There’s usually more to a political scandal than what is known when the scandal is discovered. But rarely is there this much more. In Birmingham, a police decision to ban Maccabi fans from a November soccer match turns out to have been constructed of far more malicious stuff than anyone thought at the time.
The scandal appeared to be the simple fact that, for their own “protection,” fans of the Israeli team were prohibited from attending Maccabi’s match against Aston Villa. As I wrote in October, the order was based on security concerns: A popular local Islamic preacher threatened violence against the Maccabi team and its Jewish fans. Because of what had happened last year in Amsterdam—namely, an organized pogrom against Jewish soccer fans with the apparent complicity of local law enforcement—the West Midlands police surrendered to the mob as British parliamentarians cheered on, to the great shame of the United Kingdom.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer was appalled, or claimed to be, but did nothing. (Perhaps there was nothing he could have done, though that beggars belief.) It all amounted to a green light for mass violence against Jews to force them out of polite society.
But reporting in the two months since the match has made it clear that the scandal was, as our Abe Greenwald is wont to say, worse than that.
When the police force and Birmingham pols were accused of anti-Semitism, West Midlands—appearing to bow to pressure from those politicians—changed its story: The Maccabi fans were hooligans and therefore contributed mightily to the danger surrounding the match. The evidence for this charge? That the Jews had, at least in part, provoked their own pogrom in Amsterdam.
A Tory MP, a former Labour MP, and a former attorney general called West Midlands’ bluff in a letter revealed by the Telegraph on November 15, nine days after the match: “Suggestions that Maccabi fans provoked the Amsterdam attacks have been previously dismissed as ‘entirely fictitious’ by the UK Government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism after he met the chief of police in Amsterdam and was given access to their reports,” they wrote.
“West Midlands Police have seemingly discarded this overwhelming evidence. Could you please outline how West Midlands Police have reached such a starkly different conclusion about the roots of the disorder in Amsterdam to the Dutch authorities? In the absence of an explanation, there are many who may conclude that the actions of West Midlands Police are akin to victim-blaming.”
The government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, Lord Mann, then ran a fact-check on the supposed evidence accumulated by West Midlands. Mann, the BBC reported on December 1, found that the facts marshaled against Maccabi fans in Amsterdam were mistaken or invented entirely: “Evidence cited by police which led to the controversial banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a match against Aston Villa was based on facts changed to fit a decision, a group of MPs has heard.”
During that hearing, West Midlands reportedly also claimed that representatives of the Jewish community supported the ban on the attendance of the Jewish fans. The Jewish community challenged that absurd claim, and less than a week later West Midlands admitted there was no such support: “In answering these questions, it was never the intention of the officer to imply that there were members of the Jewish community who had explicitly expressed support for the exclusion of Maccabi fans.”
Well then what was his intention? He was asked if Jewish representatives supported the ban and he answered “yes.” It was becoming clear that if the coverup wasn’t worse than the crime, it was at the very least a whole new crime.
Three days after that, on December 10, the Guardian reported that the members of the parliamentary committee investigating the scandal were “incensed about” the police’s dishonesty and misdirection. West Midlands’ chief constable and assistance chief were to be reappear, they were told, before the committee—and this time have their facts straight. The police apologized not only to the committee but, it was reported later than month, to Ruth Jacobs, chair of the Birmingham and West Midlands Jewish Community.
So: The police invented evidence that the Jewish community supported its own banishment from the public square. Why did they do it? Because the police and the local safety advisory group feared that the ban would be perceived as “anti-Jewish,” according to minutes of a meeting reported by the Times of London yesterday.
The Times noted that the original decision to ban Maccabi fans was made, according to one police officer, “in the absence of intelligence.” The Times continued: “The force only produced ‘significant’ and ‘new’ ‘intelligence’ about Maccabi’s fanbase after a Birmingham council staff member confided that they had faced questions and been ‘asked to obtain’ information to pre-empt criticism or claims of ‘anti-Jewish sentiment’.”
The whole saga is extraordinary. Politicians called for Jews to be barred from attending a soccer game; law enforcement then sought to “obtain” evidence to justify the Jew-ban that everyone knew was fake, leading to false testimony to the parliamentary committee.
The above reporting, collected in the two months after the game, is to the credit of the British press, which smelled a rat. It shows that officials piled several layers of anti-Semitism on top of each other in an attempt to justify the initial act of official anti-Semitism. The scandal implicates law enforcement and members of the UK parliament in collaboration with Islamic extremists among the public.
What in God’s name is happening to Britain before our eyes? Whatever it is, it will become impossible to undo unless every official involved in this rancid corruption is held properly accountable. Anything less will be too little, too late.
