« Pogrom » : by using this very loaded term, especially in a country which was slow to admit its co-responsibility in the extermination of more than three quarters of its Jewish community during the Second World War, the Dutch populist Geert Wilders acted in a manner intentional, on the social network X, on the morning of Friday, November 8. What had just happened in Amsterdam, after the Ajax Amsterdam-Maccabi Tel-Aviv football match, was to support his theory: the perpetrators of violence were “thugs” of Arab origin and this demonstrated the incompatibility between “mass immigration” et “Islamization”, on one side, and a democratic system on the other.
In the hours preceding these messages from the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the city had experienced a night marked by manhunts, insulting remarks and beatings sometimes preceded by savage passport checks: being Israeli or Jewish , it was, after the meeting between the Dutch and Israeli teams, exposing oneself to attacks from violent gangs and the obligation to shout “Free Palestine!” “.
In the wake of Mr. Wilders, now at the head of the kingdom’s first party – in 2023, the PVV won 23.5% of the votes in the legislative elections – the Israeli Prime Minister and President took up the theme of the “pogrom “. Benyamin Netanyahu even increased tension by talking about sending a “rescue mission” of some 3,000 supporters present in the Netherlands. Televisions, social networks and media taken by surprise by this outbreak of violence activated by social networks and whose risk had visibly been underestimated, relayed, before returning to more discernment, taking into account the true toll .
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Five people were briefly hospitalized and around thirty others were lightly injured. To date, around sixty people have been arrested. This inventory takes nothing away from the scope and meaning of a distressing evening, but far from the definition of a “pogrom”: “During this, members of the majority of a society attack a powerless and disarmed minority, with the passive or active approval of the State”recalled, Saturday November 16, in the Dutch-speaking Belgian daily The MorningAmos Goldberg, Holocaust specialist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to him, the events in Amsterdam did not “nothing to see” with this.
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