A pogrom in, of all places, Amsterdam

November 8, 2024 • 9:30 am

Once again Amsterdam is proving itself Europe’s most antisemitic city. Last night a pogrom of Jews began in the city, involving a group of extremist Muslims roaming around a soccer field where an Israeli team was playing. Demanding that people identify themselves, the hooligans then proceeded to beat up anybody with an Israeli passport, or even those who were suspected to be Jews.

This is especially distressing because the Netherlands has a sad history of Jew hating—largely (but not exclusively) on the part of the Nazis. Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank and her family, who were probably betrayed by a Dutch person. They were sent to the dreaded camp of Westerbork, a transit stop from which, between 1942 and 1944, nearly 100,000 Jews, as well as Romani, were sent to death camps elsewhere. The Netherlands lost a huge number of Jews during WWII:  nearly three-quarters of all Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust.

It’s ironic, then, that Dutch citizens enacted a pogrom on Jews in Amsterdam just last night. And El Al is evacuating Jews back to Israel! From the NYT report:

Israeli commercial planes on Friday were bringing home citizens injured in Amsterdam after bursts of violence tied to a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team that Israeli and Dutch officials described as antisemitic attacks.

The police in Amsterdam said in a statement on Friday that they had begun an investigation into multiple outbreaks of violence, and that 62 people had been arrested. Most of those arrested were later released, the authorities said.

The Dutch police said that the clashes had taken place in several places where people had gathered, some in support of the Israeli team and others to protest its arrival.

A tense atmosphere and street disturbances had been building since Wednesday night and early Thursday, hours before the soccer match. The Amsterdam authorities said at a news conference that people had attacked Israeli fans and chanted anti-Israeli slogans, and that they were investigating whether the attacks were coordinated. They also said that some supporters of the Israeli team had taken a Palestinian flag down from a building. Videos posted to social media and verified by The New York Times show men taking down a Palestinian flag while others nearby hurled anti-Arab chants.

While the exact sequence of events remained unclear, the violence appeared to be the product of two combustible forces in Europe: the unrest that often accompanies gatherings of hard-core soccer fans and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

Five Israelis who had been hospitalized were later discharged, the Amsterdam authorities said. Some others sustained light injuries, they said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that he had spoken with Dick Schoof, his Dutch counterpart. Mr. Schoof said in a statement early Friday that there had been antisemitic attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam, calling them “completely unacceptable.”

He added that the situation had calmed and that he had told Mr. Netanyahu in their phone conversation that the perpetrators would be found and prosecuted.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, said he would travel to the Netherlands on Friday to meet with his Dutch counterpart as well as with Israelis and members of the Jewish community.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli airline El Al said that it would “operate on short notice rescue flights” free of charge from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv starting Friday afternoon.

Apparently the IDF had started planning rescue flights of Dutch Jews, but abandoned that plan after El Al said it would rescue the Jews on commercial flights.

Some tweets from one person:

“I’m not Jewish, and he gets punched anyway. The Times of Israel reports that the Amsterdam police stood by and didn’t do anything. WHY?

Click to see the videos on this one, which I can’t embed:

 

As usual, the NYT deliberately misleads the readers (see below):

You may recall that when I visited the Netherlands last May, invited by students to be on a panel at the University of Amsterdam to discuss the incursion of ideology into science, the student group who invited the four of us canceled at the last minute. The reason:  two of us had proven too sympathetic to Israel! That was a shock to me, as I’d never been canceled before when I was talking about science (we weren’t going to mention the war!). But it was a sign of what’s going on in the city. And the students who canceled us weren’t Muslims. Philosopher Maarten Boudry and I, the two “cancelees,” wrote a Quillette piece about our experience. (Boudry had also been canceled the week before at the same university for a different talk, but for the same reason!) But of course our treatment inflicted a psychological blow, not a physical one.

What is to be done? A lot of the trouble in Europe like this comes from Muslim immigrants, but of course most Muslim immigrants don’t go around beating up Jews. Nevertheless, this kind of action is not only racist, but badly hurts the reputation of European countries where it occurs. I don’t know how Europe can vet the young men who cause antisemitic violence, but they should at least adjudicate their behavior quickly, and deport them when they’re guilty. I for one am not overly keen to go back to the Netherlands, though I have good and sympathetic friends there.

