‘Protecting the right of Israeli football hooligans to riot in foreign cities’ is about to be added to the list of key western values, a value that will come in just below ‘financing a genocide and arming war criminals.’
If you don’t know, I’m referencing the hysteria that has broken out across the English media after the police in Birmingham said that fans of Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv shouldn’t visit the city when they play local team Aston Villa in a couple of weeks.
The news has been turned into another ludicrous gaslighting pity party about antisemitism and the victimisation of Jews. The media and the British elite, including the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem leaders, are running with the argument that the decision is antisemitic, whipping up a racist frenzy designed to support the narrative that Britain is a hotbed of Islamist antisemitism. Keir Starmer has said the decision made by the police is wrong and is looking to reverse it.
All the standard arguments are flowing forth, and some increasingly ridiculous ones too. British Tory party MP Katie Lam equated the right of Israeli hooligans to travel wherever they want with Jews fleeing the Nazi holocaust, suggesting that where Jews were once welcomed in Britain, banning Maccabi fans shows they are no longer safe.
It’s insane making. It’s pathetic. It trivialises the Nazi holocaust to make some incoherent point in defence of hooligans! The editor of the Spectator magazine and former Tory government minister Michael Gove said it showed that Jews weren’t welcome in Birmingham.
How do you even respond to this? This what a mind poisoned by Zionism looks like, I suppose. Birmingham of course has a large Jewish population. The real antisemitism, as per various definitions, is equating all Jews with a minority of Jewish Israeli football hooligans.
And it’s not even a ban! A few hundred people have been discouraged from travelling because they are notorious for rioting and racism. In March last year a group of Maccabi fans assaulted and hospitalised a Greek man who was carrying a Palestinian flag ahead of their match against Olympiakos.
And when Macabbi Tel Aviv fans last travelled to Europe in November, to play Ajax in Amsterdam, they tore down Palestine flags, abused Muslim shop owners, burned a taxi, threw metal bars at police, chanted ‘death to Arabs’ and ‘fuck the Arabs.’ The Dutch police were very clear that the Israelis started it by burning a taxi being driven by a Muslim and tearing down Palestine flags. You might remember there was a similar pity party at the time designed to suggest the Israeli hooligans were the victims, not the perpetrators. (I didn’t write about it last time, but another around of propaganda signals a fucking annoying pattern I couldn’t ignore).
In response to this history of violence, West Midlands police requested Maccabi fans stay at home. Birmingham, as you may or may not know, has a significant Muslim minority, roughly 340,000 people, or 30% of the total population of the city. The potential for these hooligans to repeat their actions in Athens and Amsterdam and trigger violence is clearly high.
Yet despite these facts, we’re being commanded to see hooligans as victims solely because they’re Jewish Israeli. They just want to chant racist abuse and smash up your city centre and if you want to deny them that right you are a filthy antisemite! People who have said little to nothing about the genocide of an entire people are attempting to manufacture sympathy for violent Israeli football hooligans!
The shameless depravity and unfathomable gaslighting could send you crazy.
The only party leader in the UK to have resisted this ridiculous narrative inversion is the increasingly impressive leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski. And unlike the other leaders, Polanski is actually Jewish. But he isn’t raving about antisemitism because he’s not a complete fucking mug and he’s not been bought off by Zionist money.
The deranged, absolute defence of Israel and all its assets, including its racist football fans, stands in stark contrast with how the western elite immediately ejected Russians from all sporting events. Israel’s actions in Gaza are on another level, yet their sport teams were not banned, and Israeli football hooligans get the full protection treatment. So-called ‘western values’ stretch only as far as geopolitical and imperial considerations allow, it seems.
