How the police used ‘fake claims’ to justify the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv

I knew there was something off about West Midlands Police’s badmouthing of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans when they said they had thrown ‘innocent members of the public into the river’ in Amsterdam last year. The police spewed out this anecdote in a report justifying their ban on Maccabi fans from attending their team’s clash with Aston Villa in Birmingham on 6 November. The Israelophobic left ate it up. Social media fizzed with tirades against these ‘racist’, ‘genocidal’ Israelis who are so bereft of decency they’ll even push innocents into rivers.

The cops’ river claim niggled at me. Because if my memory was serving me correctly there had only been one incident of a man being pushed into a river during the clashes in Amsterdam last November, and it was done to a Maccabi fan, not by a Maccabi fan. Was it possible West Midlands Police were so brazenly twisting the truth that they were accusing Maccabi fans of things that were actually done to them? In chillingly Orwellian style, had they misrepresented the victims of a river-pushing as the perpetrators of a river-pushing?

We now know the answer to this question – yes. Dutch law enforcement is accusing West Midlands Police of using ‘fake claims’ to justify the ban on Maccabi fans from Villa Park. And they’ve highlighted the river story. The only known case, say the Dutch, related to a man who supported Maccabi. He was filmed by his Amsterdam tormentors who said he could leave the freezing water if he said ‘Free Palestine’. It was the ritualistic humiliation of a Jew in a European city in 2024. Now, adding insult to injury, a police force in the UK has distorted the truth of this horrific incident, making it seem like a Jew was the culprit rather than the victim.

The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. For a British police force to engage in such vile victim-blaming, for British cops to use misinformation to justify banning fans from the Jewish homeland, is a moral outrage. It is as serious a dereliction of public duty as one can imagine. With their ‘fake claims’ about Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, West Midlands Police helped to inflame the digital loathing for Israeli Jews and contributed to a feeling of insecurity among Britain’s Jews. And all on the back of what Dutch law enforcement is now calling ‘untrue’ claims. Heads must roll at West Midlands for this.

This is one of the most serious police scandals of recent times. In the run-up to the Maccabi-Aston Villa clash this month, West Midlands Police cited the clashes in Amsterdam on 6 and 7 November last year, when Maccabi played Ajax. They said the behaviour of Maccabi fans made them too ‘high risk’ for Villa Park, so they were banned. In their analysis, they said many of the Maccabi fans in Amsterdam had been ‘highly organised, skilled fighters’ with links to the IDF, that they had ‘intentionally targeted Muslim communities’, including by pushing people into rivers, and that a whopping 5,000 Dutch cops were needed to quell their hooliganism.

The truth? Not any of that. Dutch law enforcement says many of these claims are simply ‘not true’. On WMP’s claim that the Maccabi fans in Amsterdam were ‘highly organised, skilled fighters’ driven by a lust to ‘fight with police and opposing groups’, the Dutch police say they ‘[do] not recognise the claim’. On the claim that 200 of the Maccabi fans had links to the IDF, the Dutch say: ‘We did not investigate any IDF backgrounds.’ They also point out that ‘most young men in Israel have some connection to the IDF’ because of conscription. On the claim that 600 Maccabi fans deliberately targeted Muslims, the Dutch say it was actually ‘small groups in the city’ that got involved in clashes. And 5,000 Dutch cops on the streets? Nope. That number is ‘so not true’, say the Dutch. It was actually 1,200.

How did so much hyperbole and outright untruth end up in a police report about foreign football fans? There needs to be an urgent inquiry. The consequences of West Midlands Police’s ‘fake claims’ were dire. They led to an unjust ban on Jewish fans from Israel. They stirred up further Israelophobic bigotry, with mobs gathering at Villa Park on 6 November to cheer the banning of ‘Zionist scum’ from Britain’s second city. When the West Midlands report was leaked, it generated a firestorm of anti-Israel animus which in some cases bordered on outright anti-Semitism. The ‘analysis’ was cited by armies of keffiyeh-adorned bigots as proof that Israeli fans are indeed a uniquely menacing force that every civilised nation has a duty to blacklist.

The truth of Amsterdam was twisted. In fact, it was buried. Yes, some Maccabi fans behaved badly in Amsterdam last November, but the thing they subsequently suffered was of a wholly different order. It was a pogrom. There was a coordinated ‘Jew hunt’ by gangs of mostly Arab men who beat the streets in search of ‘cancer Jews’ to assault. They punched them, whipped them, pushed them into rivers. The mob ‘incited each other to hunt down Jews’, as one Dutch paper put it during the trial of the Jew-hunters earlier this year. For British police to distort the truth of this racist rampage, and even to pin on the Jews some of the acts of violence they themselves experienced, is shameful and sickening.

What was most striking was how gleefully the left lapped up the ‘fake claims’ of the West Midlands Police. The left loves to call the police ‘institutionally racist’ and to damn them as untrustworthy. Bourgeois leftists have even co-opted the old street slogan ‘ACAB’ – All Coppers Are Bastards – to signal their haughty disregard for ‘the filth’. And yet on the Maccabi issue, they believed every word West Midlands Police said. They treated their ‘analysis’ as gospel. They begged for more. How do we explain this sudden switch from being wary of the cops to uncritically imbibing their every utterance about foreign football fans? With one word: Jews.

It is absolutely beyond dispute now: Jews do not factor in the thin ‘anti-racism’ of the modern faux-progressive. So much so that even the word of the police is prized more highly than the word of a Jew. All the usual positions of the woke – that police claims should be treated with scepticism, and the concerns of minority groups should be treated with sympathy – are utterly turned on their heads when it comes to Jews. Then, ‘fake claims’ from the police are believed, while protestations from the Jews themselves are dismissed. It is impossible to explain this phenomenon without using the word anti-Semitism. Seriously, I’ve tried – it can’t be done.

We have witnessed the rise of a most unholy alliance. Police, leftists and Islamists united in the shrill condemnation of Jewish football fans on the basis of untrue claims. This scandal confirms how high Israelophobia now goes – right from the sewer of social media to the air-conditioned offices of top cops. The position of every person at West Midlands Police who was involved in compiling the defamatory dossier against Maccabi fans is now in question. Keir Starmer’s government should do something useful for once and demand an inquiry into how this police force came to spread ‘fake claims’ that caused so much consternation among both Israeli and British Jews. Anything less will be yet another betrayal of our Jewish citizens.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.