Jew-hunting riots in Amsterdam expose dangers of bystander inaction - opinion

‘Yesterday there was an outburst of antisemitism the likes of which we hoped not to see again in Amsterdam,” Mayor Femke Halsema declared after the Muslims’ Jew-hunting soccer riots. “Among our Jewish Amsterdammers, there is fear, dismay, anger, disbelief.” 

Don’t be fooled by the indignant first line. The mayor’s dithering invites more violence. As long as non-Jews treat Jew-hatred as a Jewish problem – distressing only “our Jewish Amsterdammers” – it will keep metastasizing. When fighting Jew-hatred – or any bigotry – bystanders, silently standing by, seeing hatred as the victim’s headache, are anything but innocent.

The rot runs deep. Last month, Nieuw Israëlisch Weekblad (New Israelite Weekly – NIW) reported that some Dutch police officers resisted protecting Jewish institutions – including the National Holocaust Museum. Their supervisors indulged them. The police spokesperson told De Telegraaf: “We take moral objections into account when creating schedules” – unless it’s an “urgent task.”

When did police protection become selective, contingent on victims being popular? And what’s more “urgent” than protecting innocents from hateful hooligans systematically Jew-hunting?

By contrast, another Dutch politician denounced the “pogrom in the streets of #Amsterdam” on X: “We have become the Gaza of Europe,” Geert Wilders wrote. “Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews. I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again.”

Wilders is always saddled with the designation: “Far-Right Dutch politician” – rather than “Heroic Dutch Leader.” Such framing dilutes the necessary mass disgust. The hyper-partisan plague polarizing most Western democracies today subverts the united front needed to defeat Jew-hatred. It’s not Left vs Right but right vs wrong. 

Similarly, the passions stirred by Hamas’s October 7 rampage last year and Israel’s Gaza war blurred too many people’s ethical calculus. Policing is a sacred apolitical mission. If Jewish police officers refused to protect pro-Palestinian protesters, I would say “fire them.” Similarly, voters should fire politicians who only define Jew-hatred as the Jews’ problem, sexism as women’s problem, or racism as a Black problem.

WE’RE LIVING a sick paradox globally. On October 7, terrorists slaughtered over 1,200 people – Jews and non-Jews – in the worst paroxysm of Jew-hating violence since World War II. Yet, instantly, even as most of the civilized world reeled, this antisemitic sadism unleashed more evil. 

Rather than being ashamed by their allies’ barbarism, Jew-haters and Israel-bashers – sensing weakness, smelling blood – imported the violence wherever Jews were found: weeks before Israel entered Gaza in self-defense.

The failure starts with the haters, but doesn’t end with them.

Police, authorities embarrassingly weak 

The police and the authorities have often been embarrassingly weak. Too many university presidents saw evil on campus – and whimpered. And too many prosecutors and police officers have unintentionally proven that when you tolerate small acts of incivility, they intensify, having emboldened the criminals. 

Last Wednesday, before the Amsterdam abomination, a warning came from two Canadian rabbis, Adam Scheier and Reuben Poupko: “It is open season on the Jews of Montreal.” Just before Rosh Hashanah last month, the police arrested some individuals who left Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices near synagogues, hours before they filled up. The “perpetrators appeared in court and were released with a promise to appear.... in June, 2025.” 

Again, sensing weakness, last Tuesday, 40 masked Jew-haters harassed congregants attempting to enter a different Montreal synagogue. Although the mob violated an injunction keeping demonstrators 50 meters away from houses of worship, “the police allowed the harassment to continue, uninterrupted, for over three hours.”

Tragically, as the authorities dithered, others failed, too. Last year, various universities including Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, launched task forces exploring the antisemitism “in the air,” as Stanford’s summary called it. Some reports assembled hundreds of examples of Jewish students being bullied. After one young Columbia student placed a mezuzah on her doorpost, some dormmates banged on her door night after night until she moved out. 

DEPRESSINGLY, I didn’t encounter one story in one task force report describing non-Jews intervening to defend their fellow students. This lack of empathy, the selfishness, the passivity, should worry us all.

The philosopher Edmund Burke taught: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even if Burke didn’t quite coin the phrase, it became a cliché because it captured an enduring truth. Bigotry – and the silence it too often encounters – are cancers in a society. 

Police abandoned Israelis after the match

And, indeed, many good people did a whole lot of nothing in Amsterdam. The police abandoned the Israelis after the match. Some reported running into the street away from the mobs, waving down passing cars, only to be ignored. “The Dutch police sold us so that the Arabs would lynch us,” one Israeli reported. 

In Amsterdam, the Dockworker Statue honors Amsterdam’s workers who went on strike in February 1941 to protest the Nazis’ anti-Jewish pogroms. That statue should be covered in black for the next year because the Dockworker’s grandchildren have turned chicken. 

More substantively, tourists opposed to bigotry should boycott Amsterdam for the next three months. A dramatic drop in visitors would show the world the cost of tolerating evil in their midst – for those who cannot recognize that cowering before these hooligans also only encourages them to launch their violence against others they dislike.

Even while aiming to harm their targets, the haters curdle their own souls, while humiliating rubberneckers. By not standing up, these not-so-innocent bystanders betray themselves, their communities, their fellow citizens, their neighbors and our core democratic ideals – and in Amsterdam’s case, their Israeli and Jewish guests.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.