Kudos to the King and to the Dutch Prime Minister for decrying this violence and Jew hatred, but decrying is not enough. As the country’s Chief Rabbi said above, the situation has gone too far for words; there must be action taken to stop the brutality and the hatred that causes it (without, of course, abrogating free speech).

h/t: Jez

51 thoughts on “A pogrom in, of all places, Amsterdam”

  2. Most can’t be deported, as they will have Dutch citizenship via ius solis. People with Arab identities in the Netherlands/France/Belgium are often grandchildren of people who came from North Africa in the sixties or seventies.
    A soccer game between the Belgian team and the Israeli national team had to be played in Budapest recently, because the safety of the Israeli fans could not be guaranteed in Brussels. The difference between Budapest and Brussels: Fewer Arabs in Budapest.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/belgium-refuses-to-host-israel-soccer-match-citing-security-fears/

    1. So what does a country do with a polity with corrosive toxic cultural values that will not assimilate into the host country and live peaceably within, but which can’t be driven out because they have Dutch citizenship and no other? Are some mistakes truly irrecoverable, like failing to stop bleeding early enough? Is that what Managed Decline just means?

      1. Yep. Immigration is forever. It’s not like a law you can revoke when the government changes.

      2. Not a lot but you can sort of stop the rot, Leslie.
        You can instruct y/our embassies to give visas to Lebanese Maronites, Egyptian Copts, Iraqi Christians… prioritize them.
        Or just give visas to ANY Indians irrespective of religion (Indian Muslims don’t do terrorisms) or Chinese, Finns… or Australians! heheh 😉
        We’ll throw a shrimp on the barbie but we won’t blow it up
        You can titrate this.

        According to Gad Saad in Montreal the Islamic terrorism thing is a big deal in Canada. I believe him.

        I’ve been very destabilized by the Hamas-Pal-mobs marauding my city (just this week but it is constant). Many are from the Islamosphere.

        Many also are grads of “TikTok U. of Middle East politics” – the low mate value “girls who aren’t doing well” and their queer friends.
        Both problems need work.

        D.A.
        NYC

  3. Absolutely disgusting but don’t just blame this on Amsterdam, as someone from the UK I see people like Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway et al stirring up anti-semitic hatred on a regular basis, the trendy left will be celebrating this.

    1. Since Israeli intelligence is so good at ferreting out and surgically eliminating its enemies, I would like to see Western nations infected with these Palestinian thugs partner with Israel to identify and root out these malignant elements in their society.

      In the case of the Dutch, identify all of these bad actors, most of whom are useless, unskilled young men who refuse to contribute positively to their host society, and deport them or jail them indefinitely. Send a very strong message that their society will not be reduced to a violent backwater like much of the Middle East. If you come to our country and we let you in, you need to provide a net benefit, not drag us down into barbarism.

      1. Surgically? The UN says that almost 70% of the deaths in Gaza were women and children. Both antisemitism and the atrocities committed by Jews are abhorrent.

        1. I’m sorry to say but the UN blindly repeats the data supplied by Gaza’s Ministry of Health (i.e., Hamas). According to much more reliable assessements by the IDF, the majority of killed are fighters. There is a long history of Hamas claiming “mostly women and children” in every previous war which Hamas started with Israe—only to admit a few years later, when nobody cares or remembers, that the majority killed were their heroic fighters. Exactly like IDF claimed from the beginning.

          2. Every war is an atrocity. This atrocity could be avoided if Hamas didn’t invade Israel, didn’t massacre over 1200 people and didn’t take over 250 as hostages. Israel, as every state in the world, has a duty to defend its citizens and to try to get innocent hostages out of the enemy’s dungeons. The war (and atrocities) could end any moment. The only thing needed is that Hamas lies down its arms and returns hostages.

            A war conducted by Israel should be judged according the same standard as any other just war. War with ISIS conducted by the Western coalition took many more dead civilians per every killed combatant than what IDF achieves now both in Gaza and in Lebanon. Ask any real military expert who knows what it takes to fight an urban war. 

          3. Thank you Malgorzata and glad you are on the mend from illness enough to rejoin the good fight.

        2. Killing civilians isn’t an atrocity if they are killed non-wantonly in the destruction of a legitimate military target of sufficient value, in a war for a just cause. Civilian deaths in Gaza at the hands of the IDF so far largely meet all those criteria. (Civilians killed by Hamas, even accidentally or recklessly, are another matter.)

          In response to your loaded question, “How much atrocity is acceptable?”, the answer is none. But civilians can be killed in whatever unavoidable numbers it takes to win.

