RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gal Binyanmin Tshuva, 29, is a keen football follower from Israel. Not a hooligan, not a thug, just a fan. In Amsterdam on Thursday night he found himself surrounded by a frothing, Israelophobic mob. They asked where he was from. ‘Greece’, he said, in a desperate bid to evade their hate and blows. They demanded to see his passport. He said he didn’t have it on him. They pushed him to the ground, stomped on his face, gashed his head, broke two of his teeth and knocked him unconscious. He came to eventually, in an ambulance, his face streaked with blood.

Adi Reuben, 24, was set upon by 10 Jew-haters. They beat him so badly they broke his nose. ‘Jewish! IDF!’, they yelled as they pummelled the Jew’s face. Aaron, a Jewish football fan from Britain, saw one of his co-religionists from Israel being stomped on and subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. He intervened to help him. The mob cornered him, yelling: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ He said he was a Brit. ‘You helped the Jew’, they said and smashed his face in. They broke his glasses and left his face coated in cuts.

Barak took refuge in Amsterdam’s Holland Casino, along with hundreds of other Israelis, as outside a mob of 200 gathered and seethed, ‘looking for blood’. A young Israeli man staggered into the casino. ‘All his face was blood’, said Barak. They were the victims of a jodenjacht – a ‘Jew hunt’. That’s the phrase used by the assailants themselves, in Telegram chats ahead of the violence. Bring fireworks, they told each other. We’ll attack this ‘cancer’, these ‘dogs’, they said, referring to the Israelis. And they did. They whizzed through the city on mopeds, using fireworks to ‘pelt’ the ‘dogs’ from the Jewish State.

Things got so bad that Esther Voet, the editor-in-chief of a Dutch Jewish newspaper who lives in Amsterdam’s city centre, offered her home to the Israelis fleeing the jodenjacht. ‘I told them this is a Jewish home and you are safe here’, she said. Try to take this in: in Europe, in 2024, a safe house had to be offered to young, bloodied Jews fleeing the blows and kicks of a marauding mob that damned them as dogs, as a disease. Not for the first time in the history of the Netherlands, good people offered to open their doors to Jews running from a Jew hunt.

This is what the left in Britain and across Europe has been making excuses for. This. In the days since Amsterdam was rocked by a self-confessed Jew hunt, leftish talking heads have furiously sought to explain it, to ‘contextualise’ it, to say the Israeli fans brought it on themselves by being rowdy and racist. As if there could ever be context for the breaking of an innocent Jew’s teeth because he failed to prove he was not Israeli. As if there could ever be context for the smashing of a Jew’s face for the crime of ‘helping a Jew’. As if there could ever be context for ‘hunting’ the ‘dogs’ of the Jewish nation. As if there could ever be context for a pogrom.

Last week, the left influencers of the West sank to a new, foul low. Their cant and bigotry was on full display. They started the week noisily gnashing their teeth over the election of the ‘fascist’ Donald Trump and ended it essentially shrugging their shoulders over fascist violence in Amsterdam. One day they were puffing themselves up to condemn the ‘fascist’ heading to the White House, the next they were ‘contextualising’ the hunting of Israelis by Jew-haters on mopeds. They weep virtuous tears over fake fascism while borderline excusing what feels like real fascism. Listen – when Europe’s middle classes start ‘contextualising’ anti-Jewish violence, it’s time to worry.

The dust hadn’t even settled on the jodenjacht before observers were offering up snivelling ‘explanations’. It was the visiting Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv who started it all with their hooligan-like behaviour, they said. They shared shaky footage of Maccabi fans making offensive chants about Arabs and in one case tearing down a Palestine flag as proof that the Israelis were responsible for the mayhem. In this twisted retelling, the orgy of violence against Israelis and just plain old Jews – ‘Are you Yehudi?’ – was not a pogrom but a political reaction, maybe even just vengeance, for the alleged Arabphobia of these vile outsiders.

The Maccabi fans ‘rampaged through the city’, said Owen Jones. They ‘ripped down’ flags and ‘attacked local residents’, he cried. It’s ridiculous, he suggested, to call it a ‘racist pogrom’ when the local residents then attacked the Israeli fans. What do we call it then? A fightback? An Arab revolt against Zionists? Do tell us. The Israeli fans who ‘rampaged around Amsterdam… had it coming’, said Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. ‘They fucked around and found out’, she mocked.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a privileged leftist who referred to Hamas’s butchery of 7 October as a ‘day of celebration’ should also think Israelis in Amsterdam deserved their beatings, ‘had it coming’. But as a journalist, Ms Brown might at least be expected to explain why the mob in Amsterdam referred to their brutality as a Jew hunt, not a hooligan hunt, and why they visited persecution and punishment not only on the Maccabi fans who’d behaved badly but on anyone from Israel, anyone Jewish, even anyone who helped a Jew. Did that British Jew whose face was reduced to a bloodied, black-eyed mess for the sin of assisting a fellow Jew ‘have it coming’? Did he fuck around and find out?

