A worldwide ‘Jew hunt’

If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in the Gaza Strip. It was something altogether darker.

“Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night,” the newspaper reported, referring to the Tel Aviv, Israel, club. “Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or ‘Jew Hunt.’”

Jew hunt: Grotesque as the phrase is, it can no longer surprise.

It is what the graffiti on a wall in an Oslo, Norway, metro station promises: “Hitler started it. We finis[h]ed it.”

It is a wave of antisemitic hate crimes in Chicago, including antisemitic flyers “with rat-poison like pellets” found in Lincoln Park in April, a Jewish man shot while walking to his synagogue in West Rogers Park in October and two Jewish students at DePaul University assaulted by masked men last Wednesday.

It is a long succession of assaults — sometimes with sucker punches, other times with cars, more recently with an attempted child abduction — against Hasidic Jews in New York City.

It is the alleged gang rape near Paris in June of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by teenage boys “uttering death threats and antisemitic remarks,” according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

It is the arson attack Monday on an Amsterdam tram — a follow-up to last week’s mayhem — with rioters in black yelling “Kanker Joden” — “cancer Jews.”

It is what a Hamas terrorist was doing Oct. 7, 2023: “Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew. I just killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed 10.”

Notice what these attackers aren’t saying. They aren’t expressing themselves in the faddish language of anti-Zionism. They aren’t denouncing Israeli policy or speaking up for Palestinian rights. They aren’t trying to make careful distinctions between Jews and Israelis. They are, like generations of pogromists before them, simply out to get the Jews — a reminder, if one was needed, of the truth often attributed to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

A great deal of attention has also been paid to some Israeli fans who pulled down a Palestinian flag, vandalized a taxi and, in Hebrew, chanted ugly anti-Arab phrases. There’s no excuse for any of that. But rowdy English soccer fans in Germany have been known to celebrate German war casualties. Somehow it doesn’t lead to a frenzy of organized violence.

Nor does it add any light to provide the “context” of the war in Gaza as a way of trying to understand what happened in Amsterdam. No decent person would explain anti-Asian attacks in the United States by observing that attackers might be angry about, say, China’s human-rights abuses or its biosafety standards.

Yet so many supposedly decent people are quick to try to account for the evil that is done to Jews through reference to the evil (as they see it) that Jews do to others. As Leon Wieseltier pointed out years ago, this type of reasoning is not an explanation for antisemitism. It’s the essence of antisemitism.

Antisemitism in Europe has now reached the point where the future of many of its Jewish communities is now seriously in doubt. I’m not sure most Europeans understand what a civilizational catastrophe this represents — albeit less for Europe’s Jews, most of whom will find other places to go and thrive, than for Europe itself. The fate of societies that become “Judenfrei” — free of Jews — has not, historically, been a happy one.

The United States is still a long way from this point, thanks to a larger and more politically confident Jewish community, along with a national culture that traditionally has generally admired Jews. But that culture is also under growing threat today, whether from Hamas’ fellow travelers in the Ivy League and the publishing world; Louis Farrakhan’s admirers in the Black community; or the alt-right inveighing, with a sinister wink, against “globalists” and “neocons.”

Americans (and not just Jews) should beware: If we stay on this path, the Jew hunt of Amsterdam may be upon us, too, and sooner than we think.