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By Inna Rogatchi (Times of Israel)
‘Lock in your rooms. Don’t go anywhere. Externalisation of Jewish and Israeli symbols is forbidden.’ Such instructions were sent to all Israelis who happened to be in Amsterdam yesterday and today, November 7 and 8, 2024 by the Israeli National Security Council as a guide-lines of survival. Today. In Europe. Again.
The instructions came as the outcome of yesterday’s violent pogrom against Israeli and Jewish fans of a football Israeli Maccabi team that played a game with Ajax in the capital of the Netherlands. The massive assault was committed also against anyone who looked Jewish to the well-prepared, well-organised, well-placed, well-instructed mixed huge mob of migrants all over in the Palestinian attire. “I am not Jewish!!!…” – screams man on the ground, beaten severely. It sounds so painfully familiar, from our grandparents and parents’ never disappearing recollections, as well as from history books and so many movies. What movie about the Holocaust is it? Ah, it is not a movie?
Police. What Police?
The quantity of the attacking mobs of young organised bandits was huge, about 10:1 against people whom they attacked in a vile racist assault, being completely, totally, absolutely free-handed. We have hundreds of videos, and hundreds of witness first-hand reports from the place. “No police”, “Police cars are moving without any action taken”, “ Police cars are standing idle”. In which place and under what circumstances anything remotely close could be possible? Oh, it happened in Amsterdam?
According to numerous witness accounts, the police did not appear nor did they start to do a thing before 30 minutes in some places and one hour and thirty minutes in many others. On the record: in the case of an attack on a property in Amsterdam, the police are at the scene in 5 minutes, according to their own manual and mode of action. What was wrong with this mode last night? Ah, the Jews were attacked with knives, clubs, and cars. It is only the Jews, nothing serious.
It is difficult to watch, but it is impossible not to. On November 8th, 2024 in the city of Amsterdam, no war was declared, apart from the one against Jews, people were running to take refuge anywhere they could, in the stores, in buildings. They are barricading themselves in those places. This was not a rehearsal of a mass scene in yet another Holocaust-related movie. It was for real. Now. In an oh-so-overwhelmingly hyper-tolerant city many of us did like to visit. Now Amsterdam would be also remembered as a city of an open people-hunt. Unopposed.
It would be also remembered as the city where people, being hunted and assaulted, being brutally beaten and viciously attacked, are jumping in the canals escaping the determined mob. With no police around. It all is on the videos. The minister of the interior of the Netherlands is welcomed to have a look.
Preparations & Free-Hand
It is all on the videos. No need to wait for years to collect some of the evidence. We saw the numbers of the attackers. They were placed, in a very thorough planning, at every turn of every alley stretching from the stadium where the Ajax-Maccabi game took place. They were placed also in many places all over railway stations, metro stations, near the hotels in which Israeli touring fans were staying – they knew precisely which ones, notably. Then they opened the hunt against people in the centre.
Anyone is able to analyse what kind of preparation such a pogrom, conducted in this way, needs, and what kind of information it is required as well. And against all this, the Amsterdam police took from 30 minutes to an hour and a half to appear at some, not all scenes? Arresting, in the end, just 57 thugs among thousands of them? It is not even a bad joke. It is not even a tasteless joke. It is an indignation and it is a disgrace. Both require immediate and strong actions not only by the Israeli authorities but by anyone who is paid by state funds, thus taxpayers money, to govern that city of Amsterdam, to start with.
Who in its sober mind would believe for a second that the Amsterdam police was not aware of massive preparations of that sort for this kind and scale of an assault, including the stadium, railway stations, metro, several hotels in which the Israeli fans were staying, the entire city – which, so outrageously hypocritical did carry on screamingly irrelevant commemoration of the Kristallnacht just a few hours before the start of the violent pogrom.
Who needs your false commemorations? Those assaulted people? Those who jumped in the Amsterdam canals to escape the attack? Those injured? Those wounded? Those wounded seriously? Or those missing ones?
The Netherland’s PM ‘watched the attack in horror’, according to his tweet. It is not the vocabulary of a PM. Horror he can save for his friends to relate his reaction. Actions are expected from the authorities.
The actions of the Amsterdam police, infamous because its members publicly declared having ‘a moral dilemma’ over restraining anti-Semitic mobs sweeping the city all previous year, exposing absolutely innocent people to clear danger and open violence for over a year by one. As we saw once again, such an attitude emboldens the mobsters and leads to more violence only and always. There should be no mistake: the Amsterdam police knew about all that as well as any sane person does. No excuse for them whatsoever. All necessary actions have to be applied there in full measure. This is the matter of public security, and the Amsterdam police could have their ‘moral dilemmas’ to ponder about being off-board.
There is no question that during the violent attack which has jumped to the history already as the Amsterdam pogrom 2024, the police was in a switched-off mode on purpose. So we do have moral dilemmas over this police force of a big European capital, too. Huge ones.
