Amsterdam Violence: ‘How the Media Fell Into Benjamin Netanyahu’s Trap’

This week’s news was a hangover of last’s: Amsterdam’s mayor took back a statement in which she had likened street violence between Israeli Maccabi football fans and Dutch locals to a “pogrom”.

In her backtrack, Femke Halsema said Benjamin Netanyahu “totally bypassed” Dutch authorities in his framing of events “while we were still gathering facts,” and her words, plastered across the mainstream media, had been “turned into propaganda”. We commend Halsema for setting the record straight. Now where is the media’s mea culpa?

Some have scaled back on their misguided, one-sided reportage. But for all the quiet corrections, we’ve seen little editorial introspection. The question news outlets should be openly asking is: How did we let the narrative become so quickly and so heavily dominated by Netanyahu? Are we… biased?

Some of the violence that occurred between 00:30 and 02:30 on 7 November was heinously antisemitic. The words ‘Jew hunt’ were used as racists piggybacked on hooliganism to terrorise Jewish residents and tourists.

The violence stormed international headlines with the dramatic development that Israel was “preparing to immediately deploy a rescue mission to the Netherlands,” (BBC News). “Two Hercules planes are going to be flown over with medical supplies,” marvelled Channel 4, citing a report from the IDF.

No rescue planes materialised, of course. It was a publicity stunt by Netanyahu, a farcical story, and an incredibly successful one.

The Israeli Prime Minister played the Western media for puppets and fools. He co-opted the news agenda with a declaration so dramatic that it normalised days’ worth of headlines likening events to “a second holocaust” (Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock), “pogroms” (Amsterdam’s mayor: comments since revoked) and “Kristallnacht (Netanyahu’s own).

About 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population were killed during the Holocaust. Five people were hospitalised during Amsterdam’s clashes, and their ethnicity or religion has not been reported.

Halsema believes she unwittingly served as a mouthpiece to propaganda. What does that then mean for the trained journalists and editors who uncritically regurgitated her words? Headlines were couched in quotes from Netanyahu, Baerbock, and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof; they featured Maccabi supporters and correspondents based in Jerusalem. So here’s what we call ‘the Media Storm test’ – spot the missing voices.

The voices of Dutch locals terrorised in their own home for expressing support of Palestine, or being deemed Arab or Muslim, were missing.  “The Maccabee fans have been here since Wednesday, and they have wreaked havoc everywhere,” one young woman told Middle East Eye. “They’ve been chanting horrible things about Arabs, they’ve vandalised numerous buildings, they’ve ripped off Palestinian flags. They’ve been inciting for violence, and they have only been protected by the police. This has made me feel incredibly unsafe”.

In the days before the match, some Israeli Maccabi supporters marched through the streets of Amsterdam attacking people they perceived to be Arab or Muslim. They tore down and set fire to Palestinian flags. Their hate speech chants included, “F*** the Arabs,” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there”.

Amsterdam witnessed racist hooliganism across a polarity. We know this now, despite attempts by legacy media to downplay, or even bury, one side of that racism.

The anti-Arab side was documented by Sky News as the violence played out. But once the political narrative had fallen into step with the Israel brigade, Sky News removed their original report and replaced it with a heavily edited rendition.

The original described the violence as having been initiated by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, but the re-run downplayed their racist provocations. “Anti-Arab” was removed from the accompanying X caption, replaced instead with “antisemitic”.

Editors at Sky inserted the clip of Schoof denouncing “antisemitic violence” and a Maccabi fan likening events to 7 October, but no testimonies from Amsterdam locals. And here’s the cherry on the top.

The original Sky report ended with these words: “Dutch, Israeli and British leaders denounced the attacks as ‘antisemitic’ and even referred to it as a ‘pogrom’, but their statements failed to mention the assaults by Israeli hooligans against Dutch citizens”.

In the re-edit, the second clause of this sentence was removed, leaving as the closing statement the since-renounced ‘pogrom’ comment.

In a blatant affront to fact-checking, the BBC, Guardian, Channel 4, CBS, Wall Street Journal, Bild and New York Times published footage from a Dutch local that she herself has captioned: “Maccabi supporters attacked Amsterdam citizens in front of Central Station after the game”—instead, they captioned it with the opposite description: a violent assault on Israelis.

The witness has implored them to correct their captions. One German outlet apologised. The Guardian noted a correction. As far as we can trace, the BBC, CBS, and Wall Street Journal have taken no action.

Across outlets, editors deemed verified footage of anti-Arab attacks to be less headline-worthy than politicians’ statements. The New York Times chose the headline, “Israeli soccer fans injured in attacks linked to antisemitism in Amsterdam,” for an article that only included evidence of anti-Arab racism. They based their lede, not on the footage they had successfully verified, but on a tweet by the Dutch prime minister.

Another week has passed, and these media outlets have failed to acknowledge the sinister political agenda they propelled. The Dutch government is dominated by the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), headed by Geert Wilders, who tellingly blamed the violence on “multicultural scum.”

In the weeks since the violence, Wilders has used the narrative he and his allies trickled into international media as a basis to threaten stripping Dutch Moroccans of citizenship. Far-right parties with sinister histories of antisemitism have co-opted pro-Israelism to advance anti-Muslim, anti-migrant agendas. In doing so, they have given strength to the antisemitism they claim to oppose.

Remember when the UK far-right riots happened, how slow officials and media were to call them ‘Islamophobic’? Even as mosques were being vandalised and hotels housing Muslim asylum seekers set on fire. Even as Muslim campaigners, including MP Zarah Sultana, implored politicians and the press to call it what it was.

For days they declined, referring to “thuggery” instead. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper finally said the I-word after a week of violence. By contrast, last week, we watched politicians fall over each other to compare Amsterdam’s violence to evermore extreme varieties of antisemitism.

The sluggishness of British politicians to name Islamophobia is mirrored this week by a media that should have applied the label to its own shameful coverage of the Ajax-Maccabi violence.

The bias was obscene, and outlets’ attempts to brush it under the carpet are destructive to public trust: what does it tell readers about bias across reporting of this war?

Let there be no illusion, downplaying and deleting testimonies of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim violence is Islamophobic.

Media Storm’s ‘News Watch’, helping you make sense of the mainstream media, is available wherever you get your podcasts.