A Channel 4 News video report, “Is the Maccabi fan ban in Birmingham really ‘unprecedented’?”, by correspondent Symeon Brown, focused on the the October 16th announcement of a ban on fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa in Birmingham, citing “security concerns”.
The decision, putatively made due to advice from the the city’s safety committee, was condemned as antisemitic by politicians from across the political spectrum, including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch – as well as by major British Jewish organisations. As Nandy stated during a debate in the House of Commons about the ban , the “majority of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans who want to attend are British, the only distinguishing feature is that they are Jewish“. She added that the decision was, in effect, a surrender to the antisemitic mobs who would have threatened the safety of Jewish attendees.
In other words, the ban was instituted not to protect attendees from potential violence from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, but because they feared violence targeting Maccabi fans by anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrators.
As the bipartisan free speech organisation FIRE argued, “Security concerns must never become a cudgel for viewpoint discrimination. By excluding only Maccabi fans, Birmingham authorities effectively granted critics of the team, or its home nation, a heckler’s veto. But police should focus on those who cause violence, not their intended victims. Banning a group only hands intimidators exactly what they want“.
The debate became moot after Maccabi Tel Aviv decided not to sell tickets to fans, citing fears that – even if the ban was reversed – the campaign by anti-Israel MP Ayoub Khan and others who’ve used demonising and antisemitic rhetoric about the team’s supporters, as well as the intervention of far–right activist Tommy Robinson, put the safety of innocent Maccabi fans at risk if they travelled to Birmingham.
The Channel 4 News report pushed back against critics of the ban, arguing that other “away teams have had their allocation of tickets removed or reduced as punishment, or reduce incidents like what happened last year in Amsterdam. A section of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans clashed with pro-Palestine supporters. The concern was this repeating in Birmingham“, thus whitewashing what was nothing short of a pre-planned antisemitic pogrom in the Dutch capital.
Though videos from the incident show largely Muslim and Arab gangs literally hunting down anyone they suspected of being Jewish and Israeli and viciously attacking them., tellingly, Channel 4 News illustrated the “clashes” in a few seconds of footage which solely showed Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ actions – erasing the antisemitic violence completely:
As our colleagues documented at the time, the claim that “both sides” were to blame, or even that the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans instigated the violence, was based on disinformation spread by anti-Jewish activists, which was then parroted by some media outlets.
Brown then interviewed MP Khan, who of course defended the ban. Tellingly, Khan himself, in a BBC interview last week, engaged in Amsterdam pogrom revisionism.
That talking point by the MP, our colleague Gilead Ini argued more broadly in his piece last year on Amsterdam pogrom inversion, is that there was a legitimate reason for the anti-Jewish violence in Amsterdam, which the victims brought upon themselves.
The latest Channel 4 News report represents another illustration of a pattern we’ve been documenting since Oct. 7th, 2023: When it comes to covering issues focusing on Israel or Jews, the most stridently anti-Zionist and antisemitic voices are amplified at the expense of fact-checking, objectivity and professional journalism.
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