PATRICK LAWRENCE: Zionists in Amsterdam

What happened in one Dutch city is the world since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on Gaza: Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view.     

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

In the annals of “anti–Semitism,” if not anti–Semitism in its un-weaponized form, the events before, during, and since an ill-fated soccer match in Amsterdam last week merit a prominent entry.

We find in these chaotic days a picture in miniature of the sickness that has overtaken “the Jewish state,” the shameless apology those purporting to lead the Western post-democracies make for the straight-out barbarities of Zionist zealots, and the full-frontal disinformation spread by corporate and state-funded media as they pose as the first line of defense against disinformation.

It’s a three-fer, then, the whole banana in one place and at one time —all of this in the cause of the Zionist regime as it prosecutes its yearlong genocide in Gaza and sets about expanding its campaign of murder and destruction across West Asia. 

Bad enough that planeloads of freak-show Israeli extremists arrived in Amsterdam last week for a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax, the famous Dutch side, and instantly set about terrorizing the city in the name of Zionist chauvinism.

Worse were the authorities, starting but not ending with Amsterdam’s mayor and the Dutch foreign and prime ministers, recasting what was bound to follow as anti–Semitism, a 21st century pogrom, and so on down the list of hyperbolic absurdities. 

Worst — and I indeed count this worst for its consequences — Western print and broadcast media purposefully falsified all representations of these events to turn reality upside down: Wall-to-wall, the criminals became the innocents in the news accounts, the victimizers became victims, and the victims became condemnable, anti–Semitic menaces to human decency. 

See what I mean? Violence, lies, distortion, inverted reality: Two days in Amsterdam last week look now like one of those 16th century paintings the Dutch called “world landscapes,” wherein the whole of the earth is depicted in a compact panorama.

What happened in one Dutch city is the world as we have it since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, the Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view.     

Language is the instrument of my trade, and there must be words adequate to these depravities and corruptions. There must, there must. But the only one I know that matches the task at this point is “No!” Bear with me, please, as I struggle to find others. 

It has been long and well documented that the Zionist ideologues who have fashioned a national consciousness among Israelis have systematically cultivated a presumption of Jewish superiority and — the contradiction here is only apparent — a corresponding belief that the rest of humanity detests Jews and the world is in consequence a dangerous place.

This project, wherein Old Testament tales of Jewish barbarities are routinely invoked, predates World War II by many decades; since 1945, as is plain to anyone who looks honestly, the Holocaust has been fully instrumentalized in this cause. 

Systematic Indoctrination 

I recall video footage shot in Jerusalem during the crisis at al–Aqsa Mosque in May 2021. It showed young Israelis, the girls in prim blue-and-white school uniforms, leaping up and down in a sort of blissed-out frenzy shouting “Kill all Arabs!” and other such obscenities.

What in hell? I wondered. Zionism is racism, yes, but how did it sink to this level of crudity?  I should have understood. I did not know then the extent to which the minds of Israelis and Zionists the world over have been mutilated.  

Two films — maybe there are more — explain the systematized indoctrination that produced the outcome at al–Aqsa.

Defamation is a cleverly done documentary from 2009 that follows adolescent students as they are brainwashed, during a summer sojourn in Europe, to fear a world that hates them.

Israelism, released last year, shows how American Jews are similarly instructed in Hebrew school — and how the eyes of many of these victims are opening to the frauds and racist cruelties of Zionist ideology. 

You can watch Defamation here and Israelism here. These films are brilliant and brave.

And there is a straight line from the purposefully inculcated xenophobia and paranoia they depict to the scene on Jerusalem’s streets during the crisis at al–Aqsa and now — my point here — to the repulsive mobs of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week. 

These are people, hundreds of them, who began their provocative aggressions as soon as they disembarked at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport.

The video and reported record shows them marching through the streets in what amounts to a rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags displayed on house fronts, vandalizing a taxicab with its driver (Moroccan) inside, attacking local people with pipes and clubs, chanting obscene, probably criminal slogans — “Kill the Arabs,” “Fuck you Palestine,” “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs,” and on and on in this line. 

