Entitled To Know The Full Truth

Imran Mulla writes:

Dutch police told their British counterparts that over 200 Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans who wreaked havoc in Amsterdam in November 2024 were "linked to the Israel Defense Forces [IDF]", and that hundreds more were "experienced fighters", "highly organised" and "intent on causing serious violence", Middle East Eye can reveal.

The recent ban on fans of Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv from a 6 November fixture at Aston Villa in Birmingham triggered a political furore and was denounced as antisemitic last month by the British government.

But the West Midlands Police assessment which led to the ban was based on intelligence provided by Dutch police about the conduct of Maccabi fans during a match in Amsterdam last November.

The Guardian reported on 21 October that the police assessment "concluded the biggest risk of violence came from extremist fans of the Israeli club".

Now, as the match approaches, MEE can reveal new details of the police assessment which have not been previously reported, and which raise further questions about claims made by government ministers.

This comes days after the police and Birmingham's safety advisory group upheld the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending the match – after government criticism – although Maccabi Tel Aviv had eventually decided not to sell tickets to its fans for the fixture.

The original police assessment, seen by MEE, records that Dutch police informed their British counterparts that "over 200" Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam last year were "linked to the Israel Defense Forces", Israel's army.

Dutch police reported that "significant numbers of Maccabi fans were actively involved in demonstrations and confrontations".

They said "500-600 fans" were "experienced fighters who were highly organised and co-ordinated. They were intent on serious violence and were not afraid of fighting with police."

'They lied to the British public'

When news of the ban first became public, British Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy criticised suggestions that the ban was due to the behaviour of the Israeli club's fans.

In parliament, she claimed the ban was "based in no small part on the risk posed to those fans that are attending who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, because they are Israeli and because they are Jewish".

Former Labour leader and Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn told MEE on Tuesday: "Lisa Nandy must tell us whether she knew about this shocking intelligence before she smeared and attacked those of us who supported the ban."

Corbyn added: "I find it, frankly, disgusting that the government has taken what is ultimately an issue of public safety and distorted the facts for its own political ends. They lied to the British public - and they have been caught out."

Nandy had accused Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who had backed the ban, of "seeking to divide and exclude", a claim that Khan denounced as false at the time.

Khan told MEE on Tuesday: "This information about the Maccabi fans has not been previously mentioned in the media. The public are entitled to know the full truth of what took place in Amsterdam. The police know it.

"This assessment shows that these fans were attacking Muslims and retaliating against police. They were operating in an organised manner."

When approached for comment, West Midlands Police pointed MEE to a recent statement by Birmingham Police commander Tom Joyce, which said: "We are experienced at policing high-profile football matches and demonstrations, and for many weeks now we have been working closely with different faith and local community groups to listen to their views and concerns.

"Our goal throughout planning for this match is to ensure people can enjoy the football fixture while we continue to keep everyone in Birmingham safe, facilitate peaceful protest and maintain the King’s peace."

'Intentionally targeting Muslim communities'

More than 700 officers are preparing to mount an operation for the match on Thursday, amid planned protests by pro-Palestine protesters, who say Maccabi Tel Aviv should not be allowed to play because of Israel's genocide in Gaza and continued occupation of Palestinian territory.

Amsterdam City Council recently banned Maccabi Tel Aviv from the Dutch capital after the club's fans caused mayhem by rampaging through the city last November, before and after their Europa League match against Ajax.

According to the West Midlands Police assessment, the day before the fixture saw between 500 and 600 fans "apparently intentionally targeting Muslim communities and committing a variety of targeted, hate-motivated crimes, including serious assaults on Muslim taxi drivers, throwing innocent members of the public into the river, tearing down Palestine flags and singing hate-fuelled songs.

"Police attempts to disperse this group resulted in serious violence."

The day of the match saw fans "tearing down Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Arab slogans".

The assessment notes: "Several Maccabi fans were assaulted by masked groups believed to be pro-Palestinian protesters. There were running street battles between the two groups throughout the day.

"Significant incidents of vandalism and street violence, including several attacks on taxi drivers and local communities by Maccabi fans were experienced."

Embodiment of the Cruelty and Cynicism

Ben Sixsmith writes:

Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84, and I feel nostalgic.

