Disturbingly Popular Arguments In Favor Of Beating Jews In The Streets

The FAFO Excuse and Others

In the weeks following the widespread attacks on Israeli visitors in Amsterdam, details have emerged that fill in the gaps about what authorities have described as the largest attack on Jews in the Netherlands since World War II. Both The New York Times’ and The Wall Street Journal’s investigations of the story, revealed that members of Amsterdam’s Arab community used messaging apps “calling for a Jodenjacht, or ‘Jew Hunt’.”

“I’m not Jewish!”, one victim pleads as he is beaten on the Streets of Amsterdam.

’The events leading to the attacks began with a soccer match between the Israeli club Maccabi and Ajax, the storied Dutch team. Before the match, some Maccabi fans chanted rude and offensive slogans, and a Palestinian flag was torn down in the city center. Additionally, there were reports of a taxi cab being struck by someone, though the specifics of this incident remain unclear.

Motivated by perceived offenses, such as chants, the destruction of symbols, or perhaps merely the presence of Israelis and Jews, some members of the city’s Arab community coordinated assaults. After the match hundreds communicated on chat groups and messaging platforms to organize the chasing down and beating of dozens of Israeli and Jewish visitors.

From coverage in de Volkskrant:

Dozens of videos circulating online show Maccabi supporters being chased, attacked and beaten up by hooded men with Palestinian flags on their backs. 'Tonight the world will see that the People's Army don't like (sic.) those Israeli dogs,' reads a Snapchat post.

The police are investigating the extent to which taxi drivers were involved in the violence. 'Block the players' bus of those cancer Jews,' says someone in a Telegram group for taxi drivers with over 3,700 members. 'Hang Palestinian flags in the city,' says another. 'They're going to come like rats.'

The mayor of Amsterdam initially referred to the assaults as a "pogrom," but later expressed regret for using the term, citing how quickly it had become politicized. A member of the Amsterdam City Council concurred, lamenting that the incendiary label “pogrom” had overshadowed what she described as the perfectly accurate term “Jew hunting.”

President Biden condemned the assaults, and his ambassador against Anti-Semitism traveled to Amsterdam to show solidarity with the victims.

The Narrative Shifts

Since the initial expressions of sympathy and condemnation, a competing explanation has emerged that shifts blame onto the Jewish victims who were chased and beaten. This counter-narrative has been built through selective documentation, exaggeration, reliance on hard-to-parse video narrated by a Dutch child, and conspiracy theories. Mehdi Hassan condemned President Biden’s condemnation of the attacks. He published an analysis on his popular Substack which counted the number of times the BBC featured beaten or frightened Israelis versus the number of times the BBC heard from Arabs offended by the beaten-up Israelis, ultimately denouncing the imbalance

in coverage.

The justifiers of these attacks represent a loud, influential faction of anti-Israel commentators and self-proclaimed propagandists. This same group played a significant role in denying that many Israeli women were raped on October 7th. To their often massive audiences they have turned the assaults on Israelis as a collective shaming of the Israelis. They claim to have uncovered the "truth," but in reality, they have underscored a longstanding and troubling reality: there is a persistent, thriving market for media narratives that seek to justify the abuse of Jews.

Justification for A Jew Hunt