The last is a reference to recent protests in Israel in defense of Israel Defense Forces soldiers found to have gang-raped Palestinian prisoners. Violent demonstrators, among them members of the Netanyahu cabinet, thought sodomizing Palestinians held in what amount to torture camps, should be made legal.  

Numerous videos and news reports detail the horrific conduct of these repellent punks and the to-be-expected response from local people.

Here is one published last Friday in Middle East Eye. Here is a nine-minute video from Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist who has had a lot of things wrong over the years but has this story very right. Here is an exceptionally pithy commentary in MEE by the estimable Jonathan Cook. 

On Sunday The Grayzone published the excellent video reporting of a young Dutch journalist-in-the-making that records Israelis attacking a contingent of uniformed Amsterdam police officers.     

We can dispense with the ridiculous thought that these are football hooligans of the common variety and do not represent ordinary Israelis. Out of the question.

Owen Jones put out a second video Sunday, this one 17 minutes, that includes within it a video of the scene when the Israelis who went to Amsterdam arrived home. It is another raving paroxysm of racist delirium. 

Let us take good care to understand these people and what they signify. 

Sickness of a Nation 

One, we see in them the sickness of a nation. Amsterdam showed this to the world in real-time video, reports on “X” and various other social media platforms.

I do not know when the apartheid state can be said to have succumbed to a perfectly diagnosable case of collective psychosis, but this is its condition now and it should be treated as such. Israel as now constituted, and arguably from the start, I mean to say, is not an acceptable presence in the community of nations.  

See, for easy reference, the international community’s long, eventually successful ostracization of South Africa under the old apartheid regime. The time has come. 

Two, it is one thing to indulge in deranged eruptions of hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs generally within the (internationally recognized) borders of an hysterical state.

Let us invoke the principle of noninterference in the affairs of others, even if these affairs amount to crazed ravings, and leave Israel’s freakish majority to itself. Gaza, and the Occupied Territories are, of course, another matter. 

The Amsterdam events were something else. They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it.

This is what makes the mess in Amsterdam significant. And it is why it is important that it turned out to be, indeed, a mess.

Israeli terror did badly when it put its show on the road in the Netherlands last week. Ajax trounced Maccabi Tel Aviv 5 to zip. Zionism’s score was no better.   

Amsterdam police chief: Israelis provoked Palestine supporters

Amsterdam's police chief acknowledged that it was the Israelis who rioted, incited the supporters of Palestine, and angered them with offensive slogans and burning flags. pic.twitter.com/GSaAvalxlE

— Saif Ali Khan (@saifalikhan067) November 11, 2024

To consider this another way, listen carefully to all the racist chants. What were the Zionist deplorables who flew to Amsterdam saying? 

In my read they were terrorists asserting that Israeli terror has a legitimate place in what we call Western civilization. They demanded acceptance. And why shouldn’t they try this on, given the Western powers’ unequivocal endorsement of all the state-sponsored barbarism?    

The lesson here: It falls to those not of high office but of high principle to defend, in the streets or elsewhere, the remnants of the humane in the Western post-democracies. 

Finally, let us not forget that in almost all cases history records, victimizers are also victims.

In this case, to praise gang rape and the slaughter of children amounts to an inverted, perverted admission that one’s psyche has been grotesquely disfigured at the hands of manipulating ideologues desperate to make a nation out of a diaspora that, as various Jews have argued over the years, ought to have remained a diaspora.  

As to those who counter-demonstrated as these damaged people ripped through Amsterdam’s streets, it has been de rigueur this past week to include in one’s thoughts and observations some variation of, “There is no excuse for violence in response to the Israelis’ conduct.”

I go back to that important word mentioned above, “No!” The violence of those protesting the Israeli racists as they exported their nation’s terror to Europe, and the extent of this violence cannot be measured and so not known, is perfectly understandable in my view.   