If you are a millennial, you probably remember a time when Mr Cheney was considered to be the most powerful man in the world. President George W. Bush was a bumbling simpleton. No one thought that he was really directing politics in the USA. Cheney, with his Bond villain appearance and his gravelly voice, was the perfect candidate for being considered the power behind the throne.

Of course, this was simplistic. No one person is ever absolutely powerful in a system as strong and complex as that of the USA. But Cheney remained the physical embodiment of the cruelty and cynicism of the Bush administration.

For most of us, riddling our friend with shotgun shells would be a low point in our lives. For Mr Cheney, the accidental shooting of his hunting buddy was among the more understandable and even quaint disasters in his life.

This sounds harsh but it is very much justified. It was Cheney, more than anyone, who promoted the false idea that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said in 2002. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

Reader — there was doubt.

According to Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Cheney attempted to intimidate him, threatening that he would “discredit inspections” if they did not produce results. For Cheney and his accomplices, it appears, Blix and the inspectors were not there to see if there was cause for an invasion — they were there to provide an excuse.

What made Cheney especially responsible for the carnage that followed, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Coalition soldiers, is that he knew damn well what was liable to happen if the US invaded. After the first Gulf War, when asked why the US had not pursued a policy of regime change, Cheney said that the US was right not to take Baghdad because it would have created a “quagmire”. So it did — twelve years later.

Mr Cheney also played a major role in the implementation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, otherwise known as torture, which inflicted waterboarding and other forms of cruelty on terror suspects. Cheney was unapologetic — even saying that he had “no problem” with the fact that there were suspects who were tortured who were later found to have been innocent.

In more recent years, Cheney has become a notable opponent of Donald Trump. Trump, Cheney has argued, has been a liar and a demagogue. Of course, there has been justice in Cheney’s accusations. But it has been wildly, staggeringly ironic that a man who built a brutal war on a foundation of lies has been making those accusations. It is like being called a mobster by Al Capone.

Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” in 2015, Cheney blustered, “went against everything we stand for and believe in”. How could not letting Muslims into the country offend his sense of the American spirit more than killing them?

I don’t want this to seem like a celebration of Mr Cheney’s death. He was an old man without power or influence, and his death must be very sad for the people who loved him. (To someone, even the worst leader in the world might be “grandad”.)

Yet obituaries are the stuff of legacy building, so it is important to be honest about Mr Cheney’s most significant contributions to the world. The Bush administration took the promise of the post-Soviet era, and the outpouring of sympathy that was produced by 9/11, and destroyed them with their stupid and dishonest wars and their hypocritical combination of the rhetoric of human rights and the furtive use of torture and extrajudicial detention. Trump’s rhetoric of “Making America Great Again” struck a chord because men like Cheney had contributed so much to its decline.

Mater Populi Fidelis

Before the Blessed Sacrament Exposed, I have prayed the Rosary in thanksgiving for this. See especially the following paragraphs:

19. In the Feria IV meeting on 21 February 1996, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was the Prefect of the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was asked whether the request from the movement Vox Populi Mariae Mediatrici to define a dogma declaring Mary as the “Co-redemptrix” or “Mediatrix of All Graces” was acceptable. In his personal votum, he replied: “Negative. The precise meaning of these titles is not clear, and the doctrine contained in them is not mature. A defined doctrine of divine faith belongs to the Depositum Fidei — that is, to the divine revelation conveyed in Scripture and the apostolic tradition. However, it is not clear how the doctrine expressed in these titles is present in Scripture and the apostolic tradition.” Later, in 2002, he publicly voiced his opinion against the use of the title: “the formula ‘Co-redemptrix’ departs to too great an extent from the language of Scripture and of the Fathers and therefore gives rise to misunderstandings… Everything comes from Him [Christ], as the Letter to the Ephesians and the Letter to the Colossians, in particular, tell us; Mary, too, is everything that she is through Him. The word ‘Co-redemptrix’ would obscure this origin.” While Cardinal Ratzinger did not deny that there may have been good intentions and valuable aspects in the proposal to use this title, he maintained that they were “being expressed in the wrong way.”

