Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans: lies, smears - and the truth

Tel Aviv's police ban the city's derby after Maccabi hooligans rioted. You cannot make this sh*t up.

You cannot make this up. Last week, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group from attending an away match against Aston Villa after receiving a risk assessment from West Midlands Police.

The reasoning was set out in a statement:

This decision is based on current intelligence and previous incidents, including violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.

Based on our professional judgement, we believe this measure will help mitigate risks to public safety.

This provoked hysteria, with politicians and media outlets denouncing the decision as giving into - or being motivated by - antisemitism, and smearing anyone who backed the decision as racists. As the polling showed, that meant smearing the British public as antisemites. We’ll come on to all that, because it is very revealing about the chasm separating the media and political elite on the one hand, and the public on the other, over Israel and Palestine.

Then, yesterday, Tel Aviv’s police banned the Tel Aviv derby between Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv. Why? For what the police called “public disorder and violent riots”.

Presumably now Britain’s political and media elite think Tel Aviv’s police are antisemites now.

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed throwing flares at Israeli police.

They were also filmed doing racist chants.

According to the anti-Zionist Israeli activist who goes under the catchy handle “ireallyhateyou”, they’re chanting: “Tuama is a terrorist, Tuama is a terrorist”

He explains: “Salim Tuama was a iconic Arab football player who used to play for Hapoel Tel Aviv. Here are Maccabi Tel Aviv fans today, making racist chants against Tuama.”

He also shared footage which he says shows Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras roaming “the streets of Jaffa earlier today, looking for victims to beat up, before the game that was eventually cancelled against Hapoel Tel Aviv.”

The new spin is that it was Hapoel fans rioting and not Maccabi. So for total clarity, this is from Israel National News:

The Israel Police announced Sunday evening that the highly anticipated derby match between Hapoel Tel Aviv and Maccabi Tel Aviv at Bloomfield Stadium was canceled due to widespread use of pyrotechnics and riots in the stands.

Fans from both teams hurled flares onto the pitch, producing dense smoke that engulfed the field. Even before the match officially began, police reported that rioters launched smoke grenades and fireworks onto the playing area. In total, 48 smoke grenades and 52 pyrotechnic devices were thrown.

We already know more than enough about Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, which I’ll come on to. Let’s just consider the hysteria and bile over the decision to ban them coming to Birmingham.

Our prime minister, unfortunately, Keir Starmer tweeted about the ban:

This is the wrong decision.

We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets.

The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.

The Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, tweeted:

A serious mistake by WM Police. You don’t tackle antisemitism by banning its victims. This decision must be reversed.

And Nigel Farage declared:

That elected members of Parliament are supporting the ban on Jewish football supporters coming to Birmingham shows just how much trouble our country is in. The police are giving in to extremist intimidation, which will only make them go further.

This has become a perennial deceitful theme of this whole saga. Politicians and media outlets keep claiming there is a ban on Jewish football supporters, specifically conflating racist Maccabi football hooligans and Jewish people. It is this which should be regarded as antisemitic. Clearly, Jewish supporters of football teams are free to attend matches.

To be clear, I support the same boycott of all Israeli football teams as existed against South Africa’s football teams under apartheid. Such a boycott is no more antisemitic than the ban on South Africa’s football teams was anti-white or anti-Boer. The pretence here - the despicable lie - is that this is about hating or targeting Jewish people. Our position is very clear - Israel is an apartheid state, like South Africa before it, which is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Russia has been barred by Uefa and Fifa after the country invaded Ukraine. That decision wasn’t driven by anti-Russian hatred or Russophobia, and the Russian regime does actually use the term Russophobia to deflect accountability, in just the same way that false claims of antisemitism are deployed to protect Israel from accountability.

But even if you refuse to follow the boycott of Israel as a genocidal apartheid state, the facts are that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have a long history of racist thuggery.

Last year, in Athens, they aggressively beat up a man and left him unconscious when they spotted him carrying a Palestinian flag.

And then there was Amsterdam last year, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played against Ajax. That descended into violence. I covered that extensively at the time.

And on this occasion, Sky News posted a video package laying out the facts - which was then deleted. It’s worth watching what they produced before erasing it with no meaningful explanation.

