Calling a Football Riot a Pogrom Insults Historical Memory
Israeli ultraright football hooligans rampaged through Amsterdam, and regular fans were targeted with violence in turn. The whole episode was atrocious, but calling it a pogrom is historically ignorant and trivializes genuine horrors.
Football riot at the Dam Square in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on November 7, 2024. (Mouneb Taim / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Last week, Bari Weiss’s newspaper, the Free Press, ran the headline, “Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam.” Two days later, Fox News informed its online readers that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “condemn[ed]” the “antisemitic pogrom in Amsterdam.”
Right now, a one-word Google search for pogrom gets you headline after headline about the same event, many accompanied by videos of fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team being attacked on the streets of Amsterdam.
The narrative logic seems simple enough. What happened after the match between Maccabi and Amsterdam’s Ajax was (a) a riot where (b) the victims were Jewish and (c) the perpetrators were not. Hence, it was a “pogrom.”
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