THE media coverage of the violence seen after a football match in Amsterdam has been slammed as “ridiculously skewed” and “Orwellian” by an academic.
Israeli fans were attacked and injured following clashes with apparent pro-Palestinian protesters after a Europa League football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax in Amsterdam on Thursday evening.
Many media outlets and politicians have decried the violence as “antisemitic”, with some referring to the incident as a “pogrom”. Dutch police have launched a large-scale investigation after gangs of youths conducted what Amsterdam’s mayor called “hit and run” attacks on Israeli fans.
But many media outlets have also been criticised on social media for leaving out important context about the actions of Israeli fans before and after the game.
Videos posted on social media on Thursday and Friday showed Israeli fans shouting anti-Arab slurs and chants about the war in Palestine with lines reportedly including “no schools in Gaza because there are no children left” and “Let the IDF win to f**k the Arabs”.
An Amsterdam councillor, Jazie Veldhuyzen, said: “They [Israeli fans] began attacking houses of people in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that’s actually where the violence started.”
There were also reports and videos shared on social media of Maccabi fans starting fights with taxi drivers and attacking buildings.
Dr Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation expert and a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, said that – despite this information being out in the public domain – mainstream media outlets instead gave a “ridiculously skewed” version of events.
“Mainstream media outlets – from The New York Times to the BBC – uncritically embraced what looked like an Israeli government press release emphasising that these attacks were antisemitic and pre-planned,” he said.
“And they put these releases out without doing any verification initially so it gave a completely slanted side of the story.
"Even when they started to verify videos that showed the Israeli fans engaging in racist chants – The New York Times verified the anti-Arab racism – they still led in the headline with antisemitism.”
Owen-Jones added that it was a “very clear pattern of just marginalising the anti-Arab racism” and also hit out at outlets for a lack of context on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s ultras group, which has previously been called out for violence and for using racist language.
The academic added that the “most egregious example” was with Sky News – who initially released a news report that was “kind of balanced” before retracting it.
Sky News claimed it didn’t meet their “standards for balance and impartiality” and re-edited it to remove some of the accusations against the Israeli football supporters.
“Honestly, it was just egregious – and I think that's why it's so shocking,” he said.
“Everyone just realised how it was like an Orwellian memory hole, a re-editing of history in real time.”