Mehdi Hasan sneered at President Biden when he condemned ‘the anti-Semitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans’. ‘Those soccer fans – or, more accurately, hooligans – were attacking people [and] ripping down Palestinian flags’, Hasan said. Were they? All of them? That young man who had his teeth broken after failing to convince the mob he was Greek, not Israeli – he was a hooligan? It’s ‘wild’, said columnist Rachel Shabi, ‘to see our politicians and media wilfully ignore that among Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters are some long-time violent, racist football hooligans’. Actually, what’s wild is the idea that it matters one iota that Maccabi has hooligan followers, as do all teams in Europe. Who cares? It’s irrelevant. It no more makes sense to point out in the aftermath of a street ‘hunt’ for Jews that some Israeli football fans are hooligans than it would to say after an act of anti-Muslim violence that some Muslims are terrorists.

There seems to be a new rule on the woke left: if some members of an ethnic group behave badly, we should not be surprised if other members of that ethnic group get attacked. Will this rule be applied consistently? Will they say, next time a few fuming Islamists gather in a city centre in Britain to burn the UK flag or the Israeli flag and to chant about the return of Muhammad’s army to finish off the Jews, that we shouldn’t be surprised if EDL-style racists then go out and attack random Muslims? That these people ‘fucked around and found out’? Of course they won’t. I hope they won’t. So why are they ceaselessly mentioning that some Maccabi fans are idiots, as if this explains why some Jews got beaten to a pulp in a self-described jodenjacht?

Worse than the contextualisation is the moral inversion. In accusing all of the visiting Israelis of ‘rampaging’ through Amsterdam, of being ‘racist’, even of bringing ‘the spirit of Israeli fascism’ to Europe, the left turns truth and reason utterly on their heads. The Israelis are accused of doing what was in truth done to them. It was the self-confessed ‘Jew-hunting’ mob who rampaged. It was they who stamped racism on to the streets of Amsterdam. It was they who embodied the ‘spirit of fascism’ with their vile demands to know who’s an Israeli, who’s a Jew, so that they might know who to batter. To accuse the victims of something not unlike fascism of being the real fascists is almost unimaginably cruel, even by the standards of the post-truth woke left.

We cannot overlook the magnitude of what happened last week. A literal Jew hunt unfolded in one of the cities that trembled under Jews hunts in the last century, and some in our intellectual classes essentially said: ‘Well…’ People who write for newspapers, who are feted by the BBC, who move and shake in the middle-class universe of performed virtue scratched their chins, offered up explanations, saw a young Jew with the gash of an anti-Semite’s boot and wondered: ‘Is this a thug who deserved it?’ This was more than hypocrisy. It was more than the identitarian downplaying of anti-Jewish racism that has become tragically commonplace on the modern left. It was confirmation of a new moral ghettoisation of the Jews, of their unforgiving exclusion from the entire realm of progressive sympathy.

In essence, a new edict of expulsion has been issued against the Jews not from the physical kingdom of the nation state this time, but from the moral kingdom of elite empathy. They are to enjoy none of the rights or privileges of woke concern. No other social group can be victim-blamed, but they can be. No other ethnic group’s ‘truth’ about the hatred they experience may be discounted, but theirs can. No other group is forbidden from making sense of their current persecution through their past persecution, but they are. Witness the rage against those who have used the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the hunt in Amsterdam. The words ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ have already been stolen from the Jews, and are now used against them by a woke elite convinced Israel’s war on Hamas is a new species of Nazism. Now, ‘pogrom’ is taken from them, too. Not only is their persecution denied – the very linguistic tools through which they might describe their persecution are denied to them as well.

To my mind, the chattering classes’ ‘contextualisation’ of the violence in Amsterdam could prove more dangerous, in the long run, than the violence itself. The Jews’ black eyes and torn skin will heal. Their attackers – we hope – will be brought to justice. But the grim ‘intellectual’ singling out of the Jews as a lesser identity, to whom few of the new moral codes apply, will linger. The pogrom is over – the spirit of the pogrom lives.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy