תגית: Ajax Amsterdam

Amsterdam Court Convicts Five for Violent Attack on Israeli Soccer Fans

Defendants face prison and community service, while court acknowledges claim that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were involved in violence but condemns attacks on Israeli soccer fans.

Published in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2024-12-24/ty-article/.premium/amsterdam-court-convicts-five-for-violent-attack-on-israeli-soccer-fans/00000193-f851-d8c2-a7db-f97d06230000

An Amsterdam court on Tuesday sentenced five individuals for their involvement in an attack on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans last month, following the team's Europa League match against Ajax.The sentences ranged from community service to six months in prison, although the prosecution had sought much harsher penalties. For instance, a defendant who received a six-month sentence had initially faced a prosecution request for two years in prison.

The court acknowledged the claim that the Israeli fans were involved in violence and considered the context, but stated it "sees no justification for violence against Maccabi fans." Defense lawyers argued that the evidence used against the defendants was unlawfully obtained, claiming it involved privacy violations through phone hacking. However, the court rejected these arguments, as well as accusations that the events had been exploited for political gain by local politicians. Both sides have 14 days to appeal the sentences.

The defendents are:

Sefa Ö., 32, a Turkish barber, was filmed attacking Israeli fans in Amsterdam's Dam Square and was sentenced to six months in prison for assault.

Umutcan A., 24, a Turkish-born resident of The Hague, was filmed striking a fan and stealing his scarf. He was sentenced to one month in prison.

Rachid A., 26, from Utrecht, was convicted of sharing information and participating in the violence. He received a 10-week prison sentence.

Lucas D., 19, from outside Amsterdam, was accused of throwing stones at police and attempting to breach their defensive line. He was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

Karavan S., 26, a night-shift hotel worker in Amsterdam, was found guilty of inciting violence and sharing the location of the fans. He was sentenced to one month in prison.

In November, Israeli fans were attacked by locals who waited for them as they returned from the stadium on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

Five fans required hospitalization. Dozens of suspects were arrested in the days following the attack, which was widely documented and triggered a diplomatic dispute.

The five defendants and two others are the only ones to have been charged so far.

The Far-right Activist Who Sparked an Imaginary Pogrom in Stockholm

The question of whether the attack on Israelis in Amsterdam last month was an isolated incident or the beginning of a trend is critical to Israel's relationship with the rest of the world and the future of Europe's Jews. And according to several Israeli media outlets, two days after the incident in Amsterdam, a similar incident occurred in another European capital.

Published in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-12-12/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-far-right-activist-who-sparked-an-imaginary-pogrom-in-stockholm/00000193-b770-dd53-a3f3-f77b2ee60000

The online news site Mako reported that Jews were attacked "in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during a ceremony commemorating the Kristallnacht pogrom." It said anti-Israel demonstrators yelled derogatory names at the ceremony's participants, snatched their Israeli flags, tore them up and threw them into the river.

The report was accompanied by a video titled "the difficult footage from Sweden." It shows police officers chasing a woman and arresting her. Channel 14 News added analysis and superlatives. "Antisemitism is having a feast day," it reported. "Pro-Palestinians brutally attacked Jews who gathered to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht in Stockholm." The same news item, with some variations, appeared in other media outlets and was widely circulated on social media.

Meanwhile, in the real world, what happened in Stockholm is indeed troubling, but for different reasons. First, no ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht took place there. Second, no Jews were attacked. Third, this false information was disseminated by people who counted on the media to spread the lie, thereby providing them with free political propaganda. And they were right. The Swedish media refused to buy the goods, but the Israeli media sure did (I might add, for the benefit of Mako's investigative reporters, that Stockholm doesn't have a river).

What actually happened in Stockholm that night was revealed by Swedish investigative reporter Jonathan Leman in Expo magazine (which defines itself as fighting "racist ideas, myths and conspiracy theories"). On the evening of November 9, a pro-Palestinian march took place in central Stockholm. Such demonstrations have been happening in Sweden for more than a year now. The marchers chant slogans that some people (myself included) see as antisemitic, and they are filled with hatred for Israel. But usually, they are completely nonviolent.

