The Amsterdam pogrom is what happens when the world tolerates antisemitism
Much like the reaction to the Hamas massacre of 1,200 citizens in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it didn’t take long for some in the media and on the anti-Israel left to try to flip the narrative about what took place in Amsterdam on the night of Nov. 7.
Fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team who flew on El Al rescue flight from Amsterdam arrive to the arrivals hall of the Ben-Gurion International Airport in Israel on Nov. 8, 2024. Photo by Jonathan Shaul/Flash90.
Even as both the prime minister and king of the Netherlands apologized for the failure of the Dutch police to protect Israelis from a planned and coordinated attack on visiting Israeli soccer fans, many in the international media were suggesting that the incident was provoked by the Israelis.
According to The New York Times and the Associated Press, some Israelis in the country, who were there to attend a game between the Dutch Ajax team and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv, allegedly chanted anti-Palestinian slogans and tore down a Palestinian flag. Rather than innocent victims of a mob reportedly composed of Arab and Muslim immigrants determined to hunt down and harm Jews, the leader of one left-wing Dutch political party referred to the visiting tourists as “thugs” who uttered “genocidal” and “racist” slogans.
Not to be outdone by the journalistic establishment and its anti-Israel bias, the left-wing Forward also claimed that the victims were “violent hooligans.” It claimed that Dutch Jews who feared antisemitism but didn’t wish to be associated with Israel and its post-Oct. 7 war on Islamist terrorists felt trapped in a conflict they wished to avoid. According to the paper, they are worried that the attacks in Amsterdam would be “weaponized” by Zionists or by non-Jewish right-wing politicians like Geert Wilders, leader of the largest party in the Dutch parliament. Wilders speaks for many in Holland and in Europe who are deeply critical of the way a massive influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa is changing the character of their nations for the worse and that is also responsible for a surge in antisemitism. Yet for many on the left to even raise these issues is, by definition, racist.
In this way, even the spectacle of an anti-Jewish pogrom in Western Europe is being used as yet another excuse to bash Israelis and to portray its perpetrators as victims of racists and xenophobes. The fact that the outrageous attacks on Israelis were documented by videos widely circulated on social media platforms and were committed on the eve of the 86th anniversary of the Nazi’s Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews has not deterred those who believe that the Jews must always be in the wrong.
The point here is even if some of the visiting Israelis didn’t behave as exemplary tourists, the notion that violence against them is a justified reaction to the presence of Jews in the city where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis epitomizes how a global surge in antisemitism has been normalized.
The Amsterdam pogrom—and due to the way the mob-driven attacks to physically harm the Israelis were clearly planned and coordinated in advance on WhatsApp and Telegram, the specific term does apply to the violence—matters not so much because of the Kristallnacht anniversary or that it happened in a country that profits from tourists who flock to the museum on the site of the secret annex where the Frank family sought to survive the Holocaust. Its significance lies in the fact that though the imagery of Jews being “hunted” is particularly frightening, it is merely one more in a growing list of outrageous attacks on Jews not just in supposedly enlightened Western Europe but throughout the globe. Rather than being exceptional, it is part of a pattern of behavior that is the natural outcome of a combination of factors that have emboldened those who hate Jews to act on their vile beliefs.
Antisemitic mobs in the United States
Though the current European variant of this plague of prejudice is distinct from what has been happening in the United States since Oct. 7, it is nevertheless closely linked to the mobs on college campuses and in the streets of America’s cities who have been chanting the same slogans the Amsterdam pogromists acted on. The terror in the Dutch city is an illustration of what happens when mobs seek to “globalize the intifada.”
In Holland and many other places in Western Europe, Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, especially the torrent of refugees from the Syrian civil war in the last decade, were welcomed with open arms. Governments who thought they were acting on the lessons that needed to be learned from Europe’s troubled past believed that they were obligated to take in those seeking a better life than could be had in their home countries.
Nevertheless, the desire to help those in need quickly morphed into a willingness to turn a blind eye to the way their own national identities and cultures were being transformed by the migrants. Rather than seeking to assimilate, the newcomers conducted what might be described as a reverse colonization from what had occurred during Europe’s imperialist past. The increasingly aggressive Muslim communities didn’t merely bring a culture of misogyny and antisemitism with them; their presence and numbers essentially normalized behavior and hatred that were supposedly banished from the continent after the Holocaust.