          Please don’t use words that I don’t think you understand what they mean.

          Besides, even if Israel was committing atrocities, the Muslims in Amsterdam still need to just fuck off.

        3. As an obvious example, Israel went to great lengths to plan and execute an ingenious plan through the “pager offensive” to precisely target its attackers in Lebanon. But with its available firepower, Israel could have just decimated the area.

          Obviously, if Israel’s enemies had that same level of firepower, they would not waste any time trying to execute a surgical attack with booby-trapped pagers. They would just indiscriminately kill, like on October 7, but on a much larger scale.

          If you don’t notice these obvious differences, I’m not sure what to tell you.

        5. There’s no atrocities. Hamas started a war. They’ve got a war.

          Civilians also die in wars (check the figures for WW2. They’re unbelievable.)

        6. The UN? Do they? Well how could an org with 50 Muslim states and one Jewish state NOT be trusted?

          Institutions decay, Mr. Jenkins, over time.
          Update your Basian priors and you’ll see a distinctly different UN.
          respectfully,

          D.A.
          NYC

    2. Bullies need to be restrained by the police before any violence erupts, and arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced if they still manage to cause it.

      Reports say the Amsterdam police abandoned what they must have realized were vulnerable targets and then apparently sat around for an hour and a half doing nothing. So let’s start right here.

        2. I suspect you’re typical: many if not most people believe themselves to be especially virtuous.

  5. I have yet to see a situation in the reverse…in which Jews living in the West roam around and beat up Muslims and Palestinians. The bullies and the thugs are always sympathizers of Palestine.

    The violence is always one way….Arab/Muslim —> Jew.

    No surprises that the NYT, who backed the loser, woke-addled Democrats, misreported this incident. You can’t fix stupid, apparently.

    1. Makkabi fans did beat up an Arab holding a Pali flag in Greece. I know this because venom spouting supporters of the attackers of last night posted the video (probably the only known case, though). Jews living in the West and Israeli Makkabi fans are not quite the same thing. I have yet to hear Western Jews chant Fuck you Palestine. Also, Jews are a tiny majority versus Muslims in Western Europe, and keeping the peace and supporting the state’s monopoly on violence is in their best interest. Not quite so in Israel, where Jewish thugs beating up Arabs is not an unknown phenomenon.

  6. Israel is the greatest threat to the Jewish people since Hitler!?
    How does one arrive at this twisted logic?

    I’ve noticed that the politicians who are today described as far-right also seem to be the ones who are most in favor of protecting Jews and opposed to violence against them. It’s funny – my values haven’t changed from my centrist positions that I’ve always held, such as it’s not OK to beat up Jews or any other people because of their race, creed, or color, but now I’m a far-right hate monger because I don’t want to see Jews killed in their homes in Israel or beaten up in the streets in Europe or America.

    I’m doubleplus ungood, I guess.

    1. Oy veh. MiddleEastEye is a peak of comedic stupidity and almost certainly a front for Saudi “charity” money and the Islamic Brotherhood. See their insane youtube channel.
      So there’s that.

      D.A.
      NYC

  11. Abhorrent, to be sure.

    I have learned to be slightly conspiratorial as of late : as a way to turn it over in thought for more insight, to look for signs of deliberate destabilization->crisis, particularly in regard to how that crisis is seemingly to be “resolved” – there are methods such as reflexive alchemy to drive crisis into a trap.

    But of course, all I mean is to consider this sinister element potentially behind apparently “organic” instability, with emphasis on material evidence. Maybe it turns something up, maybe not.

    1. Got cut off:

      … and I need not accept such notions as true just because they sound like a cool heist/thriller movie.

      I also understand antisemitism is, itself, the product of a deep conspiratorial thought virus, of which there is detailed examination of here on WEIT. So it is extremely tricky to make this comment clear, is what I’m saying.

  12. Sorry, but I blame Islam. It is a retrograde force, and does not mix well with Western values. Europe made a huge mistake by allowing mass immigration of Muslims into their societies. These problems will only get worse and will enable far right populists to eventually gain control.

    Have a nice day.

    1. Yes Lysander – the mob didn’t consist of Dutch Christians/atheists, nor I’d imagine Chinese immigrants or Japanese exchange students.
      I’ll say no more.

      best,
      D.A.
      NYC

    2. Retrograde to the sixth and seventh centuries but don’t the blighters love their modern weapons, the pick-ups with .50cal machine guns, the explosive belts. the motorised hang gliders, etc? Oh, yes! Hypocrites! Eff off back to Arabia, your camels and your backward way of life!

