RUTHFULLY YOURS

They called their rampage a ‘Jew hunt’. They incited each other to violence, saying ‘[we] may never get this chance [again] to beat up some fucking Jews’. They called for a city-wide ‘rage’ against ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’. They damned the Jews as a ‘cowardly’ people. They shared information about the arrival of a ‘train full of Jews’ and said everyone should be there to greet it, because ‘we have to make those cancer Jews feel what they did to our brothers’. The train could be late, one of them joked, because it might be a ‘special train’ laid on by Hitler, ‘with gas for [the Jews]’.

Where were these racist obscenities uttered? Where was this violent hunt for Jews carried out? Germany in 1938, perhaps? No, it was in Amsterdam, last year. This was the jodenjacht of November 2024 when visiting Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv were ‘hunted’ by mobs of mostly Arab men in the streets of Amsterdam. More details about this pogrom emerged during the latest court cases last week, and they heap yet further shame on the pogrom deniers of the Western left who insisted these were just street clashes, not a Jew hunt.

Five more of Amsterdam’s alleged Jew hunters found themselves in the dock last week. One – Mounir M, aged 32 – is charged with being an administrator of the WhatsApp group in which the violence was incited and organised. Originally called ‘Free Palstine’ (sic), the group later changed its name to ‘Buurthuis 2’ (Dutch for ‘Community Centre 2’). Racial animus and open calls for violence swirled through this ominous chat. Drive your car ‘into those people’, one participant said. ‘Hit them hard’, said another. There must be ‘at least one death’, dreamed one messenger. There were also tips for how to incite the Maccabi fans. Shout ‘Free Palestine’ at them, the mob was advised.

Mounir M is said to have helped oversee this group that seethed with Jew hate. As the Dutch daily paper Het Parool reported, last week’s court proceedings ‘left little to the imagination: participants in the group… incited each other to hunt down Jews’. The court heard that the group was full of ‘insulting words about Jews’, alongside calls for action. There were ‘quips’ too, like the one about Hitler’s special train, with gas in it. Mounir M is accused of responding in the most chilling way to a message about the hotel in which Maccabi fans had taken refuge from the blows of the Jew hunters. ‘Get rid of it’, he allegedly wrote.

Another suspect in the current trial – Mahmoud A, a Palestinian asylum seeker – faces a more serious charge: attempted manslaughter. A video clip allegedly shows him kicking a Maccabi supporter in the head four times as he was lying on the ground. The three other suspects face charges of ‘providing information to commit violence’, trivialising and condoning the Holocaust, and using a belt to whip an elderly visiting Israeli. The Dutch paper De Telegraaf said at the end of last week that this latest ‘Trial of the Jew hunters’ has ‘severely shocked’ the people of the Netherlands. It is horrifying, it said, that an event of such a ‘clearly anti-Semitic character’ could take place in modern-day Amsterdam.

Is there also ‘shock’ outside of the Netherlands over this trial of suspected Jew hunters? Over this chilling spectacle of a pogrom being pored over in a court of law in 2025? Remarkably, no. There’s mostly silence. You will search in vain for coverage in the non-Dutch press of this latest development in the Amsterdam pogrom. Is Europe’s press bored with this story of Jews being hunted on the streets of a European capital? Yes, what a drag that we might have to grapple with the fact that there was an organised and violent hounding of ‘cancer Jews’ on our continent in the 21st century. After all, Europe is meant to be a paragon of liberalism and diversity, and so much more morally superior than those populist oafs who’ve taken over in America. We can’t let a pesky little thing like a Jew hunt interfere with that narrative.

There’s an even more sinister reason for Europe’s silence on this ‘trial of the Jew hunters’ in one of our most enlightened cities. Many have clearly bought into the pogrom denialism that spread like a pox in opinion-forming circles in the immediate aftermath of this street hunt for Jews. Western leftists devoted the same amount of moral energy to denying the truth of the Amsterdam pogrom as they normally devote to uncovering racism absolutely everywhere. The same people who for years decried everything from white women wearing their hair in cornrows to the scuffing of a page in the Koran as ‘racism’ were now shrugging their shoulders over a literal Jew hunt. ‘Maybe the Maccabi fans brought it on themselves’, they essentially said.

To the rational observer, it was clear from the start that what happened in Amsterdam was a pogrom. The first ‘trial of the Jew hunters’ took place in December. Five men were convicted of violence. One had boasted in the WhatsApp group about joining the ‘Jew hunt’ – his words. He later kicked Maccabi fans and grabbed one by the throat. Another described his victims as ‘cowardly [Jews]’. The men, along with around 900 others, were part of the virtual chat which, the court heard, had shared information for the purposes of ‘violence against people of Jewish descent and / or supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv’. Four of the five men were jailed, one was given a community order.

So we have known since the end of last year that the mob in Amsterdam called its evil endeavour a ‘Jew hunt’. We know they incited each other to ‘beat up some fucking Jews’. We know they gabbed about cleansing Amsterdam of this ‘cancer’ of Jews. We know from last week’s trials that they joked about the Holocaust too, and invoked Hitler, and chuckled about gas, and allegedly beat an Israeli with a belt, and allegedly carried out an attempted manslaughter. All of it done with a ‘clearly anti-Semitic character’, as De Telegraaf said.

And yet still leftists said it wasn’t a pogrom. Still we saw headlines like ‘The pogrom in Amsterdam that wasn’t’. Still we were told that the Maccabi fans had it coming because they yelled offensive slogans and tore down a Palestine flag. These fans brought the ‘spirit of Israeli fascism’ to the Netherlands, one observer said, and folk in Amsterdam just fought back. It was victim-blaming on steroids, as grotesque as when anti-Semites said the Jews of Germany brought Kristallnacht on themselves by being such economic disruptors. Nothing better sums up the turbo-smug racial paternalism of the modern left than the fact that gangs of men said ‘We carried out a Jew hunt!’ and these people essentially replied: ‘No you didn’t. You were just protesting. Bless.’ They don’t only know better than Jews, you see – they know better than Arabs, too.

The pitiless cynicism of so many observers following the Amsterdam pogrom exposed the neo-racist cruelty of identity politics. Their denials of the Jew hunt were fuelled by a warped belief that Jews can never be victims. After all, Jews are part of ‘the privileged’ and Arab migrants are part of ‘the oppressed’. And how can ‘the privileged’ suffer a pogrom at the hands of ‘the oppressed’? They sacrificed the truth of Amsterdam’s Jew hunt at the altar of ideology. They threw Jews under the bus in the service of their own self-aggrandising worldview. They memory-holed a pogrom to preserve their virtue. Other people did the same in Europe 80 years ago. They were not the good guys.

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