RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’

It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.

The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.

On the rubble of the ‘pogrom’ – their scare quotes – that they feverishly rebutted, they built a new narrative. It was the visiting Israeli Jews, the brutes and bigots who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, who really instigated the violence. They were the real racists. They brought the ‘spirit of Israeli fascism’ to Amsterdam. It was these ‘marauding gangs’ of foreign fans who carried out a ‘racist rampage’, cried the BDS movement. They tore down a Palestinian flag, they made offensive anti-Arab chants – ‘incitement to genocide’. These thugs embody ‘the most fascistic, right-wing, racist, misogynist elements of Israeli political culture’, said one observer. The Israeli disease, infecting Europe.

And in this retelling, in this ruthless confiscation of the rights of victimhood from the Israelis battered for being Israelis, the ‘Jew hunt’ came to be reimagined as ‘street justice’. That’s how one left-wing commentator in the UK referred to the hunting and assaulting of the visiting fans – these ‘notoriously thuggish’ football followers started a fight in the Dutch capital and ‘the street justice [was] swift’. You know who else thought that beating Jews to a pulp was a ‘just’ response to alleged misbehaviour by other members of their ‘race’? I’m not even going to say. It’s too easy.

It has added up to one of the most pitiless dismantlings of a people’s experience of racism that I can remember. The very activist class that insists we respect the ‘truth’ of what ethnic-minority people tell us were now giddily shredding the truth of what happened on the streets of Amsterdam, of this jodenjacht organised via Telegram and visited on anyone in the city that night who looked Israeli or Jewish or who just helped a Jew. And here’s the worst thing: the dismantling has been successful. These radicals’ jealous, furious chipping away at the Israeli Jews’ experience of racial hatred has had the desired effect: more people are backing off from the word pogrom. Now even the political class and media elites wonder out loud if it was just a scrap, no big deal, nothing to trouble the history books with.

This week, to the frenzied delight of every Israelophobe on the internet, the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, said she regrets using the word pogrom about the clashes in her city. The day after the violence she said it ‘brings back the memory of the pogroms’. Now she’s rowing back. She says she hates the way that the p-word is being used as ‘propaganda’ by far-right politicians to stir up animus towards Muslims in the Netherlands. It was under Israeli pressure, she implies, that the word pogrom took off. ‘We were completely caught off guard by Israel’, she said. ‘At 3am… Netanyahu was already giving a lecture about what happened in Amsterdam, while we were still gathering the facts.’ She says she wishes she’d had more info. ‘The story of a racist club was never properly told to me’, she now says of Maccabi Tel Aviv.

To my mind, this is an act of staggering moral cowardice. It seems to me that Ms Halsema has buckled under the pressure of the pogrom belittlers of the seething left and the commentariat. It feels like she has taken the knee to the narrative these people have worked tirelessly to impose over the pogrom they deny: namely, that it was the Israeli fans, this ‘racist club’, as Halsema now dutifully echoes, who kicked off the clashes that then spun out of control. Halsema is right that some on the hard right, like Geert Wilders, are using the pogrom to bash the broader Dutch Arab community. But our response to that should be to defend Muslims from hate, not to conspire in the denial of what happened to Jews.

Halsema ought to have known the impact her disavowal of the word pogrom would have. It has set alight the Israel-hating internet. To these people it is final proof of the ‘lie’ of the pogrom. Worse, her comments about Netanyahu’s ‘lecturing’ have inflamed their bigoted belief that the all-powerful Jewish State puppeteered this myth of Jewish victimisation. This is the dark irony of the pogrom belittling of the past fortnight: in the very act of sneering at the idea that what happened in Amsterdam was anti-Semitic, some of these people have given voice to their own latent anti-Semitism. Every Jew-fearing trope leaks from the post-Amsterdam commentary. Jews controlling the narrative of the global media. Jews exaggerating their victimhood in an effort to disguise the power they truly enjoy. Jews importing disruptive and malign forces – in this case ‘fascism’ and ‘genocidalism’ – into the heart of our societies. We’ve heard it all before. We’ve heard it for centuries.

It is so tiresome to have to say, once again, what happened in Amsterdam. Yes, some Maccabi fans behaved badly, as do fans of virtually every club in Europe. But this neither excuses nor even explains the ‘Jew hunt’ organised by gangs of mostly Arab men. To all who take morality seriously, there can be no causal link between idiot behaviour by a few Israeli fans and the pursuit of ‘Yehudi’ through the streets of a city for a videoed beating. This is my question for those describing the invective and violence visited on random Israelis as ‘street justice’ for what other Israelis did hours earlier – if some black football fans behaved badly would it be understandable if white-supremacist thugs then went on a ‘n***er hunt’? A simple yes or no will do.

The opinion-forming set’s pathological refusal to see Jews as victims confirms how lost they are to the lunacy of identitarianism. In their eyes, Jews are white, and thus incapable of experiencing racism or oppression. As for Israelis – they’re a morally fallen people in the grip of genocidal mania and thus deserve everything they get. The pogrom denialism of the past fortnight represents a brutal reassertion of ideology over truth, of elite narrative over Jewish experience. It is a restoration of the diktats of identity politics, of its hierarchies of racial sympathy, to counter the politically inconvenient fact that Jews were hunted on the streets of Europe in 2024. We are being reminded that when society takes flight from reason, Jews are often the first to suffer.

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