Melanie Phillips: Britain's shocking Jew-free zone

The scenes in Birmingham last night demonstrated Muslim control of British streets

It was never about Israeli football fans. It was always about Muslim Jew-hatred. And last night in Birmingham, we saw that in Britain it’s Islam that now controls the streets.

A Muslim mob presenting a serious threat of violence and disorder was allowed to stage a thuggish display of hatred of Jews, incitement against them and intimidation.

The mob swarmed the area around the Villa Park stadium where Aston Villa was playing Maccabi Tel Aviv. The Maccabi away-fans had been banned, reportedly for their own safety. The Muslims who demanded they be banned claimed instead that they were violent hooligans.

But as last night’s disgraceful scenes conclusively demonstrated, it had nothing to do with the fans. The Israeli fans weren’t there. But the mob still turned out to threaten violence — against the Maccabi team itself and against Jews.

Jack Angelides, CEO of Maccabi Tel Aviv, told BBC Radio’s Today programme:

This is the only country where we were told it is unsafe for us to stay in the city where we were playing a match. This is the only country where we were told that to be safe we should be at the stadium five hours beforehand, with our players having to lie down on the ground in club facilities for their rest.

Before the match, masked thugs set about making the area around the stadium a Jew-free zone. They fixed to lamp-posts Palestine Liberation Organisation flags (the ones said to be of “Palestine”) and laminated placards reading “Zionists not welcome” and “If you see a Zionist call the anti-terror hotline”.

During the match, the Muslim mob outside the stadium screamed “Death death to the IDF,” “Intifada” and “Resistance is justified”.

“F**k every Jew here,” ranted a hooded thug. Sheikh Asrar Rashid, the genocidal rabble-rouser who previously 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” — including Canada and Australia — stood outside the stadium and told the cheering mob:

We should not have mercy on the Maccabi fans who are IDF killers, we should not show mercy.

To a freelance reporter who asked him why he was there, he said :

Are you Zionist? Are you anti-Israel? Your channel, is it anti-Israel? Are you anti-Benjamin?” before stomping off with his henchmen.

Some brave Jews and Israel embassy staff, determined not to let the Jew-haters win, went to the match — and were penned by the police inside a caged basketball court for their own protection.

There wasn’t a shred of doubt exactly who was being protected against whom. Yet the West Midlands police have now claimed that they banned the Maccabi fans not for their own safety but mainly due to “significant levels of hooliganism” in the fan base that was jeopardising safety around the match. Chief Superintendent Tom Joyce told Sky News:

I’m aware there’s a lot of commentary around the threat to the [Maccabi] fans being the reason for the decision. To be clear, that was not the primary driver. That was a consideration. We have intelligence and information that says that there is a section of Maccabi fans, not all Maccabi fans, but a section who engage in quite significant levels of hooliganism. We’ve had examples where a section of Maccabi fans were targeting people not involved in football matches, and certainly we had an incident in Amsterdam last year which has informed some of our decision-making.

We are absolutely not saying that in Amsterdam that the only fans causing trouble were the Maccabi fans. But what we were very clearly told is that they played a part in causing trouble particularly a day before the [Amsterdam] match. That absolutely resulted in following day there being attacks on Maccabi fans.

That is a slanderous distortion. The Amsterdam match last year between Maccabi and the Dutch team Ajax produced a pogrom against the Maccabi fans by a mostly Muslim mob in what the Dutch authorities said was a “premeditated antisemitic attack”. While there was some hooliganism by Maccabi fans, the vast majority of those arrested were their attackers. In what those thugs themselves chillingly described as a “Jew-hunt,” the Maccabi fans were chased through the streets, beaten and driven into the canals, with five taken to hospital as a result.

What Joyce did not say was that the match took place in the middle of a week of anti-Israel demonstrations in Amsterdam, leading to an order against those demonstrators to keep one kilometre away from the football stadium because of the threat of violence that they posed.

The day before the match, according to the Dutch paper De Telegraaf, social media posts revealed the co-ordination of planned attacks on the Jews. That day, attacks started on the Israeli fans. Some of them responded by singing insulting songs and chants about Arabs, and in response to the abuse they were receiving they started pulling down the PLO flags.

The Dutch Prime Minister, Dick Schoof, called the attacks on the Maccabi fans a source of “shame,” as did Dutch King Willem-Alexander, who referenced the abandonment and near annihilation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

The city’s municipality, embarrassed by the fact that it had allowed a pogrom against Jews to take place, subsequently produced a revisionist account of what had happened in which they tried to turn the Maccabi fans from victims into perpetrators. But Dutch police officers told De Telegraaf a different story:

“I was there all day and all evening,” said a riot police officer. “I don’t recognize the image that Maccabi fans provoked the violence. On the contrary, when pro-Israel stickers were placed on the roadblock and we explained that it was our national war memorial, everything was removed properly.”

A colleague added: “If the entire city is filled with thousands of Israeli supporters and a Palestinian flag is deliberately hung from a window on the Rokin, who is provoking whom?” Another said: “I absolutely don’t see why it’s being claimed that Maccabi fans were out to stage confrontations, the opposite is true”.

The West Midlands police — possibly trying to guard their backs against a Commons select committee which is asking it tough questions about the ban on the Maccabi fans — are now parroting the very same inversion of reality being peddled by Muslims as their pretext for attempting the ethnic cleansing of Jews from what they consider to be their territory.

Others may have assumed that territory was governed by English law. This no longer seems to be the case.

In any event, what the police are now saying about the ban is irrelevant. The scenes last night in Birmingham demonstrated unequivocally that it was Muslims who posed the threat and it was the Jews who had to be guarded from them. This had nothing to do with the Maccabi fans. It was about a mob of Islamic thugs declaring the area around Villa Park to be judenrein — horrifyingly, with the tacit connivance of the police.

What those scenes showed was that Islam is now dominant in Britain; Muslim antisemitism is off the scale; and that four days before Remembrance Day the British state, which once fought and defeated a mortal threat to western civilisation, is now grovelling to its Islamic clone.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE