The pernicious lies about Maccabi Tel Aviv

‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.’ Those words, by the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, have rung in my ears throughout the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal. For the Jews who support that team have been accused, time and again, of the very things their tormentors are guilty of. They’ve been found guilty in the kangaroo court of elite opinion of crimes that were actually carried out against them. Anti-Semitism’s slipperiest moral inversion – where the victim is reimagined as the perpetrator – is back.

Tell me what you accuse Maccabi supporters of and I’ll tell you what their persecutors are guilty of. West Midlands Police in the UK, in that concoction of half-truths and hyperbole that they used to justify the banning of Maccabi fans from their team’s clash with Aston Villa on 6 November, said Maccabi fans had pushed Muslims into a river in Amsterdam. They said it twice. They said it in their fact-lite report proposing a ban on those pesky hooligan Jews. And their chief constable, Craig Guildford, repeated it in his appearance at the Home Affairs Committee in parliament on 1 December.

During the riotous scenes in Amsterdam on 6 and 7 November 2024, when Maccabi played the Dutch club AFC Ajax, thugs from the Jewish State threw ‘innocent members of the public into the river’, said West Midlands Police. ‘Militaristic’ mobs of Maccabi fans ‘attacked members of the local community’ and ‘people were thrown into the river’, said Guildford.

Not only is this untrue – it is a flagrant inversion of the truth. Not only is it factually incorrect – it is a savage and Orwellian gutting of the historical record in order to present the victim of a crime as the perpetrator of that crime. For there is only one recorded case of an innocent being thrown into a river during the disturbances in Amsterdam last year, and it was done to a Jew, not by one.

Dutch law enforcement recently pushed back against the Israelophobic propaganda of West Midlands Police. They singled out the force’s river lies. It was a Maccabi fan who was thrown into the freezing waters. A mob of mostly Arab men, engaged in what they themselves called a ‘Jew hunt’, dunked the Jew in the water and filmed it so that other anti-Semites might enjoy his humiliation. They told him he could leave the water on the condition of saying ‘Free Palestine’.

It was the ritualistic shaming of a Jew for the entertainment of a rabble of Jew-haters. West Midlands Police’s distortion of this twisted act of anti-Semitism is more than misinformation. It is more than a falsehood. In warping the facts so completely that the racist persecution of a Jew by a Muslim is reimagined as the racist persecution of a Muslim by a Jew, West Midlands Police were engaging in the very strategy of inversion that has long been central to the ideology of anti-Semitism. Their cruel and baseless depiction of the Jew as perpetrator rather than victim echoed the deranged hatreds of history.

Or consider the liberal media’s branding of Maccabi fans as the bringers of ‘racial hatred’ to Amsterdam. The disturbances in Amsterdam last year prove Maccabi’s fanbase is ‘infested with genocidal racism’, said one writer. ‘Infested’ – what a striking choice of word, bringing to mind swarms of insects. The BDS movement said Maccabi fans in Amsterdam had engaged in a ‘racist rampage’. These marauding men were ‘vile, violent and blatantly racist’, it said. What we witnessed in Amsterdam in November 2024 was a ‘Zionist riot’, wrote one radical observer. Maccabi fans behaved like the ‘new Nazis’ of Europe, he thundered.

This, too, is a grotesque spectacle of moral inversion. For what occurred in Amsterdam last year was the exact opposite of a ‘Zionist riot’ – it was a self-described Jew hunt whose cowardly perpetrators occasionally used the language of ‘anti-Zionism’ to make their anti-Semitism seem more respectable.

Their Jodenjacht, as they called it, was organised in advance of the Maccabi fans’ arrival in Amsterdam. In their WhatsApp group, the racist mob goaded each other to commit acts of anti-Jewish savagery. Go out and ‘beat up some fucking Jews’, they said. We need a city-wide ‘rage’ against these ‘cancer Jews’ and ‘cancer Zionists’, they wrote to each other. They shared information about the arrival of a ‘train full of Jews’ so that anti-Semites might greet the ‘cowardly Jews’ with extreme violence. Let’s hope it’s a ‘special train’, they quipped, laid on by Hitler, ‘with gas for [the Jews]’. Well, it would certainly have saved them the hard task of chasing, beating and pushing Jews into rivers if someone had just come along and gassed the visiting Jews to death.

