The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck huffed in a Nov. 8 post:
On Thursday, scenes of Europe’s ugly past seemed to have returned with a full-scale pogrom by pro-Palestinian thugs chasing and beating fans of an Israeli soccer team through the streets of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, ABC’s Good Morning America saw no reason to cover these horrifying acts of violence that resulted in rescue planes being dispatched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rescue them.
The Israelis were in the Dutch capital to support Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C., a team in the Israeli Premier League facing off against AFC Ajax Amsterdam in UEFA Europa League competition.
NBC’s Today had a different idea by leading each of their two hours with this. Co-host Savannah Guthrie didn’t mince words in the first tease, calling it “a shocking wave of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe” and “ambush” of “Israeli soccer fans,” who were “attacked and beaten in a disturbing night of anti-Semitic violence.”
But when the other side of the story was told, Houck objected, declaring that correspondent Raf Sanchez “seemed to make an attempt at false equivalency by citing the “tension on the streets around the time that the violence erupted,” saying “[s]ome of those Israeli soccer fans chanting ‘death to Arabs.’” Houck later insisted that “Sanchez again tried to bothsides this, playing clips of “[s]ome Israeli fans chanting racist, anti-Arab slurs” and said “[o]thers seen ripping down a Palestinian flag.”
Houck then went after a CBS report on the incident, similarly enraged by thet full story being told:
Foreign correspondent Remy Inocencio first showed videos from the Amsterdam streets before explaining it was a “night of violence marked by multiple attacks, groups of men beating other men after a football game between a visiting Israeli team and a local club. Called anti-Semitic by Dutch leaders and Israeli officials. Police told fans to hide.”
He too played both sides by citing the “death to Arabs” chant and lamented “[a]nger rose as Israeli supporters in yellow disrespected a moment of silence.”
Clay Waters spent a Nov. 25 post being similarly angry at the New York Times for reporting both sides of the story:
Later it was time for blaming the victim.
On the night of Wednesday, Nov. 6, some fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, a prominent club that had traveled to Amsterdam to play the Dutch squad Ajax in a league soccer match, chanted incendiary and racist slogans, pulled down a Palestinian flag and attacked a cab. Palestinian solidarity has been amply displayed in Amsterdam during the past year of a war that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including many women and children.
The Times managed not to mention Muslims as the Amsterdam attackers, but did claim that Muslims have historically also been victims of “pogroms.”
Waters went on to huff that Times reporter Marc Tracy “seemed to hold out the possibility that the Jews had at least somewhat “incited” the attacks, in defiance of all the recorded timelines of what happened over the two nights (the attacks on Maccabi fans were pre-planned),” later complaining that ” Tracy suggests there was a “both-sides” aspect to the attacks on Jews.”
But those reports were correct — there was plenty of blame to go around. A Washington Post analysis of videos of the violence showed that Israeli soccer fans did engage in inciting behavior:
There was some planned coordination — among taxi drivers and other locals who used messaging apps to organize a show of force, with at least one chat referring to a “Jew hunt.” Those conversations took place after, and in many cases in response to, episodes the night before the match, when Maccabi supporters pulled down a Palestinian flag and damaged a taxi. Neither The Post nor Dutch investigators came across plans for orchestrated violence in the days ahead of the match.
The Post found that the violence that unfolded was not one-sided. Israeli fans were harassed, chased and in some cases beaten. But video of one of the earliest post-match altercations, shared by multiple news organizations as an example of attacks on Israelis, in fact shows Maccabi supporters as the aggressors.
There is no justification for this violence, especially given the anti-Semitic bent it seemed to have taken on. But Houck and Waters dismissing factual reporting as an attempt to “bothsides” the incident is a denial of the fact that, yes, there was more than one side to the story.