Outrage, focus on Muslim migrants after Amsterdam 'pogrom'

(JNS) — Amsterdam police detained 62 people in connection with a series of antisemitic assaults against Israeli soccer fans, which resulted in five moderate injuries and about 20 to 30 minor ones, in the Dutch capital, the city’s prosecutor René de Beukelaer said at a Friday press.

The five injured people were treated in the hospital and discharged, De Beukelaer said during the briefing with Femke Halsema, the Amsterdam mayor. 

Witnesses described about 100 men, whom they described as Arabs, assaulting Israelis in a coordinated manner on Friday morning. The country’s largest-scale antisemitic incident in decades has shocked many Dutchmen and especially Jews and Holocaust survivors, who said that it is a reminder of what led up to the Holocaust.

The Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. Less than a quarter of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust, and the country has many Holocaust memorials, including a museum in the former home of Anne Frank, which is one of the nation’s most visited sites.

Friday’s incidents prompted Israel to send two airplanes to evacuate its citizens from Amsterdam, and the Israeli government told Israelis in the city to remain in their hotels and to remove signs that could identify them as either Jews or Israelis. The attacks also generated an international uproar, including by King Willem-Alexander, the Dutch ceremonial head of state.

“We must not look away from antisemitic behavior on our streets,” the king stated. “History has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse, with horrific consequences. Jewish people must feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times. We embrace them all and hold them close.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated that Willem-Alexander told him that “we failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.” 

“We see with horror this morning, the shocking images and videos that since Oct. 7, we had hoped never to see again: an antisemitic pogrom currently taking place against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and Israeli citizens in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands,” the Israeli president added in his own statement.

Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s incoming foreign minister, and Amir Ohana, the Knesset chair, flew to Amsterdam on Friday to help the embassy coordinate efforts to evacuate Israelis who decided to cut their stays short in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla said that 800 officers had been deployed nationwide to prevent attacks on Israelis or Jews ahead of the events in recent days. He noted that before the incidents on Thursday night, there had been “small upheavals” involving Maccabi supporters, who he said had removed a Palestinian flag from a building facade and had “destroyed a taxi.”

A journalist asked at Friday’s joint press conference about the alleged provocations. “There can be no excuse for what happened,” the mayor said.

The incidents, which followed a match between the Ajax soccer club and Maccabi Tel Aviv, also drew a response from French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community. France has also experienced a lot of antisemitism in recent months, and Israeli companies were banned recently from a defense fair in the country.

“The violence against Israeli citizens in Amsterdam recalls history’s darkest hours,” Macron stated. “I strongly condemn it and express my sympathy for the injured. France will relentlessly continue to fight against heinous antisemitism.”

Dick Schoof, the Dutch prime minister, called the incidents “utterly outrageous and abhorrent antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens in Amsterdam.”

Christians for Israel, an international organization based in the Netherlands, lowered the large Israeli flag, which flies atop its Nijkerk headquarters, to half-mast in solidarity with those attacked.

“Last night’s attack chillingly echoes the events of Kristallnacht,” wrote Frank van Oordt, the group’s director. “That such a violent hunt for Jews could occur again in 2024 in our capital city is both incomprehensible and unacceptable.”

Halsema, the Amsterdam mayor, said that “we have seen an outburst of antisemitism tonight, and it is very unlike Amsterdam.”

“Telegram groups where a Jew-hunt is being discussed,” she said. “It’s so shocking. I am furious and I’m expressing, in the city’s name, the harshest condemnations over what happened.”

“I’m ashamed of the behavior of rioters and criminals,” she added.

A journalist asked at the press conference if Halsema had a comment on the accounts of victims, who said that all of the perpetrators looked Middle Eastern. 

“This is an issue that needs to be researched. The background and ethnicity of people, that’s not something I can comment on right now, nor do I want to,” she said. (Halsema is a former leader of D66, a pro-immigration, left-leaning party.)

Geert Wilders, leader of the largest political party in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom, which is right-leaning, showed no such reservations. 

In a series of furious posts on social media, Wilders, a strident critic of immigration and Islam, referenced the alleged ethnicity of the perpetrators repeatedly.

“A pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. We have become the Gaza of Europe. Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews. I will not accept that. Never,” he wrote. “The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again.”

“We weren’t allowed to speak of Islam as the source of antisemitism, and they didn’t deport criminals. Now we have Jew hunts in Amsterdam,” he added in another post.

Wilders, a passionate supporter of Israel whose party is a senior coalition member, called for the perpetrators to be deported.

The incident, which happened shortly before the anniversary of the Nov. 9-10, 1938 Nazi pogrom called Kristallnacht, comes amid polarizing debate in Europe about Muslim immigration.

In September, Marjolein Faber, the minister of asylum and migration who is part of Wilder’s party, unveiled a plan that she called “the strictest asylum policy ever.”

“We need to change course,” she said. “We are taking measures to make the Netherlands as unattractive as possible for asylum seekers.”

The Party for Freedom received the highest number of vote in the 2023 elections, amid widespread dissatisfaction with mass immigration, primarily from Muslim countries.

On Sunday, an overwhelming majority of lawmakers in the lower house of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, passed a resolution that for the first time named Muslim antisemitism as a driver of that phenomenon.

Yanki Jacobs, a prominent Dutch Chabad rabbi from Amsterdam, urged Muslim community leaders to speak out against the assaults. “I think at this moment, Muslim faith leaders need to condemn this vocally,” he told JNS. “I will be asking them to do so today.”

The incidents in Amsterdam prompted a slew of condemnations from Jewish organizations.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, expressed “profound concern and solidarity with the victims of

last night’s unprovoked attack on Jews.”

“Antisemitism cannot be thwarted by words alone,” stated Dani Dayan, Yad Vashem’s chair. “We call upon world leaders to recognize and take immediate and decisive action to fight against antisemitism and hate before the disease metastasizes to catastrophic proportions. History has shown us that we cannot afford to be complacent in the face of antisemitism.”

Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, stated that the “unprovoked violence—resulting in serious injuries and reports of missing persons—has not only shaken the Israeli and Dutch Jewish communities but underscores the global resurgence of antisemitism that continues to metastasize across societies worldwide.”

“We are horrified by the organized and vicious antisemitic attack on Israelis in Amsterdam,” the Orthodox Union stated. “Coming days before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, it is time for world leaders and individuals of conscience to recognize that brazen attacks against Jews is what protestors are calling for when they chant ‘globalize the intifada.’”

The Jewish Federations of North America stated that it is “horrified and outraged at the hate-filled antisemitic attacks in Amsterdam, in which anti-Israel mobs terrorized and beat Israelis and Jews trying to enjoy a soccer game.”

“This modern-day pogrom, just two days before the anniversary of Kristallnacht, should make it clear that the entire world must act now to condemn and prosecute to the fullest all the perpetrators and take every necessary step to protect the Jewish community,” the Federations said.” We are in close contact with our partners in Israel and The Jewish Agency for Israel as we continue our commitment to the security of Jewish communities around the world.”

The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, called for “concrete measures” to be taken to prevent such events from recurring.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement warned that tolerating such incidents would cause Jews to leave Europe. “Europe should remember this: Jews won’t wait around like they did in 1939. They’ll leave, leaving you to deal with the extremism that has been allowed to fester,” Sacha Roytman Dratwa, the group’s CEO, wrote.