It was a pre-planned, well-coordinated hunt for Jews. In Amsterdam, in the 21st century. To call these events a ‘Zionist riot’, to say it was the Maccabi fans who waged a ‘racist rampage’, is not only a lie – it is a wilful obliteration of truth in the service of depriving Jews of their victim status and restoring them to their position as a toxic people who pose a unique threat to Europe’s social fabric. To call the victims of a Jew hunt ‘the new Nazis’ is one of the most sinister inversions of morality and reason we have witnessed since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. ‘Fucking Jews’ were beaten with belts, punched in the face and shoved into rivers by an avowedly racist mob and yet it’s the Jews who are called ‘Nazis’. These are 1930s levels of racist truth-twisting.

Or consider the words of a British member of parliament. It was Ayoub Khan, MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, elected as a ‘Gaza independent’ in the 2024 General Election. Following Chief Constable Guildford’s evidence at the Home Affairs Committee on 1 December, Mr Khan took to X to say we now know that there was a ‘coordinated MILITARISTIC MUSLIM HUNT in Amsterdam’ – his caps – carried out by ‘organised Maccabi racist thugs’.

And there it is: the final moral inversion. The rebranding of a Jew hunt as a Muslim hunt. The theft from Jews of their suffering and the bestowing of that coveted mantle on to Muslims instead. In the space of a year, a proven Jew hunt, a Jew hunt that has been the subject of two long, legal trials in Amsterdam, has become a Muslim hunt. A pogrom against ‘cancer Jews’ has been turned into an Islamophobic rampage by those ‘cancer Jews’. The humiliation and battery of Maccabi fans by proud Jew hunters is now called a Zionist riot organised with military precision to the end of harming Muslims.

We need to ask how this happened. You might not care about football. You might not care about Maccabi Tel Aviv, AFC Ajax or Aston Villa. But you should care about the violent return of moral inversion. You should care that Jews, once again, are being accused of what their haters are guilty of. You should care that noisy mobs of ‘fools, reactionaries and failures’, as Vasily Grossman called them, are pinning on the Jews crimes that the Jews themselves have suffered. Few events of the past two years have illuminated the horrors of contemporary anti-Semitism as well as the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal.

There are two key events in this scandal, separated almost exactly by one year. There was Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Europa League game against Ajax in Amsterdam on 7 November 2024, which was marred by violence both the day before the match and on match day itself. And there was Maccabi’s Europa League clash with Aston Villa at Villa Park in Birmingham on 6 November this year, which Maccabi fans were banned from attending. That decision, underpinned by a report drawn up by West Midlands Police, was informed by the riotous events in Amsterdam. The Maccabi fanbase’s behaviour in the Netherlands in November 2024 made them unfit to visit Birmingham in November 2025 – that was the argument of the police and of the army of ‘anti-Zionists’ on the internet who cheered their barring of Israeli Jews.

It is astonishing how much myth and misinformation swirls around these two events. It is now a matter of historical urgency to set the record straight. Doing so is the first step towards having a real reckoning with the irrational animus that drives the boycotting of Israel and its people, and with the dangerous reanimation of ancient hatreds in the post-7 October moment.

Let’s start with this November, and the West Midlands Police report on the supposed threat posed by Maccabi fans. The number of falsehoods in their report is staggering. Not since South Yorkshire Police’s horrendous untruths about Liverpool fans in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster has a police force spread so much bile about football fans that later proved to have virtually no basis in reality.

Dutch law enforcement have called into question almost every argument made by West Midlands Police. There’s their river-pushing claim, entirely untrue. They also said 5,000 riot cops were required to quell Maccabi hooliganism in Amsterdam. Not true. Or ‘so not true’, to quote Dutch law enforcement. Actually around 1,200 officers were on the streets of Amsterdam. They said the Maccabi fans were ‘highly organised, skilled fighters’ driven by a dark urge to ‘fight with police’. The Dutch say they ‘[do] not recognise [this] claim’.

West Midlands Police said around 200 of the Maccabi fans had links to the IDF – a claim that went viral in the Israelophobic cesspit of social media, where it was cited as proof that soldiers of the Jewish State had virtually invaded the Netherlands to visit their ‘genocidal racism’ on Muslims there. The presence of trained IDF fighters in the ranks of the fans was proof, said one writer, that Israel’s ‘football culture’ has become a ‘weapon of genocide’. But this claim was without substance, too. The Dutch said they had no information on the fans’ ‘IDF backgrounds’. They also pointed out that ‘most young men in Israel have some connection to the IDF’ because of conscription. As for West Midlands Police’s ominous talk of 600 Maccabi fans ‘intentionally target[ing] Muslim communities’, the Dutch didn’t recognise that claim, either. It was ‘small groups in the city’ who ‘partook’ in riotous behaviour, they said.

