Dutch authorities: “Israel a state threat”

Above, UK Telegraph gets it spectacularly wrong, November 8, 2024. Below, Kit Klarenberg yesterday.

Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism (NCTV) has designated Israel a “state threat”. The agency’s annual assessment of “threat actors” for 2025 takes damning aim at malign “attempts to influence Dutch politics and society” by the Israeli government and its local lobbying apparatus. It’s the first time a Western intelligence service has acknowledged the grave hazard posed by Tel Aviv’s global Hasbara network. Will others now follow NCTV’s lead?

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Joe McCarthy was brought down by overreach. Flushed with success in politics and show-biz, he tried to take on a US Army whose lawyer, in a 1954 televised Senate Hearing, put to him those immortalised and career-terminating words: “have you no sense of decency?”

As many are coming to realise, an Israel Lobby which could have taught the Wisconsin Senator a thing or two about smear, character assassination and guilt by association has not one drop of the stuff. It’s too early to tell whether the Lobby – a tougher nut to crack on grounds of cash, organisational clout and, underpinning both, Israel’s value to the US ¹ – has overreached. But its irking of the Dutch authorities may one day be regarded, if not as a watershed moment, then as an early indicator of a shift similar to that opened up by a Boston lawyer’s question, devastating in its simplicity, seventy-one years ago.

Nine months ago I wrote a post, Gaslit in Amsterdam, on how the Lobby – its power and reach such that even to speak of it as a thing invites charges of antisemitism and rabid conspiracism – had swung into action to stand truth on its head when Israeli soccer thugs, enraged by Maccabi Tel Aviv’s five-nil drubbing by home team Ajax, rampaged through the capital to tear Palestinian flags from private dwellings whose walls they’d scaled, chant “death to Arabs”, and scare the living Jesus out of anyone crossing their path while looking as if he – or she – might fit the bill. When Muslim taxi drivers used radio to mobilise and push back, it was the most natural thing in the world for public figures, reporters and editors in permanent fear of that fulminating Lobby phone call ² – in the Netherlands from Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) or Christians for Israel (CFI), in my country the Board of Deputies – to present the whole affair as Kristallnacht II.

Israel, of course, helpfully stoked this idea by promising “emergency flights” to “rescue” its football fans – seeking to evoke memories of its airlifts in the 1980s of Ethiopian Jews to escape famine and reports of persecution, or possibly of the 1975 airlift of US embassy staff from Saigon …

Jonathan Cook

But the truth will out, though not usually as swiftly as it did in respect of “Kristallnacht II”. Here to pick up the thread is Kit Klarenberg:

Dutch Intel Flags Israel As ‘State Threat’

In a remarkable development, Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism (NCTV) has designated the Zionist entity a “state threat”. The agency’s annual assessment of “threat actors” for 2025 takes damning aim at malign “attempts to influence Dutch politics and society” by the Israeli government and its local lobbying apparatus. It’s the first time a Western intelligence service has acknowledged the grave hazard posed by Tel Aviv’s global Hasbara network. Will others now follow NCTV’s lead?

The agency’s report focuses on Israel’s “attempts to influence political and public opinion” around the riots that engulfed Amsterdam in November 2024, prior to a UEFA Europa League football match between Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch club AFC Ajax. Initially, local and international media, and politicians, condemned the clashes as unprovoked attacks on Israelis and Jews. The city’s mayor Femke Halsema described the incident as evocative of “Nazi pogroms”. Benjamin Netanyahu similarly likened the violence to Kristallnacht.

Rapidly however, it became clear that thuggish, far-right Maccabi supporters had purposefully sought to cause maximum mayhem. Upon entering Amsterdam, they tore down Palestinian flags flying from private homes, chanted repulsive slogans such as “death to Arabs”, assaulted Muslim residents of the city – including women – and vandalised state and public property. Despite CCTV footage of these incidents being mysteriously erased, and Western media deliberately concealing the crimes of Israeli fans, public figures who’d initially shrieked “antisemitism” over the upheaval were forced to issue embarrassing retractions.

Read in full …

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1. “Israel’s value to the US”  will always be determined by utilitarian cost-benefit analysis on lines set out in my four part series on US Neocons & Israel’s far-Right, and my 2019 post on Israel as beachhead for imperialism. As with all settler colonies, from Algeria’s pieds noir  through apartheid South Africa to the Six Counties of Occupied Ireland, Israel lives in fear of being cut loose by its underwriters. As I put it in Road to WW3. Part 1: Iran:

   No one should doubt the power of the lobby but … no one should doubt either that this power derives in the last analysis from the alignment … of US deep state agendas with those of a Greater Israel.

2. Whether those public figures, reporters and editors self censor, or speak from conviction, is a secondary question. Here for the umpteenth time is Noam Chomsky’s 1996 response to the BBC’s Andrew Marr on media bias at large:

   Marr: how can you know I’m self-censoring?

   Chomsky: I do not say you are self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair.