Amsterdam witnessed violent clashes last week during a UEFA Europa League match between the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch club Ajax. A day prior to the match, on November 6th, the followers of the football club, often known as “Maccabi Fanatics” marched through the streets of Amsterdam chanting “F*** you Palestine” and “No children left in Gaza” which went unstopped and unreported. This continued on the day of the match, on the 7th, while the police escorted these violent fans to the stadium chanting death threats to the Arabs and displaying the Israeli flag. According to a city council member, quoted by Al Jazeera, the fans tore down a Palestinian flag and attacked homes displaying the flag, chanting “Death to Arabs”.Videos verified by various news agencies show the Maccabi fans chanting “Let the IDF win, f*** the Arabs”.
Following the match, where the Israeli club lost with no goals against five by Ajax, there was backlash from the pro-Palestinian groups who had gathered for a pro-Palestine march near the stadium, at Anton de Komplein Square.
However, when the incident was reported on the next day, on November 8th, the context and precedent to the violence was minimised and ignored, with reports emphasising the attack on the Israelis and the alleged increase in antisemitism in Europe.
A report by the New Israel Fund titled Reporting on Racism in Soccer, released in 2003, also quoted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal that Maccabi Tel Aviv is the second most racist football club in the world, after another Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem. The fans of these club are known for shouting racist remarks against their own Arab players, calling them “terrorists” and Black players, making ape noises when they are on field. The racial attack against the former Maccabi player Maharan Radi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel was widely condemned, even from the club’s Canadian Jewish owner Mitchell Goldhar. He eventually left the club in 2015, since then, there has been no Arabs in the club.
The fans are also known for their violent attack against the anti-Netanyahu protesters during 2021 with batons and broken bottles. During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015 where, the banners of “Refugees Welcome” became popular, the same club displayed the banner saying “Refugees not Welcome” during a match in Israel.
However, the anti-arab violent indictment in Amsterdam or the club’s long history of racial and anti-arab violence was effectively ignored by the Western media. As the news of the violence came in, Arabs became the violent attackers and the zionists became the victims.
In one of the initial reports that appeared in The Washington Post, “antisemitism” was highlighted in the heading, with the lede saying the attackers used social media “to target Jewish people”. The report also says that “reports of antisemitic speech, vandalism and violence have been on the rise in Europe since the start of the war in Gaza”. This was also repeated by The Guardian article that came out the next day on November 9th. This effectively ignores the anti-arab racial attacks and abuses that the club has been continuing for years, which was repeated on the days before the match along with delegitimising the genocide in Gaza by equating it with the attack in Amsterdam.
The chants of “Death to Arabs” has been mentioned in another report of The Guardian as “anti-arab slogans”. The Washington Post report also mentions an instance when the soccer games involving the Israeli team was canceled in the 1970s as the Arab nations refuse to play with Israel. However, the use of this incident in this situation with the phrasing “Israel was exiled (please stress on the word ‘exile’) from the Asian Football Confederation in the 1970s after Arab nations refused to play against it” is nothing but another attempt in weaponising antisemitism for justifying the attacks by Israelis.
Reuters has quoted the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, who called the pro-Palestinian “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads” along with imposing a three-day ban on demonstrations while there were no serious charges against the Maccabi club by the UEFA even in the past. She was also quoted by the BBC saying “What happened last night has nothing to do with protest. There is no excuse for what happened”, singling out the pro-Palestinian protestors as the attackers and the Israeli fans as innocent victims.
The BBC published an entire article on the 8th of November recounting the experience of the Israeli fans who were attacked in Amsterdam. It has vividly described their experience of broken noses and getting kicked for “one minute” with no descriptions of the events that took place from a neutral point of view. The hypocrisy of the article lies when “Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF” is considered as “antisemitic threats” while “Death to Arabs”, which is not even worded but considered only as “offensive slogans”. The article also quotes an Israeli fan with a broken nose who could not go to the hospital because he “heard that taxi drivers were involved in the attack”, all while Benjamin Netanyahu deployed planes to “rescue”the Israeli fans. Along with this, local media reports of a taxi driver being attacked by mobs a night before the game, however, the nationality of the attackers could not be confirmed.
