The scenes of violent, deliberate, and rampant antisemitism against Israelis visiting the Netherlands to support the Maccabi football team – Israel’s national football team – represent untrammelled Islamist antisemitism.
The Mayor of Amsterdam has failed to acknowledge Islamist antisemitism, preferring instead to repeatedly underline Amsterdam’s commitment to ‘protect all minorities’.
An emphatic denunciation of Islamism is essential – as is an absolute repudiation of Islamism’s supporters and sympathisers. These are not only the clerics and ideologues who might incite violence through speeches, or who organised acts of domestic terrorism targeting Israeli fans. It is anyone who associates with these groups or beliefs – namely that antisemitism is acceptable, legitimised, and a motivator for intimidation and violence.
Despite explicit evidence of extremism and accelerated Jew hatred since October 7, not only in the Netherlands but across Western Europe, Dutch authorities remain unable to identify Islamism as a threat to Jews and the safety of all people in the Netherlands. These innocent people stand to be marginalised, silenced, and subjugated by Islamist radicalisation – both ideological and violent.
While secular liberal democracy is defined by the safeguarding of the rights of the most disadvantaged minorities, it is imperative to recognise that Islamists exploit these privileges to shelter and nurture Islamist totalitarianism under the guise of a religious minority.
Islamists are demonstrating that they are emboldened and free to intimidate the most vulnerable minorities in Holland today. The global narrative propagated by Islamists inverts the victims of October 7 – the Israelis, the Jewish people – as perpetrators themselves. This deliberately renders October 7 as an event without witness.
This ‘unwitnessing’ was then systematised through mainstream media and social media to the point where violence against women, children, and civilians was erased and the status of the hostages downplayed. Once October 7 became an unwitnessed event, Israelis and Jews could be held responsible for all the outcomes of the defensive war waged by Israel on Hamas in an effort to safeguard Israeli sovereignty and Israeli citizens. Hamas’ corrupt strategy to maximise civilian death has involved hiding among civilians or in tunnels; corralling civilians in areas announced to be targeted by military strikes; corralling humanitarian aid and hoarding it instead of distributing it; and many other corrupt crimes. All of this has left Israel vilified despite the monumental war crimes perpetrated by Hamas.
Instead of dissecting this nuanced but very well documented reality, Islamists and other antisemites found it easy to deconstruct reality by demonising the Jew and blaming all the ills of this war on Israel and the Jew, fuelling astonishing global and national hatred resulting in the violence we saw last week.
This violence will continue to be cultivated and pandered to without challenge unless Holland rises to the challenge. The dangerously virulent jihadist ideology, which Muslims in the Muslim world recognise as the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, has been coursing and flowing freely throughout Western society. It has now been mainstreamed, legitimised, and popularised under the aegis of pro-Palestinian advocacy. This is not pro-Palestinian sentiment. This is the sentiment that has underpinned some of the most virulent jihadist terror groups since 9/11. Where Islamists surge in influence, masquerading their totalitarianism as ‘minorities’, the rest of pluralist society is rendered silent. Some of them are complicit, some of them are intimidated, and some of them remain the target of lethal violence.
That this attack occurred on the threshold of the 89th anniversary of Kristallnacht – the 1938 Reichspogromnacht – when Nazi-sanctioned and Nazi-led pogroms augured in the beginning of the Holocaust. It is an especially grotesque and shameful reminder of the history of Nazism in the Netherlands. It is for me a reminder that while I have long been involved with combating contemporary antisemitism including serving on the USC Shoah committee combating contemporary antisemitism through testimony, both Europeans and Americans are much less comfortable grappling with Islamist antisemitism (that right-wing neo-Nazi ideology) because of the chilling effect of Islamophobia. This must stop. While anti-Muslim xenophobia is despicable and criminal in Western Europe and the United States as a hate crime, Islamophobia serves only as a political and judicial shield to protect the very Islamists who perpetrated and nurtured the violence that has racked Amsterdam.
That the Dutch authorities reportedly had advance notice of these events is further confirmation of their impotence in the face is Islamist intimidation and violence. Reporting confirms clear warning signs including antisemitic chants during the football match. Reports are emerging that targeted individuals were met with indifference by Dutch police on the night of the attacks. The scenes were deeply resonant with the events of October 7 where civilians were powerless in the face of swarming, violent Islamists.
The Deputy Director General at the Israel Ministry of Diaspora Affairs stated:
‘Our Ministry had clear indication of an organised attempt to attack the Israeli football fans … information shared … at 7pm with the relevant Israeli security agencies who immediately shared this with their Dutch counterparts. Unfortunately, the Dutch security agencies although they had this very concrete information in their hands, failed to secure the wellbeing of the Israeli fans.’
They also did not ask for help from the Israelis nor the military nor other special responders, instead subjecting the victims of overwhelming violence and both Amsterdam and the world to horrifying violence.
Jews have been persecuted globally with extraordinary intensity since October 7, violence that I personally bore witness to in the Gaza envelope and in Israel’s morgues in the days after. The bodies I saw have left an indelible mark on my memory, soul, and psyche. But most of all they confirmed to me that this genocidal antisemitism that manifested in the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust begins with words, with accommodation of a brutal ideology, with an uncomfortable appeasement, and eventually with complete capitulation to the Islamists. This is what we are seeing in Holland.
That the Netherlands could not protect these Jews is a disgrace and that the self-described pro-Palestinian perpetrators who were predominantly Muslims is a particular signal of untrammelled Islamist extremism being allowed to flourish in the name of liberal democracy.
Islamism is expert at exploiting secular, pluralistic democracies. It isolates and mobilises Muslims as a parallel ghettoised society. This is the result which the state is powerless and unwilling to confront.
As a British-born Muslim raised in Europe, I stand with the Jewish people today. As an American Muslim who rejects Islamism I am warning Europe this will continue to recur until Islamism is outlawed and Islamist sympathising is criminalised. This is key not only for safeguarding the Jewish minority but also the Muslims of Europe where the blame will be collective and a lack of robust punitive actions against the Muslim perpetrators and inciters of this violence will have grave repercussions throughout the Muslim Diaspora in Europe.
Europe has failed the Jewish people once before almost to their extinction. A devastating loss to humanity. By failing to name Islamism, expose Islamist antisemitism, and name Islamist sympathisers – violent or nonviolent – the Netherlands fails them again.
Whether the Netherlands authorities name Islamism or not, it is already deeply enmeshed in Dutch society as nihilistic, fascistic, and lethal.
This will not end with a resolution of the wars with Hezbollah or Hamas or even with the inception of a Palestinian State, this is here until it is dismantled within Europe.