Back in October I commented on the efforts by law enforcement in the U.K. to prevent Israeli soccer fans from attending a match between Aston Villa F.C. and Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C..
Well, as it turns out, authorities in Birmingham used misinformation to justify this ban:
In the report presented to the club that suggested banning Israeli fans, police presented information about a 2023 match between Maccabi and West Ham, which the report said was the Israeli club’s “last appearance on UK soil to date.”
“The most recent match Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in the Europa Conference League on Nov 9, 2023,” the report read.
However, no such match was played, and Maccabi has never faced off against the East London club.
And that wasn't all:
In addition to the fake match, police cited “violent clashes and hate crime offenses” during a Europa League match in Amsterdam between Maccabi and local team Ajax last November.
The report claimed that Israeli fans threw “innocent members of the public into the river,” that 500-600 of them “intentionally targeted Muslim communities” and that the violence forced the deployment of 5,000 police officers.
Guildford admitted to MPs that he “conflated” information about the Amsterdam incidents in the report, including an example about a “running street battle” that did not take place on the day of the match.
Not only is this anti-Semitism, but it is also defamation. Israeli fans were not permitted to travel to see their team play Aston Villa F.C. on the basis of matches which never took place and on incidents which never occurred. Local law enforcement in the U.K. made up these incidents out of whole cloth. They lied because they did not want to welcome Israeli Jews in their community.
When the rot of anti-Semitism runs this deep, it is only matter of time before the U.K. abandons democracy and any basic notion of civil society. Unfortunately, this rot is hardly confined to the U.K.
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