That deleted package makes clear that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed tearing down Palestinian flags from private Dutch homes, singing racist anti-Arab songs - like ‘Let the IDF win to fuck the Arabs’ - and then disrupting the one minute silence for Valencia food victims with chants, whistles and fireworks. That was because of Spain’s position on Israel’s genocide.

The package also states that footage shows Maccabi fans attacking locals.

It gets worse. Footage taken by Dutch journalist and photographer Annet De Graaf of Maccabi fans beating up locals was broadcast by multiple media outlets, who claimed it was actually Maccabi fans being beaten up.

In a surreal article at the time, an Israeli newspaper which claimed that there was a pogrom against Maccabi fans included these details:

This is what an Israeli woman who arrived in Amsterdam two days before the soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax clubs wrote about the atmosphere in the city: “There were huge gatherings and shouts of ‘Death to Arabs’ in Amsterdam’s main squares, alongside violence against people holding Palestinian flags.”

“We didn’t know that the organized violent reaction from the other side was coming. Leaving the game, 10 Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were roaming the train looking for a Palestinian to ‘beat up’ (their words). They didn’t find one. They arrived at the central station. At first, everything was fine,” she recalled.

Furthermore, the Dutch police said that the disturbances began with Maccabi supporters taking Palestinian flags and setting them on fire, while shouting chants about there being no schools in Gaza because we’ve already killed all the children

And there were multiple other incidents - but the Dutch Public Prosecution Service couldn’t pursue them because the footage of them was, according to the Dutch public broadcaster, “deleted earlier than usual”.

They report two incidents as follows:

Two women reported incidents involving Israeli supporters. One of the women shouted “Free Palestine” at Maccabi supporters on the platform of the Central Station metro station, who were on their way to the stadium for the match against Ajax. They then allegedly assaulted her.

The woman claims she was punched, spat on, and had her hair pulled. According to her report, this happened right in front of the police, but the officers present were unable to stop the supporters.

Another woman reported being threatened. A few days before the match, she was wearing a veil and riding the subway with another woman when Maccabi supporters allegedly shouted, “ We will kill all of you!”

Furthermore:

One incident that may well have a sequel is the vandalism of a taxi on Rokin. A video taken by the driver shows a man dressed in black hitting the car’s windshield. According to the driver, he used a chain lock; the Public Prosecution Service believes it was a belt.

This suspect was recently identified by Israel. They are now waiting for a name. The Public Prosecution Service has submitted a supplementary legal assistance request for this purpose.

Another taxi driver’s complaint was dismissed. His car was pelted with what appears to be a glass bottle. Although dashcam footage shows something being thrown at the car, the quality is too poor to identify anyone, according to the Public Prosecution Service.

That’s not to say there wasn’t antisemitism too - that there were racists who conflate Jewish people with Israel and its crimes, which is always heinous. Those people were rightly prosecuted.

That doesn’t mean that Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fan base isn’t infested with genocidal racism - as we can see.

Yet these are the racist thugs who the British government and British media want to come to an ethnically mixed community in Birmingham, which has a large Muslim community.

But the BBC reported on the ban as though it was a national emergency. They carried a live blog and even put out a push notification. We were told breathlessly that talks were happening “at pace, across government” to resolve the ban.

More outrage, more scandal over this ban than there has been over Israel wiping Gaza from the face of the earth and exterminating countless people.

Yet in an interview with Cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson on Sky News today, the interviewer did not mention that the Tel Aviv derby match had been cancelled after riots involving Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters. Both he and the Cabinet minister framed it as anti-Jewish. What an absolute farce.

And yet despite British politicians and media outlets screaming about the ban as though it’s a national scandal and a national crisis, a poll by YouGov found that 42% of the British public support the ban, with just 28% opposing it.

This sums up everything to do with Israel and Palestine. There is a political and media elite which has supported and justified Israel’s genocidal mayhem, and now they’re lining up behind racist Israeli football hooligans. But British public opinion takes a completely different view. Those of us smeared as dangerous hateful extremists represent the mainstream of where British voters are at on this issue.