The red-green alliance
Just as troubling was the way advocates for Islamist politics were able to ally themselves with European leftists. Though their cultural attitudes were the opposite of what secular Europeans believed in, they did have something very important in common: hatred for Israel and prejudice against Jews.
In this way, a bizarre red-green alliance of disparate groups that shared an anti-Zionist agenda became a staple of Western European politics. And, as we’ve seen in countries like France, Sweden and now Holland, this creates an atmosphere where “criticism” of Israel quickly morphed into support for the destruction of the Jewish state, as well as tolerance for antisemitic agitation aimed at intimidating and silencing Jews. As Douglas Murray noted in his prescient 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, the introduction of a large Muslim population into the continent whose values were incompatible with those of secular Europe led to a dynamic in which liberals found themselves unable to muster the will to defend their beliefs, lest they be labeled as racists.
While Western European leaders are always willing to denounce violence like the “Jew-hunting” in Amsterdam when it becomes too egregious to ignore or downplay, they are largely responsible for setting these events in motion. They did this, in part, by unthinkingly opening up their nations to a flood of people who had no desire to give up attitudes that Europe had supposedly left behind during the Enlightenment. It was also a function of their willingness to normalize the presence of intolerant Islamists who shared their resentment of Zionism, Israel and the Jews with many in mainstream European political parties.
In essence, every college with an anti-Israel encampment or a campus culture where pro-Israel Jews find themselves ostracized and targeted by faculty and students is an example of how pogroms like that in Amsterdam become a possibility.
The takeover of American education by those advocating for toxic Marxist myths like critical race theory and intersectionality, which falsely label Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors who are always in the wrong and deserve whatever violence is directed at them, has led to the indoctrination of a generation that sees the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7 as justified “resistance.”
In this way, the chattering classes in the United States have, like their European counterparts, essentially normalized antisemitic discourse about Jews and Israel under the guise of anti-Zionism and critiques of Israel. It was no surprise that three elite university presidents were willing to tell Congress last December that it depended on “the context” as to whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews broke the rules of their institutions. If they feared the campus mobs of Israel-haters more than being labeled as soft on antisemitism, it was because current intellectual fashion has normalized hatred for Israel and the Jews.
It is a short leap from that position to one in which violence against Jews becomes not merely imaginable but inevitable.
There is a difference between America and Western Europe. The sort of official government-backed antisemitism that was once commonplace in Europe has not taken root in the United States. What’s more, the large majority of Americans support Israel and oppose antisemitism. As the recently concluded presidential election shows, voters also rejected woke ideology and elected a man who was pledged to fight its spread.
A warning to world-wide Jewry
Still, the Amsterdam pogrom is a warning to Jews that should instruct them as to what happens when tolerance of antisemitism goes mainstream. That is true whether the result of the influx of antisemites from abroad or the spread of toxic, leftist “anti-racist” myths that seek to divide the country and fuel Jew-hatred. The war against Israel may be only a sidebar to a general leftist war on Western civilization. But the peril of Jews in Europe and elsewhere signals that what is happening in Amsterdam could easily be repeated elsewhere.
Israel’s decision to rush planes to Holland to evacuate Israelis hiding in Amsterdam hotels from the mob in what can only be described as a 21st-century update of the Anne Frank story is another important reminder. In the era before the founding of the modern-day Jewish state in 1948, there was no Jewish army or air force to protect or evacuate Jews in need. Those who today disparage the existence of a Jewish state as an example of the dangers of nationalism are oblivious to the way the Amsterdam pogrom illustrated anew the need for a strong Israel.
While some on the left, including a sector of the Jewish population, may think that the problem is Israel and its refusal to let itself be destroyed by genocidal Islamist terrorists, recent events show that a Jewish state is imperative in a world where pogroms are still an unfortunate reality. Those bent on eliminating it “by any means necessary” aren’t—contrary to many in the Democratic Party—articulating a moral critique of Israel. Instead, they are legitimizing Jewish genocide in the Middle East and everywhere else. When such dangerous ideas are tolerated, excused and rationalized, the world is merely a short step away from a time when pogroms like Kristallnacht or Amsterdam become the rule rather than the exception.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