While vivid descriptions of the ‘attack by Arabs’ were presented in multiple articles with majority of titles displaying antisemitism, the racial attack of the Israelis found no mention, if at all, were passing references.The Associated Press too repeated the claim of antisemitism, repeating mayor Halsema’s claims of a “Jew hunt”. It also quotes an Israeli fan, who stated that he is not scared and would go back to Amsterdam because “ours is the people of Israel.” Reports of homes of Amsterdam residents being attacked, two days of unpoliced Israeli hooliganism with death threats and destruction, and years of racial attacks found no column in the pages of any of these articles.
Amidst all this, The Times came up with a diabolical title mentioning the Kristallnacht – the series of the pogroms that happened against the Jews led by the Nazis on the night of November 9-10, 1938. The title says that “Amsterdam attacks were no Kristallnacht, but Europe’s Jews should be afraid”, directly drawing parallels between the violence in Amsterdam to the pogrom in Germany. The lede goes on to say that “Some Israeli football fans behaved thuggishly but the extreme and organised violence meted out to them the following day speaks of a terrifying resurgence of antisemitism” – while marches with death chants are mere “acts of thuggishness”, the retaliation are “terrifying acts of antisemitism”. The author then goes on to openly say that the violence of Amsterdam was a repetition of Kristallnacht. This article also bring out a relatively unheard by soon to be popular term – “Islamo-Nazism”, referring to the retaliation as an event. Even though the article mentions the context that led to violence, it still accuses the Muslims of retaliating in a “different type and magnitude”.
NBC News also did its part in paralleling the attacks with the Holocaust by evoking the memory of Anne Frank, saying “The violence unfolded in a city that was once home to a young Anne Frank and her family as they hid from Nazi occupiers during World War II”. This further reinforces the propaganda of antisemitism through historical memory and eternal victimhood, along with accusing the retaliators of destroying the peace of the city.
Therefore, the script is the same in all of the media reports – Israelis were targeted, they were chased and beaten up, antisemitism is on the rise and the event has shattered the peaceful environment of Amsterdam. And the culprits for all this are the violent Arabs who chose to retaliate to the vile death threats and direct violence they have been receiving for days in the city.
However, these same organisations were silent on the Anti-Muslim hate crimes that have been rising in Europe and Western countries since the past one year and decades of blatant Islamophobia and acts of racial segregation. Three Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont in the US in November 2023 near a residential building, a six year old Palestinian boy was stabbed 26 times by a white man in Chicago who yelled “You Muslims must die” in October 2023. According to the UK-based anti-Islamophobia organisation Tell MAMA, hate crimes against Muslims have increased by 140 percent since October 7. US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) received 4,951 complaints on hate crime against Muslims and Palestinians during January – June, 2024, a sixty-nine percent increase over the same period in 2023. However, these were not particularly discussed with the same vigour by any of the mentioned Western medias.
The erasure of the events that led to the backlash is the same tactic used in the reporting of the Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Decades of oppression of and resistance by the Palestinian people was completely and deliberately ignored by focusing on the retaliation on October 7th. The events on October 7th supersedes decades of massacre and resistance, before and after October 7, 2023. Recently, ten journalists BBC and CNN who were covering the genocide in Gaza for the past year have called out their organisations for its pro-Israel bias in reportage, tampering journalistic ethics and principles. Media here has worked for the state machinery, an extended arm of the Israeli genocidal machine. One another argument that was raised in the whole affair was the act of violence – that Arabs shouldn’t have acted under any provocation. The same argument used to delegitimise the Palestinian resistance and the Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
It all sums up to one thing – the complicity that western media provides in the carte blanche that Israel enjoys in inciting violence anywhere. They have laid the narrative for years, especially since the US’s invasion of Iraq, that Arabs are violent and barbaric; whatever measure that takes to ‘tame’ them is justified, be it bombing or starvation. On the other hand, Israelis are inherently moral and peaceful, therefore, the violence that they instigate, whatever measure or goal, is morally justified, even though it supersedes any forms of laws or guidelines. Here, the peaceful Israelis were attacked by the violent Arabs – the context and condition does not matter.
Hajara Najeeb is a independent researcher based in Delhi.
