THREAD: The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, today released a 12-page report on the events in Amsterdam during the past week. It provides the most detailed account we have thus far, and corrects some details in my earlier posts on the matter. For example, and contrary to what I reported, the police did in fact arrest a few Israeli hooligans (ten in total), but appear to have quickly released them as well.
The above notwithstanding, Halsema like virtually every other Dutch politician continues to frame the disturbances within the broader framework of the long history of anti-Semitism rather than the specific one of opposition to continued Israeli participation in international sports competition while the state engages in genocide against the Palestinian people, or more directly of Israeli hooligans running amok in the streets of Amsterdam. As if the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans were singled out because they are Jewish, rather than on account of their violent and vile conduct. As if Israelis were singled out not because they were presumed to be visiting Maccabi supporters but because of Jew hatred.
The report does provide evidence of anti-Semitic expressions, primarily by a taxi driver, and then goes on to conflate any and all hostility to rampaging Israeli hooligans and indeed to Israel and its genocide with anti-Semitism. (According to the report, Israel's foreign minister went one further, and in a telephone call with Halsema invoked the Holocaust).
As previously noted, the fatal flaw in the anti-Semitism/pogrom framework is that there is no evidence of attacks on Dutch Jews on the night in question, nor is any provided in the report. In fact, as the report recounts, the Amsterdam Jewish community held its commemoration of Kristallnacht in the city's Portuguese Synagogue - a well-known landmark - on the same night as the football match. Yet the purportedly anti-Semitic hordes made no effort to attack or disrupt this event, or any other Jewish target that was not believed to be associated with Maccabi Tel Aviv's contingent of genocidal thugs.
Given the authorities' understanding of what happened and why, the report recounts in great detail the additional measures they have since taken to provide extra protection to the Amsterdam Jewish community and its institutions. While these measures appear to have been taken as a general precaution rather than in response to specific threats, it's hard to quibble with any decision taken for the protection of communities who feel themselves to be at risk and are constantly being told that their neighbours want to slaughter them.
Yet in doing so the report reveals the gross discrepancy in Halsema’s and the authorities' response to different forms of racism and discrimination. Indeed, the systematically downplays the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism that was so very evident throughout the events in question, and for that matter the severity of the conduct engaged in by the Israeli thugs. It's inconceivable this would have been given the same treatment in the report had it been discussing a visiting Arab team directing similar abuse at Amsterdam's Jews.
In contrast to a whole series of meetings with Amsterdam's Jewish community leaders and organizations, and constant communication with the Israeli embassy and Israeli officials, there was only minimal communication with the Arab or Muslim community and none whatsoever with Palestinians. And while the report recounts explicit calls to attack mosques (presumably from the nativist far right rather than the visiting fascist thugs), there is no indication the authorities considered these houses of worship worthy of protection.
Clashes between hooligans affiliated with opposing football teams are hardly a novelty, but what happened in Amsterdam was fundamentally different. Rather than pitting supporters of the home team against those of the visitors, violence erupted between visiting hooligans and residents of the home city who had nothing to do with football but rather were presumed to be of Middle Eastern origin or visibly in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The explanation for this is to be found not in anti-Semitism, but in a somewhat opaque sentence on page 4 of the report: "Concerns centered particularly on the aggression shown by Maccabi supporters and the reaction of taxi drivers."
Rather than drawing the appropriate conclusions, Dutch politicians have engaged in endless grandstanding, seeking to outbid each other in demonizing the country's Arab and Muslim citizens, and its Moroccan community in particular, while resorting to increasingly ghastly historical comparisons to characterise last week's events.
There’s an ongoing power struggle in the country’s increasingly chaotic politics. Not only between left and right, but particularly between the right and far right, and within the expanding far right. And it is being waged on the backs and at the expense of society’s most vulnerable members. Not just by the right, but by all of them. And their political hooliganism is not expected to end anytime soon.
Representatives of a civilization that within living memory gassed their fellow human beings to death on an industrial scale in purpose-built facilities, and literally burned humans in ovens, now lecture others about norms, values, and anti-Semitism without a scintilla of self-awareness.
The link below contains links to both the Dutch original and English translation of the report in question. END
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