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The attacks on Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in #Amsterdam by Arab and so-called ‘pro-Palestinian’ youths are unacceptable. They constitute, however, only one part of the story. The other part, which saw Israeli supporters climbing on houses in the centre, tearing down flags, tearing them to shreds and chanting chants of ‘death to the Arabs’ is equally unacceptable. It does not justify the first, it complements it. Few people tell the whole story. But it must be told
The scenes of young Arabs attacking and beating Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam (Friday, 7 November) are causing waves of outrage in Israel and Europe. It is only right that this outrage should be expressed. In some videos circulating on social media, the phrase ‘God is great’, shouted in Arabic, is distinctly audible. This phrase cannot be tolerated in Europe. It has found wide and recent diffusion with the advent of the Islamic State, which has turned it into the characteristic formula accompanying atrocities committed and into a battle cry.
Having said that, there is a part of the story that we struggle to find in the Western media, totally concentrated on producing and sustaining the narrative of the ‘innocent’ Israeli fans attacked out of the blue by a horde of anti-Semites. This was not entirely the case, evidently. In fact, images are also circulating on social media that unequivocally provide evidence of equally unacceptable behaviour by some fans (known and tolerated in Israel as hyper-nationalists) of Maccabi Tel Aviv in the days and hours before the match against Ajax.
On these videos, young men can be seen climbing the walls of houses and tearing down Palestinian flags on display. A Palestinian flag was set on fire in public. The sound documents how the flags are described as ‘stinking’ by Israeli fans.
This is not the end of the story: in one scene, a group of Israeli supporters on an underground escalator shout, in chorus, ‘Death to the Arabs!’, ‘No schools in Gaza because there are no more children’ and ‘Let the IDF win so we screw the Arabs’.
Israeli flags were profusely waved by Maccabi fans during scrunts in the city centre before the match.
According to witnesses, the same Israeli fans beat up a taxi driver and clashed with security forces.
To write this is to tell the whole story. Only then can those who read it draw their own conclusions.
Mine? Imbeciles, all of them, on both sides of the barricade of fanaticism.
(gianluca grossi)