Wait. What happened in Amsterdam?
The war in Gaza invades my city. Where will it go next?
I don’t relish jumping into the subject of Israel vs Palestine. Like so many people around the world, I have Jewish friends and family I love dearly. I don’t want them to think I don’t support them or don’t respect their feelings. I most certainly don’t want anyone to think I’m antisemitic. Sound familiar?
Most of us would like to see an end to the horrific war in Gaza, regardless of whether or not we’ve had the courage or foolishness to take a side. I admit that I sometimes do what other people do when they feel their voice is either too small to be heard or won’t contribute anything positive to the conversation: I bite my tongue. If you know me well, you know how truly difficult that is for me. Instead, I try to find small ways to support the people who are working harder and more bravely than I am to find an end to a terrible war that has the legitimate potential to lead us into World War III.
Maybe you do something similar. You may stay silent, or at least be a little less vocal than you might want to be, about the atrocities you see in Gaza because you don’t want to be accused of being antisemitic, which is perhaps the most powerful negative label that exists in today’s world. Using that word immediately puts people on the full-court-press defensive, in a historically charged way.
But I don’t want to be silent about something that’s happening a few neighborhoods over from me. I feel like it’s imperative to weigh in on what’s happening right now where I live – in the event that anyone wants to listen – for a few reasons.
Ik wil te inburgeren
I fell in love with Amsterdam five years ago when I moved here. I am already mightily proud of this city that I will probably call home for the rest of my life. I’m also an immigrant who has been diligently working towards citizenship for five years (I’m so close!), doing my absolute best to speak the language and integrate as fully as any buitenlander possibly can. So, natuurlijk, I’m keenly interested in issues of immigration, and I think that what has been happening in Amsterdam this week is more about immigration than it is about antisemitism.
But even more than that, I think this event – and in particular how it has been reported and is being politically utilized opportunistically in real time – is extremely important, and more dangerous than most people realize. The things that you might have heard in news reports over the last week are not actually representative of what happened in Amsterdam. So, what did happen?
I woke up a few days ago to a text message from my employer warning me about a public safety advisory for Amsterdam “due to antisemitic attacks,” which of course encouraged me to scramble online and find out just what the hell was going on. I was dismayed to hear the news. I squinted at the screen, big mug of coffee in hand. How could this be? How could something like this happen in one of the most tolerant places on the planet?
The initial news reports were extremely damning, referring to mob attacks as an orchestrated “pogrom” with squads of youthful thugs on scooters (presumably Moroccan and Muslim, based on the coded language of news reports) chasing down and attacking any Jews they could find. I checked the American and British press, who had filed early reports, but they were very thin on details and unreasonably stuffed with official statements from Israeli and US government officials, along with incendiary headlines that amounted to “antisemitism returns to Europe.” No real eyewitness accounts or interviews.
I couldn’t just dive into work. I had to know more.
Hoe kan dat?
What I found out was more disturbing than I originally thought. The stories in the mainstream media seemed completely backwards based on what I saw in eyewitness video accounts and from European news sources. The sequence of events is relatively easy to look up online if you take the time, but most people only experienced the thinnest coverage of this event as a quick sound bite or social media swipe on their feed. (Terrible news, fam. Antisemitism has returned to Europe. Like and boost to show your outrage.)
So how did a rampaging group of football hooligans – the Maccabi – chanting anti-Arab slogans and attacking locals end up heroes of headlines around the world saying that this was a pogrom comparable to Kristallnacht?
Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema, who I generally like and respect as a voice of reason and who I want to see succeed, really did a disservice by immediately framing the terrible events as one-sided antisemitism. Her official first take of history becomes harder to swallow when you later find out the Israeli football hooligans who started it all had spent the previous 36 hours climbing up the brick walls of locals’ homes to tear down and burn Palestinian flags, whistled loudly during the moment of silence for flood victims in Spain (because Spain recognizes Palestine as a state), held an unscheduled Zionist rally wrapped in Israeli flags in Dam Square chanting “Death to all Arabs”, “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs”, and “Fuck Palestine”, attacked a cab driver, threatened and threw bottles at locals, and picked up wood and metal poles from a construction site, wielding them as weapons. Can you guess what happened next? That’s right: People eventually fought back.