It gets worse. During Chief Constable Guildford’s evidence at the Home Affairs Committee, it became clear that his force had included an entirely fictitious match in their report. It said the last time Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in 2023. No such clash took place. What was truly shocking was Guildford’s explanation for how a made-up match found its way into their report. It was a result of ‘social-media scraping’, he said. His force gathered info on Maccabi fans from various sources, he told MPs, including by ‘search[ing] through social media to see what’s trending’. I’ll tell you what is ‘unfit’ for Birmingham – a police force that thinks trawling X counts as research.

The thing that was ‘trending’ on social media when West Midlands cops were ‘scraping’ it for information about Maccabi fans was Israelophobia, and in some cases outright anti-Semitism. Social-media sites were awash with venomous screeds about Maccabi’s ‘genocidal’ supporters and also with naked pogrom denialism regarding the events in Amsterdam. That West Midlands Police were ‘scraping’ social media to see ‘what was trending’ goes some way towards explaining their production of such a scurrilous report; one which falsely claimed that thousands of riot cops were needed to put down the militaristic violence of Maccabi fans who targeted Muslims and pushed them into rivers. This bigoted bullshit was all over social media.

The police’s promotion of so much misinformation about Jewish football fans had terrible consequences. It inflamed hateful commentary about Israelis online. It emboldened Islamist mobs who took to the streets of Birmingham to declare the city a ‘Zionist-free zone’. It directly led to ‘Gaza independent’ MPs crowing that we finally had proof, from the police no less, that what happened in Amsterdam was a ‘MUSLIM HUNT’. It deepened the pogrom denialism of the anti-Semitic left who insist the only racism in Amsterdam was from those vile Jews from Israel. It stoked fears among British Jews that our second city is becoming a ‘no-go area for Jewish people’.

If a police force had done this to any other social group – lied about them, isolated them, greenlit venom about them – the left would be up in arms. But in this case they were fully aligned with the cops. They devoured their falsehoods, did their anti-Maccabi bidding. Leftists became propagandists for police bigotry. West Midlands Police, like other police forces in Britain, has a shocking history of anti-black racism. They apologised in 2020 for their historic ‘institutional racism’ and said that even now the West Midlands force is not ‘free from bias, discrimination or even racism’. I agree. To my mind, their scandalous deceptions on the Maccabi question speak to a deep culture of prejudice. We might call it ‘institutional anti-Semitism’.

The most disturbing contribution of West Midlands Police was to depict the Jew hunt in Amsterdam as a response to the behaviour of Maccabi fans themselves. They have done this continually. Chief superintendent Tom Joyce gave an interview to Sky News, which went wildly viral, in which he condemned Maccabi fans’ ‘significant levels of hooliganism’ in Amsterdam and said this ‘absolutely resulted the following day in there being attacks on Maccabi fans’. Read that again. A leading police officer is suggesting that there is a logical connection between bad behaviour by football fans and the subsequent hunting of them by mobs of racists screaming about ‘fucking Jews’ and making jokes about the Holocaust. Here’s my question for Joyce, and for leftists who have even more explicitly said the attacks on Maccabi fans in Amsterdam were payback for their own degeneracy: if fans of an African football team behaved badly in a European city, would a ‘n*gger hunt’ by self-described white supremacists be a logical and possibly even understandable response? A simple yes or no will suffice.

The truth about Amsterdam is this: it was a pogrom. Yes, some Maccabi fans behaved badly, but their behaviour fell squarely within the realm of the moral delinquency sometimes exhibited by football fans. They made offensive chants, they drank too much, they started fights, they tore down a Palestine flag. What followed was of an entirely different order. Something far outside the bounds of footie scraps. Something we had not seen in Europe for some time. A Jew hunt. A literal Jew hunt. And as a Dutch columnist reminds us, ‘The Jew hunt was not a response to provocations by Israeli football fans’ but a mass act of racist violence ‘planned before Maccabi fans tore down a Palestinian flag in the city centre’.