    3. Don’t be sorry for stating facts! Islam is antithetical to Western values. It is quite apparent that, courtesy of questionable immigration policies, turmoil in Europe has resulted.

  13. HA. I hope El Al put on more flights to NYC. We have an infestation of River to Sea morons flowing down our streets and avenues pretty regularly.

    Actually El Al fly here daily. To Newark and JFK. Despite my maximalist pro-Zionist column and family history, and the time I’ve spent in the Islamosphere, Lebanon particularly, I’ve never been to Israel. I should get on one of those planes but unlike PCC(E) I am a lazy man.
    —————————————
    And I’m loathe to criticize the Dutch here – despite this mess up they seem to realize they went too heavy on unrestricted Islamic immigration. See their recent elections.

    Much of our prosperity and freedom in the US comes from the UK and some of that intellectual seed capital originated in the Netherlands.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Wow, Roz. Thank you for posting that. She’s fortunate the feds are protecting her. She’s a brave woman. I have the utmost respect for her. I hope beyond hope that the new administration will do all it can to weaken Iran and perhaps the populace can rid themselves of those nasty mullahs and their basigi henchmen. It’s a big ask, I know. The Iranian people have so much to offer the world. They are a wonderful people. I wish for their freedom.

  16. I’m not sure that a howling mob demanding passports & attacking people can be considered free speech by any stretch of the imagination. In a recent publication the ACLU was discussing the issue of free speech vis a vis the recent student protests on university campuses against Israel. They specifically noted that any violence, intimidation, &/or prevention of normal activities were not protected as free speech. They also noted that municipalities & universities had the right to impose restrictions including requirement for a permit, limitation to a specific area, & prohibition on establishing camps. There are issues that I don’t agree with that the ACLU supports, but this is not one of them. The only problem with the article was that no remedy for violations was provided as they advised against the use of police &/or the National Guard, as have other people who are too far to the Left. When “pretty please” doesn’t work, what exactly is a campus or municipality left with to enforce laws if not escalating force?

    1. The first responsibility is for the police to prevent breaches of the peace. This means arresting people illegally interfering with lawful business or posing a risk to public safety (or, obviously, committing ordinary crimes like arson, robbery, and assault.) That’s why we have riot squads and why riot is a serious crime. Rioters who resist arrest or who won’t disperse after the mayor reads the riot act can end up dead from the application of lawful force. There is a protocol for calling in the National Guard or, in Canada, the Army to assist the civil authority. The United States Army can be deployed by the President to suppress insurrection against the Constitution, as at Little Rock. I’m sure the Left agreed enthusiastically with uniforms and rifles on the street then.

      To my mind, the only people who could object to the state exercising its obligation to keep order and protect civil rights in this way are those who hope that this riot is the first act in their long-awaited revolution. They are hoping it might succeed if only the oppressive state can be intimidated into going easy on it.

  17. In the UK, we already have antisemitic bobblehead political commentators like Owen Jones trying their best to mitigate this pogrom, and even blame Jews for it.

  18. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who of course knows the Netherlands well, and served in its legislature) wrote this on the subject:

    “Yesterday night’s pogrom was thus the opposite of a black swan. Such an event was foreseeable long ago. Twenty years ago, I watched as the Dutch authorities caved in to almost every Islamist demand. Muslim students disrupted or walked out of classes on the history of the Holocaust, so the classes were eliminated from their curriculum. Jews and gays were attacked and beaten in the streets of Amsterdam, so—after a series of platitudes about “unacceptable behavior”—the victims were told not to appear so gay or Jewish in future.

    More recently, in one of those ironies that would require an Evelyn Waugh to do full justice, the Anne Frank House, a museum established to commemorate the Holocaust, was made to include Islamophobia as many of the hatreds it is now repurposed to combat.

    No doubt Amsterdam today can boast the highest share of minorities employed in government and security agencies. But, as a consequence, those agencies cannot guarantee the safety of Jews.

    The globalization of the Intifida is progressing rapidly when, in the year 2024, we are called to witness a pogrom in the city of Baruch Spinoza and Anne Frank.”

    https://courage.media/2024/11/08/the-pogrom-in-amsterdam/

Comments are closed.