Who does Uefa think it’s kidding? It says the huge banner saying ‘Stop killing children’ unfurled at a Super Cup match last night was ‘not political’. It was ‘about humanity’, insists an insider. ‘In fact, you could just say it is common sense’, they said. They must think we were born yesterday. Everyone whose moral faculties have not been entirely fried by the Gaza war knows this banner was likely a political dig at that state it is fashionable to hate – Israel.
To display such a banner ahead of a Spurs match – a team with deep links to Britain’s Jewish community – is especially egregious
The banner said ‘Stop Killing Children – Stop Killing Civilians’. It was displayed on the pitch in Udine, Italy ahead of the clash between Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain. Children from conflict zones around the world stood by the banner, including two Palestinian kids. Uefa’s rules forbid the display of political messages before, during or after matches. But this wasn’t political, it says – it was a cry of concern for littl’uns everywhere.
I call BS. I suppose it is wholly coincidental that such a banner has been displayed at a time when Europe’s chattering classes feverishly accuse the Jewish State of being a child-killing entity. Spend more than 60 seconds on social media and you’ll encounter this calumny. Browse the ‘respectable’ press and there it is. Venture into your city centre when there’s a ‘pro-Palestine’ march and you’ll hear the mob holler it: ‘Israel spills the blood of children!’
This view of Israel as a uniquely murderous state, as a nation that takes pleasure in the butchery of children, is all the rage right now. ‘Israel is annihilating Palestinian children’, op-ed writers cry. It is ‘targeting childhood’ itself, we’re told. A Unicef official described Israel’s war in Gaza as a ‘war on children’. It is no such thing, of course; it is a war on the neo-fascists of Hamas who invaded Israel on 7 October 2023 to rape and massacre Jews.
On those weekly street rages against Israel you’ll see placard after placard calling on it to ‘Stop Killing Children’. Israel is seen as an infanticidal regime, as uniquely wicked among the nations of the earth in that children do not merely perish in its wars, as they tragically do in all wars – no, they are targeted for execution by this sick state that gets a twisted thrill from letting the blood of innocents.
You don’t have to be an expert in Medieval History to hear the echo of the blood libel in these chants. Where once Jews were seen as the dastardly spillers of the blood of Christian children, now the Jewish state is seen as the murderous spiller of the blood of Palestinian children. Some people might believe the left’s anti-Israel hotheads when they say it is entirely coincidental that they now accuse the Jewish nation of the same ritualistic crimes of child slaughter that the Jewish people were once accused of – I am not one of those people.
For me, it was made most clear on an anti-Israel demonstration in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex back in April. Protesters carried dolls in shrouds stained with fake blood while screaming ‘Stop killing babies!’ as Jewish families walked home from synagogue after Sabbath prayers. How profoundly shaming that 900 years after the blood libel was born in the City of Norwich, England’s Jews once more found themselves surrounded by a frothing mob howling about child slaughter.
And now into this mix comes Uefa’s apparently innocent banner. Look, who knows what the thinking was of the individuals who thought it would be a good idea to mention the death of children in war before a game of footie. But the impact of the banner is undeniable: it will have made hundreds of thousands of people think about that ‘evil’ state that the cultural elite insists is murdering children for sport.
‘For centuries, Europe has traded in the blood libel that Jews kill children, and clearly the trope remains as popular as ever’, said the Campaign Against Antisemitism in response to the Uefa furore. Quite right. To display such a banner ahead of a Spurs match – a team with deep links to Britain’s Jewish community – is especially egregious. Why not a banner saying ‘Stop Kidnapping Jews’, in reference to Hamas’s brutal, 15-month abduction of the British-Israeli Spurs fan, Emily Damari?
Children die in all wars. It’s the worst thing about war. But the Israel-Hamas war is the first of my lifetime where there has been such a grim, frenzied obsession with these tragic deaths, and such a certain conviction that they are not accidental tragedies at all but the intentional handiwork of that monstrous Jewish army. I’m tired of tiptoeing around this: the reason they accuse this nation alone of ritualistic child murder is because it is the Jewish nation.
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