The football wars
Antisemitic riots in Amsterdam:
Israeli commercial planes on Friday were bringing home citizens injured in Amsterdam after bursts of violence tied to a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team that Israeli and Dutch officials described as antisemitic attacks.
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While the exact sequence of events remained unclear, the violence appeared to be the product of two combustible forces in Europe: the unrest that often accompanies gatherings of hard-core soccer fans and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza.
In other words men lose control.
Videos circulating on social media and a video distributed by The Associated Press provide a glimpse of the tensions in the hours leading up to the violence. In the A.P. clip, dozens of men wearing scarves with the colors of the Israeli soccer club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, are seen gathering on Thursday at Amsterdam’s central Dam Square, where flares are being lit amid a heavy police presence.
Other video footage verified by The Times shows a group of men trying to take down a Palestinian flag from a building on Rokin, a street in central Amsterdam. One man is heard saying in Hebrew, “The people of Israel live,” while others shout anti-Palestinian chants using expletives. The earliest versions of the videos appeared on social media in the early hours of Thursday.
It’s almost funny, in a way. What’s it about? Israel and Palestine? Or football?
Europe has experienced an increase in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing war in Gaza. On Thursday, a broad coalition of German lawmakers passed a resolution calling on the government to do more to criminalize and otherwise punish antisemitic acts.
Gaza? Or football?
Why not both?
Football, soccer, or wogball – it doesn’t matter what name we give it, there is always an element of violence around the fringes. We have seen it with the “soccer hooligans” in the UK, we saw it in Australia in the 1960s until teams were forced to remove ethnic identifiers from their names and symbols, and we see it during and after every World Cup. Even the fans of the victorious World Cup team rampage and destroy.
It is my belief that the violence grows out of the nature of the game, where a 0-0 score line is all too common. The crowd invest themselves in their team, they buy the merchandise, they pay ridiculously inflated prices for refreshments and all they get for their money is 90 minutes of foreplay and no orgasm!
Then, as we see time and time again, there are those who are not invested in the particular activity, be it a public assembly, a demonstration, or a riot, but who will attach themselves to it to further their own ends. Again, just look to the arrival of Neo Nazis at Posie Parker’s Melbourne rally and the demonisation of Victorian MP Moira Deeming for “associating” with the Nazis who arrived uninvited and unwanted. (Her court case is going well for her).
Flares are often used as a precursor to violence around soccer. As the article is behind a paywall I can only go by the snippets you provide, but there seems to an element of provocation at the very least from the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters. Perhaps this is less about Jews or Israel and more about general violence. Not every interaction between Jews and Gentiles is fed by anti antisemitism.