The Times blames ‘both sides’ for Amsterdam attacks

When Owen Jones, in a series of tweets, defended the brutal antisemitic attacks last week in Amsterdam on Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans by of mostly Arab and Muslim gangs, we were not the least bit surprised. Why? Because, he’s a Guardian columnist, and his name is Owen Jones.

What we didn’t expect, however, is a report in The Times by their Europe editor Peter Conradi, and reporter Hugo Daniel, which went out of its way to playdown the clear antisemitic nature of the assaults – pre-planned anti-Jewish violence that was denounced by the Dutch prime minister, the Dutch King and local Amsterdam authorities.

The headline of the piece, interestingly, was appropriate (‘Father, you said Jews were safe’: stories from a shaken Amsterdam), quoting the son of an Israeli man who experienced the hateful mob, as were the opening paragraphs.

However, the tone beings to change in this paragraph:

As the Dutch government grapples with the repercussions, questions still have to be answered about what happened: was this an organised pogrom, as Netanyahu and others have suggested, or another example of how war in the Middle East is creating tension leading to violence in Europe?

First, it wasn’t only Netanyahu who called it a pogrom. The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, said it evoked memories of pogroms against Jews throughout history. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the US envoy to counter antisemitism, went further, saying that what occurred was “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom.”

Further, even though most Dutch authorities didn’t use the word “pogrom”, there was universal agreement that what occurred was clearly inspired by antisemitism, by gangs who coordinated in advance their “Jew Hunt“.

However, while the use of the specific word “pogrom” to describe the racist violence is certainly debatable, to suggest that the scenes of Jews being savagely beaten by antisemitic mobs may be merely the result of “tensions” from the Mid-East War denies agency to the Arabic-speaking perpetrators, and imputes at least some of the blame for the vicious assaults to the actions of the Jewish state.

Like Owen Jones, the Times report centers its at least partial defense of anti-Jewish violence on the fact that, two days before the attacks, a few of the Israeli football fans tore down a Palestinian flag was torn down and, reportedly, set alight.  Further, there’s a video of a group of Israelis chanting, in Hebrew, “We are going to f*** the Arabs.”

But, as we noted to the Times journalist on Twitter, Jews in the UK have seen posters of the hostages constantly torn down by anti-Israel activists, and Israeli flags trashed, since the Oct. 7th massacre, as well as antisemitic, pro-terror chants and abuse in the streets by demonstrators, many of them Muslim.  Can you image anyone citing such behavior to justify Jewish attacks on British Muslims?

Further into the article, the Times writers revisit the theme of understandable ‘tensions’ – rather than Jew hatred – stoking the violence on Friday, when readers are told that “Amsterdam has a large north African population, many of them shocked by images on social media and television of Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Lebanon“. 

They then acknowledge that there’s been “surge” of anti-Jewish incidents in the country, but fail to reach the intuitive conclusion that those in Europe who are most radically anti-Israel, particularly Muslims, tend to be the most antisemitic – with their Israel hatred driven by their hatred of Jews qua Jews.

There seems to be no question that the reporters would have covered the anti-Jewish attacks in Amsterdam far differently, avoiding even the appearance of excuse making for the antisemitic violence, if the perpetrators were neo-Nazis or other far-right extremists.

The fact is that much of the media still refuses to accept the fact that, while far-right antisemitism is still a major problem, the most serious threat to Jewish communities in Europe and North America comes from people of Middle-Eastern descent and their pro-Palestinian allies on the far-left.  This has been particularly evident since the Oct. 7th massacre.

As Dave Rich observed in his Substack post on the Amsterdam attacks, the shameful reaction within some quarters to the antisemitic mobs serves as “a reminder that some of those people in our societies who have thrown in their lot with the Palestinian cause will find ways to justify and excuse anything that befalls Europe’s Jews”.