This demonstration was the same, aside from one difference – the protest march was joined by a guest riding a bike, who was widely filmed by videographers broadcasting from the scene. One of them is known to work with media outlets identified with the Sweden Democrats, a populist right-wing party that has a neo-Nazi past.

The demonstrators immediately realized that the bike rider wasn't one of theirs. She was an older woman who spoke with the videographers and attracted attention because she had an Israeli flag attached to her bike (as well as the Finnish flag and Iran's flag from before the Islamic Revolution). She also had a loudspeaker through which she played Hebrew songs like "Am Yisrael Chai" and a megaphone via which she proclaimed that "Hamas murdered all the homosexuals in Gaza" and "Hamas planned to annihilate all the Jews."

At first glance, she appeared to be a courageous warrior who supports Israel. And that is indeed how she was depicted in reports from the videographers who were there. But this isn't true. As Expo discovered, the woman is actually a far-right activist. On social media, she spreads a mixture of antisemitism, Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, an Islamic takeover of Europe and the destructive power of Sweden's Jews, who "want to destroy the Nordic peoples" and constitute "a metastasizing cancer."

So why was she demonstrating against the Palestinians and seemingly supporting Israel? Anyone who tries to impose order on this eccentric activist's political theories will discover that her support for Israel stems from her hatred of Jews and Muslims in Europe. Despite her ideological hatred of Zionism, she wants the Nordic states to be free of Muslims and Jews, so she supports their expulsion. This isn't love of Zion, but radical racism and antisemitism.

The bike rider's appearance at the demonstration had the potential to cause an outbreak of rioting. But that didn't happen. Granted, there was some anger, but the organizers worked to calm it. At the end of the demonstration, one demonstrator grabbed the woman's Israeli flag, threw it off a bridge and was arrested on the spot. The headline the right-wing media gave this incident was "On the day we remember Kristallnacht, a Palestinian activist stole an Israeli flag and threw it into the water." What happened next is fascinating. People posting on numerous X, Instagram and Facebook accounts in several countries began adding details, limited only by their imaginations.

A ceremony that never took place was invented, groups of Jews who were attacked were created ex nihilo, one flag became many flags, and on some accounts, it was no longer flags that thrown into the freezing water of the Baltic Sea, but Jews. Anger boiled over, and there were thousands of shares and comments in groups with hundreds of thousands of members. When all this reached the Israeli media, the makeover was complete – the inventions became news. Even their rejection of the original videographer's false information didn't change anything.

Two conclusions can be drawn from the incident in Stockholm. First, the support Israel's government has found in Europe's far right is a broken reed. Beneath the hatred of Arabs and the nationalist fervor that the government likes so much lies a thick layer of antisemitism that cannot be mistaken. Second, the battle that honest politicians on all sides must join is the battle against the agents of chaos who create a world in which instead of truth and lies, there are only narratives.

The worship of likes and internet traffic, media outlets that dispense with checking facts and operators of trolls and bots aren't a threat to the opposition or the governing coalition. Rather, they are threat to the very existence of a free society.

The question of whether last month's attack on Israelis in Amsterdam was an isolated incident or the beginning of a trend remains critical. Yet anyone who reports on imaginary pogroms is not only undermining the media's credibility, but also creating a situation in which nobody will believe in or deal with the real ones.

For Europe's Jews, Antisemitism Is Felt in Everyday Interactions

More than physical violence, antisemitism against European Jews now reveals itself through incidents such as school bullying and ostracism at the workplace. Israeli expat communities on the continent could become a bridge between Israeli and European societies.

Published in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-19/ty-article-opinion/.premium/for-europes-jews-antisemitism-is-felt-in-everyday-interactions/00000193-447d-dd32-a9df-7e7d4c000000

STOCKHOLM – The rioting that followed the soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax in Amsterdam at the beginning of the month engendered mixed reactions in Israel. Initially, there was shock over its blatant antisemitic character and lamentations over "the Islamization of Europe." That was followed by claims that the violence was prompted by the conduct of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and that comparisons to Kristallnacht trivialized the Holocaust.

