West Midlands Police’s message: antisemites’ feelings matter most
This is a huge police scandal. Up there with the Met's mishandling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence or South Yorkshire Police’s smearing of Liverpool fans
Appeasement. It’s a strong word. It’s a grave insult. We most commonly hear it in relation to Neville Chamberlain, whom history records, rightly or wrongly, as Hitler’s appeaser.
It’s a word with staggering power. People recoil when this charge of cowardice is laid at their door.
No one wants to be thought of as a yellow-bellied wimp who “feeds a crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last” – Churchill’s famous description of appeasement.
And yet it is the only word that will do to describe the behaviour of West Midlands Police in relation to Maccabi Tel Aviv.
It’s undeniable now that the banning of Maccabi fans from Villa Park was an act of cultural appeasement.
West Midlands Police barred these Jews from Israel in order to placate a seething Islamist mob in Birmingham.
In doing so, they sent a deadly message to the nation: that the feelings of antisemites matter more than the rights of Jews. It’s a message that absolutely cannot stand.
The Maccabi scandal grows larger and more alarming every day.
The fans were banned from attending their team’s clash with Aston Villa in November last year.
The local Safety Advisory Group, with input from West Midlands Police, said Maccabi fans were too hooliganistic for Birmingham. We don’t want these louts raising hell, they said.
The bosses of West Midlands Police continually talked up the violent tendencies of the Maccabi mob.
They did the media rounds, telling anyone who would listen that these thugs from Israel just can’t be trusted.
This ignited yet another firestorm of anti-Israel bigotry on social media.
Leftists and Islamists whose entire personality is hating the Jewish State took to X to cheer the cops and slam the supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv as “genocidal” .
But we soon discovered West Midlands Police were not being entirely truthful.
Their claims about the behaviour of Maccabi fans in Amsterdam in 2024 were challenged by the Dutch authorities themselves.
Dutch law enforcement accused West Midlands Police of using “fake claims” to justify their ban on Maccabi fans from Villa Park.
It’s simply “not true”, said the Dutch, that the Maccabi fans in Amsterdam were “highly organised” hooligans requiring 5,000 riot cops to put them in their place. West Midlands Police made it up.
Then we found out that West Midlands Police made up a football match.
The last time Maccabi Tel Aviv played in the UK was against West Ham in 2023, they said. But no such game occurred. It was another invention. Honestly, who are these halfwits?
This is a huge police scandal. It’s up there with the Metropolitan Police’s mishandling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence or South Yorkshire Police’s smearing of Liverpool fans in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster
This week, though, we’ve had the most shocking revelation yet.
It’s now reported that West Midlands Police had information suggesting local Islamists were intent on attacking the Maccabi fans.
These bigoted mobs felt an intense “hostility” towards Israelis, the police were told. And they were hell-bent on “arming” themselves so that they might bash a few of the Jews.
What did West Midlands Police do with this info? They suppressed it. They brushed the Islamist threat under the carpet and focused instead on the alleged threat posed by the “bad” foreigners.
This is a huge police scandal. It’s up there with the Metropolitan Police’s mishandling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence or South Yorkshire Police’s smearing of Liverpool fans in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.
To respond to information about a violent threat against Jews by banning Jews is a moral outrage. It really is appeasement.
In the words of Kemi Badenoch, police in Birmingham “knew extremists were planning to attack Jews” and their solution was to “blame and remove Jewish people”.
They capitulated to the mob. They gave the Islamists exactly what they wanted: a Jew-free zone.
It’s the 21st century and police are doing the bidding of bigots. They’re removing Jews in order to keep Jew-haters happy.
It’s like a metaphor for our times: a cowardly state placating Islamists in order to “keep the peace”.
But it’s a strange peace that requires the hiding away of Jewish people.
Enough is enough. Here’s what our politicians and police should be saying: no street, institution or football match in 21st-century Britain will ever be “Jew free”.
And if anyone makes such a rancid, racist demand, they’ll be in serious trouble.
- Brendan O’Neill is a journalist and author.
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