THE legacy media seems to have learnt no lesson from its debacle in the US presidential election, as its coverage based on its preconceived notions about the events in Amsterdam during a UEFA football fixture this week demonstrated.

The bulk of it continued to suggest that the presidential fight was neck and neck with a slight edge for Vice President Kamala Harris when the ground reality must have been very different, given the election result.

When street fighting broke out between Maccabi Tel Aviv-supporting football hooligans in the Netherlands capital for their team’s UEFA fixture against Ajax and those they attacked while there, from New York Times to the Guardian to the BBC many media outlets fell for the victimhood narrative Israel has successfully sold for decades.

Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany perpetrated the Holocaust, in which some five to six million Jews perished in the last century. It was undeniably a grave, unforgiveable crime against humanity. The Jewish people and many around the world vowed ‘Never again’. This was a just resolve.

The Amsterdam incident showed how many media outlets fell for the victimhood narrative Israel has successfully sold for decades.

But for the past 75 years, it has also been used to justify the occupation of Palestine, expulsion, murder and imprisonment of Palestinians; anyone with a conscience who objects or protests against this is labelled ‘antisemitic’ and demonised and castigated as being a ‘Jew hater’. Any specific criticism provokes outrage and is dubbed ‘an antisemitic trope’.

This narrative has been built by the subtle and often not-so-subtle control of and manipulation by the Western media and powerful Western governments whose politicians are compromised by receiving generous campaign contributions in exchange for toeing a pro-Israel line. I promise you, this sentence will also be labelled a ‘trope’.

It is important to make a distinction between Jews, of whom so many around the world and in Israel too, have expressed disdain at the apartheid state’s policies towards the Palestinians and Arab Israelis, and genocidal Zionists such as the one in control of Israel as we speak. The latter’s settler colonialism has very little to do with Jewish values.

But the genocidal Zionists’ excesses are often brushed under the carpet or even justified because they enjoy immense financial and political power in the West. Just google to see how they fund mainstream political parties in Western democracies to understand why they get a free pass to brazenly violate international law and norms. Anyone daring to call them out is vilified as antisemitic.

When the Amsterdam violence news started to break, most leading lights of the legacy media and Western leaders from the Dutch king to the prime minister to the EU president to the British foreign secretary started using terms like ‘antisemitic’ attacks and ‘pogrom’ in Amsterdam.

Surprisingly, UK’s Daily Mail was the first to report the violence in its correct context and then slowly but surely a trickle started to appear in the media. First in SkyNews, then a small piece buried in the labyrinth of BBC News. Then the US network NBC aired a video which was geo-verified as being from the site of the clashes showing acts of provocation.

But what the glorious British newspaper Guardian I have read for some 30 years, and that I now find so one-sided, has come to was underlined by its story and headline. Its initial headlines were outrageously pro-Israeli ‘fans’.

Even when the Amsterdam police chief detailed the provocative slogans and actions of the Israeli football hooligans including their tearing down the Palestinian flag from two homes, burning one of them and ‘destroying a taxi’, the statement was buried in the seventh paragraph of the Guardian story!

The slogans included “IDF will f…. Arabs” and “there are no schools in Gaza because all the children are dead”.

The counter-violence started when a crowd alerted by the taxi drivers’ WhatsApp group gathered to challenge the Maccabi ‘fans’. The police chief also told the media that Israelis who’d come to Amsterdam and whose team lost by a near-tennis score to Ajax went round the city the night before the match too raising inflammatory slogans.

I’ll leave it to your judgment if this was antisemitic violence targeting peaceful Israeli, read: Jewish, football fans or trouble provoked by genocidal hooligans. What the violence did achieve was again the overshadowing of the UN statement that 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza were women and children.

Enough of the horrible, brutal and ugly things that seem to dominate our lives these days. Now a few lines my wife Carmen Gonzalez, herself a journalist, wrote two days ago about the loss of someone very dear to us who was like an unshakeable pillar of support during our years in Karachi when we moved to Pakistan in 2006 from London.

RIP Arbab: “Today, our family had to say a sadly premature goodbye to someone very dear, very special, and who made our days in Pakistan so much better and so much easier. His name was Arbab, he drove us around, watched over us like a hawk, taught us the value of loyalty and always, always kept his endearing cute grin, his naughty half smile, and his good spirits. Arbab, the protector, could happily watch Dora the Explorer with Elena, take Alia to school through flooded streets and suffering from high fever (he would never admit to being ill), make sure he got the best parking spot ever, and wash the car (in his shalwar and vest with his starched shirt draped over a chair) while listening to the Three Tenors, his favourite CD, that he requested from me one sunny Monday morning. With his charming cheeky demeanour, Arbab could disarm the toughest of Bajis and get special treatment from the most unbreakable guard. He was a gem; he was part of our Pakistan family and we will never forget him. Rest in peace my friend. Thank you for so much! We will miss you, dearest Arbab.”

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2024