Femke Halsema said Israel 'bypassed' Dutch authorities and that the description had been 'turned into propaganda'

The mayor of Amsterdam has taken back comments describing violence that took place following a football match between Israeli and Dutch teams earlier this month as a “pogrom”, and has said Israel “bypassed” Dutch authorities regarding the details of the events.

Mayor Femke Halsema was speaking on Sunday evening on Dutch state broadcaster NPO’s News Hour programme.

On 6 and 7 November, travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv fans stirred trouble in different parts of the Dutch capital by chanting racist anti-Arab slogans ahead of their Uefa Europa League match against Amsterdam club Ajax.

  • CrisEnglish
    1•1 day ago

    For anyone else who wasn’t familiar with this term and didn’t have the context to understand any of this story:

    A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places also became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom