2 weeks Ago By Chris Selley
Reports out of Amsterdam Thursday night were bone-chilling: Gangs of black-clad young men, Arab Muslims by all eyewitness accounts, essentially hunting down and assaulting Jews, 80 years after Anne Frank was discovered in a local attic and condemned to Bergen-Belsen. At a Friday morning press conference, Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema described marauding thugs on scooters who “criss-crossed the city looking for football club Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters.” Maccabi fans had travelled to Amsterdam to see Israel’s most-decorated team take on Ajax, the Netherlands’ most-decorated team, in the UEFA Europa League.
“It’s against everything we’re proud of in Amsterdam,” Halsema said. “I’m very ashamed of the behaviour that was shown last night.” “Jews must feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times,” said King Willem-Alexander .
“We put our arms around them and will not let them go.” A lovely thought, but clearly not one that’s very reflective of Dutch reality. It was a terribly grim landmark day for European Jews, and indeed for Europe in general.
The World Jewish Congress estimates there are only about 30,000 Jews in the Netherlands: roughly one-eighth as many as in 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust. There might be even fewer than that in very short order, if Thursday’s madness becomes routine. Canadians, Jews especially, are right to wonder whether it could happen here.
The answer is, basically, sure it could. But it could also be prevented. And this should have been.
It looks like a colossal failure of policing. It’s easy to say from a desk on the other side of the Atlantic, but this was entirely predictable. Reports out of Amsterdam Wednesday night were alarmingly and obviously portentous of what occurred the next day.
Some purported Maccabi-supporting hooligans had assaulted a taxi driver and ripped down Palestinian flags, while chanting anti-Palestinian slogans. Even if it weren’t true, the fact those stories were out there in the wild should have been reason enough to expect retaliation — and then some. Clearly what happened Thursday night isn’t primarily about soccer.
It’s about primordial hatred. But alas, soccer incubates primordial hatred. That’s true within the Netherlands: Ajax supporters, few of whom are Jewish, have traditionally embraced the team’s Jewish roots (they often refer to themselves as “the Jews”) and their rivals — especially supporters of Rotterdam club Feyenoord — have often taunted Ajax with antisemitic chants like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas, followed by a hissing noise.
From a North American perspective, it’s almost beyond belief. What happened Thursday night isn’t primarily about soccer. It’s about primordial hatred It’s true in Israel too.
Beitar Jerusalem is known as Israel’s right-wing team; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leading lights of Likud are often seen at the games. As is true of many soccer teams’ most perfervid supporters, some of Beitar’s fans are horrible people. In 2013, two of them set fire to the team’s offices in protest over it signing two Muslim players, who faced racist abuse on the pitch from some team supporters.
Maccabi’s supporters aren’t nearly so notorious, but one organized group of fans was blamed for violently attacking anti-Netanyahu protestors in Jerusalem in 2020. In 2014, Maccabi fans essentially forced star player Mahran Radi — an Arab-Israeli member of the national team, at the time — out of the club with anti-Arab abuse. “The Beitar .
.. fans at least have the integrity to swear and boo consistently, even when a Muslim player scores a goal for their team,” Tamir Cohen wrote in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
“The Maccabi Tel Aviv racists simply ignore it when (Muslim players) score.” You can’t separate politics from soccer. The good news is, Canada and the United States have come closest (though prominent Canadian clubs include Toronto Croatia and Serbian White Eagles).
In the Old World, there’s no chance. The only reason Israel’s national and club teams even play European teams, and not Asian ones, is that so many teams in the Asian federation have historically refused to take the field against Jews. So the specific elements that made this week so combustible in Amsterdam aren’t in evidence here in Canada.
There is reason to hope we might not see this sort of horrifying escalation. The Jerusalem Post recently reported that some Amsterdam police officers are reluctant even to protect Jews and Jewish institutions, citing “moral dilemmas.” We haven’t heard or seen anything like that in Canada — but nor have Canadian police been entirely successful at keeping order.
It’s not inconceivable that Israel might qualify for the 2026 World Cup, and that it might play one or more games in Toronto or Vancouver. I shudder to imagine what that would look like. Police don’t just need to be prepared for serious Amsterdam-style violence; they, and their political overseers, need somehow to convince Canadian Jews and their friends that they’re actually safe.
It’s a tough job, nowadays. National Post [email protected].
