Never again? Amsterdam, the Holocaust and Hamas

The recent attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam after a soccer match between an Israeli team and a Dutch team are despicable.

Disturbing videos show Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans visiting the city to attend a match against AFC Ajax, being hunted through the streets of the Dutch capital by pro-Palestine gangs demanding to know whether they are Jews – demanding to see their passports – with chilling echoes of the Holocaust and its prequel Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass”, in which German Jews were hunted and attacked.

In Amsterdam, the city for ever associated with Anne Frank, this incident places a question mark over the expression “never again”.

Christians United for Israel point out that “the media and anti-Israel activists online are justifying this when they try to blame the victims or pass it off as football hooliganism”.

A small minority [of Tel Aviv fans] who tore down a couple of flags or a group chanting anti-Arab slogans does not justify open attacks on fans or the hunting down of random Jews on the streets. It doesn’t justify attacking women and children. It doesn’t justifying [sic] throwing people onto train tracks. It doesn’t justify pushing people into rivers. It doesn’t justifying [sic] ramming vehicles into Jews in hit and run attacks. It doesn’t justify beating up foreign nationals who assist Jewish victims.

As part of a degree course in Jewish-Christian relations, I studied the Holocaust in depth but found the universal acceptance of this terrible event as the epitome of evil not quite as reassuring as I should. Instead, I found it strangely disturbing: how long would this apparent consensus last, I wondered?

We may now have the answer, as the Western world succumbs to violent anti-Israel feeling evident in countless “Just stop Israel” protests, marches and agitation. Has the age-old disease of anti-Semitism simply transmuted into anti-Zionism, its more acceptable but equally deadly offspring?

The early 21st century terror attacks on British soil – the 7/7 bombings of 2005, the attacks on London Bridge, Borough Market, Finsbury Park, the Manchester Arena and Westminster Bridge, all in 2017, seem to have been disposed of down what George Orwell described in 1984 as the cultural memory hole.

The British public may not have forgotten, but the British ruling classes appear to regard such events as embarrassments to be quietly forgotten, a response not unconnected to the obvious fact that to draw attention to them might provoke yet more terror. We have come to a strange pass when Dutch “far Right” activist Geert Wilderscondemns the attacks on Jews while up until now, at least, the liberal Left media, not least the BBC, have been more inclined to take a more soothing, sympathetic approach to such incidents, along the lines of “move along there, nothing to see”

Nearly 20 years ago, the United Nations introduced Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 every year, but since 2012, November, traditionally associated with remembering those members of our armed forces killed in battle, has been designated Islamophobia Awareness Month. As eminent Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips notes, this is despite the fact that:

“every week, demonstrators have been on the streets of Western cities chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, sometimes setting fire to the Israeli flag, and tearing down pictures of the Israeli hostages. Are these media outlets — who have ignored, minimised, sanitised and excused this genocidal frenzy against Jews — suggesting that Jews should therefore hunt down anti-Zionists to beat up as a result? Or are the media once again demonstrating a grotesque and all-too revealing double standard?”

It has been disclosed that pro-Palestinian zealots have been training activists to attack targets across Britain. Following the Amsterdam attacks, the Dutch National Security Council revealed intelligence indicating that pro-Palestinian groups were trying to harm Jews and Israelis across Europe under the guise of protests and demonstrations.

As to our own nation protecting Jewish people from anti-Semitism, enormous (and “largely peaceful”) protests are allowed to take place on a regular basis demanding that Palestine be “free from the river to the sea” – a clear reference to genocide.

The Palestine lobby would argue that Israel is recklessly killing innocent Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. However, while all innocent deaths are to be lamented, they conveniently omit any mention of Hamas deliberately basing their military operations among civilians, with the result that the mainstream media concentrates on these hapless victims without pointing to the real aggressors, who might more accurately be described as terrorists holding their own people hostage. And amidst all this undeniably tragic carnage and destruction, the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas over a year ago, whose plight prompted Israel’s military response, are conveniently forgotten. As is so often the case, more attention is paid to Israel’s response to attacks than to the attacks themselves – it’s not the action, but the reaction, that makes the news.

Despite the determination that “never again” would attempts be made to exterminate the Jewish people, we may indeed see another Holocaust in political, military and terrorist attacks aiming to destroy the State of Israel, itself created as a refuge from persecution for the Jews. And inevitably, the UK may well become embroiled in that struggle, since Britain was instrumental in the founding of the modern state of Israel: the Balfour Declaration, written by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and published on November 9, 1917, pledged British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The British may have forgotten this historical detail, but the pro-Palestinian campaign has not, as evidenced by the attempt to kidnap what were thought to be two busts of the first Israeli President, Chaim Weizmann, to mark the 107th anniversary of the signing of the Balfour Declaration.

Whatever one’s religious beliefs – whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or even atheist – it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something special about this group of people, who persist in existing despite every fresh attempt to destroy them. Where other ancient peoples have died out, the Jews continue, bloody but unbowed, overcoming all such attempts at extermination – even thriving where allowed to do so.

Perhaps it is this stubborn refusal to be killed off which explains the ever-more zealous attempts to destroy them, since the failure of such efforts seems only to point even more plainly to their supernatural origins. The Chosen People appear to have been marked out for destruction by those who resent the possibility that they may indeed have been chosen by God as His emissaries to the world.

Ultimately, the Holocaust failed to exterminate the Jews, but while the world may forget the Holocaust and what led to it, the Jewish people can never forget – and neither will Hamas.

Was this just football hooliganism or part of an anti-Semitic campaign?  

AUTHOR

Ann Farmer

Ann Farmer writes from the United Kingdom.

RELATED ARTICE: A few items on the Kristallnacht that is still taking place across the West

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.