We are talking about a city — one with a large Muslim population, as the Israelis surely knew — that was confronted with a manifestation of evil that is nearly as pure as it gets. And those subjected to this viciously aggressive display are to be criticized because they did not respond as angelic pacifists? 

I am simply not on for this. It has long seemed to me that we in the West, to dilate the lens briefly, have a very peculiar attitude toward violence given we live under regimes whose policies at home as well as abroad begin and end with violence or the threat of it. But I will leave this topic for another time. 

For now, this: However many Muslims were among those countering the Israelis in Amsterdam’s streets, and we cannot know this either, they are absolutely correct to read the small-time terrorists who arrived last week as manifestations of a global system that, in its centuries of racist ideology, has violently made of them its victims. 

Israeli officials ran all the miles their legs could carry them as they cast the Amsterdam events as another demonstration of a rampant wave of anti–Semitism sweeping across the globe. “It was a pogrom!” “It was another Kristallnacht!”

And among my favorites in this line for its faux desolation, this from Issac Herzog, the Israeli president: “I had hoped we would never again see these things.” 

This kind of stuff is altogether predictable. Zionist officials long ago lost the privilege of being taken seriously. 

Dishonesty Exposed

It is the responses of Dutch officials, and soon enough others in Europe, Britain and the U.S., I take seriously indeed. Their dishonesty — pervasive, distant from reality — has consequences running to free speech, all manner of other democratic rights, and popular opposition to terrorist Israel’s gross offenses to our shared humanity. 

As is now well-reported in many independent media, in the early aftermath of last week’s chaos Dutch officials and others — among them the egregious Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U. Commission — assiduously erased the provocations of the Israeli mobs, turning them into the innocent victims of Jew-hating urban marauders. 

Breaking: @SkyNews just deleted this video by their Amsterdam correspondent @AlicePorterTV posted to Twitter, without public explanation. I saved a copy.

The video explains the truth about the Israeli football hooligans who went on a racist rampage in the city this week. Watch: pic.twitter.com/saVATm74FO

— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) November 9, 2024

This narrative is now more or less in ruins. But there is no indication that officials at any level are prepared to self-correct in light of now-established facts. 

“What happened over the past few days is a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, hooligan behavior and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other countries in the Middle East.” That is Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, diagnosing last week’s events as quoted in The New York Times’ Tuesday editions. 

Once again, “No!” There is no equivalence among the three items on Halsema’s list.

The “war in Palestine and Israel” — what does this mean, while I am at it? — is by a long way the main event. Thuggery and anti–Semitism, and I will get to the latter shortly, are of passing importance in any honest evaluation of last week’s chaos. 

Dick Schoof, the Dutch premier, asserted that many or most of those so far arrested — 60-odd at this point, and who knows how true this is — were of “a migration background.” He added, “We have an integration problem. This is an expression of that.”

We are now dismissing last week’s events as unimportant, symptoms of the Netherlands’ social problems, nothing more than the resentments of brown people? “No!” once more. This is not an integration problem. It is a Zionism problem. 

It was inevitable that the riot of Zionist excess the Netanyahu government set in motion a year ago last month would spill well beyond Gaza and the rest of West Asia, given the Western powers’ enthusiasm for it.

Amsterdam can be reasonably interpreted as merely a chicken come home to roost. 

Dick Schoof will not get anywhere near addressing this reality. Dick Schoof is what I mean when I suggest that leadership in the Western post-democracies, artful dodgers all, is hopeless. As we must all face, there is no getting any sense or decency out of them. 

It is likely — once again, we have no confirmation of this — that there were declared anti–Semites among those who countered the Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam’s streets.

One cannot condone this, of course, but neither can one take these people, however many their number, as defining of the last week’s events, and neither can we neglect to put their presence in context.

Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel:  This has long been the Zionist state’s refrain — and the Netanyahu regime’s incessant refrain since it began its assault on Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023.

