Old New Land?

Maccabi Tel Aviv's supporters ran amok in Athens not long ago, again shouting racial abuse, and their team's forthcoming match against Besiktas had already had to be moved to neutral ground even before this week. It is just one of those football clubs, getting away with it in Israel because at least it is not as bad as Beitar, and hitherto getting away with it abroad because any criticism of an Israeli team had to be "anti-Semitic". But that bluff has been called. Perhaps the Israelis, whom you will notice are European when it suits them, should take up the American sports? They could then participate in international competition for another half a generation, if for no longer than that.

Tuesday's Jerusalem Post reported that Mossad agents were embedded among the fans travelling to Amsterdam. One might add that those fans were largely off-duty IDF soldiers. Both of those facts provide some context to the non-materialisation of flying military showboats to take home the rioters, meaning that they had to catch commercial flights back to their ostentatiously orchestrated heroes' welcomes. Clearly, not all of the Israeli security machine was comfortable with their mission, perhaps inspired by events in Britain this summer, to stir up anti-Arab and anti-Muslim pogroms in Western Europe.

In any case, that mission failed. Its fundamental amateurism, arrogance or both, is summed up by the expectation that anyone would believe that in plotting to "hang Palestinian flags in the city" so that "They will come like rats" and be murdered, Moroccan taxi drivers in the Netherlands had messaged each other in English. But there are those who must keep up the pretence, caring more about football hooligans than about dead women and children. That is to say, caring about them at all. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. Keir Starmer and David Lammy. Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau. And Femke Halsema, Mayor of Amsterdam and member of GroenLinks, because of course she is. See also Annalena Baerbock. Bourgeois liberal centrists are the worst. The ones who think that they are left-wing or at least "progressive", and who sometimes even used to be, are the worst of the worst. And the worst of the worst of the worst are European Greens.