On the night of Thursday, Nov. 7, the Dutch capital of Amsterdam witnessed Europe’s first pogrom since 1945. Around 3,000 Israeli Jews were in town to watch Maccabi Tel Aviv play a UEFA league match against the Dutch team Ajax. Between midnight and dawn, local Muslims and Arabs launched what they called a “Jew hunt.” Organizing themselves through social media apps such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, taxi drivers and moped gangs scoured the streets of Anne Frank’s city, attacking Jews with cars, clubs, knives, and fireworks and trapping terrified Israelis inside their hotels.
The Dutch authorities failed to act on reports of the planning. The city police expected trouble but failed to preempt it. They also failed to stop it once it had started. Not a single arrest was made during the rioting. Five Jews were hospitalized. As many as 30 others had minor injuries. Hundreds huddled inside their hotels while the Israeli government sent planes to rescue its citizens.
For the first time in decades, the world’s attention fixed itself on the Dutch republic. It saw a society in freefall and a futuristic replay of the worst moments in Europe’s recent past, all recorded on messaging apps and filmed for social media.
“I’m not Jewish,” one man begs before a masked thug punches him in the face.
Chased by a mob, a Jew jumps into a freezing canal and flails in the water. “Say ‘Free Palestine,’ and we’ll let you go,” a gang member crows.
“Cancer Jews!” shouts another, using a double Dutch insult.
The Dutch authorities were as unanimous in their condemnation as they had been pusillanimous in their response. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again,” King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands admitted to Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Dick Schoof, the civil servant and counterterrorism expert who leads Holland’s coalition government, felt obliged to clarify that even if some Maccabi fans had behaved loutishly before the game, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to serve as an excuse for the deliberate search and hunting down of Jews.”
“Men on scooters crisscrossed the city looking for Israeli fans,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema of the Green Party admitted the next day. The rioting, she said, “brings back memories of pogroms” and left her “deeply ashamed.” Though the police were now combing through social media and security footage and making arrests, Halsema refused to confirm that the suspects were Muslims or Arabs. Her office described them as “scooter youths,” as though they were traditional Dutch cyclists who had veered off the straight and narrow.
These are the exercises of Europe’s post-1945 conscience. This moral calisthenics gently stretches a guilty conscience while making sure not to strain the social compact or antagonize key segments of the electorate. Violent antisemitism still exists on Europe’s white nationalist rump, but everyone knows, though few politicians dare to admit it, that the only Europeans both willing and capable of fielding large forces against the Jews are Europe’s radical Left and raging Muslims.
No act of terrorism is complete these days without someone filming it and adding live commentary. No arrest is made without the footage appearing on social media before the suspect has reached the police station. The Amsterdam attackers look like Arabs. They speak Arabic-inflected Dutch. They shout “Free Palestine,” not soccer slogans. The police are in their social media accounts. If the suspects were pink-faced and blond, there would be no need to call them “scooter youths.”
The same strategic euphemism recurred in President Joe Biden’s statement on X. The Zoomer who controls the ex-president’s X account said the “despicable” attacks “echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted” and called for the “perpetrators” to be prosecuted. But the present is more than an echo of the past. The dark moment is now. The conditions that produced a pogrom in Amsterdam exist in every major Western European city — and an American variant is established in our blue-state cities.
Double Dutch-speak
As usual in Holland, the only politician willing to state the obvious was Geert Wilders, the leader of the anti-immigration Party for Freedom. Over the last three decades, Wilders’s penchant for bluntness has carried him and his party from beyond the pale to winning the largest share of the votes in the November 2023 elections. It has also obliged Wilders to live under 24-hour police protection. In 2017, a security official of Moroccan extraction was arrested for leaking Wilders’s location to a Dutch Moroccan gang. The security services did not confirm if scooters were involved.
Wilders condemned what he called an “Islamic Jewhunt” and called for the mayor’s resignation. Mass immigration, Wilders said, had turned the Netherlands into “the Gaza of Europe.” This was infelicitous, but at least it addressed Europe’s current trouble with Muslims rather than its past problem with Jews.
The only other leader to connect past and present was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He detected a continuity between the violence on Amsterdam’s streets and the commemoration of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, whose 86th anniversary fell two days after the game. Netanyahu also drew a “clear line” between “two antisemitic attacks we have seen recently on Dutch soil”: the “reprehensible legal assault against the State of Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague” and “the violent assault against Israeli citizens” down the road in Amsterdam.