What is most damning to me is that the Maccabi also had a penchant for loudly and enthusiastically singing songs with lyrics like “Ole, ole, ole, why is school out in Gaza today? Because there are no children left.” They sang that same song again with friends and family at the airport after being shuttled home to Tel Aviv in jets that were hastily arranged by the Israeli government. That’s the detail that sticks with me the most, that frankly will haunt me for the rest of my days. Celebrating the deaths of nearly 17,000 children (and counting) in song with friends and family might be one of the most depraved things I’ve heard in my entire life.
(One of them even brought a Trump flag. Of course. No one can escape him!)
The Dutch-American friendship entreaty
Why did so many of the initial reports get it wrong? One reason is because Dutch politicians who supplied the media with their initial sound bites rushed to judgement themselves based on their own biases as steadfast supporters of Israel. Were they also influenced directly by immediate conversations with American and Israeli allies? That might help explain the one-sided response because those are the two most powerful voices in the world right now.
You probably already know that the Americans continue to supply Israel with as many weapons as they like (“so we can finish the job”, as Netanyahu told Congress to a standing ovation). Interestingly, the Dutch also supplied weapons until a court earlier this year said that doing so violated international law. No problem. Now the Dutch government ship their weapons to the US, who then promptly put them on the next plane to Israel. Problem solved.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, the gaunt, thinly-salt-and-pepper bearded “stand-in” unelected former intelligent agent who was appointed PM because the Dutch parties who formed the right-leaning government in July couldn’t agree on a PM candidate except to agree on one thing – anyone but Geert Wilders – expressed outrage at the events. “This is a group that exhibits inappropriate conduct. This does not fit in with the open and tolerant society that the Netherlands wants to be. They are completely morally degenerate. Their behavior is shocking.” Of course, he wasn’t referring to the Maccabi football hooligans, but instead to the co-villains in this story, the local youths on scooters.
Which is not to say that the Amsterdammers who returned violence with violence don’t deserve to be punished. They absolutely do. Dick’s right: They are morally depraved, and their behavior is indeed shocking. They will be dealt with very harshly. Shadow PM Geert Wilders is already calling for revoking their passports and kicking them out of the country.
Are some of the people who were arrested anti-semitic? Oh, hell yes. These men are hooligans too, only of a different stripe – or more to the point, a different religion: Islam. (Full disclosure: I’m an atheist who dismisses all religions equally.) These hooligans are just as terrible as the Maccabi, but I presume they will not be afforded a private jet back to where they came from. The politie have not been forthcoming about the backgrounds of the arrested suspects, but some, if not most of them, will undoubtedly turn out to be Morrocan Muslims, to the glee of Wilders.
The Dutch right wing presumably sees this as their best opportunity to accomplish their main goal of cutting back on immigration, so natuurlijk Geert Wilders began furiously hitting send on social media, calling the perpetrators “multicultural scum” and framing the night of violence from both sides as a “Jew hunt”. To give you an idea of how terrible he is, Geert’s big idea right now is to declare parts of Syria “safe enough” to send back war refugees who came here half a decade ago. Do you think Syria’s President Assad, the one who gassed his own civilians, will welcome these refugees back with open arms?
I think this event has deep political consequences in the Netherlands. It has the potential to give the struggling Dutch right wing government the leverage they’ve been seeking to crack down on immigration (talks on legislation have been stalled for months), but it could also end up dissolving the government. If I were a betting man, I might bet on the latter considering it took them six months to actually form a government and they’ve accomplished practically nothing since forming in July. They’ve spent much of their political capital on immigration and have so far accomplished helemaal niksen. Have Nederlanders given these winning right-wing parties as much rope as they’re going to get? We shall see. If they don’t accomplish something soon, it might be hangin’ time.
Your media choices matter (now more than ever, as they say)
It’s truly depressing to see the major media outlets, most notably in the US, who have failed to follow up and add perspective or context to this story, much less issue any corrections. It’s reckless to splice together race-baiting coverage like this in a rush to garner likes and subscribes. There’s nothing like a “Jewish pogroms in Amsterdam” headline to make your content go viral, which unfortunately seems to have zero consequences. Only rewards.
