Then there’s this Channel 4 news report, which shows a bit of a masterful narrative manipulation. It begins with images of people draped in Palestinian flags, marching in the streets of Amsterdam, with the voiceover talking about the ‘shocking’ violence, and how “men on scooters hunted down Israelis to beat them”. We immediately see footage of random Israelis being beaten in the streets and then a jump to the Dutch PM condemning these actions. When presented this way, it is shocking – your initial introduction to this story is that Israeli Jewish football fans were ‘hunted’ and assaulted in the streets by pro-Palestinian hooligans.
A little over a minute into the three-minute report, we move onto what is the critical context: 36 hours of violence and racist slurs and chants by the Maccabi fans. The report spends about 40 seconds going over it, only to return to framing the incident as antisemitic. It concludes with a brief acknowledgement that Maccabi fans have a history of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism but its final note is about the historical memory of Jews with regards to being ‘hunted and chased’ in the streets.
Nevermind the present experience of Arabs, of Muslims being exterminated in their homes, hospitals, schools and tents by a Jewish military.
It’s also worth mentioning here that during the course of writing this piece, Sky News posted and deleted a video report on the racist Israeli mob’s instigation and violence — only to repost the report, with its content and copy edited to center the “antisemitism” framing. In other words, a real-time manufacturing of a story to fit a specific narrative, despite all the evidence available. Few things have captured the intentional complicity of the news media, in the genocide of Palestinians, as transparently and poignantly as this.
But our lazy, lying press could not even be bothered to interview Dutch Jews about what they thought of the matter. They were content to take their cue from the stuffed dummy Starmer and his Black parrot Lammy, whose only concern is to keep in step with Senile Biden.
The Israeli fans were attacked, not because they were Jewish but because they were Israeli thugs. A small point but one lost of the mass media. If this had been an anti-Semitic attack then it’s strange that Amsterdam’s 14,000 Jews haven’t received similar treatment.