What happened in Amsterdam november 2024?
An evidence-based overview.
What happened in Amsterdam November 7 and 8 2024 has been obscured by misleading press coverage, with the most relevant facts often buried deep in the text.
What is agreed on is that 3000 supporters of the Tel Aviv Maccabi soccer club arrived in Amsterdam for a match between the home team Ajax and Maccabi. Per the Jerusalem Post they were accompanied by Mossad agents.
The Wednesday before the match verified footage showed the supporters tearing down Palestinian flags from a second story window,chanting anti-arab messages,and beating up a taxi driver.
The next day as they were being escorted by police to the match the Maccabi supporters were recorded chanting anti-Arab songs, singing “Let the IDF win and F*** the Arabs”. These actions were confirmed by the Amsterdam police commissioner.
Before the match started, Maccabi supporters disrupted the moment of silence for the victims of the Spanish floods with chants, whistles and fireworks, allegedly because Spain had cancelled an arms deal with Israel.
After the match, won by Ajax 5-0, things turned uglier. This is best documented by a video made by @OmeBender, a 14 year old dutch video journalist.
Coverage starts with the match and goes through events afterwards. He documents a large group of Maccabi supporters marched through the streets, arming themselves with metal poles and wooden planks and charging at another group, then prying up bricks and rocks that they hurled at taxis and police. A Palestinian flag is ripped off and burned. Of note many of the Maccabi supporters had military training as reservists and appeared to be coordinating their actions and listening to a leader. Bender notes that they talked among themselves in Herbrew, thus keeping their plans hidden from the police. Belatedly the police arrived, surrounded the 100 or so hooligans, arrested some and put the rest on buses.
An interesting aspect of Bender’s and others reportage is that some fragments of the footage shown on mainstream media match what he shows, except are misidentified as violence done against the Israeli supporters. How do we know which is correctly labelled? It can be difficult at times given darkness and distance, but Bender’s 17 minutes of video leaves no doubt as to who is doing the violence.
One wonders, what would have been the reaction if 3000 arabs had marched through Tel Aviv, ripping off and burning Israeli flags, attacking Israeli taxis, and chanting songs about finishing off Jews and mocking their lack of schools because they had killed all Jewish children?
Most press reports emphasized the clashes as anti-semitic, with only later in the text adding the actions by the Maccabi supporters. For example, Le Figaro, the conservative pro-Israeli French newspaper, noted further down in its coverage that 3000 Maccabi fans had torn down Palestinian flags, attacked taxi drivers, and chanted to finish off arabs. The NY Times highlighted attacks on Israeli, only later in article mentioning how the Israeli had burned Palestinian flag, attacked taxi drivers and chanted anti-arab songs, but omitting their more riotous behavior. Sky News was a rare exception in giving fuller and more objective coverage.
The usual pro-Israeli politicians were quick to condemn the actions against Israeli hooligans, ignoring completely the actions of the Maccabi supporters. Netanyahu was quick to compare the events to Kristallnacht, the night when thousands of Jewish establishments in Germany were vandalized and Jews rounded up in response to an assassination of a German embassy worker in Paris. The evidence, however, shows that the actions in Amsterdam that most resembled “Kristallnacht” were those perpetrated by Maccabi supporters, tearing down pro-Palestinian flags and attacking identifiable Arab establishments.
This is not the first time that Maccibi supporters behaved like hooligans at their matches. Earlier in the year at a match in Greece a mob of their supporters were filmed viciously attacking a Palestinian.
In the end, “traumatized” Maccabi Tel Aviv fans arrived from Amsterdam at Ben Gurion airport singing a celebration of their genocide:
Ole ole
Ole ole ole
Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs
Ole ole
Ole ole ole
Why is school out in Gaza?
There are no children left there
this raises a final question: why are Maccabi fans not banned from matches because of the behavior of their fans and their open racism towards Arabs and Palestinians? And when other nations are banned from athletic events for their behavior, why are Israeli teams not banned because of the genocide perpetrated by Israel ?