The New York Times (11/8/24), like other corporate media, framed the Amsterdam violence in terms of antisemitism—treating anti-Arab violence as an ancillary detail at best.
When violence broke out in Amsterdam last week involving Israeli soccer fans, Western media headlines told the story as one of attacks that could only be explained by antisemitism. This is the story right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants them to tell: “On the streets of Amsterdam, antisemitic rioters attacked Jews, Israeli citizens, just because they were Jews” (Fox News, 11/10/24).
Yet buried deep within their reports, some of these outlets revealed a more complicated reality: that many fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club had spent the previous night tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, attacking a taxi and shouting murderous anti-Arab chants, including “Death to the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there” (Defector, 11/8/24).
As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24) wrote, the media coverage revealed
troubling patterns in how racial violence is reported; not only is anti-Arab violence and racism marginalized and minimized, but violence against Israelis is amplified and reduced to antisemitism.
Buried context
James North (Mondoweiss, 11/10/24): “You had to jump to paragraph 7, buried on an inside page, to learn that the Israeli fans had, in fact, been violent and provocative the night before.”
“Israeli Soccer Fans Attacked in Amsterdam,” announced NBC News (11/8/24). That piece didn’t mention until the 25th paragraph the Maccabi fans’ Palestinian flag-burning and taxi destruction, as if these were minor details rather than precipitating events.
Similarly, the Washington Post (11/8/24)—“Israeli Soccer Fans Were Attacked in Amsterdam. The Violence Was Condemned as Antisemitic”—didn’t mention Maccabi anti-Arab chants until paragraph 22, and didn’t mention any Maccabi fan violence.
James North on Mondoweiss (11/10/24) summed up the New York Times article’s (11/8/24) similar one-sided framing:
The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.
Also at Mondoweiss (11/9/24), Sana Saeed explained:
Emerging video evidence and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here, here and here, for instance) indicate that the initial violence came from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted a moment of silence for the Valencia flood victims.
But despite that footage and Amsterdammer testimonies, coverage—across international media, especially in the United States—has failed to contextualize the counter-attacks against the anti-Arab Israeli mob.
Misrepresented video
Image from Annet de Graaf’s video showing violence by Israeli soccer fans—widely misrepresented as an example of antisemitic violence.
Several news outlets outright misrepresented video from local Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf. De Graaf’s video depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24) and BBC (11/8/24) and other outlets initially labeled it as Maccabi fans getting attacked.
De Graaf has demanded apologies from the news outlets and acknowledgement that the video was used to push false information. CNN World News‘ video now notes that an earlier version was accompanied by details from Reuters that CNN could not independently verify. BBC’s caption of De Graaf’s footage reads “Footage of some of the violence in Amsterdam—the BBC has not been able to verify the identity of those involved.”
Message to news outlets:
Today I received an apology from Tagesschau for abusing my footage of the incident which took place after the soccer game in Amsterdam between Ajax and M. Tel Aviv. I refer also to the footage of reporter @OmeBender who covered that same fight with more… pic.twitter.com/9QyEezb8tL
— iAnnet 🦋 (@iAnnetnl) November 9, 2024
The New York Times (11/8/24) corrected its misuse of the footage in an article about the violence:
An earlier version of this article included a video distributed by Reuters with a script about Israeli fans being attacked. Reuters has since issued a correction saying it is unclear who is depicted in the footage. The video’s author told the New York Times it shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street—a description the Times independently confirmed with other verified footage from the scene. The video has been removed.
‘Historically illiterate conflation’
Jacobin (11/12/24): “Far from acting like tsarist authorities during a pogrom, the police in Amsterdam seem to have cracked down far harder on those who attacked Maccabi fans than the overtly racist Maccabi hooligans who started the first phase of the riot.”
It is undoubtedly true that antisemitism was involved in Amsterdam alongside Israeli fans’ anti-Arab actions; the Wall Street Journal (11/10/24) verified reports of a group chat that called for a “Jew hunt.” But rather than acknowledging that there was ethnic animosity on both sides, some articles about the melee (Bret Stephens, New York Times, 11/12/24; Fox News, 11/10/24; Free Press, 10/11/24) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”
Jacobin (11/12/24) put the attacks in the context of European soccer riots:
There were assaults on Israeli fans, including hit-and-run attacks by perpetrators on bicycles. Some of the victims were Maccabi fans who hadn’t participated in the earlier hooliganism. In other words, this played out like a classical nationalistic football riot—the thuggish element of one group of fans engages in violence, and the ugly intercommunal dynamics lead to not just the perpetrators but the entire group of fans (or even random people wrongly assumed to share their background or nationality) being attacked.
