Amsterdam attack shows the world is ‘sick of Jews’: Palestinian leader

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(Nov. 12, 2024 / JNS) — A senior Palestinian Authority official claimed on Sunday that last week’s antisemitic assaults targeting Israelis in Amsterdam prove that “the world is sick of the Jews,” the Palestinian Media Watch NGO reported Monday.

“What happened in the Netherlands two or three days ago is the best proof that the world is sick of the Jews,” Tayseer Nasrallah, a leading member of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah, the faction that controls the P.A., told Ramallah’s official Palestine TV channel in an interview.

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The top Fatah official also claimed that the pogrom revealed that people are “sick of the Israeli arrogance and cannot stand this huge amount of hatred towards people,” per PMW’s translation.

Nasrallah has led unity talks with the Hamas terrorist organization on behalf of P.A. chief Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah in recent months.

Amsterdam police have detained 62 people in connection with a series of antisemitic assaults against Israeli soccer fans, which resulted in five moderate injuries and about 20 to 30 minor ones, in the Dutch capital.

Witnesses described about 100 young men, whom they described as being of Arab descent, assaulting Israelis in a coordinated manner on early Friday morning. The European country’s largest-scale antisemitic incident in decades has shocked many Dutch Jews and Holocaust survivors, who said that it is a reminder of what led up to the Shoah.

Over the weekend, the P.A. Foreign Ministry issued a statement that omitted the antisemitic violence perpetrated against the Israelis and instead denounced the alleged “desecration and removal of Palestinian flags from locations symbolizing support for Palestinian rights against the ongoing occupation’s crimes and genocide in the Gaza Strip.”

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Ramallah “urged the Dutch government to investigate those responsible for these disturbances and to safeguard Palestinians and Arabs in the Netherlands from colonists and Israeli soldiers who traveled to the country to spread their racist ideology and actions to European capitals.”

On Oct. 6, PMW and the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs lodged a complaint with the world soccer body FIFA against the head of the Palestinian Football Association for using sports to promote terror and violence in violation of the organization’s rules.

The 27-page complaint states that the actions taken by senior P.A. official Jabril Rajoub, including praising Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, “are among the most egregious offenses” according to the world soccer body’s laws, and notes that Rajoub was previously convicted by the organization in 2018 for “inciting hatred to violence” for which he was sentenced to a 12-month match suspension and a monetary fine.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has also threatened to ban the head of the Palestinian soccer association from traveling abroad.

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“Jibril Rajoub, a terrorist in a suit who openly supported Hamas’s crimes, is working around the clock to get Israel removed from the international soccer association,” Katz tweeted in May, tagging FIFA on the post.

“We will work to thwart his plans, and if he doesn’t stop—we will imprison him in the Muqata’a (P.A. presidential compound in Ramallah), where he will be left to play Stanga by himself between the walls,” added Katz, referring to a soccer-like game popular with Israeli children.

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