Amsterdam, Paris, and Beyond: Europe’s Frontier for Jihad?

The October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel encouraged Islamic extremists the world over, from Nigeria to Bangladesh. In Europe, the main thrust of assaults on Jews is no longer the property of the far right, but rather Islamic extremists, as witnessed in the recent attacks on Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans visiting Amsterdam for a match with the Dutch Ajax team, and subsequently, Israeli fans who visited Paris for a game between the Israeli national and French national teams.

In Holland, Israeli fans were targeted by Muslim youths in alleys, who chased them down on foot and in cars, and beat them on the streets. Antisemitic incidents in Holland have increased by 800 percent since October 7, including a violent assault on a Dutch rabbi in Utrecht. ¹ Israeli soccer fans have sustained broken jaws, stab wounds, and damage to internal organs. ² Some fans were forced to jump into Amsterdam’s canals to avoid being physically attacked, fans’ passports were forcibly stolen, and others hid in their hotel rooms as the attackers attempted to break down their doors. ³

The Jerusalem Post reported a month before Holland’s pogrom that many of the Dutch police force, heavily staffed by Muslims, refused to secure Jewish sites since October 7, citing a “moral dilemma.” ⁴ This seems a significant context as to why the pogroms were not prevented by Dutch authorities that night.

Some media reports excused the Amsterdam attacks, blaming them on Maccabi fans ripping down Palestinian flags from private residences (purportedly placed there to “tempt” them according to reports) and chanting “Let the IDF F#^* the Arabs.” While football hooliganism and vulgar fight songs are common occurrences across Europe, it is naïve to depict this attack as mere hooliganism by the locals.

Police and security force investigations and eyewitness reports indicate that the attacks were premeditated. A network of Muslim taxi drivers using a chat group was centrally involved in the planning of the attacks, noting and sharing the locations of Israeli soccer fans’ hotels, ⁵ information they had collected when transporting the fans from the airport. Perpetrated by scores of local youths of mostly Moroccan and Turkish Muslim ethnicity, Israelis were hunted in the streets, some rammed by cars, others beaten unconscious. Footage of the pogrom was recorded on cellphones and posted online, just as Hamas terrorists had done while perpetrating the atrocities of October 7 in Israeli communities.

In fact, pro-Palestinian Dutch groups with ties to the terror organizations Hamas and the Marxist-Leninist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine helped organize the pogrom through Stichting Palestijnse Gemeenschap(PGNL) and other local pro-Palestinian activist organizations, which told people online, to prepare for “grave violence.” They later shared pogrom videos. ⁶

PGNL member Amin Ghazi Abou Rahed, originally from a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was previously arrested on suspected terror financing for Hamas, as was riot planner Ahman Nourallah. One of the pogrom organizers, who posted pro-Hamas propaganda and Amsterdam pogrom footage on social media, wrote in a post, “Kill them, Allah will punish them with your hands, and He will disgrace them…. Allahu Akbar.”

Amsterdam Was Just a Start

The attacks also did not end on the night of the football match. Four nights later, on Monday, there was vandalism and destruction of public transportation ⁷ and attacks on local Dutch bystanders. The next day, protestors filled the streets, including keffiyeh-wearing ethnically Dutch supporters of the Muslim attackers. Days later, on Wednesday, November 14, protests against an Israeli gala honoring the Israeli and French national soccer teams broke out in Paris. ⁸

What Amsterdam experienced, followed by subsequent Muslim attacks in Paris on Israeli soccer fans and others, and what Europe is seeing on a broad scale, is the scapegoating of Jews as an excuse – a preview of jihad against Christian Europe.

What is advertised as the “pro-Palestinian” activism to “Globalize the Intifada” often becomes a larger and more strategic campaign of da’wa (Islamic proselytization) and jihad. As conservative British author Douglas Murray notes in his book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017), and Egyptian Jewish researcher Bat Ye’or before him in Eurabia (2005), the European continent is slowly being overtaken by its large, unassimilated, Islamist migrant population.

Ye’or’s long historical study, The Decline of Eastern Christianity in the Middle East, may predict the future of the other side of the Mediterranean. Right-wing Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s now-viral 2004 speech at CPAC in Hungary, cited the replacement demographics of Muslims in major European cities, including Brussels which is majority Muslim, and in London, Paris and Amsterdam, where Muslim populations have reached approximately 20 percent.⁹

Though Vlaardingerbroek was labeled a racist Islamophobe for her speech, Islamic preachers themselves say as much, unabashedly declaring Islam’s intent to rule the world. Five years ago, a Muslim preacher in Jerusalem predicted that demographics would transform France into a Muslim-majority country by 2050. He portended that, as in the past, when parts or all of modern-day Poland, Austria, the Caucus, Mongolia, China, Hungary, and India were Muslim, these places would return to the rule of Islam by way of jihad or jizya (the tax on non-Islamic dhimmis). ¹⁰

Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal proclaimed in 2008, “We will conquer Rome, and from there continue to conquer the two Americas and even Eastern Europe” (on Al-Aqsa TV, April 11, 2008, MEMRI TV.)

While European politicians such as London’s mayor Sadiq Khan and Scottish Prime Minister Hamza Yousef (perhaps innocently) tout “diversity,” many Muslims harbor extremist Islamist positions. These opinions were symbolized the day after the Amsterdam soccer pogrom, in a march where hundreds of Dutch Muslims carried ISIS and al-Qaeda flags – not the Palestinian flag – as was seen in the original protests of Amsterdam. ¹¹

The phenomenon of West-hating Islamism under the cover of anti-colonialism is not limited to Europe. Hundreds of protests on the streets and campuses of North America and elsewhere lead young Canadians¹² and Americans¹³ to denounce their own countries. Lest liberal-minded Americans think that anti-American expressions are the Islamists’ reaction to the United States alliance with Israel, it should be noted that 20th-century political Islam had a problem with the West much before the establishment of Israel.

Foundational Islamist Sayid Qutb’s critiques of the West were recorded in his essay, “The America I Have Seen” after he visited the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, where he spent most of his time in Greeley, Colorado. The Egyptian Qutb, who later penned Milestones, a still-popular foundational text of political Islam, was a Muslim Brotherhood leader who eventually helped plan an assassination attempt on secularist Arab Nationalist Egyptian President Gamal Abd-al-Nasser.

Qutb was open and direct in his rejection of the United States and the West. In his essay on America, Qutb criticized American jazz, whose singing he characterized as “crude screaming” of the “savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.” Qutb, who never married, criticized American women’s awareness of their “seductive capacity” and their lack of physical modesty. He said of American values: “This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values? And what does it add to the moral account of humanity? His answer: nothing.” Muslim Brotherhood founder the Egyptian Islamic scholar Hassan al-Banna similarly wrote that Western civilization “is now bankrupt and in decline,” concerned with the same issues as Qutb.

For Islamists, whose thinking and actions rest on those of Muslim Brotherhood predecessors, the attacks on Israelis were justified revenge against kuffar – the infidels – for the war in Gaza against their Islamist comrades in Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and for the audacity of Jewish sovereignty in dar al-Islam, in opposition to Islamic dictates. But as Israeli investigative journalist and Arab affairs analyst Tzvi Yechezkeli exposed in his documentary series work on Islamist extremism in Europe and the United States for Israeli television between 2012 and 2018, Jews are not the “last stop” for jihadists. ¹⁴

Rampant Jew hatred and attacks on Jews always represent the decline of Western civilization no matter how the Jews’ enemies justify their behavior.

The now dire warning “The West Is Next” needs to be amended and heeded: “The West Is Now.”

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