22. Given the necessity of explaining Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it would not be appropriate to use the title “Co-redemptrix” to define Mary’s cooperation. This title risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation and can therefore create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith, for “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). When an expression requires many, repeated explanations to prevent it from straying from a correct meaning, it does not serve the faith of the People of God and becomes unhelpful. In this case, the expression “Co-redemptrix” does not help extol Mary as the first and foremost collaborator in the work of Redemption and grace, for it carries the risk of eclipsing the exclusive role of Jesus Christ — the Son of God made man for our salvation, who was the only one capable of offering the Father a sacrifice of infinite value — which would not be a true honor to his Mother. Indeed, as the “handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38), Mary directs us to Christ and asks us to “do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

This is not about ecumenism. The Truth is the Truth, and there will only ever have been anything much to ecumenism when a church full of Pentecostalists chanted Salve Regina. Rather, the Church’s defined dogma is already complete with regard to Our Blessed Lady’s cooperation in the Redemptive Work of Her Divine Son, and the movements to proclaim Her Co-Redemptrix have been motivated by the desire, not to summarise that dogmatic corpus in that title as Popes had occasionally done, but to assert Her equality with Him in that Work. The Collyridians probably never existed in the days of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis. But they do now, complete with the pastries.

Their position is blasphemy and heresy, leading to idolatry and sacrilege. It is “another Gospel”, resembling Mormonism in its distortion of classically Christian vocabulary into a polytheism that included a Mother Goddess, although Mormons rarely mention theirs, whereas what we have here is more like Shaktism. Both are called to mind by the prominence of ostensible seers and gurus. Catholics are required to accept the principle of private revelation, permitted to accept those specific examples which the Church had formally approved, and forbidden to accept those which She had formally repudiated. In any event, no private revelation can be a basis for dogma. Those invoked by the proponents of Marian Co-Redemption manifestly fail 1 John 4:1, and any apparent blessing flowing from them should be referred to Galatians 1:8 and to 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Overview and Scrutiny

Neither the party of government nor the party ahead in the polls has any remaining economic policy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer ought no longer to be in office, while the rising candidate for First Lord of the Treasury also has serious questions to answer, again about housing. Any Government would have had to have done what was about to happen, but that is not the point. They all sought the job by pretending otherwise, so the lot who won have only themselves to blame.

Yet the money can still be found for the Chagos deal. Speculation swirls around the Government's withdrawal of this evening's committal motion in the House of Lords, but no one is suggesting that it had finally baulked at the cost. Nor that it had suddenly been converted to Chagossian self-determination, any more than the other side had.

In the midst of all of this, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is as silent as he is on the case of Thomas Waller. If you need to look him up, then do. Note, as much as anything else, that he is not on remand. Where were or are the protestors? But if Yaxley-Lennon was not guilty of terrorism, and that in the view of a salaried State employee sitting alone, then how could the Palestine Action defendants possibly be so?

And where would that leave the Labour Party in relation to Councillor Georgia Pickering, of the Binfield and Jennett's Park Ward of Bracknell Forest Council? In her day job as the Managing Director of CMS Strategic, and acting on behalf of Elbit Systems, that Chair of Overview and Scrutiny planted in The Times the false story that Palestine Action was being funded by Iran. Days later, Parliament voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

The Empire State, Indeed

Like the rest of his cabal, Dick Cheney endorsed Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris against Donald Trump, who has endorsed Andrew Cuomo against both Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa.

Imagine telling George W. Bush's voters in 2000 or 2004 that his lieutenants, effectively speaking for him as well as for themselves, would openly vote Clinton, for Biden, or for someone like Harris. Ask the supporters of Clinton, Biden and Harris why they were enthusiastic for candidates who could attract the support of Bush and Cheney.

Imagine telling Trump's voters in 2016, or even as recently as 2020 and in many cases this time last year, that he would advise people to vote for Cuomo. Ask people who had looked to and stuck with the Cuomos for more than 40 years what had attracted Trump back their side in 2025. But it is a big club, and you are no more in it than we are.

Selective Editing

Of course the BBC doctored its footage to make it look as if Donald Trump had incited the January 6 riot, not that that deceit will have made any material difference. Rather more consequentially, the BBC reversed its footage of Orgreave to make it look as if it the miners had attacked the Police rather than the other way round.

