It also demonstrates something to which I have been drawing attention for years — and was indeed the first person to do so — that the British state is losing a battle against Islamic domination that it has been refusing even to acknowledge it is facing and that it must fight.
Maccabi fans are being excluded from the match in response to a petition by the independent MPs Ayoub Khan and the disgraced former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The Birmingham police said they had reviewed what had happened last year in Amsterdam, when violent clashes between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli fans erupted around the UEFA Europa League football match between Maccabi and the Dutch club Ajax. The police say they assessed the forthcoming Birmingham match as a high risk based on “current intelligence and previous incidents”, including the violence and hate crime offences that occurred in Amsterdam over the fixture.
Ayoub Khan said in response :
Maccabi fans are being excluded from the match in response to a petition by the independent MPs Ayoub Khan and the disgraced former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The Birmingham police said they had reviewed what had happened last year in Amsterdam, when violent clashes between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli fans erupted around the UEFA Europa League football match between Maccabi and the Dutch club Ajax. The police say they assessed the forthcoming Birmingham match as a high risk based on “current intelligence and previous incidents”, including the violence and hate crime offences that occurred in Amsterdam over the fixture.
Ayoub Khan said in response :
I welcome the news that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will not be permitted to watch the match at Aston Villa! Well done to all those that signed our petition!
The ban and Khan’s remarks have caused widespread outrage and anger. The police have been castigated for refusing to ensure the safety of Maccabi’s Israeli Jewish fans. It is an act of discrimination that makes Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, into a no-go zone for Jews during that match.
One notable but overlooked aspect of this needs to be dwelt upon. Many news outlets have reported the police saying that Maccabi fans should stay away from the match “for their own safety”. This has added to the outrage that, rather than Jews being protected against attack in Birmingham, they are clearly being penalised even though they are the potential victims.
But Ayoub Khan and other Muslims are saying instead that Birmingham needs to be protected from the violent Maccabi fans. Khan has described them as “hooligans”. He said:
Let’s not conflate the issue. This is not about the Jewish community, this is about hooligans. We’ve seen what’s taken place in Amsterdam.
This really is an intolerable statement. In Amsterdam, the Maccabi fans were subjected to an onslaught by a pro-Palestinian mob that the Dutch authorities said was a pre-planned antisemitic outrage.
Referring to that disorder, the Birmingham police have talked about a “risk to public safety” for the Maccabi-Aston Villa match rather than the risk specifically to Jewish fans. There is no reference to excluding the Israeli club’s fans “for their own safety” in the press notice published by the West Midlands Police.
Regardless of this possible police ambiguity, what actually happened in Amsterdam showed that any risk in Birmingham is not by the Maccabi fans but to them. The Amsterdam disorder didn’t result from violence by the Maccabi fans but violence against them.
The Maccabi fans started singing anti-Arab songs and pulling down Palestinian flags only in response to the abuse they were getting from pro-Palestinian thugs. And this attack on the Maccabi fans had been planned in advance as an attack on Jews. A pro-Palestinian mob organised through WhatsApp what they themselves called a “Jew-hunt” across Amsterdam. As the Telegraph reported:
One piece of footage posted online shows a man who had jumped into a canal in a desperate attempt to escape his attackers. As he thrashes around in the water, a pursuer shouts: “Say Free Palestine, and we’ll let you go,” and spits out a vile Dutch phrase that means “Cancer Jew”.
Another video shows a man who appears unconscious on the street being repeatedly kicked as he lies in the fetal position. A third film shows a young Israeli football fan cornered in a narrow alley where he ends up crouching on the floor. He begs for mercy but his assailants knock him out with a punch to the head…
Now it has emerged that the attacks on the Jewish football fans were planned in advance and co-ordinated using WhatsApp and Telegram…Violence flared when a group gathered at the National Monument in Dam Square — the country’s cenotaph— started chanting pro-Palestinian slogans at passing Israeli fans.
One Maccabi Tel Aviv fan dressed in a blue and yellow dressing gown gestured at the protestors and shouted “f--- you” and others joined in by shouting “f--- you Palestine”.
Maccabi fans descending into the Amsterdam metro sang: “Let the IDF win, we will f---* the Arabs” and “f--- you Palestine.”
Yet Khan turned this “Jew-hunt” into Maccabi “hooligans” who he called “violent fans,” thus reversing offender and victim. This kind of inversion, of course, characterises the Palestine cause itself, which preposterously accuses Israel of the genocidal intentions that the Palestinian Arabs have towards the Jewish state simply because Israel defends itself against such an onslaught. As with the Palestinian Arabs and Israel, so with these British Muslims and the Maccabi fans.
The British state in unable on every level to deal with this. Indeed, it doesn’t even understand what’s happening to it.
Keir Starmer said he was appalled by the ban. His government is reportedly “doing everything in our power” to reverse it and is “exploring what additional resources could be required” to guarantee public safety.
Good luck with that one. Given the incitement against the Maccabi fans by Khan and his ilk, this has now become an even bigger headache than it originally was. But the real problem is vastly more huge and significant than one football match in Birmingham.
Sectarian Islamic politics and the demonisation of Israel and Jews are now out of control in Britain and have breached the walls of Parliament itself. Although one Muslim MP, the Conservative Saqib Bhatti, has spoken out bravely against the Maccabi ban, others along with Ayoub Khan are making vicious statements. Iqbal Mohammed MP has said:
Thank you all who put the safety of Aston Villa fans, Birmingham residents snd the British public above the zionist and political pressure to let Israeli hooligans and terrorists run riot in our country.
