I often wonder – we all do – how human beings can be made to forget terrible events. Like the Tiananmen Square massacre, wiped, just like that, from a billion minds in China. Or the burning of the Jews of Jedwabne in Poland in 1941, which lay unforgivably unremembered until the truth was dug up, literally, in the 1990s. To this list of shamefully erased horrors from history, we might now add the Jew hunt of Amsterdam in 2024.
It is a crime against truth to speak of Amsterdam without mentioning the open racial hatred that fuelled the hunt for men from Israel
No, the hunting of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans by a mob of self-confessed anti-Semites was not as bloody as those other atrocities. Nobody died. History is unlikely to be reshaped by the Amsterdam hunt, like it was by the tyranny of the CCP or the savage pogroms of the 1940s. And yet the expressly racist ‘hunting’ of those Israeli football fans shares something in common with earlier outrages: it has been all but memory-holed by those who find its barbarous truths an inconvenience.
The past few days have provided us with a textbook case of how historical truth can be sacrificed at the altar of moral crusading. Following the scandalous banning of Maccabi fans from their team’s clash with Aston Villa at Villa Park on 6 November, numerous leftists, activists and Islamists have cited the events in Amsterdam as proof that these fans have an insatiable lust for hooliganism. In the process, they’ve buried the truth of what happened there.
On 7 November 2024, Maccabi Tel Aviv played AFC Ajax at the Johan Cruyff Arena. Both before the match and after it, clashes broke out across the city. Listening to the army of Maccabi-bashers in Birmingham and beyond, you would be forgiven for thinking the violence was all down to ‘fascists’ from Israel bringing their bloodlust to a civilised country. Or, at best, that it was street-fighting between Ajax ruffians on one side and Maccabi louts on the other. This is almost wholly false.
Did some Maccabi fans behave badly in Amsterdam? Of course. Football fans often do. Though I do balk when leftists point to the fans’ tearing down of Palestine flags as evidence of their brutish urges, given that more than a thousand Israelis had been raped and murdered only the year before. But what subsequently befell the Maccabi fans had nothing to do with their earlier behaviour or with old-fashioned hooliganism – no, it was classic Jew hatred.
‘Jew hunt’ is not a phrase invented by observers of the events in Amsterdam – it was proudly used by the gangs of mostly Arab men who went looking for Jews to batter. There have been two trials of the Jew-hunters of Amsterdam, during which it became clear that their pursuit of the Maccabi fans was a coordinated racist attack. It was in their WhatsApp group that they christened their rampage a ‘Jew hunt’. They goaded each other into a ‘rage’ against those ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’. They called the Jews a ‘cowardly’ people.
They made fun of the Holocaust. The ‘train full of Jews’ heading to Amsterdam might be late, one quipped, because it might be a ‘special train… with gas for [the Jews]’. We ‘may never get this chance [again] to beat up some f**king Jews’, they said. And beat up Jews they did. The Jew hunters were accused of kicking Maccabi lads in the head and using a belt to whack an elderly Israeli.
As one Dutch newspaper said in March this year, during the second trial of the hunters, the court proceedings confirmed that these men ‘incited each other to hunt down Jews’. It is a crime against truth to speak of Amsterdam without mentioning the open racial hatred that fuelled the hunt for men from Israel.
It’s denialism. Worse, it’s moral inversion, victim-blaming on steroids, where the Jews hounded and beaten by Holocaust-mocking mobs are themselves held responsible for the violence visited on them. It’s akin to when apologists for Kristallnacht said those money-grubbing Jews had it coming. I wonder – did those ‘progressives’ who are conspiring in the deletion of the truth about Amsterdam ever imagine they would be making excuses for a literal Jew hunt?
There is so much hypocrisy and cant in the explosion of hatred for Maccabi Tel Aviv. We don’t have the resources to police this mob, say radicals who have happily watched the cops spend millions of pounds on policing their ceaseless and hateful marches against the Jewish state. We want them banned because they’re hooligans not because they’re Israeli, say keyboard warriors who’ve never once agitated for a ban on non-Jewish footie fans who sometimes behave badly. We see you.
But it is this, this obscuring of the truth of the Jew hunt, that is most galling. Anyone who talks about Amsterdam without mentioning the mobs that hunted Jews is either unaware that this happened, which makes them ignorant, or they’re fine with it, which makes them racist. Which is it – stupidity or bigotry? Or perhaps both?
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