It also broadcast an infamous Panorama about Jeremy Corbyn, if probably not a very effective one; in the runup to the 2019 General Election, Labour was on 33 per cent and a Conservative overall majority was far from guaranteed until the deal with the Brexit Party, a favour that the Labour Right returned in 2024 when it ordered the Labour candidate not even to set foot in Clacton, where he still took nearly as many votes as Nigel Farage's margin of victory. The same machine actively guaranteed that Iain Duncan Smith would retain his seat rather than see Faiza Shaheen in Parliament.

And the BBC is making the Sde Teiman story about the leak rather than the rape, a word that it refuses to use in this case despite having come as close as it ever would to admitting that it ran a fabricated story about rapes of Israeli women on October 7. The Sde Teiman rapists have never denied it. They held a defiant press conference, and their supporters, including Members of the Knesset and some in the uniforms of the IDF's Force 100, rioted in July 2024. A month earlier, in a report that it was also highly critical of Hamas, the United Nations Human Rights Council had found that the IDF was inflicting sexual humiliation on Palestinian men and boys.

To the BBC, Trump is as dangerous as the miners, as Corbyn, and as the nonwhite males whose economic exploitation has necessitated their demonisation as sexual predators, leading to sexual and other violence against them on every continent in the course of at least the last half-millenium, meaning on all continents simultaneously since the completion of the process of European "discovery". Even Trump may be forgiven a sense of pride at being counted in such glorious company.

Trump's misrepresentation by the BBC has been brought to light by the Daily Telegraph, the independent directors of which have again complained, about someone who had not yet acquired it, to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In other words, to the Labour Government, which the previous Conservative Government legislated to give the last word on its ownership. Apparently, that this the only way to protect the Free Press. These directors are independent of what or whom, exactly? They should be told that if they could not find any potential proprietor to suit them, then the Telegraph would be nationalised, as it seems to think that it already is.

That would rank with the Reform UK flagship Kent County Council's order that Union and Saint George's Flags be taken down to stop the Christmas lights from setting fire to them, and with Nigel Farage's abandonment of his entire economic policy even while replacing it with a pay cut for his angry young men and with the requirement of PIP claimants to take days off work to present themselves for reassessment as to whether or not their legs had grown back. Five or 10-minute interviews on Zoom? Oh, Nigel, do not believe everything that you either read in the Telegraph or hear on the BBC.

Emergency Stop

Lobbying on behalf of Elbit, CMS Strategic planted in The Times a false story that Palestine Action was under investigation for being funded by Iran. Days later, Parliament voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. The courts now face collapse as they attempted to try more than two thousand blind wheelchair-users and octogenarian clergywomen for having silently held up placards. There is, however, no such action against the organisations that are at the very least egging on the seasonal use of fireworks to attack hotels.

Such egging on has included the circulation of falsehoods about the Cambridgeshire train attacker. In reality, like the Union Flags in the old Irish quarters of English towns and cities, the knife-wielding sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of beautifully mannered, strongly family-centred African and West Indian churchgoers have assimilated perfectly into the country and city of the Krays and Richardsons. The Windrush generation arrived in the Teddy Boys' London, and those streets were vastly more dangerous than they are now. Violent crime in general, and knife crime in particular, are down both nationally and in London, as are hospital admissions for knife-related injuries, so it is highly unlikely that anyone is systematically fiddling the figures.

It is therefore no surprise that no MP either elected or now sitting for Reform UK attended Shabana Mahmood's Emergency Statement this afternoon. Do not look to those MPs for too much, if any, resistance to airport-style scanners at railway stations most of which are in any case unstaffed. Nor to even greater use of facial recognition, which is run by the state whose flag is conspicuous both at Reform's events and at those of the people whom it was desperate to prevent from denying it scores of seats by a handful of votes apiece. Notably on 13 September, those people were presumably happy to have put themselves on those databases, if less so to have contributed generously to the immigrant economy every time that they bought so much as a sandwich.

The rarity of anything like the Huntingdon train stabbings is why we find them so shocking. But how long will it be before railway and emergency workers were once again officially lazy, greedy, overpaid and obsolete? I give it until Thursday at the latest. Yet we demonstrably do not need scanners or facial recognition cameras, much less digital ID. We need guards on the trains, porters on the platforms, conductors on the buses, park-keepers in the parks, and Police on the streets.