Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’

By Seth Mandel

Monday, November 11, 2024

 

An important ideological convergence is taking place in the wake of the Amsterdam football pogrom, demonstrating a timeless characteristic of Jew-hatred: It has no permanent political home—hatred of the “wandering Jew” is itself a wandering phenomenon.

 

A popular meme in recent years on the nationalist right is the number 109. It is meant to signify the number of countries from which Jews have been expelled. (The number is wrong, but it is self-defeating to spend much time rebutting the statistic. It’s like trying to rebut the claim that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs—you simply can’t accept the anti-Semite’s premise if you are to engage with him.) Sometimes this is represented as “109 soon 110” or some formulation of that, suggesting that the U.S. or some other country will follow suit.

 

Inflating the number of Jewish expulsions is not, as one might think at first glance, an attempt to garner sympathy for the Jew. It is meant to blame the victim: Jews wear out their welcome in every country in every part of the world, gee I wonder what the common denominator is here, etc.

 

You can easily understand why neo-Nazis in particular are so fond of this argument: If you can make Hitler seem only as evil as, say, Edward I, you can normalize everything from the Nuremberg Laws to the gas chambers.

 

But its usefulness as revisionist history pales in comparison to its main, forward-looking purpose. Namely, to cause the instinctive reaction to any event of mass violence against Jews to be the assumption that they must have done something to deserve it.

 

This is what the counternarrative surrounding Amsterdam is doing. And it’s edifying to see the counternarrative crafted and released into the air vents in real time.

 

There’s an easy test to see whether the “Jewish soccer hooligans” blather is yet another “109 soon 110,” only this time from the left: Even if you were to grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ behavior, would it mitigate the evil of the pogrom? Did random Jews deserve to be stabbed and run over because other Israeli soccer fans were rowdy? To even write out that question is to see how much of a lunatic you’d have to be to entertain it.

 

And yet we also know that you cannot grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi fans’ actions. For example, we now know that the small number of Israelis who picked up sticks or other makeshift weapons had done so because they were set upon by organized attackers. We now know that taxi drivers were not victims of Israeli abuse but rather were the ringleaders of what the pogromists referred to as the planned “Jew hunt.” We now know the disingenuous nature of the accusation that random Jews deserved to be stabbed because some Maccabi fans interrupted a moment of silence for victims of a flood in Spain: The announcer was speaking in Dutch, which only one team’s fans in the stadium could understand. We now know that the rumor that Israelis were disruptive at a casino is false and that what actually happened is that an employee of the casino alerted the pogromist organizers to the Israelis’ location so they could be hunted. (Those last two details come to us from excellent reporting by the Wall Street Journal.)

 

So we’re left with a video of some Maccabi fans singing an anti-Arab chant as they’re being escorted by police away from crowds that taunt them and which the police assume will get into a violent confrontation with the Israelis. The people claiming that video is what led to a preplanned pogrom are telling on themselves, both because they don’t know what “preplanned” means and because there is a sociopathic element to their justifications.

 

And history is littered with them. In 1881, Jews in Alexandria were accused of kidnapping and killing a Greek child in a ritual murder—the classic blood libel. A newspaper reporter, wrote that, in light of a similar accusation made against the Jews in Syria, “the position taken up by the Greeks is not on the face of it so absurd, untenable and prejudiced as the European colony would have us believe. If the voice of the vast majority be the voice of the people, and if it be true that vox populi vox Dei, then one should surely pause before exonerating the Jews of Alexandria of every suspicion of guilt.”

 

His point was: Could it be that the Jews keep getting accused of the same thing and yet all of these accusations are false? Could it be, today’s anti-Semites on both left and right will ask, that the Jews keep getting kicked out of their “host” countries and yet it is always the host countries’ fault? In the past year there have been Jew hunts not just in Amsterdam but across Europe and even an occasional version in the U.S.; could it be, we are asked, that none of those Jew hunts were the Jews’ fault? And don’t get so defensive, these pundits and activists insist; they’re just asking questions.