Zarah Sultana MP, the former Labour MP who now sits as an independent and has a long history of eye-watering hatred of Israel, also posted on X:
Next UEFA must ban all Israeli teams. We cannot have normalisation with genocide and apartheid.
The presence of such virulent Islamic extremists in parliament reflects in turn the antisemitism, threats and incitement being promoted by Islamic clerics to which successive governments have resolutely turned a blind eye.
A Nottingham imam Asrar Rashid, who has said that if the Maccabi fans come to the Birmingham match “we will not show them mercy,” has also called for Muslims in the UK and “other white nations” to take up arms to carry out pre-emptive strikes against “white people and white nations” who have been committing “genocide” against Muslims — in Canada and Australia, don’t you know, as well as in Gaza.
In September, Talk TV ran a clip of a preacher at Redbridge Islamic Centre in Iford, Essex, declaring:
Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel; oh Allah curse the infidels and the polytheists; oh Allah break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and their homes.
Yet the police said that this “did not meet the threshold of a crime”. Well of course.
There have been many other similar examples of hatred and incitement against Jews, Christians and the west being spewed out in mosques and Islamic centres. A disproportionate number of Muslims are involved in attacks on Jews. Polling of British Muslims indicates substantially higher levels of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli attitudes than in the general British population.
All this not only poses an acute danger to British Jews — two of whom were killed in the Yom Kippur Islamic terror attack on a Manchester synagogue early this month — but is an attempt to subvert Britain itself and force it to bend to Islamic demands and Islamic precepts.
It is jihad in the heart of the British state. Yet nothing is being done done to stop this.
Instead, we have witnessed the jihad against British Jews being put on steroids by the weekly hate-marches against Israel that have been permitted on British streets ever since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab atrocities in southern Israel on October 7 2023.
The Birmingham ban is part of this jihad. The demand for it was not about protection from allegedly violent football fans. It was about turning Israel into a national and international pariah.
As the Khan/Corbyn petition made clear, the ban was necessary because of “the ongoing genocide in Gaza”, and so “Israeli teams cannot be separated from the wider political context”.
Ayoub Khan MP has said:
Maccabi Tel Aviv football club should not even be playing within this international competition.
Now All Israeli teams and athletes must be banned from all international sport.
The Times reports that Birmingham Labour councillor Waseem Jaffar, who claims to advise Aston Villa on safety, was previously reprimanded by the party after describing Palestinian Arab terrorism as “a reaction to Israeli oppression and violence”. He wrote last month that he would not attend the match because “the starvation torture and killing of the people of Palestine carried out by the Israeli government and military have crossed many red lines for a very long time”.
As is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, there is no starvation, torture or “genocide” in Gaza. These are the defamatory and ludicrous claims made against Israel for defending itself against genocide. These claims are straight out of the Soviet-Nazi playbook being employed by these people to project their own side’s appalling behaviour onto their Jewish victims in order to wipe them out — the tactic they have deployed over the Amsterdam pogrom against the Maccabi fans, and the tactic deployed for the last two years by the Islamonazi-leftist alliance.
The October 7 atrocities were treated by the Islamists and their left-wing allies as the starting gun for an attack on Jews and the west in which they gloatingly proclaimed that victory was now within their grasp. Ever since, the response by Britain’s authorities has put further wind in their sails. Faced with chanting, banners and placards on these demonstrations constituting incitement to hatred, incitement to violence against Jews and calls to destroy Israel — all crimes under English law —the British authorities looked the other way.
Far worse, they have persistently targeted Jews and other Israel supporters for threatening the peace. Instead of the people who were making these violent threats or inciting hatred against Jews being arrested, Gideon Falter, who runs the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was threatened with arrest by a police officer for being “quite openly Jewish” when he attempted to to cross the road where a hate-demo was taking place on his way back from synagogue.
Last year, after the former Labour MP Lord Austin posted on X that Hamas was a “Islamist death cult”, he found himself investigated by the police for an Orwellian “no-crime hate incident”.
Yesterday’s Telegraph reported that a Jewish lawyer wearing a Star of David was arrested last August at a pro-Palestine demonstration outside London’s Israel embassy after police alleged that the symbol had “antagonised” pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The man was a member of the Society of Independent Legal Observers, a group set up earlier this year to monitor the growing wave of pro-Palestinian protests.
The police say the man was in fact arrested for “repeatedly breaching” an order to keep opposing protest groups apart. Nevertheless, his Star of David necklace was identified as a provocation by officers behind the arrest as well as by the detective constable drafted in from the robbery squad (because of pressure on police numbers) to question the man. Justifying his questioning about the necklace, the detective said:
We are not talking about [the accused] walking about with a Star of David chain on his neck in an open forum in public generally…We are talking about a hostile environment where pro-Palestinian protesters are obviously objecting to what is happening in Israel and Gaza…
It’s not to discriminate. I want to have that on record. I am not asking that question to cause you any offence. However… the officers have noted in their statements that they believed because the Star of David was out and present to people… they felt that was antagonising the situation further.
Once again, the police haven’t understood what exactly they’re up against. Regarding their task as to keep the peace between opposing groups rather than prevent intimidation and worse against Jews, they believe that the very sight of “openly Jewish” people by Islamists and their allies on the anti-Israel hate-fests will apparently provoke disorder. They therefore single out the Jews as the problem — just for being Jews.
Appalling — but the police are merely the enforcement arm of a country that’s committing cultural suicide.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
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