This was no Kristallnacht II …

Maccabi fans in Dam Square chant Zionist slogans before the UEFA cup match with Ajax. Middle East Monitor, November 11

It should surprise nobody. Why would anyone of sound and attentive mind expect the political and media classes who’ve spent three years deceiving us on the war in Ukraine, and thirteen months lending material and moral support to a genocide, to suddenly grow a conscience over events in Amsterdam on Thursday night/early Friday, when thugs – including IDF conscripts – followed Maccabi Tel Aviv’s five-nil caning by home side Ajax with a rampage of racial hatred?

Why would we expect them to condemn human rubbish filmed slithering up the walls of private dwellings to pull down Palestinian flags, or destroying a taxi whose driver looked Arabic? Why would we think a supine media would call for a newfound appetite for criminalising “hate” to be applied to a mob – an Israeli mob – promising to slaughter Arab men, rape Arab women and hang communists while chanting an anthem with the chorus, “why no schools in Gaza? Because there are no children any more!”

A mob which, earlier in the Ajax stadium, had jeered, whistled and set off flares during a minute of silence for the Valencia dead …

… seemingly because Spain has been a tad less reticent in calling a genocide a genocide and, along with Ireland and Norway, has formally recognised a Palestinian state.

And yet …

When students of tomorrow look for the most egregious single-event lies by media unable, for reasons given here and here and here, to speak truth to power on matters of core concern to said power – such as a genocidal state whose slyly expansionist goals align with those of a dying empire – they’ll be spoilt for choice of course. The BBC’s inversion of its own footage at Orgreave 1984, to persuade millions of viewers that systematic police brutality was in response to stone throwing miners when precisely the opposite was true, will definitely feature.

But Goebbelsian Gold will surely go to the standing on its head of the truth – as captured on a zillion citizen phonecams – of what happened in Amsterdam last week. As leaders from Biden and Netanyahu to Starmer and Von der Leyen – and from the Mayor of Amsterdam and King of Netherlands to its two prime ministers ¹ – condemned “antisemitic attacks” in this the city of Anne Frank, where Arab cabbies led an impromptu resistance, the media went into overdrive.

Neither The Telegraph  nor this Jerusalem Post account offer a scintilla of evidence for saying Jews were targeted for being Jews – as distinct from racist hooligans who are Jewish. The levels of editorial cowardice and the reckless disregard for consequences – not least for real McCoy antisemitism as opposed to the imaginary kind so useful to Zionists of Judaist, Christian or for that matter secular stripe ² – are staggering.

It was simply a matter of time, hours not days, before this incendiary meme did the rounds on social media:

True, I did cover these things in my previous post, and Owen Jones’s forensic takedown is a hard act to follow. At his best the lad’s uncommon good at combining moral outrage with icily magisterial command of the facts – and this was indeed Owen at his best.

That said, and though the tone is dialled down, this Double Down News  take has more than enough additional detail to get my vote. Over to Peter Jukes:

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1. I refer to de jure  prime minister Dick Schoof and de facto  prime minister Geert Wilders, far Right leader of Holland’s largest party but blocked from ministerial office.
2. As Jonathan Cook pointed out in the Amsterdam context:

   Anyone opposed to genocide – sadly, not enough of us, it seems – probably isn’t feeling too warmly towards Israel right now. That is a moral position. Confusing it with antisemitism is pure sophistry. The sophistry is dangerous to boot. It creates the very reality it claims to be trying to stop. It suggests a connection between being Jewish and supporting genocide. That truly is antisemitism.