Monday, December 1st, saw the Chief Constable and the Police and Crime Commissioner of the West Midlands Police (WMP) scheduled to give evidence to a UK parliamentary Home Affairs Committee—explaining the decision to exclude fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a match in Birmingham last month.
Outside the Committee’s base for the day in Porcullis House, protestors also demanded answers and called out ‘policing by appeasement.’
Throughout November, it became widely recognised that WMP had used a so-called intelligence report from Amsterdam police to predict violence from the visiting Israelis. Back on November 24th, MPs were told by WMP assistant chief constable Mike O’Hara that the risk of antisemitic hate crime was not the “predominant” reason for preventing Maccabi fans from attending the Europa League match at Aston Villa.
In other words, WMP, according to the solidarity group Our Fight, not only restricted the rights of fans wishing to attend the fixture, but fuelled antisemitism by casting Jewish and Israeli fans as violent, “highly trained” (by the Israel Defense Forces), and “anti-Muslim.”
As police attempted to defend the decision of the WMP/Birmingham City Council-controlled Safety Advisory Group, Lord Mann—the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism—told the Committee he “struggled” with some “inaccurate” details given by the West Midlands force. In particular, the WMP interpretation of Amsterdam police intelligence on Maccabi supporters, even including their ‘ultras,’ seemed willfully distorted to support banning them.
Protest organiser Mark Birbeck of Our Fight declared:
The British police repeatedly fall over themselves to appease the largest or loudest groups. But they must police for the few just as they do for the many. Around the Europa League game at Villa Park, West Midlands Police were manipulated by anti-Israel activists into using anti-Semitic tropes to describe Maccabi fans—fuelling bigotry against Jews and Israelis in the UK. We are pleased to see that momentum is building to hold West Midlands Police to account.
