After Thursday night’s events in Amsterdam, many commentators were remarkably uninterested in the truth of what had happened. The clashes between Israeli football hooligans, Dutch fans, and local, often ethnic-minority men had turned into an international incident — and it was obvious enough what side most of our leaders would pick. The language of “anti-racism” was marshaled to tell us who was guilty and who was good.

Joe Biden described a wave of “antisemitic attacks . . . echo[ing] dark moments in history.” The Dutch king spoke of how his country had failed Jews “like during World War II,” no less. The word “pogrom” spread across Western media, with most outlets suppressing basic facts about the events.

Violence is bad and has no place in or around a football stadium. Luckily, no one actually got “abducted,” as was initially reported. Responding to provocation is often a terrible idea, and any instances of anyone being harassed because of their nationality or religion ought to be examined. Still, it is hard to remember a similar time when hooligans showed up looking for a fight and were treated as heroes. This is indeed what at least several hundred Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters did in Amsterdam.

Many spent the last day picking fights with people they saw as Muslim, calling for the collective murder of Arabs, ripping down at least one Palestinian flag from a personal residence on the street, and even protesting a minute of silence for victims of last week’s flooding in Valencia, Spain. This latter incident, in the stadium, was broadcast on live TV; the whole story was amply documented on social media well before many of the most screaming headlines and po-faced political statements.

Many journalists thus ignored basic information about what the Israeli fans did in Amsterdam. Perhaps this was because the chanting hooligans actually told a lot of truth about the war on Gaza, which Western governments support and fund.

Slogans like “Let the IDF win, fuck the Arabs” are not, at this point, to be considered jokes or extremist provocations. They are the reality of what Israel is doing and what is supported by most of Israeli society, bar a brave minority of critics. Even such a figure as recently sacked defense minister Yoav Gallant — this week widely presented as a rare “moderate” in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — labeled Israel’s enemies “human animals” and insisted that a “complete siege” should cut off “electricity, fuel, and food.”

One of the more vile slogans chanted by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans was “There are no schools in Gaza, as there are no children left.” Proud in its genocidal intent, this line is only half true. According to UNICEF, some 625,000 Palestinian children have now gone over a year without attending class. Six hundred and twenty-five thousand. Forty-five thousand first-graders, or at least kids who ought to be in first grade, didn’t start the school year in September; thanks to Israel, thousands never will. “Only” a minority of children are dead (at least tens of thousands are).

But Israel has damaged or destroyed around 90 percent of Gazan schools. With the mass bombing of homes and ethnic cleansing of whole swaths of territory, even the buildings that are still standing are used by the displaced as a simple refuge.

Our political leaders might have devoted more words to this vast, unconscionable suffering than to a rabble spewing racist bile in the streets of Amsterdam. Perhaps the journalists who present themselves as crusaders against “fake news” and “disinformation” might have looked up some sources other than government Twitter/X accounts.

But the good news is that fewer people are buying the Israeli narrative. Only last week, one hundred BBC staffers criticized their own employer’s biased, baseless reporting for uncritically parroting Israeli claims about the war and dehumanizing Palestinians. Even in Germany, whose political class is among the world’s most extreme in its support for Israel, more citizens don’t trust media reporting on the war than do trust it.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam showed ordinary TV viewers and social media users who they really are. Listen to them and believe them.