Yet it’s hard not to see the Maccabi hysteria in the context of Israel losing the propaganda war over the last two years. The settler outpost has haemorrhaged support as a result of the Gaza genocide and is rightly no longer seen as the victim, but as the aggressor. This is a very dangerous state of affairs for the western media and political class who for decades have been able to enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Israel. When Zionism was the mainstream belief, there were no real costs to being pro-Israel. You could write biased articles that humanised Israelis and dehumanised Palestinians, and you could give Israel unequal weight in your coverage. As a politician you could talk in glowing terms about Israel, your love of the country and how you would support it when elected. None of these words would harm your prospects in the slightest. On the contrary, your Zionist beliefs were often a boon to your political or media career. And in return for your Zionism you’d often get some cash from the lobby or friendly treatment from Zionist media.
Much has changed.
While the Jewish lobby will still treat you well if you don’t cross them, it’s just as likely that today you will be punished politically if you align with Israel. Genocide has cleaved apart the old bargain. Surveys show a majority of people across the world now have a negative view of the country. And the pro-Israel media bias that helped Israel commit genocide has sickened people. As a result people are no longer swallowing Israeli propaganda and are increasingly turning to independent news sources.
In the face of observable reality, the victimhood narrative is losing its punch. So to redress the balance, any opportunity to position Israelis as the oppressed must be seized.
To put it another way, Israel, after committing a genocide, is running out of victim stories.
Hence we’re subjected to a confected hysteria that weaponises the memory of the holocaust and turns Israeli football hooligans, of all people, into victims.
Hence the outsized focus on the Israeli prisoners-of-war who have just been released, and the relative lack of coverage regarding the far more horrifying stories of Palestinian bodies delivered back to their families with their wrists still zip-tied, their faces unrecognisable, their bodies mauled by IDF dogs. Or the stories being told by Palestinians as they emerge from Israeli torture dungeons after years or even decades.
Hence why Israel has broken the ceasefire on numerous occasions and it has barely made the news. The frequency of the fire may have slowed, but it has not ceased. Israeli has murdered at least 23 Palestinians since the ‘ceasefire’ came into effect, and pretexts for a full-scale restart of the genocide are currently being invented. Yet all we hear about is ‘tensions’ or that Hamas aren’t releasing bodies which are stuck under mountains of rubble caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies are stuck under the same rubble, but we don’t hear much about them.
Truth matters. Words matter.
But when it comes to Israel you won’t find much of it in the mainstream media.
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are hooligans with a violent and racist past.
Jews are not banned from Birmingham.
Banning football hooligans from travelling is not antisemitism (a word which Zionists have infused with so many meanings it has now lost all meaning).
What this episode points to is the biggest truth of all: Zionism is losing, Israelis are now universally hated, Israel can’t be rehabilitated and no amount of whining hysterical victimhood can change that.
Here would be my response: I would welcome into my home, even cook a gigantic Italian dinner for any anti-Zionist Jew I know, including the likes of Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, Milo Peled, and two of my local personal friends. But I'd sooner drop a cauldron of boiling oil from my roof onto just about any Zionist a-hole before I allowed them to cross my threshold. THE DISTINCTION'S NOT HARD IF ONE IS PAYING ATTENTION. Smarmer and the British elite are US puppy-dogs and deserve nothing but disdain for their lack of spine and adequate cognition.
There are three ways to deal with this. 1. A request for no footy hooligans by the plods followed by hand wringing by the usual suspects profiled in the article. 2. Heavy police presence to protect B’ham citizens from footy hooligans. 3. Do you feel lucky punk? (= minimal/zero police presence & football hooligans discover “how hard they are” when a large quantity of disaffected B’ham inhabitants engage in some “attitude adjustment” wrt to the footy hooligans). Personally? I favour No 3. Let’s see how hard they are without their guns/tanks/aircraft. It recalls Celtic against one of the Spanish clubs in Spain in 1969. The Spanish fascist police thought they could do to the Scots fans what they routinely did to the poor Spanish. They discovered a different reality. Of course No 3 won’t happen (pity) – but if it did – my advice for the footy fans from Israel – just get one way tickets – cos you will go home on an air-ambulance.