This is an abridged version of an article first published in Hungarian on Mandiner.hu.
Exactly 86 years ago to the day, the Nazis staged pogroms across Germany, killing more than 90 people and burning hundreds of synagogues to the ground. The German police and fire brigades watched on, but did not intervene. German propaganda has portrayed this as a reaction to the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, although historians agree that it was more like a first step towards the Holocaust. The event has gone down in history as Kristallnacht.
On the evening of 7 November, almost on the 86th anniversary, antisemitic riots broke out in Amsterdam. Videos of Jews lying on the ground being kicked by Arabs are circulating on the internet, while in another video a man is being punched in the face while is crying: ‘I am not Jewish’. The city, known as a liberal utopia, has thrown off its mask to show what has been boiling in the suburbs populated by migrants and Dutch citizens of a migrant background. We are talking about a city where, beneath the veil of tourism, red lights and the smell of marijuana, Arab crime gangs are rampant, beaten and intimidated Jews and gay people are contemplating emigration, and a slow but seemingly unstoppable socio-cultural change is taking place.
‘Beaten and intimidated Jews and gay people are contemplating emigration’
The police seem helpless. In July 2018, Amsterdam Ombudsman Arre Zuurmond essentially admitted that in Amsterdam ‘in the city centre at night…the state is no longer present. The police can no longer handle this situation.’ According to Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, Amsterdam’s police chief at the time, ‘60–70 per cent of our work is spent on murders, the rest is mainly on investigations into radicalization and terrorism.’ Young immigrant criminals are brutal and are prepared to kill for as little as €3,000. Wouter Laumans, a Dutch journalist, has written a book on the drug trade in Amsterdam, giving shocking examples: two young boys killed by accident in a shoot-out with a Kalashnikov; a mother killed in front of her children; a severed head found outside a café.
Crime is of course also linked to radical Islam. Mafiosi obtain their weapons from war zones such as Syria and Libya. According to Dutch intelligence, Iran has used Moroccan Dutch gangsters to eliminate two ‘enemies of the state’ abroad, but it also actively protects clan leaders. Between 2019 and 2021, during the time of the trial of a Moroccan clan chief, a key witness’ brother was killed, followed by his lawyer and finally a crime reporter who was covering the case.
And what about antisemitism? Dutch Jews have been sounding the alarm for years. I know this because I myself studied for a year at the University of Amsterdam and wrote a long report on the subject for the Jewish magazine Szombat in 2017.
‘Dutch Jews have been sounding the alarm for years’
In the Netherlands 183 anti-Semitic atrocities occurred in 2021, 155 in 2022, and 379 in 2023 (CIDI, the Jewish organization that measures the numbers, received 1,550 reports, but only counted this many atrocities according to their criteria). Jewish students have been insulted, threatened, harassed and sometimes even assaulted by their fellow students because of their origin. The organization has received reports from Jewish students who have been forced to change schools, stay at home for long periods out of fear, or even change their surnames. After 7 October, several Jewish schools in the country remained closed. Of course, there were also atrocities years ago, including the memorable case of the Dutch Chief Rabbi who was almost run over by Arabs at a petrol station.
We already know that mass immigration leads to serious social tensions. That Western and Northern European Jewry (and increasingly American Jewry) is in danger, its daily physical existence and religious practice plagued by antisemitism of Muslim and Arab background (along with far-left woke and far-right neo-Nazi threats) has also been known for some time. But now we have also learned that it does not seem to matter that an otherwise right-wing, anti-immigration government is in power in the Netherlands. Even so, Israeli fans could not be protected, perhaps because of lack of capacity, or simply because in a country where about 5 per cent of the population is Muslim, not everyone can be watched.
Meanwhile, there are frightening reports that Israelis may have been kidnapped. This is not entirely a novelty in the sense that Iranian intelligence services have tried to kidnap Israelis from third countries in the past, but it is a telling sign that the Israeli government has now banned Israeli soldiers and reservists from travelling to the Netherlands. It is not our job as Hungarians to solve other countries’ problems: our only job is to keep Hungary a Hungarian country, where mass Muslim-Arab migration does not cause such problems. In the future, it is likely that even more Israeli football matches will be played in Budapest, and hopefully Israeli tourism will also increase in our country, because Jewish fans are not kicked on the ground here.
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