Part 3
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.
The left’s pitiless cynicism about the pogrom in Amsterdam confirms how morally lost they are.
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