Weak & Numb Games: A Chamberlain Mode 2.0
But there is more. More than Amsterdam or the Netherlands. It is what is going on in Europe and how it might develop, G-d forbid.
As outrageous as it is, the meaning of what was allowed to happen in Amsterdam on the night of November 8th, 2024, is that once allowed, and carried on, it might become a trigger to what could be commemorated in 2104, in another 80 years, as “Never Again 2.0”. Or not.
What we are facing today, in what we are living now, over a year after October 7th, is a permitted hate. Baseless, blind, violent. The key-word here is ‘permitted’. Do we need to lecture anyone today that racist hatred shall not be allowed in any form and way, shall not be tolerated, shall not be permitted publicly and privately? No, we don’t. It is an axiom. And every single government official does know it – as everyone in the Amsterdam police knew about preparations of the pogrom on October 8th, 2024.
The reality is that European governments and pan-European bodies , as well as the US, Canada and Australian ones, are deeply engaged in a weak and numb game. This game is deadly dangerous, by the way, but the majority of those people who had been elected and placed to govern and thus to provide safety and security to the citizens of their corresponding countries prefer to practise ‘a Chamberlain mode’. We all know how it ended, don’t we? So, why on earth are we risking our lives again? Has hatred been accepted as the highest value, and domineering instrument of human life at the time of coming all those commemorations-in-making – again – related to the Shoah and the ending of the Second World War next year?
Does hypocrisy rule the world? Not just being present as it has always been, in varying proportion, but as the leading feature of life? In this case, we are living in a low period of humanity. And our descendants would be as ashamed of us as cowardice Chamberlain’s supporters – which were many, to remind ourselves soberly – were panicking after his disgraceful demise. Fortunately and miraculously, their country, the whole Europe, and the world were saved by just one man, a giant of men, and all those who bravely stood with him for the sake of human’s strength and decency. The question is: where is our Sir Winston?
A Wake-Up Call from Amsterdam
When the October 7th massacre happened and drew comparison with the Holocaust atrocities committed, there were many people who disagreed with such comparison, on the ground of the now-existing Jewish state, thanks Heaven, and its strong and good army, for which we all are praying, even the atheists. These facts are true. But the essence of the comparison of the October 7th with the Holocaust atrocities was and is in the core motivation of the both mega-assaults, which is the attitude towards the Jews. Children, babies, women, girls, boys, elderly, anyone. Anyone.
The hate-wave which swept the world for over a year after October 7th, has literally the same core drive which moves it, additionally to a massive organising and funding it – focused inflamed sick hatred of Jews. Any of us. Anywhere. It is obvious, fully documented, and is still allowed to happen in many forms and ways of this all encompassing wave of annihilation, starting with psychological, developing into boycotts of writers and anyone else, vandalising memorials and museums, cancelling lectures, seminars, conferences, preventing any events having connections with anything Jewish, and now coming to the Amsterdam pogrom, which might be just first of many, given the preparations and planning for it and being allowed to happen, with all information existing . When and what would become enough for our governments to wake up and to stop this ongoing assault on Jews practically anywhere in the world?
After the year since the cannibal attack on innocent people on October 7th in Israel, every Jew anywhere in Europe and in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, can already write a first-hand memoir ‘ How I lived in the resurrection of violent anti-Semitism 80 years after the Holocaust’. Each of us has her or his personal story to tell about it already. Shall we start to collect the evidence for the Holocaust-After the Holocaust? Where to send it? To Hague Court, perhaps?
The point of comparison the October 7th massacre with the Holocaust is actually in one instance: that it has happened AFTER the Shoah. That was the meaning of that comparison immediately after the massacre in Israel a year ago, in October 2023. Now, a bit over a year after, in November 2024, the point got stronger and yet more justified. The fact is that not only terrible, unimaginable massacre happened in Israel in October 2023, but the world, the societies, the governments, the international organisations and institutions after that mega-crime, did allow the wave of anti-Semitic hatred to sweep the world. This is the point today.
Allowed hatred is a serious weapon. Unopposed pogroms lead to only one thing: more of them. We are not in Chamberlain’s time any longer. Anyone knows and understands possible consequences of the permitted assault in Amsterdam.
It is also a wake-up call to the governments in the US, Canada and Australia at the time when a convicted and escaped terrorist is employed and energetically protected by one of the Canadian universities as a professor lecturing on social justice. A macabre from a low-world, indeed. An underworld, actually, which literally rules as a legal entity. In one university. As a pogrom which was allowed to happen. In one city. So far.
The immediate and decisive, de-ci-si-ve it is, actions of all European and all the other governments in their corresponding countries, of the EU and international institutions and leadership whatever is their personal sympathies and inclinations, is required for protection its citizens, taxpayers , tourists paying services to the Netherlands, or any other country, for the protection of life and normality in the most literal way. It truly is unbelievable that the citizens and taxpayers have been put in the position to articulate these constitutional norms of law in order to implement the basically required norms of civility.
Those who were elected to govern, do wake up. You’ve just got a direct wake-up call from Amsterdam.
