From the Manchester terrorist attack on Yom Kippur to Islamist threats to behead a professor at City University London, there have been several signs of a rapidly deteriorating environment in recent weeks. Yet perhaps the most troubling of all is the seemingly innocuous Sky News interview in which West Midlands Police Chief Superintendent Tom Joyce claimed that hooliganism by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans led to the ban on away supporters for the Aston Villa game.
Football Fans and Hooliganism
The UK police have decades of experience with travelling football fans – both international and domestic. In any given crowd of thousands, mostly young men, there will always be some trouble. Previously, even inside Birmingham, fans of Polish side Legia Warsaw turned violent – throwing missiles and injuring police officers.
Then there is Fenerbahçe, who have fans now facing attempted manslaughter charges. Beşiktaş and Galatasaray are hardly better. Dynamo Zagreb fans rioted in Spain, and Red Star Belgrade ‘Delije’ Ultras turned a village in northern Kosovo into a ‘war zone’.
Yet Legia Warsaw recently returned to the UK to play Hibernian with no travel restrictions. In the last few years Dinamo Zagreb played at West Ham, Red Star played at Rangers and Fenerbahçe fans visited Celtic and United.
Roma’s ultras descended on Anfield – rioted in the streets – and left Sean Cox with brain damage.
None of those matches – played in the UK against teams with notorious fan bases – saw police-advised travel bans.
Maccabi & Amsterdam
Maccabi Tel Aviv travelled across Europe with almost no incident, until the ‘hunt a Jew’ antics in Amsterdam.
Nobody is whitewashing anything. In a group of thousands of men, some will almost always ‘overstep’.
It can also be true that some Maccabi fans may chant offensively – but Turkish, Italian and Spanish fans are infamous for this behaviour – far more frequently and viciously. UEFA sometimes issues travel restrictions for such abuse, but UEFA have never issued one against Maccabi Tel Aviv.
In recent years Maccabi have played – to name just some – at Gent, Linz, Villarreal, Steaua București, FK Panevėžys, FK TSC, SC Braga, AEK Larnaca, Olympiacos, and Cluj – all without incident.
Tellingly, Maccabi could only *not* travel for one game – against Beşiktaş in 2024. And calls for a neutral venue came long before the Amsterdam match. The reason? The safety of the Maccabi team could not be guaranteed inside a country that is openly hostile to Israel and dominated by Islamist politics. Birmingham, and increasingly the UK, are edging towards the same.
On both charges – violence and racism – Maccabi are minor offenders – most fans simply come to enjoy the football.
The Tearing Down of a Flag
One of the main examples of Maccabi misconduct in Amsterdam was the ‘tearing down of a flag‘. Really? To claim a few fans pulling down a flag – or chanting – and even one or two getting in a fight – is grounds for an all-out ban on travel insults the public’s intelligence.
The truth is much simpler. Parts of Amsterdam’s population are intolerant and hate Israel. They could not bear Jews from Israel setting foot on their turf. The hunt through the city’s streets was pre-planned. The flag incident was merely painted as an excuse for the anti-Jewish violence that was always coming.
Focusing the lens on a few Maccabi fans, rather than the marauding Islamists who hunted them down, is historical revisionism being promoted to hide the truth.
And to use Maccabi fans’ actions as justification for the away fan ban is to hold them to a unique standard no club has ever faced. To paint the fans of this small club as one of Europe’s worst is to rewrite history. Which, as we will see, is precisely the point.
An Anti-Israel Police Force
We expect anti-Israel activists to seize on such moments – to demonise the Tel Aviv supporters and demand their exclusion. These antisemites see Israelis as subhuman – and outside the ground on the night, some even chanted ‘death to the IDF‘.
The shock is not that activists distorted the story, but that the police chose to play along. Instead of standing up to the extremists and telling the truth – that there was no historic pattern of Maccabi violence – West Midlands Police have officially echoed the activists’ framing. “Maccabi fans are thugs,” says the official record now – and thus it was written.
Proleptic Dhimmitude
West Midlands Police may insist the ban was imposed because of ‘Maccabi violence’, but what we are witnessing is nothing to do with law enforcement. The decision reeks of what can best be described as ‘proleptic dhimmitude’ – voluntary submission to Islamist rule before it has even arrived.
Non-Muslim Brits, along with their Israeli guests, are being reduced to second–class status – expected to bow down to the whim and will of Islamist sensibilities. Instead of confronting extremism, West Midlands Police have pre-emptively yielded to it, punishing potential victims to avoid offending potential aggressors. It is a chilling act of moral surrender – all the more alarming because it was made by choice.
Israeli fans were banned. British Jews needed to be protected in a ‘Jew cage‘. There was vile antisemitism and chants calling for the murder of Israelis.
A visible no-go zone created by local Islamist intimidation and the threat of violence. Yet the following day, West Midlands Police actually thanked local communities for an evening that passed without incident.
What behaviour is this from our police, if not dhimmitude?
Burning the Jewish Witch
We often look back on history as if it were a flat table of numbers and dates. Yet it is filled with horrific acts carried out by people convinced they were right. The Holocaust and pogroms did not emerge from nowhere. And this is not a story confined to the Jews – human history offers countless examples. In every case, ordinary citizens were taught to see their victims as threats to the moral health of society. Those who burned witches truly believed they were cleansing their villages of evil.
That is the deeper lesson history offers – persecution becomes self-justifying. The same machinery is visible here. Maccabi supporters are being cast as villains not because the evidence demands it, but because British society now needs them to be. It is easier to condemn the visible Israelis than to confront the truth of rising antisemitism, state impotence, and Islamist intimidation.
When police issue statements distorting events to fit that narrative, they perform an ancient ritual of moral inversion – turning the innocent into the guilty so the town crier can assure the crowd that evil was purged and order restored.
Britain is not yet a place where Islamist mobs dictate what may or may not be permitted. But the Aston Villa decision suggests we are edging closer to that line – not just through force, but also through submission and self-censorship – the classic Islamist way.
It marks the beginning of an era of proleptic dhimmitude – a premature surrender born out of cowardice. We are witnessing the quiet submission of a society too frightened to stand against the growing threat.
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