But Jacobin pushed back against media using the word “pogrom” in reference to the soccer riots:
Pogroms were not isolated incidents of violence. They were calculated assaults to keep Jews locked firmly in their social place…. Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority. What happened in Amsterdam, however, bears no resemblance to this structure. These were not attacks predicated on religious or racial oppression. They were incidents fueled by political discord between different groups of nationalists….
Furthermore, using that designation to opportunistically smear global dissent against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as classically antisemitic only serves to trivialize genuine horrors. This historically illiterate conflation should be rejected by all who truly care about antisemitism.
Breaking with the Netanyahu government’s spin, former Israeli President Ehud Olmert said that the riots in Amsterdam were “not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries.” Olmert, unlike Western media coverage of the event, seemed to be able to connect the violence in Amsterdam to anti-Arab sentiment in his own country. In a more thoughtful piece than his paper’s news coverage of the event, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (11/13/24) quoted Olmert extensively:
The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age—as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank—the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?
The events in Amsterdam called for nuanced media coverage that contextualized events and condemned both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab violence. Instead, per usual, world leaders and media alike painted Arabs and Pro-Palestine protesters as aggressors and Israelis as innocent victims.
I agree with your article and I’m glad you wrote it. I would note that Arabs are Semites just like the Jews so I suggest that all writers include this in their articles and stop applying antisemitism only to Jews. Maybe this would help a lot of people in Israel to stop being so racist, hateful, and evil.
Right on!
“Jewish ” is a religion/ethnicity, mostly central European. “Arab” refers to a Language group, and includes many physical types, from Blackest Black to whitest white, oriental, etc.
I wanted to share this article but the link took me to another publication , instead of Fair, and the necessity of registering and joining was` unacceptable.
I wanted to share this article but the link took me to another publication , instead of Fair, and the necessity of registering and joining was` unacceptable.
What are you talking about?
https://fair.org/home/media-coverage-of-amsterdam-soccer-riot-erases-zionist-hatred-and-violence/
There’s the link right there.
FAIR’s Elsie Carson-Holt quotes Jacobin: “Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority.”
Yes, the Amsterdam riot was initially perpetrated by zionist Israeli soccer thugs with malice aforethought — but also worth noting, relentless West Bank violence fits this and other “pogrom” definitions.
The more that news and opinion sources point this out, the better.
That ARD Tagesschau (public paid German broadcast) misrepresented the video as you tell us above – is not too much surprising. That Annet de Graaf at least got an apology is – something. In Germany – I come from a Jewish family who suffered terribly from Nazi Germany 1933-45 – it really is impossible by now to follow our media – nearly all media.
Readers from Israel newspaper Haaretz report that their comments are deleted as soon as they also describe what Israel does to the people of Gaza. TAZ or ZEIT, what ever you read (the former, er, long ago “left liberal” papers just like the conservative ones) – you wouldn’t believe this!
The definition of what Antisemitism is is so extremely biased and distorted in Germany that it simply makes no sense at all. It is no help against Antisemitism – which, of course, is a fact, but this all is misused in Germany to hammer the horrible bias and the looking away from all the immense sufferings of millions of people in Gaza, West bank, Lebanon and more into the people.
In short – something like this can only mean: forget about Berlin TAZ, about ZEIT, about Spiegel, let alone the yellow press. It is mind blowing.
The Guardian, really good, as liberal mainstream medium had good articles covering all sides, the hate of Israeli fans and their shouts to kill “Arabs”, and the Antisemitism against Jewish people that followed in Amsterdam. This is good journalism. And it is not existing in Germany right now, with the exception of very few very small papers.
Our paid-by-the-public ARD/ZDF, in theory a good idea (“be independent from big corporations by getting money from all in Germany”) are a nightmare. I must admit I started to think about paying those 19 or something Euro you pay per month to another account – to refuse paying this cruel, extremely biased and distorted German TV as long as they go on like this. If Fair would write from Germany – you were stunned, I assure you. There are too many things and distortions going on to even start telling.
We also got self declared “far Left” groups (called “the Anti-Germans”) who combine “fuck patriarchy” with horrible lies and distortions about Gaza, and those “far Left” (self-describing conservatives…) people do not only shout all Germans were Nazis, but they shout for more weapons for the Netanyahu government. You have no words for these distortions and there is just cruelty, hate, and a real lack of any empathy for the dignity of the lives of humans. You can’t stop shaking your head in disgust. At the Frankfurt book fair 2023 a lady opened the fair with the wish nobody would use the word “but” (aber). So a 100/0 view pro Netanyahu-government was the only possible view… And these generations, postmodern and queer, always boast with their “there is no truth” and “we only ask questions, we never have an answer”. They do not even understand their horrible self contradictions…
A huge majority in Germany only knows from Amsterdam that there were many Antisemitic people against the poor Israeli fans, and that this was an extreme form of Antisemitism. The majority is not informed as it should be in a democracy…