{"id":19642,"date":"2024-11-18T11:50:15","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T09:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=19642"},"modified":"2024-12-19T12:19:13","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T10:19:13","slug":"jew-hunting-riots-in-amsterdam-expose-dangers-of-bystander-inaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/jew-hunting-riots-in-amsterdam-expose-dangers-of-bystander-inaction\/","title":{"rendered":"Jew-Hunting Riots in Amsterdam Expose Dangers of Bystander Inaction"},"content":{"rendered":"By staying silent, these bystanders betray themselves, their communities, and democratic ideals\u2014abandoning Amsterdam\u2019s Israeli and Jewish guests.<\/strong>.
\nPhoto Credit: DmitriiElj \/ Shutterstock<\/p>\n

\u2018Yesterday there was an outburst of antisemitism the likes of which we hoped not to see again in Amsterdam,\u201d Mayor Femke Halsema declared after the Muslims\u2019 Jew-hunting soccer riots. \u201cAmong our Jewish Amsterdammers, there is fear, dismay, anger, disbelief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be fooled by the indignant first line. The mayor\u2019s dithering invites more violence. As long as non-Jews treat Jew-hatred as a Jewish problem \u2013 distressing only \u201cour Jewish Amsterdammers\u201d \u2013 it will keep metastasizing. When fighting Jew-hatred \u2013 or any bigotry \u2013 bystanders, silently standing by, seeing hatred as the victim\u2019s headache, are anything but innocent.<\/p>\n

The rot runs deep. Last month, Nieuw Isra\u00eblisch Weekblad (New Israelite Weekly \u2013 NIW) reported that some Dutch police officers resisted protecting Jewish institutions \u2013 including the National Holocaust Museum. Their supervisors indulged them. The police spokesperson told De Telegraaf: \u201cWe take moral objections into account when creating schedules\u201d \u2013 unless it\u2019s an \u201curgent task.\u201d<\/p>\n

When did police protection become selective, contingent on victims being popular? And what\u2019s more \u201curgent\u201d than protecting innocents from hateful hooligans systematically Jew-hunting?<\/p>\n

By contrast, another Dutch politician denounced the \u201cpogrom in the streets of #Amsterdam\u201d on X: \u201cWe have become the Gaza of Europe,\u201d Geert Wilders wrote. \u201cMuslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews. I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again.\u201d<\/p>\n

By staying silent, these bystanders betray themselves, their communities, and democratic ideals\u2014abandoning Amsterdam\u2019s Israeli and Jewish guests.\u2018Yesterday there was an outburst of antisemitism the likes of which we hoped not to see again in Amsterdam,\u201d Mayor Femke Halsema declared after the Muslims\u2019 Jew-hunting soccer riots. \u201cAmong our Jewish Amsterdammers, there is fear, dismay, anger, disbelief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be fooled by the indignant first line. The mayor\u2019s dithering invites more violence. As long as non-Jews treat Jew-hatred as a Jewish problem \u2013 distressing only \u201cour Jewish Amsterdammers\u201d \u2013 it will keep metastasizing. When fighting Jew-hatred \u2013 or any bigotry \u2013 bystanders, silently standing by, seeing hatred as the victim\u2019s headache, are anything but innocent.<\/p>\n

The rot runs deep. Last month, Nieuw Isra\u00eblisch Weekblad (New Israelite Weekly \u2013 NIW) reported that some Dutch police officers resisted protecting Jewish institutions \u2013 including the National Holocaust Museum. Their supervisors indulged them. The police spokesperson told De Telegraaf: \u201cWe take moral objections into account when creating schedules\u201d \u2013 unless it\u2019s an \u201curgent task.\u201d<\/p>\n

When did police protection become selective, contingent on victims being popular? And what\u2019s more \u201curgent\u201d than protecting innocents from hateful hooligans systematically Jew-hunting?<\/p>\n

By contrast, another Dutch politician denounced the \u201cpogrom in the streets of #Amsterdam\u201d on X: \u201cWe have become the Gaza of Europe,\u201d Geert Wilders wrote. \u201cMuslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews. I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again.\u201d Wilders is always saddled with the designation: \u201cFar-Right Dutch politician\u201d \u2013 rather than \u201cHeroic Dutch Leader.\u201d Such framing dilutes the necessary mass disgust. The hyper-partisan plague polarizing most Western democracies today subverts the united front needed to defeat Jew-hatred. It\u2019s not Left vs Right but right vs wrong.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the passions stirred by Hamas\u2019s October 7 rampage last year and Israel\u2019s Gaza war blurred too many people\u2019s ethical calculus. Policing is a sacred apolitical mission. If Jewish police officers refused to protect pro-Palestinian protesters, I would say \u201cfire them.\u201d Similarly, voters should fire politicians who only define Jew-hatred as the Jews\u2019 problem, sexism as women\u2019s problem, or racism as a Black problem.<\/p>\n

