When Jews are targeted by hate mobs, it’s the Jews who get the blame The planned ban by West Midlands Police on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Aston Villa is showing off Britain at its worst Zoe Strimple
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/19/when-jews-targeted-by-hate-mobs-jews-get-blame/
Parasites, diseases, and bugs all steadily work away, boring into their hosts, often unnoticed or brushed aside until the tipping point. Then the damage suddenly explodes, makes itself seen to all, unignorable, catastrophic and very rapid-moving. The chaos mounts fast. Panic stations and urgent action is taken to save the host, restore order, safety and stability. Sometimes it’s too late to do so.
I am reminded of this process of steady poisoning, followed by rapid breakdown, by events of the past few weeks showcasing Islamist and Islamo-Leftist anti-Semitism in this country.
Barely two weeks after the terrorist attack on Jews heading into the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur came the decision by Birmingham police and the Safety Advisory Group, the body responsible for the safety and security of football in Britain, to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Aston Villa on November 6.
This decision followed a campaign by anti-Israel pressure groups, and most shockingly of all, Members of Parliament.
The groups included Game Over Israel, one of whose members is the vile rap group Bob Vylan (of “death to the IDF” chant fame), and the Hind Rajab Foundation. A damning report on the alleged bad behaviour of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans was produced. This, boasted a member of Game Over Israel to Telegraph Sport, “laid the groundwork” for getting Maccabi fans proscribed.
The MP Ayoub Khan was the frontsman of this campaign. He wrote in a letter, topped with the cringe-making heading Barrister Ayoub Khan MP, that “I welcome the Safety Advisory Group’s decision to advise that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will not be permitted to attend Villa Park on November 6.” He continued with a masterclass in the craven reasoning that has come to define the public statements of the anti-Israel crowd.
“From the moment that the match was announced, it was clear that there were latent safety risks that even our capable security and police authorities would not be able to fully manage,” went Khan’s statement. “With so much hostility and uncertainty around the match, it was only right to take drastic measures. Sports entertainment events should be enjoyed by all, regardless of their race, ethnicity and background. But there are rare instances where the political dynamics surrounding such spectacles cannot be ignored…”
Sane people the country over will read this screed and give a collective howl of embarrassment and disgust. This is the sort of person who sits in the House of Commons? Someone who says with open smugness and “celebration” that Jewish football fans numbering a few hundred pose “latent safety risks” that the “capable” police could not “manage”? There are “rare instances”, are there, where some people are not welcome?
The self-satisfied way Khan uses the lingo of the respectable political class does not fit the cadences of the Britain I grew up knowing, that of the world’s oldest modern parliamentary democracy. For what Mr Khan is saying is that we ought not to expect the police either to protect the intended victims of violence and intimidation, or punish or inspire fear in the criminals who pose the “latent safety risks”. In addition, Khan, Game Over Israel and the Hind Rajab badgered the police and the Safety Advisory Group with reference to the disgusting violence prompted by the arrival of Israeli football fans in Amsterdam and Thessaloniki last year.
Instead of swearing to do better for Jews than letting anti-Semitic hooligans run riot as they did then, Barrister Khan calls the victims the hooligans.
This is reminiscent of the sort of logic that used to be visited on women who were assaulted: it was their fault for going out at night, or walking alone, or wearing a skirt. What did they expect? It is victim-blaming in the extreme, but of a calculated nature we are not accustomed to in modern Britain.
His tone of undisguised pleasure is striking. It riled many people, but is it any wonder that he writes the indefensible with such confidence?
He and his political brethren form parties and get votes. Khan left the Lib Dems when his obsession with Gaza overspilled even that party’s rabid condemnation of Israel, and – surprise, surprise – is now a co-founder of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party. Corbyn was one of the figures applying pressure to get Maccabi fans banned.
Along with Khan and the Irish team the Bohemians, plus the groups FairSquare and Irish Sport for Palestine, who called for Israel’s “immediate suspension” from European football, he wrote to Uefa saying it cannot be “business as usual” where Israel is concerned owing to the “ongoing genocide in Gaza. Hosting such teams sends a message of normalisation and indifference to mass atrocities.”
The rubber really hits the road where Corbyn and Khan argue that having all those Jews, sorry, Israelis, in “predominantly Muslim” areas would be intolerable.
The word “community” is twice invoked in quick succession in the Khan letter. You almost have to laugh: “community” is a word that evokes sunshine and picnics and multiculturalism. But of course this is anything but the cheery melting pot where everyone mixes and gets along. It’s the Britain of terror-fostering, intimidating self-ghettoisation of the kind of “communities” that have a shockingly high prevalence of anti-Semitism and terrorist-sympathising, of radical mosques whose imams and “scholars” rile up their congregants with the vilest stuff towards Israelis and Jews.
As Asrar Rashid – who is a fan of Khan – told a mosque: “We Will Not Show Mercy to Maccabi Tel Aviv Fans Travelling to Birmingham for the Aston Villa F.C. Match; If You Make a Deal with an IDF Soldier, Take His Money If You Win, But Do Not Pay Him If You Lose – That’s the Islamic Ruling.”
And this is relatively mild compared with some of his other recent comments. At the Islamic Centre Nottingham, he told his audience to embrace “offensive jihad” by taking up arms and carrying out “pre-emptive strikes”, posting the video of his talk to X and YouTube on September 24, where he defined jihad as “removing oppression”.
Iqbal Mohamed, independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, meanwhile, said on X: “Thank you all who put the safety of Aston Villa fans, Birmingham residents and the British public above the Zionist and political pressure to let Israeli hooligans and terrorists run riot in our country.”
Meanwhile, the Green Party’s deputy leader Mothin Ali said Starmer’s objection to the banning was “irresponsible”, again invoking that macabre language of “community” and “inclusion” distorted to serve the cause. “Everyone should be able to feel safe when they attend a football match, that’s non-negotiable,” he said, while also demanding “a sporting and cultural boycott of all Israeli teams, like we saw for South African teams under apartheid”.
The myriad ills emanating from our indulgence of this sort of thing is exploding in ways that even the great ignorers and under-rug-sweepers and appeasers are acknowledging. Even to our monumentally useless Prime Minister (who still hasn’t gone much beyond platitudes about anti-Semitism having “no place” in Britain, where, because of blind eyes like his, there most certainly is a place) it’s suddenly clear that Britain is at a tipping point.
Policing has changed in this country. Instead of going after criminals, and providing a deterrent, it is victims who are to be punished, like the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv. Our mainstream politicians may finally be waking up to the threat. What remains to be seen is whether panic stations now will be enough.
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