The Home Affairs Committee report on the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal has finally landed. And it is damning indeed. It confirms what many of us suspected: that West Midlands Police allowed themselves to become the militant wing of Israelophobia. They did the bidding of the mob, dutifully banning Israeli Jews in order to appease local bigots in Birmingham. This really is one of the worst police scandals of modern times.
People know the basics: fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv were barred from their team’s clash with Aston Villa on 6 November last year. The top cops of West Midlands Police enthusiastically did the media rounds to explain their decision. Maccabi fans are violent ruffians with a record of targeting Muslims, they said. We now know these claims were built on a tissue of lies and Israelophobic prejudice.
The new report lays it out in eye-watering detail. From the very start of this scandal, West Midlands Police were evasive and dishonest. Take their claims about the behaviour of Maccabi fans in Amsterdam in November 2024. They said 500 to 600 Maccabi fans had been involved in clashes with local communities, that 200 of them had links with the IDF, and that their scummy behaviour extended to pushing Dutch Muslims into a river. But none of it was true. Every claim was disputed by Dutch law enforcement.
The Home Affairs report scolds the police chiefs for their mythmaking. The suggestion that Maccabi fans ‘would pose a particular risk to local Muslim communities’ in Birmingham ‘is not borne out by any evidence’, it says. There is ‘no evidence’ that Maccabi fans ‘attack community members’. The idea that they went around bashing Muslims in Amsterdam was ‘specifically denied by Dutch police’, we’re told.
The worst untruth peddled by West Midlands Police was that Maccabi fans in Amsterdam pushed innocents into a river. In fact it was a Maccabi fan who was dunked into the freezing waters by a mob of anti-Semites who told him he could only come out if he said ‘Free Palestine’. To reimagine an act of violent Jew hatred as an act of Israeli hooliganism is a Kafkaesque distortion of truth. It’s victim-blaming on steroids.
The report also chastises the police for relying on AI to dredge up ‘information’ about Maccabi fans. This led to the erroneous claim that Maccabi Tel Aviv had recently played West Ham. ‘This match was fictitious’, the report says. It was invented by the dumb AI tools West Midlands Police scandalously relied on to ‘scrape’ the internet for scurrilous tales about the Israeli team.
Craig Guildford, the then-chief constable of West Midlands, told the Home Affairs Committee his force ‘do not use AI’. That was untrue and he had to correct the position. The report says it is alarming that the top cop wasn’t aware of the tools his minions were using to arrive at a decision on such a sensitive matter. It was indicative of the ‘poor due diligence’ applied ‘in this case’.
It gets worse. It is now clear that West Midlands Police were aware that bigots in Birmingham posed a serious threat to the Jews from Israel. They bigged up the supposed threat posed by the Maccabi fans and buried the darker truth that local Brummie elements were threatening to ‘arm themselves’ against the visiting Jews. The report reprimands the force for emphasising the ‘unique risk’ from Maccabi fans and downplaying the ‘risk emanating from local communities’.
Think about this: the police had intelligence suggesting anti-Jewish mobs were intending to ‘arm’ themselves and yet all they talked about was the threat posed by the Jews themselves. It was a profound betrayal of truth and morality. In blocking the Maccabi fans, the police were giving the anti-Semitic mob in Birmingham exactly what it wanted – a Jew-free zone around Villa Park.
The report criticises the role played by local councillors, too. The decision to ban the Maccabi fans was influenced by Muslim councillors who are actively hostile to Israel. It is possible, says the report, that ‘political pressure’ played a role in the barring of the Maccabi fans. For a police force to kowtow not only to an ‘armed’ mob but also to openly Israelophobic politicians is scandalous. West Midlands Police became the enactors of a lethal communalism, the enforcers not of the law but of swirling local prejudices.
And the icing on this rotten cake? The force ‘failed properly to engage’ with Birmingham’s Jews, says the report. They talked to Muslims and mosques about the Maccabi game but they ignored Jews. The committee says it heard from numerous Brummie Jews who feel ‘badly let down by West Midlands Police’.
This is incredibly serious. What we witnessed in Birmingham last year was nothing less than state acquiescence to anti-Jewish sentiment. A literal police force drank in the ideology of Israelophobia and enforced a grotesquely unfair ban on Jews from Israel. We all know there is a profound problem with anti-Semitism among the bourgeois activist classes. But when the state itself bows to that ancient animus, we are in deep, deep trouble. The Maccabi scandal must be Britain’s wake-up call.
Comments