WE\u2019RE LIVING a sick paradox globally. On October 7, terrorists slaughtered over 1,200 people \u2013 Jews and non-Jews \u2013 in the worst paroxysm of Jew-hating violence since World War II. Yet, instantly, even as most of the civilized world reeled, this antisemitic sadism unleashed more evil. Rather than being ashamed by their allies\u2019 barbarism, Jew-haters and Israel-bashers \u2013 sensing weakness, smelling blood \u2013 imported the violence wherever Jews were found: weeks before Israel entered Gaza in self-defense.The failure starts with the haters, but doesn\u2019t end with them.<\/p>\n

Police, authorities embarrassingly weak\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The police and the authorities have often been embarrassingly weak. Too many university presidents saw evil on campus \u2013 and whimpered. And too many prosecutors and police officers have unintentionally proven that when you tolerate small acts of incivility, they intensify, having emboldened the criminals.
\nLast Wednesday, before the Amsterdam abomination, a warning came from two Canadian rabbis, Adam Scheier and Reuben Poupko: \u201cIt is open season on the Jews of Montreal.\u201d Just before Rosh Hashanah last month, the police arrested some individuals who left Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices near synagogues, hours before they filled up. The \u201cperpetrators appeared in court and were released with a promise to appear\u2026. in June, 2025.\u201d
\nAgain, sensing weakness, last Tuesday, 40 masked Jew-haters harassed congregants attempting to enter a different Montreal synagogue. Although the mob violated an injunction keeping demonstrators 50 meters away from houses of worship, \u201cthe police allowed the harassment to continue, uninterrupted, for over three hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tragically, as the authorities dithered, others failed, too. Last year, various universities including Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, launched task forces exploring the antisemitism \u201cin the air,\u201d as Stanford\u2019s summary called it. Some reports assembled hundreds of examples of Jewish students being bullied. After one young Columbia student placed a mezuzah on her doorpost, some dormmates banged on her door night after night until she moved out.
\nDEPRESSINGLY, I didn\u2019t encounter one story in one task force report describing non-Jews intervening to defend their fellow students. This lack of empathy, the selfishness, the passivity, should worry us all.<\/p>\n

The philosopher Edmund Burke taught: \u201cThe only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.\u201d Even if Burke didn\u2019t quite coin the phrase, it became a clich\u00e9 because it captured an enduring truth. Bigotry \u2013 and the silence it too often encounters \u2013 are cancers in a society.
\nPolice abandoned Israelis after the match<\/p>\n

And, indeed, many good people did a whole lot of nothing in Amsterdam. The police abandoned the Israelis after the match. Some reported running into the street away from the mobs, waving down passing cars, only to be ignored. \u201cThe Dutch police sold us so that the Arabs would lynch us,\u201d one Israeli reported.
\nIn Amsterdam, the Dockworker Statue honors Amsterdam\u2019s workers who went on strike in February 1941 to protest the Nazis\u2019 anti-Jewish pogroms. That statue should be covered in black for the next year because the Dockworker\u2019s grandchildren have turned chicken.<\/p>\n

More substantively, tourists opposed to bigotry should boycott Amsterdam for the next three months. A dramatic drop in visitors would show the world the cost of tolerating evil in their midst \u2013 for those who cannot recognize that cowering before these hooligans also only encourages them to launch their violence against others they dislike.<\/p>\n

Even while aiming to harm their targets, the haters curdle their own souls, while humiliating rubberneckers. By not standing up, these not-so-innocent bystanders betray themselves, their communities, their fellow citizens, their neighbors and our core democratic ideals \u2013 and in Amsterdam\u2019s case, their Israeli and Jewish guests.<\/p>\n

Originally published in JPost<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By staying silent, these bystanders betray themselves, their communities, and democratic ideals\u2014abandoning Amsterdam\u2019s Israeli and Jewish guests..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19655,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topics-antisemitism-and-de-legitimization","library-op-ed","library-publications"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20518,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19642\/revisions\/20518"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}