Such arguments merit discussion, but, to delve more deeply, it's worth considering the European perspective in addition to the Israeli one. First of all, when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans faced physical violence, they were facing a very extreme expression of anti-Israelism and antisemitism. However, for Jews who live in Europe, it's just one manifestation of antisemitism, albeit perhaps the most frightening one, but certainly not the most common.

Other manifestations are less photogenic, but they impose a heavy burden on the lives of European Jews: pestering at school, aggressive campaigns on social media, cultural and academic boycotts, hurtful comments, and tension and ostracism in the workplace. Physical violence is rather rare.

Secondly, antisemitism is much more than an individual case of racism. In European public discourse, there is a nascent recognition that it's a kind of conspiracy theory. Those falling into its net and spreading it might be people who have never met a Jew, and perceive themselves as liberals who "have nothing against the Jewish people." They don't even need to use the word "Jewish." The conflict in the Middle East and the so-called gray area between what is antisemitic and what is anti-Israel has made it possible to use code words such as "globalists", references to George Soros – and, of course, Zionists.

It's not a new phenomenon, but it involves a world of new concepts. Instead of old-style antisemitism in which the Jews were considered Christ's killers, or more modern antisemitism accusing the Jews of controlling the world through the banking system, revolutionary movements and secret societies, there are contemporary allegations that prove confusing even to those who don't hold clearly racist views. The most popular ones claim Jews spread COVID-19 to profit from vaccines, are behind the war in Ukraine, and are breaking up nation-states. In addition, the well-known conspiracies about Jewish control of the media and the financial markets are still going around.

The Israeli left has also sometimes fallen into the trap. Since it rightly opposes continued Israeli control of the West Bank and the war crimes in Gaza, it finds European partners for its worldview. Sometimes they're serious and honest partners, however, other times, they're actors spreading allegations of genocide who support Islamist terrorist groups and propaganda advocating Israel's destruction.

Just as the Israeli far-right finds neo-Nazi partners as a result of their campaign against Muslims, some on the left find antisemitic partners because they oppose the occupation – even if its opposition is to Israel's 1949 armistice borders rather than to those post-1967.

Third, real-life antisemites, unlike those portrayed in the media, aren't two-dimensional figures. The coverage of what happened in Amsterdam focused on scenes of masked men of Middle Eastern origin looking for blood. In the real world, antisemitism has been hiding behind more familiar faces with other characteristics, other backgrounds and motives: young Europeans who read Trotskyite literature, high school students using antisemitism as a means of abusing classmates, and university lecturers attempting to attract attention to themselves.

Not all immigrants are antisemitic. Not all antisemites are immigrants, and the antisemitic incidents in Europe aren't necessarily spontaneous outbursts of hate or protest. They're also a product of campaigns financed by actors such as Qatar, Turkey and Russia. Just as most rapists don't look like monsters and don't lurk behind bushes in dark parks, the antisemitic monster sometimes lives within ordinary and seemingly unthreatening figures.

When soccer fans come to Europe and witness demonstrators spreading hate against Israel under the banner of the Palestinian flag, they experience it as a physical threat. When European Jews witness the same demonstration, more than violence, they fear that the hostile crowd includes their children's kindergarten teacher, their bank clerk or their nurse at the local clinic.

And one last point. We're used to identifying the victims of antisemitism in Europe with members of local Jewish communities. In Amsterdam, the victims were Israeli tourists who experienced it for the moment and then returned home. But among those two distinct groups, there's another. In recent years, groups of Israeli expats in Europe have established communities engaged in education, culture and social initiatives; the Hebrew language and secular Israeli identity are flourishing there.

These communities experience and deal with antisemitism differently, constituting both an opportunity and a risk in that regard. On the one hand, they're liable to constitute an attractive target for violent attacks and antisemites. On the other hand, their members might build a bridge for dialogue between Israeli and European societies that could help to deal with the sickness of antisemitism that the continent has been suffering from for centuries.