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Media Coverage of Amsterdam Soccer Riot Erases Zionist Hatred and Violence Elsie Carson-Holt ([link removed])


NYT: Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans

The New York Times (11/8/24 ([link removed]) ), 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 ([link removed]) ).

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 ([link removed]) ).

As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24 ([link removed]) ) 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
------------------------------------------------------------
Mondoweiss: ‘NYTimes’ biased coverage of Amsterdam soccer violence attempts to hide Israeli racism

James North (Mondoweiss, 11/10/24) ([link removed]) : "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) ([link removed]) . 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 ([link removed]) )—“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) ([link removed]) summed up the New York Times article's (11/8/24 ([link removed]) ) 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 ([link removed]) ), Sana Saeed explained:

Emerging video evidence ([link removed]) and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here ([link removed]) , here ([link removed]) and here ([link removed]) , for instance) indicate that the initial violence came ([link removed]) from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted ([link removed]) 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
------------------------------------------------------------
Screengrab from Annet de Graaf's video of the Amesterdam football riot.

Image from Annet de Graaf's video ([link removed]) 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 ([link removed]) depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24 ([link removed]) ) and BBC (11/8/24 ([link removed]) ) 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 ([link removed]) who covered that same fight with more… pic.twitter.com/9QyEezb8tL ([link removed])

— iAnnet 🦋 (@iAnnetnl) November 9, 2024 ([link removed])

The New York Times (11/8/24 ([link removed]) ) 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'
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Jacobin: Calling a Football Riot a Pogrom Insults Historical Memory

Jacobin (11/12/24 ([link removed]) ): "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 ([link removed]) ) 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 ([link removed]) ; Fox News, 11/10/24 ([link removed]) ; Free Press, 10/11/24 ([link removed]) ) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”

Jacobin (11/12/24 ([link removed]) ) 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 ([link removed]) ) 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.
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