‘Cancer Jews’, they called them. And ‘fucking Jews’. And ‘cowards’. Go outside and ‘hit them hard’, they said. There must be ‘at least one death’, dreamed the Jew haters. As a Dutch newspaper reported earlier this year, following a trial of the Jew hunters, the reams of evidence leave ‘little to the imagination’ – these people ‘incited each other to hunt down Jews’.

There have been two trials of the Jew hunters – one in December 2024 and one in March this year. There have been convictions and jailings for expressions of racial hatred and acts of violent assault, including the kicking of Jews, the grabbing of them by the throat, and the beating of them with belts. The mob poured through the streets demanding that people show them their IDs – if they had a Jewish name they were attacked. The most serious charge was attempted manslaughter. A Palestinian asylum seeker in Amsterdam was captured on film pushing over a Maccabi fan and kicking him in the head over and over. The court rejected the charge of attempted manslaughter, but found the mob member guilty of public disorder and assaulting a foreign national. It sentenced him to six months in jail. There are dozens more Israeli victims waiting for their cases to come to court in Amsterdam.

Let us be clear: anyone who talks about the events in Amsterdam in November 2024 without mentioning any of this, without mentioning the racist uprising against ‘cancer Jews’, is not a serious person. To my mind they are an anti-Semite by default, given they are burying the truth of a pogrom either because they are ignorant of it or because they think the Jews brought it on themselves by being such ‘vile, violent and racist’ people.

The veiling of the barbarism in Amsterdam by leftists, liberals and even British police officers is of a piece with the historic playbook of pogrom denialism. Throughout history, pogroms against Jews have been blamed on Jews. The Jews made us do it, the mob always says. One of history’s best-known pogroms – Kristallnacht in 1938 – was justified as an act of ‘self-defence’ by Germans who felt besieged by Jews. As one historian of the Holocaust says, the Nazi regime ‘cynically claimed that the pogrom was not organised in any way’ but rather that ‘the Jews themselves had provoked the righteous anger of the people’.

Sound familiar? We now hear the exact same about Amsterdam. That it wasn’t organised, it was just a spontaneous angry reaction to the Maccabi fans’ bad behaviour. That the Maccabi fans provoked the ‘righteous anger’ of Amsterdam’s Muslims with their flag desecration and offensive chants. No, the Jew hunt in Amsterdam was not on the scale of Kristallnacht. But the commonalities in the response to Kristallnacht and the response to Amsterdam are truly chilling. In both cases, the chasing, beating and humiliation of Jews by mobs of anti-Semites is sickeningly depicted as ‘resistance’ to the Jews and their wily, disruptive behaviour.

Moral inversion is central to the ideology of anti-Semitism because that ideology is wholly devoted to depicting the Jew as an all-powerful moral toxin, as civilisation’s most lethal strain of poison. The anti-Semite cannot countenance the idea of Jew as victim because that would imperil his entire narrative about the Jew as danger, as destroyer, as polluter. Where the German Jews who suffered that ‘night of broken glass’ were viewed as the cause of Germany’s economic and moral torpor, the Israeli Jews who suffered beatings and belt-whippings in Amsterdam were viewed as the importers of a foreign pox – ‘genocidal racism’. In both cases, the truth – that Jews were victims of violent racial hatred – is turned utterly upside down. The Jew can never be the victim, even when he is being repeatedly kicked in the head by mobs who think of him as a ‘cancer’, as happened in Berlin in 1938 and in Amsterdam in 2024. The Nazi regime held up the Jew as society’s greatest menace, while today’s identitarian regime holds up the Jew as white, privileged, ‘problematic’, genocidal.

Anti-Semitism is the refuge of ‘fools, reactionaries and failures’, wrote Grossman. The anti-Semite looks to ‘the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry for explanations for [his] own failure’, he said. He rages against Jews in a desperate bid to escape his own feelings of ‘inevitable doom’. That’s back now. Whether it’s in the cesspit of the digital right, which openly blames the Jews for the world’s problems, or in the woke mess that is the mainstream left, which prefers to blame the Jewish State, the inversion of the Jew from victim to monster has returned with savage vengeance. The end result is that people can witness a Jew being pushed into a freezing river and then tell the world that the Jew himself did it to a non-Jew. If we fail to challenge this sick inversion of truth, decency and enlightenment, it won’t only be the Jews who will suffer – it will be civilisation itself.

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.