It is hard to see much continuity between Nazi Germany then and liberal Holland now. The Dutch authorities are not inciting their citizens to burn synagogues. They are begging their citizens not to burn them. For decades, the Dutch state has subsidized the bunker-like defenses that protect the synagogues of their 20,000-strong Jewish population. The legitimacy of post-1945 Western European states stands, at least in the authorities’ opinion, on their lack of resemblance to “dark moments in history.” This studious inversion of past sins has, however, reproduced them in shadow form at The Hague, where Israel is hunted as the Jew among the nations. There are not too many scooter youths on the bench at the International Court of Justice. The “clear line” that Netanyahu sees is neither clear nor straight.
There are more than a million Muslims in Holland, with Moroccan immigrants and their descendants the largest cohort. Their exuberant contribution to the crime and unemployment statistics suggests that most of them are not scholars of international law. Israel’s delegitimization in international fora might offer a rare point of concord with the distant institutions of liberal Europe, but Dutch Muslims do not need a license to break the law. They already think that Israel is an illegitimate state. They already engage in a rich variety of unlicensed behavior.
On Nov. 12, Halsema met with representatives from Amsterdam’s mosques in what she described as an effort to stop the violence. She did not explain why mosque authorities might be able to influence the behavior of anonymous scooter riders.
Flash mob
Premeditated violence frequently appears on the margins of European major soccer matches. English “firms” pioneered the guerrilla tactics of football hooliganism in the 1970s. Today, every major club has gangs of “ultras.” The coinage, like much of soccer’s on-field tactics and off-field fashion, originated in Italy. For police, keeping rival sets of ultras in the stadium is the easy part. The challenge is to keep them from fighting in the streets before and after a game. Home ultras will plan ambushes in the backstreets and at transport nodes. Visiting ultras will plan raids of their own. City and police authorities attempt to corral the ultras at a distance from each other. In Amsterdam, visiting fans disport themselves in the central Dam Square like barbarian conquerors.
The Amsterdam police, the mayor told the city council on Nov. 11, spent a month planning “rigorously” for the game. UEFA, the clubs, and the police all expected a “low-risk” scenario because Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax fans maintain “friendly ties.” Ajax, like Tottenham Hotspur in England, is a “Jewish club.” Amsterdam’s Jews have historically followed Ajax. Ajax’s core fans, who are almost all non-Jews, have developed this tradition into an identity. Like the “Yid Army” that follows Spurs, Ajax fans call themselves De Superjoden, “the Super Jews.” They wave Israeli flags and sing in Hebrew at games. Some of them have Star of David tattoos. Rival fans chant “Hamas, Hamas, Joden an het gaas” (“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”) and give Nazi salutes.
This part of the police assessment was accurate. Before the game, about 400 Maccabi ultras behaved as ultras do, chanting and waving flags in Dam Square, drinking too much, and looking for trouble. The Ajax fans graciously ceded their territory and focused on fighting the local supporters of the Turkish team Fenerbahçe. But the police’s post-pogrom report to the mayor makes it clear that they always expected trouble and not from the local ultras. The existence of a Jewish team is an affront to so many European Muslims that any game involving Israelis is a massive security problem. Earlier in November, an Israel-Belgium fixture had to be moved to Hungary. The France-Israel match in Paris on Thursday, Nov. 12, will be played under quasi-military control in a mostly empty stadium.
The Maccabi match, Amsterdam police say, posed a “unique” challenge. It would occur “during the Middle East conflict and its resulting tensions within the city.” These “tensions,” entirely one-sided, included a daily pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Central Station. The match would be played just before the annual Kristallnacht commemoration, which required police protection even in quiet times. In March, thousands of leftists and Muslims protested the opening of a new Holocaust museum because Herzog was there. Amnesty International had hung signs along the roads, directing Herzog to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The protesters, waving Palestinian flags, accused Dutch Jews, including elderly Holocaust survivors, of committing “genocide.”
The police resolved to keep the Maccabi visitors away from the Kristallnacht event. They allocated 1,200 officers to the match, with “early detection” of “potential pro-Palestinian activists” and “precautionary monitoring and security measures” around hotels where Maccabi’s fans were staying.
