and does not represent the entirety of BBC coverage on the subject. The live page, which has been headlining throughout on Israeli fans being attacked, includes detailed reports of these incidents, with some posts based on single-source testimony, for example one from a Maccabi fan who describes being attacked. The BBC’s job is to report this story impartially, taking in all the context and testimony – this includes looking at user-generated content to build a full picture of how the events unfolded.
Meanwhile another reader simply took to the platform to write about the BBC: ‘I have truly lost all faith in your veracity as an unbiased news outlet.’ Oh dear. The Beeb lost half a million licence fee payers over the last year – how many more will desert it now?
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