This also shows how spineless the unions are for agreeing to cancel the protest instead of challenging the mayor and police. The budget cut of 1 billion per year will be devastating for the whole higher education sector and the vote for that plan is in less than 2 weeks, meaning that the cancellation of this protest will likely make it much more likely that the plan will pass without much opposition.
A large protest against budget cuts in higher education in The Netherlands that was planned for tomorrow in Utrecht has been cancelled due to (paraphrasing:) ‘threats of violence by pro Palestine protesters who planned to hijack the protest.’
This can not be seen without the context of the unrest in Amsterdam last week. Dutch media and politicians have been trying really hard this past week to paint anti genocide protesters in a very bad light, and this situation is no different. Several pro Palestine organisations have stated that they stand wholeheartedly behind the protests against the budget cuts and were joining to show their support. People are speculating that this support is being framed as hijacking now by the mayor of Utrecht and the police.
Police hasn’t arrested anyone related to Thursday night attacks on hooligans (all arestees were protesters), they have a team looking at footage and witness accounts first now. I’m a bit afraid this guy will get arrested but I don’t know how much proof there is against him. Police did say that they might try to charge for terrorism as well as and antisemitism which would be wild if they succeeded.
Yes I always say, if the floods come, we deserve it.
Maccabi hooligans in Tel Aviv airport
They’re singing the same song as in Amsterdam and now I finally have a good source on the translation:
Let the IDF win and fuck the arabs
Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.
I’m not sure they were Ajax fans. Most of the fights were between Maccabi and locals that were angry about the islamophobia, racism and vandalism of the night before. Ajax fans beat up a pro Palestine protester last Sunday, I don’t think they’re cool enough to be pro Palestine.
Yes that rethoric is big in NL as wel currently, especially by our extreme right government. They’re inciting hate towards Moroccans and the coming weeks we’ll see the results of that through lots of racism and targeted attacks.
The atmosphere in the city has been very grim already this whole week due to the racism by Maccabi and Ajax supporters, and lots of Moroccans already didn’t feel safe in the city due to that.
Here’s a video from the evening itself. I think that the busses brought about half the hooligans back to their hotel, the rest probably roamed the city in smaller groups getting into confrontations with angry locals.
I made a list compiling the events from a few sources including cestmocro and plant.eenolijfboom on instagram:
Edit: added some more details on Thursday evening from the video linked.
Note how the police only ever acted to arrest/remove pro Palestine protesters and did not act when protestors were attacked, flags were destroyed, or racist chants were yelled by Maccabi supporters. They’re also calling the protesters ‘rioters’ in their official reports to media and didn’t use a single bad word like ‘hooligan’ or ‘rioter’ for the Maccabi supporters. The one sidedness of the mayor and police is very apparent and people are angry. Amnesty NL is calling the events unacceptable (going with the narrative of the police) and losing credibility as are almost all ‘left’ political parties.
All large Dutch new outlets yesterday were only reporting on the poor IOF nazis getting beaten up with no word about all the events that came before. This obviously angered people even more and now media are slowly publishing ‘recap’ articles are that mention at least some of the racism and provocation but still go fully with police narrative.
Antizionist jewish organisations that are speaking out about the hypocrisy are getting completely ignored by media outlets while zionist jews will get exclusive interviews about how afraid they were for weeks to come.
The disconnect between the perception of the people vs what is published by news outlets and what politicians are saying is bigger that I’ve ever experienced. This event is opening the eyes of a lot of people around me that called me crazy for saying that the media is biased. It happened during the student encampments as well but I feel like there is a much stronger campaign on social media right now to combat the disinfo that is spread by all our local news outlets.
Edit: maybe it’s good to add that this disconnect is mostly felt by young people.
This is so funny, I love green party infighting (they all suck).
Student unions decided to take over the organisation and are calling for people to come anyways. But with the risks involved there will be less people. Small actions are also planned all over the country but because the cancellation by workers unions was so last minute everything will be pretty chaotic. Tonight the police were very aggressively beating up anti genocide protesters again so that will cause outrage as well tomorrow so it will be an interesting day.
Student unions tried to pressure the mayor to tell them exactly why she and the police think there’s a risk of violence but they won’t give any other details than what was written in my original post. This is why they decided to ignore the risk and protest anyways.