Israel’s National Security Council maintains a four-level risk assessment for Israeli tourists. Travel to Level 4 states is prohibited. Level 1 states require only “basic precautionary measures.” Holland was on Level 2 (“Potential Threat … increased precautionary measures”). Israel’s minister for sport, Miki Zohar, had previously warned Israeli fans that it might be dangerous to travel to games in Europe. On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry saw on Dutch social media that pro-Palestinian groups were coordinating their plans for what they saw as a direct fight with the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad. The ministry notified Israel’s Foreign Ministry of a “very high risk” of trouble in Amsterdam.
According to Israel’s Channel 12 TV, the Mossad warned its Dutch counterparts and urged them to increase security. But the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism identified “no concrete threat” before the game. The menacing tone of the social media posts (“No Zionists in UEFA/FIFA. … We will make the world a narrow place for the Occupation”) is typical of the global wave of anti-Jewish incitement since the Oct. 7 attacks. Perhaps the NCTV assumed that any disorder around the Maccabi match would be dirty business as usual. Instead, they were caught flat-footed by a flash mob.
You may have seen a sudden horde of roller skaters or an impromptu knot of dancers appear suddenly in the street. These are benign forms of the flash mob, a pop-up crowd organized by messaging apps. The Amsterdam version is the malignant form.
“Between 4 and 6 [p.m.] at Central Station [the Israelis] have to take the metro,” a man who rents out luxury cars texted to a group chat. “300 Israelis who are Zios,” he wrote, using a recent pejorative for Jews. “Be there, fighters, come in whole groups, we’ll show them we are not afraid.”
Later that night, eyewitnesses claim they saw dozens of Uber limos converge on a casino where the Maccabi ultras were partying in the small hours. The police stopped the drivers from entering the casino, but generally, they were unable to keep up with the flash mobs that ranged across the city.
The Israeli authorities now detect similar patterns of online planning in France, Britain, and Germany.
Globalizing the intifada
American cities had an “underclass” when Europe only had immigrants. Europe’s underclass has grown into a parallel society. Renting out luxury cars is, like the barber shops that have mushroomed in Western European cities, associated with money laundering and the drug trade. American society has balkanized into multiple parallel societies. The gilded neurotics on the Columbia University campus may be complete strangers to the petty criminals of Amsterdam, yet they have more in common than they realize: “Globalize the intifada.”
Within hours of the Oct. 7 attacks, anti-Jewish incitement and violence erupted simultaneously in Europe and the United States. This alone shows the flash mob power of digital organization. But the content has merged, too. The wellspring of Islamist incitement that animates Europe’s immigrants supplies America’s campus protesters with a vocabulary of opposition and a costume drama of keffiyeh-clad radicalism. The American intifada speaks English: “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea.” It, too, seeks to expel “Zionists” from public life.
The Left’s subversion of the institutions of education and media is in some ways more advanced in America than in Europe. So is the influence of digital media. Since the Ferguson, Missouri, protests of 2014, the mobs in our blue-state cities have been testing the police, edging forward under the cover of sympathetic mayors and a see-no-evil media. The radical Left has fused in ideology and organization with Islamists foreign and domestic. All radical movements eventually produce a terrorist hardcore (the Weathermen, Baader Meinhof). There is no reason to believe that the American intifada will be any different.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
On Nov. 7, as Jews were hunted in Amsterdam, dozens of “protesters” besieged the Chicago Loop synagogue because an Israeli, Yoseph Haddad, was speaking there. Some of them forced their way into the sanctuary. The Chicago police should have known what to expect but were slow to respond. On Oct. 27, an illegal immigrant shot an Orthodox Jew who was walking to synagogue in the back, then fired at the police while shouting “Allahu akbar.” The Chicago police leadership failed to detect terrorist motivation until outrage from Jewish organizations obliged them to admit it.
The first Trump administration extended Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to cover Jews, and Sikhs, in 2020. The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education slow-walked the enforcement. As Halsema knows, it’s hard to hold together a multicultural coalition. Nor did the Biden-Harris administration follow up on plentiful evidence of Islamist organization and recruitment in the U.S. This, too, should be a domestic security priority for the new administration. The American intifada will not look exactly like the European one, but it is part of the same global war against the West. America now stands on the threshold that leads to Amsterdam. It is easier to cross a threshold than to cross back.