The identification is, of course, key to the Israelis’ way of protecting themselves against criticism. Attack Israel and you attack the Jewish faith: You are an anti–Semite. 

One of the responsibilities of those who oppose Israeli barbarism now is to reject this false congruence as a trap set by Zionist propagandists. This is not so easy for many people.

However many anti–Semites were on Amsterdam’s streets last week, it is likely some did not think this question through sufficiently to refuse the bait. To succumb to anti–Semitic sentiments at this point is to serve, in upside-down fashion, the Israeli cause. 

It is years since various government departments, universities, and other entities operating in the public sphere have endorsed the equivalence of opposition to Israel and anti–Semitism.

This is well-enough known. Since the Gaza crisis and the demonstrations across the Western post-democracies, this project has accelerated markedly. 

Official responses to the Amsterdam events seem to me disturbing in that they suggest the erasure of this vital distinction now appears to be more or less complete. This is a war not only of words but also of individual and democratic rights in the post-democracies. 

Let us not, let us never allow this preposterous conflation to pass without vigorous objection. Voices raised in opposition to Zionist terrorism — at this point to the Zionist state, indeed — are too important to let the charge of anti–Semitism silence them. 

Mainstream media across the Western world, as has now been well-exposed, have made an ungodly mess of their coverage of the Amsterdam events — and so of themselves.

By all appearance they complacently assumed they could control the narrative, chiefly by obscuring the chronology of events, and maintain their simply disgusting defense of Israel’s genocide and the freakery abroad among its citizens.

Stories with bold-faced lies, lies of omission, accurate broadcast news segments published and pulled as “not up to our standards”: You had all of this as events unfolded. Those videos Owen Jones put out, linked above, give a good inventory of these derelictions. 

As the days went by, it was very fine to see independent media force the corporate press and state-funded broadcasters such as the BBC to run for cover. This has to go down among the most revelatory, embarrassing occasions in the long decline of the mainstream. 

I salute all those independent practitioners who got this work done.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Swiss daily, published a piece in its Tuesday editions to this effect:

“The reconstruction of events in Amsterdam reveals a differentiated picture: The scenes surrounding the Champions League match between Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv went around the world, with top politicians outdoing each other in condemning the anti–Semitic incidents. However, amateur videos show a differentiated picture of the escalation. Maccabi fans were also violent before the anti–Israeli hunts.”

Plenty of blur remains but here you see how the major media in the West are trying to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves without being seen to be climbing. This is likely to prove as far they will go in the direction of honesty. 

My favorite in this line involves one of those amateurs the NZZ mentions. In its first-day story from Amsterdam, the Times included a brief, indistinct video showing, it said without equivocation, a gang of Dutch people running down a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan along an Amsterdam street.

“Verified by The New York Times” it assured readers with all that faux authority to which the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record no longer has any claim.

The video made the rounds among mainstream media. And in days following, its maker protested that all those reproducing it had turned it on its head: It was Israeli crazies chasing down a Dutch person. Her name turned out to be Annet de Graaf, and Annet de Graaf went public to demand retractions and apologies. 

So far as I know she has had one, from Tagesschau, Evening News, in Germany. 

And then this, from a piece in The New York Times Sunday. At this point our friends on Eighth Avenue appear a touch desperate to obscure all the false reporting published in previous days: 

“A video taken after midnight by a teenage Dutch YouTube personality and verified by The Times shows a group of men, many wearing Maccabi fan colors, picking up pipes and boards from a construction site, then chasing and beating a man. The incident was also captured in a video shot by a photographer, Annet de Graaf.”

Punks. Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, is a punk to let his foreign desk pull this stunt. This is the same video it published several days earlier with the roles of victim and victimizers reversed.

Zionist Israel lost, lost big in Amsterdam. The horror it has made of itself is now plain for the world to see. The apologist pols, already hanging on for dear life in the post-democracies, lost. Mainstream media lost. 

Annnet de Graaf, all the Annnet de Graafs — they won. They spoke the word and spoke for many. They said, “No!”

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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