The ban on ‘fans’ of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv attending their European match with Birmingham club Aston Villa led to a mass lie campaign by the Israel lobby to claim they were banned because they are Jewish. It also triggered an unsightly combination of pearl-clutching, condemnation, and outright lies from government ministers, particularly Keir Starmer and his Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. The latter in particular has been asked to retract her antisemitic remarks to MPs made during a debate on the ban, claiming that the ban was imposed because West Midlands Police couldn’t guarantee the safety of Jews.

But a leak of the police intellligence leading to the ban puts beyond doubt the fact that the Maccabi thugs were banned for being a danger to the public. And, they were specifically classified as posing a threat to people in Birmingham, especially Muslims.

Maccabi Tel Aviv on hooligan rampage

According to police sources who leaked the intel, it said that:

• large numbers of extremist Maccabi fans proven to be violent and racist would be travelling to the Villa game
• Dutch police told the UK that Maccabi fans were the cause of riots in Amsterdam around a Maccabi fixture there in 2024
• Maccabi fans had gone looking in Amsterdam for Muslims to attack, despite the deployment of thousands of Dutch police – which then led to reprisal attacks
• some Jewish people in Birmingham wanted the Maccabi thugs banned from the match, as ascertained from a community assessment
• the ban on Maccabi fans was made by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group. It was decided after an intelligence assessment was conducted by West Midlands police, shared with the national UK football policing unit
• the UK’s football policing unit endorsed the local force’s decision

The intelligence leak makes even bigger fools of Starmer and others who had already been embarrassed by the decision of Israeli authorities earlier this week to cancel a match between Maccabi and Tel Aviv’s other club Hapoel because of Maccabi fans’ violence.

Laughable

The whole debacle also exposes the lies of the Israel lobby, along with Western politicians and media, who claimed and in most cases continue to claim that the Maccabi fans were the victims of antisemitism in Amsterdam rather than the racist instigators of violence who attacked innocent locals while singing songs about rape, murder and gassing Palestinians. Such is the extent of the misinformation that some media outlets actually doctored footage that originally showed what really happened. So extreme was the violence that it contributed to the decision of Dutch intelligence services to designate Israel as a threat to the Netherlands’ national security.

Maccabi Tel Aviv announced earlier this week that they will not accept a ticket allocation for the Villa match. That did not stop Nandy’s lies or the laughable attempts of other UK politicians to overturn the ban.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.