The most egregious media offender? Sky News took down their initial video that included people being chased down a street with sticks and pipes. You see, there was one problem with the story that apparently the reporter’s editors didn’t like after the report was filed and published: The video showed Maccabi football hooligans beating up Amsterdammers, which didn’t fit the narrative that the Rupert Murdoch-owned media organization wanted to push. It reportedly “didn’t meet the standards” of the editors, so they re-edited the footage and flipped the narrative from Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdammers to a “group of hooded men in black clothing, running down the street attacking people at random”, hoping that viewers would connect the dots they wanted them to connect and assume the violent ones performing the beat-down on Jews were the Arabs/Morrocans/Muslims - the bad guys. Professional journalist and film director Richard Sanders has an absolutely brilliant breakdown of how that happened if you want to see exactly how the news report was changed, which he told Double Down News, and which I’m excerpting below. 👇 (You can watch the entirety of his examination here.)
This kind of Orwellian inversion of the truth (or gaslighting, if you prefer) is, of course, a hallmark of fascist propaganda, and I think this is the kind of bite-sized clips that everyday Americans will be spoon-fed in the coming years. If you are an American, it might be time to stop visiting the Washington Post website and start discovering how much more realistic and straightforward the news can be by getting it from the non-paywalled Guardian or Deutsche-Welle instead - or from practically anywhere in Europe for that matter.
“We will take your girls / who love to party / when we rape them we will shout / today is death, hapoel” - Maccabi football song
However, it has been heartening to see lots of excellent coverage captured by citizen reporters, independent professional journalists, and activists. Or even just young YouTubers like Bender, a popular, local, Dutch 16-year-old man-on-the-street citizen journalist of sorts with a funny voice (although he speaks quite well and listening to him is great Dutch practice; then again, he’s a bit of a Dutch version of lad culture and I’m not so into pranks and firewro; subscribed anyway). He captured the football hooligan rampage through Amsterdam and subsequent conflict with Palestinian protesters and police, putting himself in great danger, especially when one of the Maccabi hooligans approached him and told him he should put down the camera and stop filming… “for your own safety”. Did I mention that some of the Maccabi were reportedly active-duty IDF soldiers and Mossad agents?
“We hebben een integratieprobleem”
While it’s heartbreaking to see the city of Amsterdam unfairly painted with such a broad racist brush, there is truth to PM Dick Schoof’s statement that “We have an integration problem. This is an expression of that.” And clearly more must be done to combat antisemitism. What exactly they will do to combat this problem, besides kicking out Morrocans who they deem to be antisemitic, is unclear. It’s a difficult situatie.
All protests throughout Amsterdam have been outlawed for the rest of the week, which is a reasonable decision in a time of emergency, up to a point. If you don’t let people protest, you’re implicitly encouraging them to riot. Interestingly, this didn’t stop enterprising protesters from gathering in groups and silently brandishing blank placards – a protest, but against what? They gained my instant admiration for their creativity, but they were also instantly arrested.
I wanted to see how this protest ban unfolded, so last night on my usual 2-3 hour bicycle ride, I stopped by Dam Square to see one in action, the largest one so far this week.
The Dutch are very proud of this square and consider it their biggest symbol of the city’s historically tolerant nature. Tourists walk by, gawking and clearly annoyed, no matter what is being protested. It’s interrupting their vacation. This widespread attitude against protests of any kind appears to be getting worse across the world’s wealthiest and most comfortable nations, who are increasingly trying to criminalize protests that are effective or that threaten to successfully mobilize public sentiment, doling out drastic years-long sentences, sometimes for simply planning protests without even attending them. Thankfully, that kind of thing isn’t happening in the Netherlands, but the Dutch people are indeed being tested on their permissive attitudes.
At the square, the Free Palestine protesters huddled together in a tight group and chanted songs and slogans (none with racist overtones FWIW), ringed by dozens of standing officers and many police vans, with busses parked around the corner ready to transport protesters to jail. The police gave ample warning before finally closing in. When the loudspeaker said (in Dutch, then in English) that it’s time to leave Dam Square or you’ll be arrested, violently if necessary, that was my cue to get back on the bike and continue my ride. On my way out of downtown, I paused by the Joods Verzetsmonument beside the Amstel river and watched the cavalry arrive, with horseshoes klippety-klopping on the cobblestone streets. In the end, 281 people were arrested.
The pogrom that actually wasn’t
While the ruling politicians seem to have put their foot in the mud in their first steps responding to this crisis, I think the politie did a middling job under difficult circumstances. It could have been worse, and it could still get worse. However, when the eye of accusation turned to the politie in the emergency Amsterdam city council meeting on Wednesday, which was broadcast on AT5 and wherein Mayor Halsema survived a vote of no confidence (for now), they predictably complained that they needed more money for more cops. Natuurlijk.
