Amsterdam and the ‘moral ghettoization of the Jews’

Brendan O’Neill takes note of the way in which the Jews in Amsterdam are being blamed for behavior — by a tiny handful of them — that supposedly justified the attacks on them. More of his outrage can be found here: “The moral ghettoisation of the Jews,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, November 11, 2024:

…There seems to be a new rule on the woke left: if some members of an ethnic group behave badly, we should not be surprised if other members of that ethnic group get attacked. Will this rule be applied consistently? Will they say, next time a few fuming Islamists gather in a city centre in Britain to burn the UK flag or the Israeli flag and to chant about the return of Muhammad’s army to finish off the Jews, that we shouldn’t be surprised if EDL-style racists then go out and attack random Muslims? That these people ‘f**ked around and found out’? Of course they won’t. I hope they won’t. So why are they ceaselessly mentioning that some Maccabi fans are idiots, as if this explains why some Jews got beaten to a pulp in a self-described jodenjacht?

Worse than the contextualisation is the moral inversion. In accusing all of the visiting Israelis of ‘rampaging’ through Amsterdam, of being ‘racist’, even of bringing ‘the spirit of Israeli fascism’ to Europe, the left turns truth and reason utterly on their heads. The Israelis are accused of doing what was in truth done to them. It was the self-confessed ‘Jew-hunting’ mob who rampaged. It was they who stamped racism on to the streets of Amsterdam. It was they who embodied the ‘spirit of fascism’ with their vile demands to know who’s an Israeli, who’s a Jew, so that they might know who to batter. To accuse the victims of something not unlike fascism of being the real fascists is almost unimaginably cruel, even by the standards of the post-truth woke left.

We cannot overlook the magnitude of what happened last week. A literal Jew hunt unfolded in one of the cities that trembled under Jews hunts in the last century, and some in our intellectual classes essentially said: ‘Well…’ People who write for newspapers, who are feted by the BBC, who move and shake in the middle-class universe of performed virtue scratched their chins, offered up explanations, saw a young Jew with the gash of an anti-Semite’s boot and wondered: ‘Is this a thug who deserved it?’ This was more than hypocrisy. It was more than the identitarian downplaying of anti-Jewish racism that has become tragically commonplace on the modern left. It was confirmation of a new moral ghettoisation of the Jews, of their unforgiving exclusion from the entire realm of progressive sympathy.

In essence, a new edict of expulsion has been issued against the Jews not from the physical kingdom of the nation state this time, but from the moral kingdom of elite empathy. They are to enjoy none of the rights or privileges of woke concern. No other social group can be victim-blamed, but they can be. No other ethnic group’s ‘truth’ about the hatred they experience may be discounted, but theirs can. No other group is forbidden from making sense of their current persecution through their past persecution, but they are. Witness the rage against those who have used the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the hunt in Amsterdam. The words ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ have already been stolen from the Jews, and are now used against them by a woke elite convinced Israel’s war on Hamas is a new species of Nazism. Now, ‘pogrom’ is taken from them, too. Not only is their persecution denied – the very linguistic tools through which they might describe their persecution are denied to them as well.

To my mind, the chattering classes’ ‘contextualisation’ of the violence in Amsterdam could prove more dangerous, in the long run, than the violence itself. The Jews’ black eyes and torn skin will heal. Their attackers – we hope – will be brought to justice. But the grim ‘intellectual’ singling out of the Jews as a lesser identity, to whom few of the new moral codes apply, will linger. The pogrom is over – the spirit of the pogrom lives.

Scarcely was the November 7 “Jew Hunt” over, its victims still recovering from the punches and kicks in the head and stabbings they received from maddened Muslims, than the Jews themselves were blamed. They — all of those terrible Jews — “destroyed Palestinian flags.” In truth, exactly three Israelis pulled down from a residential building a Palestinian flag, and, according to an account in the Guardian, burned it while shouting “F**k Palestine.” Later, a second Palestinian flag was pulled down from a different building.  Another charge made against the Jews in Amsterdam, and invoked to justify attacks on them, is that the Israeli supporters of the Maccabi soccer club did not remain silent in the stadium when a moment of silence was called for, to honor the victims of the floods in Valencia. But there is a simple explanation for that behavior. Those Israeli supporters simply did not understand the call for a moment in silence — it was made in Dutch.

But what of it? Would a handful of Israelis pulling down a Palestinian flag, or two flags, and even burning one of them as they said “F**k Palestine” justify kicks in the head and the stabbing of random Jews? Would Jews singing anti-Arab songs merit being hit by a car, or thrown into a canal, or set upon by a gang of twenty Muslim men? And would a failure of Israeli fans to observe a moment of silence before the soccer match, even if it were meant deliberately instead of the result of not understanding Dutch, be sufficient justification for such violence?