16-year-old YouTube reporter 'Bender' in the streets of Amsterdam amidst the anti-Zionist action. Photo: File Photo/GrayZone.
By Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed – Nov 11, 2024
Footage by a teenage YouTuber shows Tel Aviv Maccabi hooligans attacking Dutch police while pelting private homes with stones and hunting victims with metal pipes. The video offers the clearest evidence yet Israeli ultras provoked the violence which gripped the city.
A November 8 video report by a 16-year-old who publishes YouTube reports under the moniker “Bender” provided extensive on-the-ground footage of a mob of armed Tel Aviv Maccabi ultras hunting victims, throwing metal poles at police vehicles, threatening journalists, and even being detained after attacking undercover police officers.
While Western corporate media, US President Joe Biden and the Dutch government have faithfully echoed the Israeli propaganda narrative that the Maccabi ultras were innocent victims of an antisemitic “pogrom,” no mainstream media outlet has reported to date that the Israeli football hooligans attacked police vehicles and undercover officers, in addition to their assaults on Muslim taxi drivers and other Dutch citizens.
In a statement to The Grayzone, Amsterdam police spokesperson Eline Roovers refused to discuss the documented attacks by Israeli thugs on Dutch police officers and vehicles. “We cannot comment on ongoing investigations, which means we are not able to answer questions related to this now,” Roovers stated, referring us instead to a press conference by Police Chief Peter Holla.
In his statement to the press, Holla acknowledged that “a [Palestinian] flag was taken down by Maccabi supporters,” who also “vandalized a cab.” On Amsterdam’s Dam Square, he said, “a Palestinian flag was set on fire.”
The Dutch police said 5 people were hospitalized during the Nov. 7 mayhem, and 30 suffered more minor injuries.
Effectively confirming the Israeli hooligans as the source of the violence in Amsterdam, Holla stated, “peace [returned]” only after Maccabi supporters were “accompanied by the police back to their hotels with the use of buses.”
However, the police chief’s comments evinced heavy political bias in favor of the very element that instigated the violence: “I can imagine that Israelis feel unsafe,” he said. “As mentioned before, their well-being is our top priority.”
Israeli hooligans caught on camera attacking cops in Amsterdam
On November 7, Maccabi Tel Aviv ultras engaged in violent clashes with those of the local Ajax football club. The fighting followed a night in which Israeli football hooligans destroyed a taxi cab with a Muslim driver, tore Palestinian flags from private Dutch homes and burned them, chanted in support of the genocide of Palestinian children, and attacked any local resident displaying pro-Palestine sympathies.
Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans carry a reputation for assaulting leftists and Palestinian citizens in their own country. Following a Tel Aviv Maccabi match in Athens, Greece this March, the club’s ultras surrounded a lone Egyptian man and brutalized him so badly he was hospitalized.
“We know Maccabi fans, they already had a reputation. Even in Israel they stand out,” Yuval Gal, a member of the Dutch Jewish anti-Zionist collective known as Erev Rav, told the Dutch journalist Left Laser. “We know many of them are soldiers and ex-soldiers in Gaza right now. I also tried to explain this to the police. I said, ‘Look, if somebody just came back from Gaza, and just came back from killing a lot of people, you don’t expect them to act normally in your city.’”
Indeed, many of the Maccabi Tel Aviv Ultras were confirmed as reservists in the Israeli military who had participated in the assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. And they were escorted to Amsterdam by agents from Israel’s Mossad intelligence and assassination agency.
Several Dutch citizens told Left Laser they were assaulted by Maccabi hooligans the day before their November 7 match in Amsterdam. “Every time somebody with a Palestinian symbol walked by,” one local resident said, “they did something pretty violent. Middle fingers, also physical violence.”
Another Dutch citizen said he was randomly assaulted by the Israeli thugs, who spit on him and doused him with beer: “I don’t like aggressiveness in my city. Amsterdam has always been a tolerant city towards others, but when a group so aggressively comes in, it made me not feel at home any more.”
Bender’s YouTube report provided clear documentation of the well-organized mob of Israeli hooligans roving around central Amsterdam on November 7, gathering metal pipes and wooden clubs as they hunted for victims with apparent permission from local Amsterdam authorities.
Early into the foreign goon squad’s rampage, Bender filmed them hurling weapons at a passing police van.
