The scandal of the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban keeps getting worse. Now we discover that West Midlands Police (WMP), in their report calling for the barring of Maccabi fans from the football game against Aston Villa last month, cited an entirely fictitious football match. Their report said the last time Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in 2023. But no such clash took place. Which begs the question: what else in their Maccabi-mauling report was made up?
The fictitious match came to light during the grilling of Craig Guildford, WMP’s chief constable, at the home affairs select committee yesterday. Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on anti-Semitism, pointed out that Maccabi Tel Aviv have never played West Ham. Guildford admitted he was banged to rights – WMP’s report really did include the colossal clanger of an entirely invented match.
It gets worse. Asked how such a basic error could find its way into such a sensitive report – one which would determine whether fans from the Jewish nation would be allowed into the UK – Guildford said it was a result of ‘social media scraping’. We gathered information on Maccabi Tel Aviv from ‘other football clubs’ and ‘the UK policing unit’, he said, and we also ‘search[ed] through social media to see what’s trending’. That’s where they saw the twaddle about Maccabi once clashing with West Ham and they put it in their report without checking its veracity.
Where’s the left? They’re usually the first to call the police ‘institutionally racist’
This is alarming. It’s one thing for a dim teen to lap up whatever crap he sees online, but a police force? Social media was awash with Israelophobic lunacy and full-on Jew-baiting in the run-up to the Maccabi-Villa clash. It is horrifying to think that a police force waded through that cesspit of bigotry in search of tidbits of info about Israeli fans. What next, making a judgement about African-Americans by listening in on KKK chatter?
We actually know the answer to the question of what else was made up in that WMP report – loads of it. The police compiled their ‘intelligence report’ ahead of the Maccabi-Aston Villa clash at Villa Park on 6 November. To the great glee of Islamists and leftists, their report said Maccabi has a contingent of very iffy fans and therefore the whole lot of them should be barred from Britain. We now know they based this decision on half-cocked claims and outright inventions.
That’s why Guildford was at the select committee – to answer the serious charge that his force banned Israeli fans on the basis of ‘inaccurate’ intelligence. Their report cited the riotous disturbances in Amsterdam last year, when Maccabi played Ajax. Five thousand Dutch cops were needed to quell Maccabi hooliganism, their report said. It also said Maccabi fans in Amsterdam were ‘highly skilled fighters’ who wanted to ‘fight with police’. The toerags even threw ‘innocent members of the public into the river’, said the report.
There’s only one problem with these claims – they’re not true, according to Dutch law enforcement. Dutch cops have said they ‘[do] not recognise the claim’ about Maccabi fans being ‘fighters’. As for the Dutch deploying 5,000 officers – actually there were just 1,200 cops on the streets of Amsterdam on that crazy night.
Then there’s West Midlands Police’s most serious distortion. They said Maccabi fans pushed ‘innocent members of the public’ into a river, when in truth it was a Maccabi fan who was thrown into freezing water by the self-styled Jew-hunters who swarmed Amsterdam that night. According to the Dutch authorities, the only known case of a river-pushing involved a Maccabi victim who was told by his tormentors that he could come out of the choppy waters if he said ‘Free Palestine’. It was a racist, ritualistic humiliation of a Jew, in 21st-century Europe, yet now a police force in the UK misrepresents it as a crime committed by an Israeli rather than against one.
It’s impossible to overstate the seriousness of this. For a British police force to mangle facts about a ‘Jew hunt’ is unforgivable. That they did so in the service of justifying a ban on Israeli Jews from a British game is an outrage. That West Midlands report is the dodgy dossier of modern football. It inflamed the Israelophobic rage of Islamist and leftist mobs. It led not only to the unjust banning of Israeli fans but to their relentless demonisation too. This scandal cannot be allowed to fade away – heads must roll.
Where’s the left? They’re usually the first to call the police ‘institutionally racist’. They love to slam cops for ‘demonising’ minority communities. Yet on the Maccabi scandal, they have done the precise opposite – they’ve sided with the factually-challenged cops against the Jews from Israel who were the victims of their errors and misinformation. Why? That’s a rhetorical query, of course. We know why: they don’t give a toss about Jews.
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