If you don’t think this coverage could get worse, though, look at the state of this. It was originally presented by Sky News as an interview with a Jewish Aston Villa fan discussing the online abuse and death threats he’s received. He is captioned as the Honorary President of Aston Villa Jewish Villains supporter club.

On the Sky News website, he was also described as follows: ‘Jewish Aston Villa fan says he has received death threat’.

He isn’t Jewish.

As for “Aston Villa Jewish Villains”, there is no evidence it exists on google at all. So who is this man?

He’s a pro-Israel propagandist who works for the Henry Jackson Society, a hardcore pro-Israel organisation. He’s been a guest of the Israel Defence Force at least three times.

It gets so much worse. Let me show you what we are dealing with here.

A year ago, the New York Times published a detailed piece based on the testimonies of dozens of US-based medics who had served in Gaza, as well as 160 photographs and videos, which detailed the shooting of Palestinian children in the head and the chest by Israeli snipers.

Andrew Fox posted one of the X-rays of a Palestinian child with a bullet in their head, and joked ‘Posthumous X-ray of Sinwar just released’. That was a reference to assassinated Hamas leader Yayha Sinwar.

Andrew Fox defended his vile post by claiming it was faked, that it was a “weird Microsoft Paint bullet x-ray”. He was claiming that this detailed piece of journalism was a hoax.

Because of truthers like Andrew Fox, the New York Times was forced to issue a public clarification that they had:

gathered first-hand testimonies from 65 U.S.-based health professionals who worked in Gaza over the past year, who shared more than 160 photographs and videos with Times Opinion to corroborate their detailed accounts of treating preteen children who were shot in the head or chest. Following publication, some readers questioned the accuracy of the accounts and the authenticity of three CT images shown. Those criticisms are unfounded.

They added:

Times Opinion rigorously edited this guest essay before publication, verifying the accounts and imagery through supporting photographic and video evidence and file metadata. We also vetted the doctors and nurses’ credentials, including that they had traveled to and worked in Gaza as claimed. When questions arose about the veracity of images included in the essay, we did additional work to review our previous findings. We presented the scans to a new round of multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility. In addition, we again examined the images’ digital metadata and compared the images to video footage of their corresponding CT scans as well as photographs of the wounds of the three young children.

This is depraved atrocity denial from Fox. The New York Times - whose coverage has in fact been afflicted by pro-Israel bias - would have to be guilty of one of the biggest journalistic scandals of our age if these claims were true.

In another example, after footage circulated of a grieving Palestinian father carrying his baby who had been slaughtered by Israeli violence, when someone challenged Andrew Fox abotu why tens of thousands of Israelis were cheering on the death of civilians Fox claimed Israel was accidentally killing, he replied “Because that’s obviously a doll and mockery is what a shit attempt at faking an atrocity deserves.”

In a sane world, this disgusting man would be a pariah, someone regarded as a sick crank. Just imagine for one moment someone posted like this about Israeli children killed by Hamas.

Instead Sky News have falsely presented him as an ordinary Jewish Aston Villa fan who has been subjected to hateful abuse, with no explanation about his actual job, his affiliation or indeed his nauseating track record. This alone should lead you to ask searching questions about the sort of media we have in this country.

And yet this whole incident has been turned predictably into an opportunity to whip up hatred against Muslims. The local MP Ayoub Khan has been subjected to an avalanche of Islamophobic bile.

Robert Jenrick, the Tory Shadow Cabinet minister who is pitching to become the party’s leader, claims that the saga vindicates his claims about the failures of integration in Birmingham.

Journalist David Patrikarakos writes:

Keir Starmer must understand that this is no longer about football.

The question facing him is simple: who runs Britain’s second city — the government, or sectarian Islamists?

His answer will shape our future.

So we end up with the British government and media overriding the police’s operational independence, helping to stoke community tensions, and not just ignoring British public opinion but de facto smearing it.

Why? To protect a bunch of football hooligans from a genocidal apartheid state, and their right to rampage through the streets of an ethnically mixed Birmingham community waving Israeli flags, chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ and violently targeting locals - while their country continues to murder Palestinians, having wiped Gaza from the face of the earth.

If you feel like you’re going mad - I can promise you: you’re not going mad. It’s the people running the country who are insane.

But as I keep saying - you can only turn the world on its head for so long.