“Oh, metal poles are being thrown at a police car!” the YouTuber exclaimed. “They took the metal pipes from this construction site and started throwing them at people and police vans.”
“As usual,” Bender remarked, “we are the only media present right now!”
The Maccabi hooligans were clearly unhappy with the scrappy reporter’s presence. They can be seen repeatedly giving him the middle finger while hurling rocks at him and his cameraman. At one point, multiple Israeli thugs approach the teenager in an attempt to intimidate him, demanding he “put away the camera.” When Bender and his colleague responded that they were members of the media, the Israeli assailants ordered them: “stop… for your [own] safety.”
As the Israelis marched across the city center, Bender observed, “I think it looks life threatening. They are there with metal pipes and sticks. Everything that looks like a bat, they have gathered and are patrolling with them. And everything they don’t like is going to suffer.”
He noted that some of the hooligans were underage – and they too were assaulting Dutch police officers.
“They have kids, I think not even twelve years old, walking around with sticks on the front. And they are looking for a fight,” said Bender.
As police officers detained one of the youth assailants next to an unmarked van, the journalist explained, “It looks like they have these kids, barely 1.5 meters tall, who just attacked these undercover police officers with a stick.”
Bender said that the Israeli ultras operated like a military unit on a mission inside a hostile city. “The funny thing is,” he commented, “in contrast to the Ajax hooligans, these [Israelis] stick together. A very compact group. They are not separating… They have some mean dudes. Most of those Israelis have been in the military, so they can be strong and know their tactics.”
Even after assaulting police vans and attacking officers with metal pipes, the Israeli ultras were allowed to storm through central Amsterdam without any arrests.
Eventually, the police escorted them to a bus, which was to take them back to their hotels. But as Bender documented, just as they were about to board their bus, the Israeli ultras noticed a private home with a Palestinian flag draped on its window sill. And so – in the full view of the police – the foreign thugs began pelting the house with rocks.
“The police did something that wasn’t very tactful. Here is a building full of squatters, with Palestinian flags on it,” Bender narrated. “[The Israelis] are throwing rocks at the windows.
“Last night they tore down those [Palestinian] flags and burned them,” he continued. “And we are exactly at the same spot again…. The whole thing starts again. Half of [the Israelis] are in the bus, the other half are throwing rocks again.”
Media deletes factual reports under Israeli pressure, spreads wall-to-wall disinformation
The journalistic acumen displayed by the 16-year-old Bender stood in stark contrast to the complicity of corporate media, which has dutifully parroted Israeli government propaganda painting the violent hooligans as innocent Jews assaulted by antisemitic Muslims in what amounted to a “pogrom.”
On November 8, Sky News published one of the few factually correct reports on the unrest, demonstrating how it was provoked by marauding bands of Israeli ultras, who attacked local taxi drivers, chanted for the genocide of Palestinian children, and instigated violence across the city.
Just hours after the Sky News report was published, the British outlet deleted it and re-uploaded a heavily-edited version which downplayed Maccabi fans’ culpability while adding an extra minute of Israeli propaganda.
In the days since, Western politicians and much of the media have amplified the bogus Israeli narrative, focusing overwhelmingly on retaliatory attacks by Moroccan cab drivers and Dutch Muslims, while ignoring the apparently calculated Israeli rampage which instigated the chaos.
But despite their apparent understanding that Israelis initiated the violence, officials in the Netherlands and elsewhere have instead followed the lead of the Israeli government, laying the blame entirely at the feet of mainly Arab youths who confronted the Maccabi fans.
Later, Dutch Security Minister David van Weel declared — without providing evidence — that it was a “fact” that “people were attacked and threatened yesterday because of their origin, their religion and their Jewish background.” In public statements, both US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately insisted the outburst of violence was “antisemitic.”
Their comments came the same day as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared the instance of football hooliganism to Kristallnacht, the infamous ‘Night of Broken Glass’ pogrom carried out by Nazi SS members and stormtroopers which left hundreds of synagogues razed, thousands of Jewish-owned business destroyed, and at least 91 Jews dead.
Ironically, a Kristallnacht commemoration which was slated to take place in Amsterdam on November 9 had to be canceled following the eruption of Israeli-led violence, with Jewish organizers citing the “large presence of Zionist Israelis in the city who are planning to commit acts of violence.”
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Blacksburg, Virginia-based writer and activist who spent several years in Latin America.
