Article by Jonathan Cook

There has never been a harder time to do political and media analysis than right now. Each day, the western establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is ridicule.

The latest example was the reaction to violent clashes in Amsterdam before and after a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local team Ajax.

The ridiculous framing from western politicians, assisted by mainstream media outlets, was that the visiting Israelis were “hunted down” in what supposedly amounted to a “pogrom” by Dutch street gangs, comprising mainly youths of Arab and Muslim heritage.

According to this official narrative, the violence on Amsterdam’s streets was further proof of a rising tide of antisemitism sweeping Europe and imported from the Middle East. More, the attacks were presented as having disturbing echoes of Europe’s Nazi past.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden claimed the Israeli fans faced “despicable” attacks that “echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted”.

Israel, of course, helpfully stoked this idea by promising “emergency flights” to “rescue” its football fans – seeking to evoke memories of its airlifts in the 1980s of Ethiopian Jews to escape famine and reports of persecution, or possibly of the 1975 airlift of US embassy staff from Saigon.

Islamophobic Bile

The western media’s coverage of these events was as strangely deferential to these genocide-inciting thugs as the Dutch police’s handling of their violence.

Had visiting British fans behaved this way in Amsterdam, the police would have made mass arrests immediately.

Similarly, had British hooligans found themselves on the receiving end of violence in such circumstances, the British media would have shown little sympathy.

The clashes would rightly have been understood as ugly tribalism, a not-unfamiliar sight at football matches.

The difference here was that the clashes unleashed by the Israeli fans’ provocations had a much larger context than simple antipathy between rival teams. It was fueled by tensions surrounding horrifying events taking place on the international stage.

There is nothing shocking or especially sinister about Dutch fans, especially those with Arab or Muslim heritage, responding with their own violence to Israeli youths – some of them presumably fresh from military service in Gaza – trying to export their own genocidal anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incitement to Amsterdam.

All the more so when the Israeli fans were amplifying the bigoted, Islamophobic bile of leading Dutch politicians.

It should have been even less surprising given the wider context: that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were celebrating in someone else’s city the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza, among Dutch citizens who don’t view Arab life as worthless or Muslims as “human animals”.

Sadly, that is exactly how the western establishment has viewed Palestinians over the past 13 months, as Israel has slaughtered them in the ever-shrinking concentration camp that is Gaza.

Paradoxically, it was left to an Israeli politician, Ofer Cassif, who belongs to the tiny Hadash party, the only joint Jewish-Arab party in the Israeli parliament, to bring some perspective.

He wrote on X: “[Israeli] fans go on a violent rampage, carry out beatings, tear up Palestinian flags in the streets as if they were an occupying force, and shout Nazi slogans in favor of the extermination of a nation [Palestinians], and then whine when the situation degenerates into complete chaos and violence returns to them like a boomerang.”

Continue reading on: The Middle East Eye

In a letter addressed to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French lawmaker and former Minister Nadine Morano accused professor Şehmus Demir, the rector of Gaziantep Islam, Science and Technology University (GIBTU) of “being close to Hamas” and urged the EU to cut off its relations with the school “immediately.”

The letter, including signatures of other French politicians, claimed the university supported Hamas and said EU’s Erasmus+ partnership with it was “scandalous” in light of its support of Palestine against Israel’s occupation.

Islam plays a central role in the university’s educational program, the letter argued, slamming Demir for his criticism of Israel.

The letter comes at a time when Islamophobic sentiments and far-right parties have been strengthening across Europe and the European Parliament, revealing that anti-Islam policies are not limited to security but spreading to cultural and academic cooperation, too.

The French politicians’ letter is based on claims published in Journal du Dimanche, a popular French weekly.

Turkish universities were among hundreds of other institutions around the world that organized encampments to protest Israel’s brutal offensive in Gaza earlier this year.

Türkiye has been a vocal critic of Israel since the start of the war and a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause, including holding talks with Palestinian, Israeli and Hamas officials.

President Erdoğan has called Israel a “terrorist state” and accused it of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. He has expressed full support for Hamas and rejected the Western stance of classifying it as a terrorist organization.

Israel’s brutal onslaught in the Gaza Strip is nearing its first anniversary, which began on Oct. 7 following Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel and has since spread to Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.

In the past year alone, Israel’s bombing killed at least 41,800 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and more than 700 others in the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.

Israeli estimates indicate that around 720,000 Israelis now live in illegal settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The international community, including the U.N., considers these settlements illegal under international law, and the U.S. has said that Israel’s expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank is inconsistent with international law.

The Lebanon escalation follows a landmark opinion in July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that declared Israel’s decadeslong occupation of Palestinian land unlawful and demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Source: Daily Sabah