It’s been fascinating for me to watch the political arguments about the situation, which are already sounding a bit more realistic and nuanced than the initial statements from Schoof and Wilders and Halsema. There are no 24-hour news channels here in the Netherlands with polished talking heads and flashy themed graphics, just good old-fashioned, boring, parliamentary-style debates broadcast on Dutch TV. Other voices are now entering the debate, and they are asking the same questions I am: Where is the outrage at the buitenlanders who showed up intent on causing havoc, who were also racist and violent, and who started the violence? Do they bear no responsibility for their actions? These voices seeking to moderate the anti-immigrant sentiment will have a difficult road ahead of them because accusations of antisemitism are hard to dispel, and the right wing will wring every ounce of outrage out of the situation to further their end of limiting immigration.
The Dutch, with their famous spirit of compromising in good faith, are being tested, but what will happen if their arm is twisted by their best friend America, who appear to be ready to greenlight a widening of the Israeli war. Trump apparently just signalled that he would like Israel to attack Iran in the next eight weeks, before he officially takes office. Where do you think this will end? Oh, did I hear you saying that Trump is an isolationist? How will he be able to pass up the opportunity to have a specially designed suit dripping with medals custom-made for him so he can cosplay as a war president?
America, you may need to prepare for war. If you don’t like that idea, it might be time to prepare for protest. I’ll ask you, like I asked my son, who is attempting to build a life as a new graduate and navigate success in a country that is quickly falling apart. His generation has hardly any hope of owning a home or doing better than their parents, and the dramatic political turn in America means everything is going to get worse for everyday Americans, but oh-so-much better for the richest and most corrupt. “What would it take for you to protest in the streets? Will you be ready if the time comes?”
Remembrance of protests past
Because I’m interested in civic responsibility, and because I’ve lived in some vibrant cities throughout my life, I’ve watched a lot of protests from the sidelines, but I’ve only participated in a handful, most recently the Black Lives Matter protest at Dam Square. If you’ve never done it, there is a carthasis that comes with chanting “no justice, no peace” in unison. When you protest, you enter into community with others, you unify your aggrieved voices that long to be heard in a world where most people simply do not want to listen. Is making society listen such a terrible crime?
Just over a year ago, I was walking with my niece in London, who was on a business trip with her very high-profile political job, already wildly more successful than I was at her age, right out of university. I flew in from Amsterdam to meet her, and we spent long hours traversing the city by foot and on the tube. What a joy to converse with a child you’ve known since they were a toddler, but who is now all grown up. I can quiz her on her beliefs, her philosophies, her ethics, and damn if she isn’t smart. I can reveal the real me - the one with strong opinions who curses too much – not just the smiley Uncle Eric she grew up with.
On that Saturday, just weeks after the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, there was a 100,000-person strong Free Palestine march in the city that we could not help but intersect with on our walk. Protesters shouting into bullhorns and fireworks erupting unexpectedly from time to time. Our talk eventually had to turn to politics and the war in Gaza.
I remember the moment clearly. I was thinking about how terrible those attacks were, although I declined to watch any of the footage. Surely it must be one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, no? In my mind, I was trying to place them in historical context with the scattered knowledge I had of the series of Israeli conflicts that began well before I was even born. I pushed my mind further back into history for thousands of years, but there was little knowledge in the corners of my mind left about ancient Palestine. (That space appears to have been papered over by hours-long montages of chef smackdowns from Hell’s Kitchen episodes.)
What can I say about this situation – to a Jew – as neither an Arab nor a Jew, that hasn’t already been said before? How can there possibly be a resolution to this much hatred (yes, let’s be honest ) on both sides. This never-ending conflict feels insurmountable.
I turned my head away from the chanting Palestinian protesters across the street, decked out in long checkered keffiyahs and back towards my niece. I could see it in her face. She was visibly scared about the possible outbreak of mob violence as fireworks popped around the corner of an ancient building.
“What happened to Israeli citizens was one of the most horrific terroristic attacks in history, and I can completely understand why Israel went to war,” I said, attempting to sound philosophical and worldly, an elder bestowing wisdom. “The Jews don’t just deserve justice for October 7th, they deserve vengeance. The question is… how much vengeance is enough vengeance?”
Unfortunately, I think the answer to that question is as true now as it was then. It’s up to Israel to decide.
Wow, Eric, heel mooi en genuanceerd geschreven.
Thanks for this, Eric. Very eye opening. And such a good reminder that disinformation is everywhere.